Chapter Text
Chapter One
…But at that moment, your face looked as if you were asking for help.
All For One couldn't help but bodily flinch back at the resolve in those thoughts, in those words.
How could that boy still think that?
A familiar feeling of extreme annoyance surged up inside of him. The kind one could intimately relate to — when someone was being foolishly stubborn and lacked the very concept of self-preservation, never realizing just when to give up, even if it meant their own well-being.
What folly —
He stared and stared in shocked awe through Tomura's battered, beaten, broken, and crumbling body as the boy, Izuku Midoriya, fell into the rubble of the city Tomura had so meticulously leveled.
He could hear the boy's thoughts?!
Why? Since when? What changed?
Did he do this? Did ripping through the boy's barriers and invading his mind cause this?
Had the clashing encounter between All For One and One For All — two cosmically powerful quirks, that in the right hands could each single-handedly change the tide of any war — made it possible?
Did simply brushing against his brother's quirk in the same realm finally break through the thick haze of fog that had separated the familially legendary quirks for over two centuries?
Or maybe the connection had always been there.
Or maybe it's — Izuku.
Oh. How unpredictable.
In a blink of an eye, with no hint of hesitance, he had pushed the boy away from him as if instinctively he knew, somewhere deep within him, that a threat far more deadly than it looked was looming in his face.
He could see insurmountable pain in the boy's eyes, the raw ache of his open wounds and broken bones. He was exhausted and bleeding and hurting all over the place and yet had the nerve and resolve to seek him out.
The Symbol of Evil could still hear the pathetic cries of the so-called pros panicking and screaming in the background, still trying and failing hard to put up their heroic front.
How disgustingly pitiful.
All of this could have been avoided if it wasn't for their insistent need to squabble around with him.
He had a plan. A very intricate plan. Everything until now had been according to that plan. A plan that entailed an invaluable prize of attaining it all at the end. A carefully crafted and very well-thought-out plan — but the heroes came and destroyed everything. Again.
Knowing and realizing that none of them ever stood a chance against him, even when Tomura's body was falling apart, they were still nothing.
The Scourge of Kamino relished in the satisfaction at the waves of anguish he could feel emanating from the heroes.
There was no likelihood that those whiny little pros ever stood a chance against Tomura's newly gained strength.
None of them.
He knew that. They knew that. And none of them would dare approach. Not anymore. Not when he was in control.
Except... the boy.
The downright foolish and utterly infuriating boy who had the nerve to still him.
How blindly self-sacrificing and stupid one had to be to pull a stunt like that?!
All For One looked and couldn't help but feel a second of momentary blindness against the ball of pure, unadulterated power that radiated from the boy. A blinding supernova of pure energy empowered by so much anger and resolve.
Even as every nerve in the kid's body screamed against him, the boy still lunged forward using the manifestation of the Fifth's Quirk which —
Yes.
He had suspected that the Godforsaken Quirk could flare up in certain ways if the right conditions were ever fulfilled, and since the boy met those conditions so, so perfectly, no wonder he had been sprouting quirks left and right during this battle.
The sudden surge of pain from his .... Tomura's....right hand brought him back from his musings. The right hand was bleeding profusely as the recoil of controlling the power outflow of a strong quirk such as Air Cannon had its consequences.
His own words.. We will meet again once this body is completed, worthless Izuku Midoriya ...had stung him more than they could ever sting the boy.
He was nothing to Izuku Midoriya apart from someone who had hurt his friends and mentor. The scathing, harsh words meant nothing to the child coming from him.
Not when the boy had grown up listening to those same words for over a decade and yet still pursued against them at all odds.
He had stood tall in front of him for the world that had ignored him. Abandoned him. Cursed him. Ostracized him. All in a futile attempt to save it.
It was stupid. So very stupid —
The kind of stupid his precious but foolish younger brother would approve of. But he doesn't.
Not when willfully invading the boy's mind, showing him the slightest bit of consequences of his reckless actions, wasn't enough to scare him away.
He had berated the boy. Made him bleed and squirm and scream. Called him worthless. Made him feel helpless and scared. Tore open his old wounds. Helped his half-witted band of followers, whom the naive, young boy considered friends and teachers ....to reach the brink of death.
And yet ....nothing.
The boy had still followed after him.
Why?
A struggle from Tomura, and he stomped it out in rage, yanking his main pawn's consciousness back deep inside the maze of their shared mind.
