Darkest Before Dawn - 26 (Patreon)

Chapter 26

[Nezu]

“I can’t believe this. When’s the last time a student from the hero course became a villain?”

“We will have to check them more thoroughly from now on.”

“But how much can we really accomplish that way? It’s not like we can run a full background check on every student. There’s always a chance that something slips by. Like with this very kid. Aoyama seemed like a perfectly fine candidate until now.”

“There must be something we can do.”

He heard them all, his teachers, employees, discussing the topic at hand. It was a concerning find, to learn that one of their students had worked alongside villains to the detriment of not only the faculty, but also the other students. It was also quite a blow to the pride of U.A. as a whole for it to happen, which Nezu was almost positive was kind of the point.

He knew that the Press Incident had been caused in order to get the information necessary for the hit at USJ. However, it wasn’t necessary if they already had someone inside. No, they could have accomplished much the same thing without needing a student in the school.

Maybe Aoyama’s role was minor in this instance. Nezu supposed that was a good enough explanation. Maybe he was supposed to do something further down the line. In that case, they’d been lucky to find him so soon.

“Maybe we can check those students that seem more… likely to be involved in such things?” Present Mic asked, and the question pulled Nezu’s focus away from the tablet in which he’d been reviewing footage and information. It also caused silence in the room full of U.A. staff, mainly because of the glare Aizawa was sending his way.

“Did Aoyama seem like such a student to you, Yamada?” the man asked back, making his friend twitch a little. “Because I don’t think you are suggesting that we discriminate against our own students, are you?”

Nezu had to hold back a smile.

“No, I just… Surely there’s something we can do, right?” Yamada replied, clearly frustrated, which was understandable. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a way for them to really effectively try to prevent such a thing from happening again.

“For now,” Nezu said, turning all heads in the room towards him. “We have knowledge of a villain group that can work together, and it’s not a small one.”

That, by itself, was concerning. Yakuza groups were something that happened, for sure, but other than those, who tended to at least try to stay under the radar, villain groups were somewhat of a rarity. The last time they had to deal with a large villain group…

“All we can do is keep an eye on the students and try to pick up on any clues,” Nezu continued, because looking further into the background of every student would take too much time and effort for too little gain. There just wasn’t a way to pull that off efficiently… Which didn’t mean he wouldn’t try, but his staff would be better off doing something else with their time. “From there, this is what we can do…”

Not too long after that, the room started clearing while Nezu remained, back to looking through the gathered data in regards to the USJ mess and anything else that might be of note in that regard, like the Press Incident and even some old and not so old news. There were a lot of things to consider. A lot of things could have been overlooked, just like Aoyama.

It was so very frustrating, when his enhanced intelligence alone couldn’t quite solve a problem as fast as he wanted.

However, it was also exciting to finally have a challenge.

[}-o-{]

[Kazuki Endo]

Kazuki looked at the tank set up in front of him. His vision blurred though, with the tears forming in his eyes but he blinked repeatedly to keep them away. His expression shifted, twisting uncomfortably as he tried to decide if he should be smiling or something else. He wanted to smile, he was happy and all, and yet he couldn’t quite put that into an expression.

“Thank you,” Kazuki muttered, his voice rough as he pushed the words through the knot in his throat. His arm rose, placing his fingers against the frontal glass panel and making one of the fishes in the tank swim away a little. “I can’t believe you did this,” he added then, but he didn’t look away. His eyes simply darted around, taking in the clear sand at the bottom of the aquarium, the plants and rocks placed inside… And, more importantly, the life that also inhabited the small ecosystem.

There were snails dragging themselves around on the glass, shrimps floating and pushing water around with their little legs. Kazuki was pretty sure that more than swimming they were getting the food to move towards their mouths or something like that. Maybe it was both? And then there were the fishes too, which were just as great.

