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The key wouldn't turn in the lock. It barely fit in the keyhole. For a moment, Shouta considered the possibility that someone had changed the lock on his front door. Then he decided that was too elaborate to be likely. He did feel tired enough to have walked up to the wrong apartment again—but no, he was standing on his own welcome mat. Shouta checked his keychain for the fourth time and sighed. He had been using the key to the faculty lounge.
The phone in his pocket rumbled. Shouta dropped the keychain to pull it out. He guarded his phone number closely, and blocked most of the people who managed to find it anyway. Getting rid of unnecessary communication helped him to respond appropriately to the most important messages.
Midoriya's text had no text. Shouta’s lockscreen wouldn't load the attached image.
Bending to pick up his keys, Shouta tapped the notification with his other hand and put in his phone passcode when prompted. The message app opened. The image was grayed out, a pale circle rotating in its center. Shouta had just enough time to unlock his door properly and hang his keychain on the hook inside before it loaded.
It was a screenshot of a navigation app, the location of the user marked by a blue dot in the center.
Shouta grabbed his keys, turned around, and walked back out the door.
A quick search of the street name on his own phone got him to the location Midoriya had sent him. It wasn’t far—within walking distance of the apartment, for someone who likes walking. Shouta took the car. He almost drove past his goal, but just in time he recognized the street name on a small sign. Pulling over, he jumped out of the car and rushed forward.
There was nothing—no shouting, no fight, no blood on the ground to follow.
Opening his own navigation app, Shouta zoomed in on his location. Midoriya’s mark was ahead of him, a little to the right of the sidewalk. Shouta started forward again, a little slower this time, watching his phone track him as he went. It was springtime, and the trees along the street were littering the sidewalk with petals. The sky was a brilliant blue—no clouds came to save Shouta's scalp from the sunlight. It was miserable.
He saw the underpass before he reached its intersection—a sidestreet too small to appear on the map, just parallel with the blue circle on Midoriya's screenshot. Shouta cut the corner across the grass and turned into the short tunnel, forgetting to check his surroundings before he rushed in. It didn't matter. There was nothing there either.
That was when Shouta started to feel uneasy. Probably he should have been worried before—and maybe he had been, in some deep corner of himself that he refused to look at—but there had been a way forward. Now he had completed his first task, and there was no next step. The pavement wouldn't hold footprints, and the scum on the ground was too scattered to be useful. There were no pedestrians he could question. Midoriya hadn't texted a second time.
The sweet pollen in the air muddled his sense of smell, and the underpass did nothing to clear his head. He wished for the pungent scent of cigarettes, or that the slime on the ground would have been sewage. He knew how to fight in a city. There had to be something else, some next step. He had to remember it.
Shouta pulled out his phone again to look at Midoriya’s photo. He had told the kid to turn off location services when he went out at night, in case his mother woke from a nightmare and decided to check on him from her phone. Midoriya said there was no need. When he went out, he left his phone at home. But it wasn't nighttime now—Shouta had just made it home from school when the text came. And the flip phone he had bought Midoriya didn't do much. It texted, it made calls, and it could be traced by several of Shouta’s contacts in an emergency. It didn't support a navigation app.
Shouta checked the contact on Midoriya’s message. It was sent from his smartphone’s number. He hadn't turned off location sharing.
Shouta held his phone against the steering wheel as he drove, looking for an open parking space or Midoriya—whichever appeared first. The lower he held his phone, the less likely he was to be pulled over and the harder it was to drive safely. He hated this. He always told off Hizashi for using his phone while driving, and he had a feeling Nemuri did the same sometimes. They couldn't find out about this. He would lose his credibility. And he had patrol late tonight. He had been up since last night’s patrol, and he was missing his afternoon nap now, so he would be tired at work. That was another dangerous thing he warned his friends not to attempt.