He had more important things to focus on at the moment.
Like Izuku Midoriya.
No words were ever enough to break that boy's spirit. Someone with such steely resolve and unflinching determination. It was that resolve .... the kind that made a tiny, icy shiver of pure dread run up his spine. Not for the boy's safety. For his own.
There were few, very few, who could affect the Lord of Evil in such a way.
None of his predecessors ..... until the hypocrite, self-centered blonde oaf had made him feel any ounce of dread. And yet here Izuku Midoriya stood, not even half the age at which Yagi had fought him, with so much power running through his veins, fueled by his spirit, his essence, and his ire.
With so much control over what All For One thought and felt.
Izuku Midoriya was the worst and most dangerous wielder of his brother's quirk in the long line of lunatics that had preceded him. Far more than he could have ever imagined or comprehended.
And this fight proved that.
If it weren't for his vessel's barely newfound sturdiness and the severe deprivation of correct guidance on the boy's side, Izuku Midoriya would have wiped the floor clean with the entire Paranormal Liberation Front. Alone. Especially with Tomura and his league.
Not when each of his kicks and punches was aiming to destroy.
To kill.
A sudden thought ... a realisation ... caught him off guard. The resolution of this sudden notion shook him. It synced with something so deep in his gut that a giddy, manic grin spread across his face.
All For One reached his arms out.
Yes. He could do this. Why hadn't he thought of this before? This was perfect.
Multiple Quirks and Search reached out, pinpointing on one person. The only person who mattered on this battlefield. A blast of radio waves.
A signal.
And suddenly, all the Nomus came to a halt.
It made no sense to leave his prize behind when it was so close he could almost taste the sweet, sweet feeling of triumph in his arms. Heroes had destroyed all his plans, so why not simply throw the handbook away?
Like the puppets they were made to be, all the High-End Nomus .. apart from the ones carrying him and Spinner dived in on one target.
…But at that moment, your face looked as if you were asking for help.
Everything went eerily silent around Izuku.
But the thought repeated again and again in his mind like a mantra.
Tenko Shimura. The little kid.
He needed to save Tenko. He needed to save — he needed to ...
The thought had come as naturally as breathing to him.
In that void, in that deep dark space where dark and light collided and space and time seemed to lose all that they were known for ... the point where two of the most powerful quirks ever born or recorded in history lurked, never interacting but simply co-existing, each unaware of the other's presence ... he had felt and seen a boy not more than five, trapped and alone. His tears asking, pleading for help, for understanding, for anyone to reach him.
Tenko Shimura —
"Tenko." His lips moved.
He needed to save Tenko.
A sudden jolt of a lightning-like splitting headache, and all the senses came pouring in like a hurricane.
Danger Sense!
The wind rushed, howled, and roared in his ears.
He was falling.
The prospect of hitting the ground did not occur to him until then .. the sudden feeling of cold, dark, death-like tendrils reaching out and wrapping themselves around him like a cocoon.
He was so distracted by the feeling of icy death that he never saw the hulking dark image of a nightmare monstrosity wrap its enormous arms around his upper body and pull him close.
Instinct mixed with fierce dread made Dark Whips lash out through his arms and back, reaching out, wrapping, crushing, and breaking the flesh and bones of the arms holding him.
It would be later .. much, much later ... when a far more coherent Izuku Midoriya would analyze that the hold was not to harm him.
But here and now, when another large arm materialized from behind, Izuku moved and somersaulted in the air, landing a kick worth 70% of One For All straight onto the Nomu's head, cracking its skull and making the creature scream like a howling banshee before it dashed forward towards him again.
Still shrieking. And now bleeding.
Izuku suddenly felt nauseated. His response time was slow. His previously gained injuries were not helping the situation in any way, shape, or form. His hands and legs were completely useless and hung broken on his sides.
That kick had taken more out of him than he had anticipated. He didn't understand yet that what he felt was a simple but efficient weakening quirk from the Nomu.
"Midoriya!"
Iida?!
His eyes shot up at his friend's horrified voice as Iida desperately tried and failed to rush forward and aid him against all that rubble. Again, his momentary distraction allowed the still-screaming Nomu to wrap its large claw-like arms around him as the other .. now one-armed.... Nomu rushed toward Iida, screaming all the way.
NO —
The coldness flared up like a forest fire in summer, lapping at his rage and anger and helplessness.