It was honestly much more than he’d hoped to get for himself, really. Kazuki had thought about getting a small tank with a couple of fishes and that’d be it. Instead, his friends had presented before him a tank the size of a TV, decorated and full of life.

“This is amazing,” he said, but no matter what, he felt like he was falling short trying to put into words what he was feeling.

“That’s because we are amazing,” he heard Mineta replied, and he imagined the short guy was puffing his chest. That is, until he groaned, presumably because someone had elbowed him or smacked him, if the spike of pain was anything to go by. “Well, it wasn’t just us. Everyone that you helped with your grimm during the USJ offered money for this too. But we did the planning and the shopping though.”

“Thank you,” Kazuki told them, still unable to tear his gaze away from the tank. “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

And they truly didn’t, he was sure. After all, this meant that the USJ Incident was more than just Kazuki slipping and almost causing another massacre. Other things had happened and, while he was intellectually aware of that, his mind seemed unable to focus on anything but his fuck up. This drew attention to that, to the nevermore he’d sent to help Yaoyorozu’s group, to the beowolf he sent to help Mineta’s.

Furthermore, he was pretty sure this was the first gift someone had given him because they wanted to. He remembered receiving some gifts from his parents at times, but they always did so with annoyance, as if it were all a chore they had to force themselves through. Never something they wanted to do for him. His friends, however, had done this out of their volition.

“Not to sound cheap, but it was very expensive, so I’d be glad if we can consider this an early birthday present,” Mineta commented, before groaning again and this time there was an audible hit. Kazuki chuckled, doing his best to not let it turn into a sob.

“Yeah, I’m fine with that,” he reassured his friend. “More than fine with that.”

“When is your birthday?” Jiro asked curiously then, standing next to him and looking at the tank as curiously as he did. Apparently, she hadn’t gone to purchase the thing, since she’d been tasked with keeping him occupied that day. He wasn’t even annoyed with them for the sneakiness. No, he was just so happy to have them all he couldn’t be bothered with such things.

“December 22nd,” he answered.

“Annnd, done!” Hagakure exclaimed from somewhere behind him, making him blink and turn around. “Check it out!” she told him, even though he was already in the process of looking-

Kazuki blinked.

“And you thought I was silly for taking so many pictures!” the invisible girl told him and he imagined she must have looked supremely smug at that very moment. With good reason, if someone asked him. The tank was a great gift and an expensive one too. This one wasn’t quite the latter, but it certainly fit for the first descriptor. One of the walls of his apartment, previously empty and away from anything that would give it some meaning like the bookshelves and such, was now occupied by pictures.

Photographs of him and his friends out and about. There were a bunch of them taken in a cafe they’d gone several times already. Another was at U.A.’s training facilities. There was one that Jiro must have taken when he was playing the violin at her store.

“I could kiss you all,” he blurted out.

“Please don’t,” Mineta replied instantly, getting smacked again. “Stop that, would you?”

“Only if you stop being an idiot,” Yaoyorozu told him, somehow making that sound dignified.

“You are all the best.”

“Aren’t we?” Hagakure replied and he imagined she was beaming.

He needed to find a way to show his friends how much he appreciated them, because all this? All this was priceless. It was a day like any other. Just a day where they’d gone to his apartment after classes. Sure, the USJ had happened but that had been days ago and everyone seemed to be moving on. It was just another day that his friends had somehow turned into one of the best days of his life. They’d done it casually too, as if it were a normal thing.

Kazuki didn’t know when his life had taken a turn for the better, but he certainly wasn’t complaining.

[}-o-{]

‘I need to get armor or something,’ Kazuki thought with a grimace as he blocked one of Kirishima’s kicks with his arm. Fortunately, the other boy hadn’t used his Quirk during the spar, on account of Kazuki being basically Quirkless whenever he wasn’t using his grimm. Still, even with that and his own high pain tolerance, it was getting a little much for him.

Especially since he was training basically every day.