Before he could even think, his Black Whip had pierced through the one-armed Nomu's entire being ... through its heart, its back, multiple places in its stomach region, and its neck. Exactly like dark red tendrils had pierced Bakugou earlier.
Deja vu.
Kacchan —
Bile rose in his throat. No. He ... he hadn't just copied him.
The howling continued even when Izuku could swear he couldn't hear a thing, his back buried against the hulking figure.
What had he .... he hadn't just ... but he had.
Numbness enveloped him from all corners.
The next moment there was a hand on the scruff of his neck and he was being pulled out and away from the howling Nomu and onto the back of another creature.
A shiver ran through him at the thought of familiar hands around his neck. Unwanted memories from the mall flooded his mind.
"Change of plans, my little worthless Izuku Midoriya."
The glacial voice made Izuku claw against the hand around his neck in sheer panic, his arms failing to heed his command.
Dread wrapped around his legs and against his chest like invisible chains.
No. No, no, no. Why? He had said ... he had said that they would meet again once Tomura Shigaraki's body was complete. Whatever that meant. So why?
Pain overpowered his senses, Danger Sense suddenly shrinking and disappearing completely. He tried to grasp at the arms to pull them away but the agony in his veins simply multiplied.
Pure desperation made Black Whip coil up and against his assailant's arm —
"Are you planning on piercing me with those whips too, little Midoriya?"
And just like that, the whips flickered and disappeared into nothingness and he hung limply against the hold.
"You sure are a fast learner, aren't you, Izuku? I demonstrated and you followed. Maybe you're not so worthless after all."
And then the Nomu was rushing off.
With him. With Shigaraki Tomura. With All For One residing in Shigaraki Tomura. With Spinner. With —
A fair distance away and Izuku was gently put back down on the Nomu.
Again, instinct kicked in and Izuku bodily pushed against the figure, only to be caught and pulled against Shigaraki. He tried, he tried to bend away, to loosen it —
But he failed. He flopped and phased in and out of consciousness. He didn't have any more strength left in him.
He couldn't even curl up in a corner and let the realization hit him that he had failed. He had let people get hurt because of him — something he had sworn would not happen again. So much lost and all because of him. And now Shigaraki — no. All For One — had kidnapped him.
He screamed. Or was it a sob? Izuku wasn't sure at this point. There was just too much pain all over his being.
NO.
He couldn't let himself be dragged to whatever hell All For One had planned for him in his attempt to have One For All. He couldn't. He needed to go back. The heroes needed him. His friends needed him. Shoto ... oh God, Shoto needed him. Mom and All Might needed him —
'NO! They don't!'
An angry growl and Izuku's eyes widened.
He slightly turned his head in understanding and realization at the hand .. mask.. face? .. of Tomura Shigaraki, and spoke to All For One. Seconds passed as Izuku stared, a new kind of horror creeping into his thoughts.
"You can hear what I'm thinking."
Though stated like a question, it was a statement. Now that he concentrated hard, he could feel that connection. That path. That bond.
A dark mass of coldness and death, just out of and yet within his reach.
That feeling from before —
And suddenly that was all Izuku could feel around him. Dark, icy flames lapped against his consciousness, examining him, studying him from every corner of his mind. One For All flared up momentarily, pushing against it, trying to stop it, to shove it away .. but it slipped, and flickered, and fell back. His strength left his body with every breath.
A hand against his eyes — no. No. No. Not again.
He tightened his hold on One For All. He would not let this man — this monster — invade any more than he already had. The quirk was his. It belonged to him. All Might had given it to him. It belonged to .. it belonged to —
The murky icy flames blazed and Izuku could feel amusement radiating out of the inky darkness.
"Your quirk is not my concern for now, Izuku, so — rest, my precious little Midoriya."
A command. A suggestion. And the next moment his body was slacking against his will as darkness enveloped him. This was a quirk. Definitely a quirk.
He tried to squirm against the hold, tried focusing on the pain blazing through every inch of his body while ignoring the thought that the palm on his head could dust him in a minute ... all in a desperate attempt to move ... but every ounce of his being felt deprived of sensation, giving way to too much pain and fatigue, and finally, finally his mind caved in.
Izuku Midoriya lost consciousness.
If someone were to ask Spinner what exactly had been going on, he would let out an inhumane howl and claw his eyes out with his bare hands.