For the moment, he had other things to worry about than future changes to his costume. Chief among those being the fact that Kirishima was a breath away from kicking his ass and he’d be damned if he let him. He was rather proud to be one of the most combat capable people in his group, after all, at least in Quirkless fighting. Granted, that didn’t mean much when the others were Yaoyorozu, Jiro, Hagakure and Mineta, but still.

No offense to his friends, they had their strengths and all, but combat wasn’t one of them.

‘And I need to get much better,’ he resolved, fighting against Kirishima. He needed to be strong, after all. He needed more strength, more speed, more skill. That way, he would be able to help as much as he wanted, even when he didn’t have his grimm, or when those were occupied, like then and there, since he’d set the four he was training to maintain on others of their training group.

He punched Kirishima’s jaw and if he hadn’t known any better, he’d have thought the guy had used his Quirk. He’d felt the pain of the hit though, so Kirishima obviously had too. A small reassurance, really, but it was something.

Still, Kazuki needed to be better, all around, or he wouldn’t be able to be a hero. If he were stronger, he wouldn’t be struggling so much. He wouldn’t be feeling so tired. He wouldn’t be feeling so frustrated. He wouldn’t be hurting.

He needed to be better, stronger, more-

He needed more grimm.

His shadow darkened under him, extended and-

“Endo!” a voice called sharply and he froze. Kirishima stopped a second later. Then, Kazuki sighed, deflating and letting his grimm vanish into dust while the rest of their small gathering of students stopped their sparing too, since their opponents disappeared. “Sorry, did I call too early, I just thought-” Hagakure started excusing herself then, but he waved her off before she could finish.

“It was the right call, I was slipping. I would have made another one and that’s not a good idea, especially when it’s because I’m spiraling,” he told her, sighing again. “At least this time I didn’t have to get drugged, I guess,” he muttered, side-eyeing the spray in the invisible girl’s hands.

Not wanting to get in the way of his friend’s training, Kazuki had come up with this idea. Someone always had to stand guard whenever he was pushing his Quirk still, but at least this way it wasn’t always Yaoyorozu, so there was that. He’d have preferred not to be a liability at all, but that was a bit out of his hands, sadly.

“You are doing really well though. You are pushing more and getting further,” Hagakure told him, offering him a bottle of water she’d been carrying in her other hand. As he took it, he looked to the side. Kamakiri, impatient guy that he was, was already asking Kirishima to spar with him in the meantime. As for everyone else, they sent some looks Kazuki’s way but seemed to mostly just drift to spar with each other or hit the machines.

It was nice, to know that nobody cared overly much if he had to drop the training out of nowhere and stuff like that.

“Thanks,” he said after gulping down some water. “For the drink and the kind words. I know I’m making progress…”

“Just not making enough progress?”

“Basically,” he admitted with a weary smile. “Maybe it’s stupid, or self-centered, but I just… I want to do more. I can do more. If only my Quirk wasn’t so…”

“I get you,” Hagakure told him, giving him a pat on the arm. “I think stuff like that sometimes. What could I do if I had better control? If I could turn it off, or make my clothes invisible or make other people invisible or… Stuff like that. Would I be a better hero then?”

“Way to make me feel like an asshole…”

“What I’m trying to say-!” she told him, and he sensed some annoyance and embarrassment coming from her. “-Is that you shouldn’t worry about that kind of stuff. Just do what you can, and do your best to improve. That’s what we can do.”

“Yeah, I guess you are right.”

“Always am.”

“Humble too.”

“Of course.”

Kazuki snorted.

“You want to take a break?” the girl asked him and he could almost feel her looking at him curiously.

“You can continue your training if you want to, but yeah, I might take a little bit and then do something light. I don’t… I dont feel like trying to tackle the grimm again,” he replied, his voice lowering into a mumble by the end. His shoulders dropped as he ran his fingers through his hair tiredly.

He’d admit, he was feeling kind of disappointed.

“Nah, I’m feeling lazy,” Hagakured told him, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “So, you wanna be lazy with me.”

“... Sure,” he replied with a half-smile.

[}-o-{]

“I AM HERE!”

There was a moment of silence…

And then laughter.

“I- Ah, I told you- You couldn’t pull it off,” Kazuki said in between chuckles as he tried to regain some control of himself. It was kind of difficult, especially with how annoyed Mineta looked. Guy looked a second away from pouting. Fortunately, his feelings didn’t seem to be too bad despite the embarrassment.

“As if you could do better, Creepy,” the vertically challenged boy replied, glaring at him.

“I definitely can’t,” he answered with a grin while the girls finally seemed to start stopping their giggles. “I feel like if I tried to pull it off I’d either fail miserably or come off as a villain,” he said, only half joking. “I think just a normal entrance will be my go to. Maybe a, what did you call it, a dynamic entrance? One of those with a grimm sounds fine.”

“Fear factor can be a good approach, however,” Yaoyorozu pointed out, although she did so softly, carefully. He appreciated that, since it was something that made him uneasy. He didn’t want to make people feel afraid, he wanted people to feel safe around him. It was a bit contradictory, considering that he was at his strongest when people were feeling bad but… He hated being the cause of such emotions, always had.

“Can you imagine?” Hagakure asked, bouncing on her seat. “You appear out of nowhere with an “I am here” and the villains instantly surrender because you are just that scary,” she explained, making him grin uneasily. Sure, that picture was good and all, but he was sure the general public would be just as afraid and that wasn’t quite what he wanted.

“There’s Gang Orca, he does something like that, right? And you can bet that people are terrified of Endeavor,” Jiro pointed out, twirling one of her lobs absently. She didn’t seem as into the conversation as the others, but then again, she always seemed to have that sort-of-bored look on her face unless they were talking about music. “So, you could work with that.”

“I’m just… I don’t want to scare people. I think I do that enough without trying,” he replied, drawing into himself as he leaned back on his seat. “You get what I mean?”

“Totally, and it’s fine. You can be whatever kind of hero you want to be, Endo,” Yaoyorozu told him reassuringly and he scanned the rest of the table. He felt no negativity coming from his friends though, so that was nice.

“I guess I can give it a try though. We can’t just laugh at Tiny,” he said then, mostly because he felt bad for dragging the mood down, even if nobody was feeling bad per se. Regardless, he drew a deep breath in, smiling slightly when he saw the interested looks coming from his friends. He decided to do his best at it, if anything, maybe that’d make the whole thing more humorous. “I AM HERE!” he said, a little slower than he wanted, and his voice sounded a little too silly going that deep, he’d bet.

Sure enough, everyone started giggling – chuckling, in Mineta’s case – and he grinned, shaking his head.

“That was… certainly an attempt,” Jiro pointed out with a wry smile. “I wonder how it’d sound if you went all grimm about it though.”

Kazuki froze up then.

“All grimm?” Hagakure asked curiously. Beside him, Mineta seemed to feel a spike of annoyance, bordering on anger.

“She means when he lost control,” the little guy answered with a bit of a scowl. “His voice distorted, it was kind of…”

“Creepy,” Kazuki finished for him, his tone flat. “That’s the word you were looking for.”

“Oh, you did something like that during the press incident, didn’t you?” Yaoyorozu asked then, making him blink. She was right, but he’d almost forgotten about that. That day had been more memorable for other things, truly, so that part had been sort of pushed to the side.

“Yeah, I guess that happened,” Kazuki confirmed with a somewhat uncomfortable nod, massaging the back of his neck. “I’ve never actually… tried to use that. It sort of happens when my control slips and emotions overwhelm me a bit… or more than a bit.”

“Well, you do want to train with your Quirk, right?” Mineta pointed out then, hesitant. “Like, I know you don’t want to scare people, but it might be useful in certain situations, right?”