The past twenty-four hours had tested his sanity in ways that had shocked him, terrified him, angered him, but more importantly ... confused him thoroughly.
Yesterday, he had fought in the front lines of a war that had shaken an entire country. He had watched his friend and leader's body being slowly taken over by a two-hundred-year-old supervillain who he was pretty sure, up until a year ago, did not exist outside of legends and nightmares from the dark underbelly of Japanese society. He had heard about a fellow companion's death and watched another sacrifice himself.
And Dabi ... well. Everything he did.
Following All For One to Tartarus, the most secure anti-quirk prison in the world, had been an experience all on its own. Breaking in and letting out a bunch of prisoners ... but especially the original All For One in his corporeal form .... had been a challenge.
But they had done it.
And now he stood here in the background of an elaborate, run-down cave-like structure on some back-corner island near the mainland, watching as All For One — in all his original glory, the literal Lord and King of organized crime in Japan ... crouched beside the sleeping figure of the green-haired kid.
The Stain-approved true hero.
The one he could swear on his very soul that this same man had desperately tried to murder the previous day.
All For One ran his fingers delicately and very cautiously against those green curls, as if afraid to wake him.
Spinner stared blankly. And stared some more. The man did not acknowledge him or his presence. Too focused. Too keened in on the boy.
The only thing the man had done after getting his own body freed was leap at the first opportunity to check on the boy. He had healed him, sat beside him, and more or less hovered ever since.
At this point, Spinner would bet all his money that the man had no idea whatsoever of Shigaraki's current whereabouts.
He had disappeared once briefly — apparently to get changed from his battered jail rags into a costly, pristine dark suit which, in Spinner's humble opinion, simply looked more restrained and complex to move around in. Maybe that was the point.
He was going on intuition here.
He.Was.Still.Stroking.The.Boy's.Hair.
The sudden image of that same now-calm, sleeping figure — with an appearance far younger and more innocent than his actual age .. charging at them at full speed and power with a manic rage on his face —
"Just take the quirk and be done with him already!"
He spat it out.
The stroking stopped.
The cave felt like being plunged into coldness and death.
The faceless face turned and stared.
Spinner had faced Stain. He had faced pro heroes and walked through a literal war. He had watched Dabi set the sky on fire.
None of that had prepared him for this.
The silence stretched, pulled taut like a wire about to snap ... and All For One simply looked at him. Through him. Past him. Into some deeply uncomfortable corner of his soul that Spinner wasn't entirely sure he wanted examined.
"I see."
Two words. Quiet. Measured. Terrifyingly calm.
Spinner opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
"I just meant ... you know .. the whole point was One For All so why are we ... why is he just ...lying there while you "
"Why are you still talking?"
Spinner's mouth snapped shut so fast his teeth clicked.
The stroking resumed.
There was a time when his life was simple.
There was day and then there was night. He would venture out, find some food, sometimes some water. He had a few friends. Life, for all its worth, was quiet.
Nedzu, the highly esteemed Principal of UA Academy, could not miss that life anymore. Not because he didn't want to. But because remembering it meant remembering everything that came after.
His memory of that former life was mercifully vague now. Hazy at the edges, soft the way old pain eventually went soft. What came after was not vague. What came after was etched into the very flesh and marrow of his entire being, carved there by hands that had belonged to people who wore the same colors as the heroes his students now trained to become.
The government had wanted to know what happened when you took an animal with a quirk and pushed it. Refined it. Broke it open to see what was inside.
They had found out.
He carried that knowledge the way he carried everything with a smile and a cup of tea and the particular stillness of a creature who had learned, very early, that showing your throat invited teeth.
He padded silently now into the abandoned cave on the grassy mountainside. His stance was sharp. His step precise. All the controlled rigidity of an animal who knew exactly how this ordeal would go and had chosen to walk into it anyway.
The past was a burden people carried differently. Some with pleasure. Some with pain. Principal Nedzu of UA carried his like a debt .... a personal one, owed to the King of the Underworld.
It was not a comfortable thing to carry.
It was not a simple thing either.
The man who had opened the cage had not done it out of altruism. Nedzu had never been naive enough to believe that. But the hand that opened the cage was still the hand that opened the cage, and two centuries of pragmatism had taught All For One that a mind like Nedzu's was worth more free than broken. That was the closest thing to kindness the underground had ever shown him.