“Could help get attention, snap people out of panic, cause criminals to panic. A call like that can help take the eyes off of other heroes, make villains focus on you instead,” Yaoyorozu said, as if she were answering a question in class instead of just pointing something out in a conversation. “All Might also uses the catchphrase for comedy at times, which can be good to reassure people, especially children.”

“I don’t think I’d be reassuring anyone with a call, but sure, I guess you guys are right… I’m not stealing All Might’s catchphrase though. That’d be… I don’t think that’d be a popular decision,” Kazuki commented with a wry grin. “People would probably lynch me or something.”

“Well, you have an entire career to come up with one,” Hagakure told him. “Now, give it a try, I wanna hear.”

He was about to tell her that maybe he could leave that for later but everyone was looking at him, eagerly waiting. ‘Peer pressure sucks,’ he thought to himself as he sighed. Eventually, he took a deep breath in and decided to go for it. If it didn’t go well… Then he just would try to avoid using that and that’d be it.

Pulling on his negativity pools, he let it flow up from his center to his throat and then he spoke.

“I AM HERE!”

There was silence once more, but Kazuki still grimaced. He didn’t need actual words to know his friends’ opinions. He’d felt it clear as day, the sudden apprehension that creeped inside them. ‘Yeah, bad ide-’

“That was so cool,” Hagakure breathed out, making him blink. The fear seemed to have vanished into thin air, he noticed, confused by the sudden shift. “You definitely have to use that. I can see villains just surrendering once you get a reputation.”

“Definitely got the “strike the fear of God into people” part down well enough, I gotta say,” Jiro agreed, looking… impressed?

‘The fuck?’

“Really creepy though,” Mineta commented, getting glares from all the visible girls around.

“Yeah, I figured,” Kazuki replied with a disbelieving chuckle. That had gone a lot better than he expected. “Maybe I can appear calling out “be not afraid” like an angel. Biblically accurate ones are creepy.”

“DO NOT FEAR!” Hagakure called out then out of nowhere, apparently deciding to give the All Might impersonation a try with a different phrase.

“Nice attempt,” Kazuki told her.

“Thanks.”

[}-o-{]

There was silence in the room.

“I can’t fucking believe it,” Bakugo said, and while Kazuki would usually find the language a little distasteful, especially in the classroom at a moment when everyone could hear him and with the teacher right there, he thought it was the appropriate response at that very moment. “The fucking gall of the extra!” the explosive boy exclaimed then, looking and feeling like he was ready to blow someone to pieces.

Kazuki could relate, the shadow under him darkening and wisps of would-be grimm escaping like a pitch black mist.

“Aoyama was… he…” he heard Hagakure mumble, a pang of hurt that she wasn’t the only one to feel reaching Kazuki then. The room was becoming a box of bad emotions. Anger and hurt being the most prominent ones. It all came together in a specific mix that Kazuki knew.

Betrayal.

Aoyama was the one that sold them out to the villains. He’d been a fucking spy. Aizawa had just told them that. He’d told them why they hadn’t seen the blonde for a week already and why they would be short a person for the foreseeable future. It had been…

‘God, I want to punch something, let my grimm tear something apart,’ he thought to himself, trying and mostly failing to push the emotions in the room away from him. As if he weren’t feeling shitty enough as it was.

He hadn’t known Aoyama very well, or at all, but he’d been his classmate. It was safe to say that Kazuki wasn’t that much of a social butterfly. He interacted with those in his group alright, but everyone else? They barely existed as far as he was concerned.

Aoyama was still someone he’d seen almost every day since he came to U.A. and he’d been someone that Kazuki had even interacted with on occasion. It might have been just a few words, a greeting here, a question about class there, but it was still something. Aoyama was still someone that Kazuki had known that didn’t hate his guts or otherwise treat him badly. Every single of those people were important to Kazuki, regardless of if they were close to him or not.

Finding out what Aoyama had done was… a bitter pill to swallow. He’d looked like an alright guy as far as Kazuki was concerned. Sure, he’d been a bit on the weird side, with his comments about shining and sparkles and the french words and accent but… But he hadn’t been bad.

“That’s the funny thing about betrayal,” he remembered someone at juvie telling him. “It’s always a surprise. Otherwise, it’s not a betrayal.”

Aizawa had kept speaking, but all Kazuki heard was the vague sound of the man dismissing them eventually. Thus, the students slowly left the classroom, with a much more sedate pace than they usually did, for obvious reasons. Kazuki himself didn’t move, even when he saw and felt his friends stealing gazes at him.

He felt them still, worrying on the other side of the door. He was grateful that they didn’t stay or question him. He wasn’t sure why he was so affected by the revelation. Or, at least, he wasn’t sure why he seemed to be more affected than everyone else.

Sure, he’d been hit by everyone else’s emotions but was that it?

“... Everyone in here so far has been good to you,” Aizawa said once they were both alone in the classroom, without Kazuki needing to say anything. “More or less, at least. So, you were starting to expect them to be nice.”

“Are you sure? Because that sounds too positive for me,” Kazuki commented, but there was no real energy behind his words. He felt… Tired, for some reason. Weak, even though he didn’t know why he would feel like that.

“You may think that they’ll be bad, react negatively to you and such. But your experiences have told you otherwise, and so, you can’t stop a part of you wanting to believe things will go well,” Aizawa told him. “It’s a good thing, but believing in good can be painful too.”

“You aren’t selling this trusting thing to me right now, you know?”

“Do you know why there are usually more villains than heroes?” Aizawa asked him out of nowhere, making him blink. “Because it’s easier. It’s easier to give up and let the evil of the world get to you. You should know that more than anyone.”

And oh did he know that.

It’d be so easy, to give up and let the emotions lead him. To just… stop having to filter everything, stop keeping his mind calm as if he were constantly pushing against walls that closed in on him. It’d be so easy to just… let the negativity rampage.

“But you choose not to, the same way heroes and others do. You choose to be good, and it might be hard, and seem like it’s not very rewarding most of the time,” Aizawa explained to him, with more passion than Kazuki remembered him ever speaking with. “However, there’s always that one moment, when you do good and you feel good.”

Kazuki closed his eyes.

“You were a hero.”

“I guess I can understand that,” he said, his voice soft and low, to the point where he wondered if Aizawa heard him. Evidently, he did, because the man gave him a nod before speaking again.

“And that’s why we are here and we do what we do. Because the world sucks,” Aizawa told him. “But maybe, just maybe, we can make it suck a little less.”

[} Chapter End {]

Hey guys! How’s it going?

I. Have. No. Idea. What I’m going to do, honestly. I really don’t.

I just know that taking Aoyama out early will cause ripples in this and I’m so not ready for this shit, guys. I’m really not. However, I’ll have to pull through and see where this goes. Because God damn, this also sounds fun.

I guess I’m channeling my inner Nezu and seeing this as a challenge.

Speaking of, writing a PoV for the chimera guy really is a little unnerving. Writing from the perspective of smart people is hard for a dumbass like me, so cut me some slack, yeah? I’m trying.

We have some nice fluffy friendship moments too though, so that’s nice.

And Aizawa is once more proving to be a great character to write. I’m a little nervous about how I’ve written that last scene, but I like it, so I’m gonna try and have faith in it.

Announcement: I’ve started posting some stories that I’ve written in collaboration with a Discord mod over there in the server. For now, it’s sort of a server exclusive thing, but if we see that people like it, maybe we’ll start sharing them in FFN for everyone to see. So, if you are curious, go take a look and tell us what you think.

Discord Link: discord.gg/UTDransjJZ

Random Question: What do you think it’s gonna happen because of this? Yes, I’m definitely picking your brains to see if I can get more fuel for my already hyperactive Muse. What’s the worst that could happen?

See you.