Nedzu let his paws linger briefly against the cave wall. Cool stone. Solid. Real.
He focused.
There lay the lost UA hero-student, the boy for whom half the country was currently willing to spill blood...cradled in the arms of the very man who would comfortably watch all of them burn if it meant he could have everything.
Nedzu chose to ignore the cave's elaborate throne-like arrangement. The looming Nomu creatures stationed like pillars. The theatrical architecture of a man who had always understood that power was partly performance.
He focused instead on what mattered.
All For One, leaning over the boy. One hand holding the child's. The other buried gently ...gently ....in green curls.
Nedzu's smile did not falter.
He had seen this before. Not this exactly. But the shape of it. The particular quality of attention All For One gave to things he had decided to keep.
"You've created quite a big mess, old friend."
The scarred face lifted. That large, inhumane grin spread across features that had long since stopped resembling anything a civilian would call a face.
"I expect a call before house visits, Principal Nedzu. Or is your UA above such polite social conduct?"
Nedzu did not let his beady eyes wander, nor did he let his smile falter in the face of hostility so practiced it had become indistinguishable from courtesy.
He noticed the grip on the child tighten.
He noticed the way All For One edged subtly forward — not a threat exactly, but a declaration. A boundary drawn without words.
Try it.
Ah. Well. So much for pleasantries.
"As I'm sure you're aware," Nedzu said, "every hero, sidekick, hero-student, and media outlet in the country is currently looking for Izuku Midoriya."
"Oh?" The tone of a man deeply unbothered by what Nedzu would think he cares about.
"All Might is rather ......" Unhinged would be accurate. Unravelling perhaps more so. He could not do Yagi Toshinori the disservice of saying either to his oldest enemy. "Concerned. With the sudden disappearance of his successor."
"Do remind me how Yagi's discomfort is any of my concern."
Nedzu smiled wider. Politeness and restraint were skills he had spent decades perfecting in a society profoundly averse to anything that did not fit its neat categories. He had learned this in his earliest years what he was, what had been done to him, and how carefully a creature like him had to move through a world that had already decided what he should be.
"Circumstances have rather changed from what we previously discussed."
It was a diplomatic way of describing the abduction of a child. He was good at diplomatic descriptions.
"Have they." Not a question. "I don't see it."
"Taking Izuku Midoriya changes things."
"Sending him to a battlefield UA so blatantly hadn't prepared him for changed things first." The voice was pleasant. It was always pleasant. "I simply responded to a situation your institution created."
Nedzu was silent.
He looked at the boy's face. Young, even in sleep. Painfully young. The bruising had faded ... All For One had healed him, of course he had , but the evidence of spectacular, reckless self-destruction remained written across every inch of him.
He had read the boy's files. All of them. Every analysis, every assessment, every note from every teacher who had watched Izuku Midoriya and written down remarkable and unprecedented and singular and not fully understood what they were looking at.
Nedzu had understood.
He had understood and watched and had, with the particular careful guilt of someone who knew exactly what recognition from All For One meant, said nothing.
"He has One For All," All For One continued. The pleasant voice had developed an edge now, fine as a scalpel. "Are you making excuses, beloved Principal of UA? What about Mirio Togata?"
Nedzu kept his eyes on the boy.
All For One had wanted permeation. The ability to move through walls, through barriers, through anything that sought to contain him. A logical desire for a man who had spent years evading Tartarus. Nedzu had understood the request. Had even, to his own quiet shame, understood its logic.
"I apologize, Sensei. I did suggest Mirio Togata, as you had asked. The timing ..."
"You seem to be failing rather often nowadays."
The words landed the way All For One always intended his words to land.. precisely, cleanly, in the place that would produce maximum effect.
Nedzu breathed.
He looked at the boy again.
Izuku Midoriya. Quirkless until he wasn't. Told he couldn't..until he did. Brilliant in the particular catastrophic way that brilliant things were when they had no idea what they were, when the world had spent so long telling them they were nothing that they had never learned to be careful with themselves.
Nedzu knew something about that.
He looked at the hand in those green curls. The unconscious possessiveness in it. The way All For One had not moved from this spot , not for strategy, not for logistics, not for the thousand other pressing concerns that should have occupied the most dangerous man in Japan the day after a war.
He had stayed here.
And Nedzu felt something cold move through him that had nothing to do with the cave's temperature.
Because he recognised this.
He recognized the shape of it.
"What are your intentions with the boy?" he asked. Quietly. Without the diplomatic wrapping.
All For One tilted his head. The grin softened into something worse.. something that looked almost thoughtful.
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me."
A pause.
"Now why," All For One said softly, "would that be, I wonder."
Nedzu held his gaze.
In the silence between them lay thirty years of impossible accounting ..a debt that had never been simple, owed to a man who had never been good, for a rescue that had nevertheless been real. He had built UA. He had trained heroes. He had spent every year since that cage opened trying to construct something that could stand against the hand that had opened it..
And here he stood. In the cave. Having this conversation.
You seem to be failing rather often nowadays.
"Don't do to him what was done to me," Nedzu said.
The words came out quieter than he intended. More honest than was safe.
All For One looked at him for a long moment.
Then he looked down at the sleeping boy.
The hand in the curls stilled. Then, very slowly, resumed its movement.
"What was done to you," All For One said, almost to himself, "was done by people wearing very different colors than mine."
"I know," Nedzu said.
"And yet here you are."
"And yet here I am."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"Go back to your school, Principal Nedzu," All For One said finally. "Tell Yagi whatever placates him. Manage your institution."
"And the boy?"
All For One did not answer immediately.
When he did, his voice had shifted into something Nedzu had no clean category for. Something that had no business existing in a man like this, in a cave like this, on a day like this.
"He'll be taken care of."
It was the most frightening thing Nedzu had heard in thirty years.
Because he believed it.
He padded back out into the grey morning light with careful steps and a smile that did not reach his eyes and the particular weight of a creature who had just watched history prepare to repeat itself.
Behind him, in the cave, the ocean was audible against the rocks.
Inside, a boy who did not yet know what he was to anyone slept in arms that had no intention of letting go.
Nedzu walked and did not look back.
Some debts compounded daily.
All For One sat with the silence Nedzu left behind.
It was a particular kind of silence. The kind that had shape. Weight. The kind that a very intelligent creature left deliberately, knowing it would linger longer than any parting words.
Nedzu had always been exceptional at that.
He listened to the retreating sound of careful paws against stone until there was nothing left to hear but the ocean.
Don't do to him what was done to me.
He turned the words over. Examined them the way he examined everything from all angles, in all lights, looking for the architecture beneath them. The structural load they were carrying.
What had been done to Nedzu had been done by men with government clearance and clinical detachment and a complete absence of anything that could be called conscience. They had taken something extraordinary and tried to make it useful. Tried to sand down the parts that didn't fit their design. Tried to answer the question of what a mind like that could become if you removed everything inconvenient about it.
They had failed.
Not because Nedzu had resisted though he had, in every way available to something small and caged and afraid. They had failed because extraordinary things did not reduce. They expanded or they shattered. Nedzu had chosen expansion with a ferocity that had eventually made even the most detached of his handlers step back.
He had not done to Nedzu what they had done to Nedzu.
He had simply recognized what was there. Named it. Opened the door.
Was that not different?
Don't do to him what was done to me.
His eyes moved to the boy.
The boy who had been told for a decade that what was inside him was worthless. Who had been handed nothing and built everything anyway. Who had walked into a battlefield and aimed himself like a weapon at the most dangerous thing on it and had still .. still... in the same breath, been thinking about saving someone.
The government had wanted a soldier.
They had gotten Nedzu.
He wondered, distantly, what they would have made of Izuku Midoriya.
The thought produced something cold and sudden in his chest that had no name he was willing to give it.
His hand had stilled in the green curls without him noticing.
He noticed now.
He resumed.
From across the cave, Spinner had watched the entire exchange with the fixed expression of a man who had stopped trying to process things and was simply enduring them.
The small animal-thing had come and gone. Had spoken to All For One in the tone of someone reading from a script they had memorized under duress. Had looked at the kid with something Spinner couldn't name and then left.
Spinner had approximately forty-seven questions.
He was going to ask zero of them.
He pulled his knees tighter to his chest and watched the Lord of Evil ...the most dangerous man in Japan, possibly in recorded history ... sit beside a sleeping teenager and think.
Just ... think.
With his hand in the kid's hair.
Spinner pressed his forehead to his knees.
He thought about Stain. About ideals. About the speech that had made him pick up his weapons and walk out of his apartment and decide his life was going to mean something.
He was fairly certain this was not what Stain had meant.