It was a pedestrian area, and a villain fight this morning had disrupted the train schedule, so the crowds were thicker than normal. Shouta stopped as a few schoolkids darted across the street and glanced down at his phone. He had passed Midoriya without noticing him. Rolling his eyes, Shouta flicked his blinker and turned right. The road was too busy for a U-turn.
When he came back to the street where Midoriya was, Shouta slowed his car to a crawl, turning most of his focus to scanning the crowds. But Midoriya wasn't there. Shouta couldn't even see any more students in the right uniform. Had there been time for him to change clothes after school? Had he gone to school? Maybe he had been out all night, caught on to someone just before dawn, and been trailing them ever since. Shouta hoped Midoriya had learned better than that by now. Still, he had been teaching for a long time. He was prepared to be disappointed.
Risking a glance down at his phone, Shouta saw that he had come to Midoriya's exact location. He stopped his car to look around even harder, but he still didn't see his kid. The car behind him honked. Midoriya's blue dot crawled forward. Maybe he had planted his phone on someone else? That was also something Shouta had warned him not to do—if someone got into his phone, they could find out all kinds of information on him and his family. But Midoriya did not have a good track record of listening to advice. Shouta had to consider the possibility. If he kept following the dot, eventually it would lead away from the crowd. He could isolate the individual it indicated. They could tell him what had happened to Midoriya.
The car behind him honked again, louder and longer, and Shouta turned off of the street. He had seen how slowly the dot moved, so he knew he was tailing a pedestrian. If they noticed him and darted down a thin alley, he wouldn't be able to get out of the car fast enough to tail them. If he made them worried—if they checked their belongings and found the phone, it would all be over.
Shouta left the car in the nearest parking garage and hurried back toward Midoriya’s phone as fast as he could move without drawing attention. The crowds were thickening. Shouta stopped trying to pick out suspicious people—there were too many to choose between. He would have to wait until the tracker split off into a less public area before he found his mark.
As if to spite him personally, the crowds pressed closer and closer together, like the whole street was a queue for an airplane. Over and over strangers jostled his shoulders, and his skin crawled at the contact, even with the fabric of his suit for protection. Shouta was struck with the sudden urge to climb up a lampost and escape. But he couldn’t turn back now—Midoriya’s dot was directly ahead. For once it was moving toward Shouta instead of away.
Suddenly the crowd parted. Shouta had a split second to revel at the open air in front of him before he bumped into a civilian barrier and realized that the crowd had gathered at the edge of a villain fight. The street ahead of him was blocked off, and a vague gelatinous mass sat writhing in the center. Every few seconds it set something else on fire.
Shouta sighed. He should have noticed what he was running into. As a pro hero he could step into the restricted area, but his peers would expect him to help. He could get caught up in the fighting for hours, and he didn’t have that kind of time. And he was tired—too tired to be of much help. Shouta looked down at his phone. His mark was very close—close enough to be visible if the fight wasn’t in the way. Putting his phone into his pocket, Shouta leaned forward over the top of the barrier, peering through the smoke at the crowd on the other side. Soon he would turn back and look for a way around this obstacle. If he recognized an individual from this crowd when he caught up to his mark, he might be able to identify them faster.
Pushing past someone to reach the front of the crowd, Midoriya looked up and locked eyes with Shouta across the battlefield.
“Do not!” Shouta hissed, too quiet to be heard. A shout would have been drowned in the comotion. Midoriya could read lips.
But Midoriya had already looked away, up toward the fire and the villain. His hands tightened on the railing. Then he vaulted over and took off running toward the fight.
Shouta made a sound he didn’t know how to categorize—it was a little like the sound he made when his cat had knocked a bag of flour off the kitchen counter, and it was a little like the sound his cat made when she didn’t like the way her food was arranged in her bowl. Then he jumped over the fence and ran after his charge.
Midoriya threw his backpack, and the villain jerked backward. For the first time, Shouta saw their face. He saw the person trapped there. Reaching the villain, Midoriya began clawing at them, trying to dig out the civilian who was stuck.
The villain raised an arm to crush Midoriya. Shouta erased them, and they collapsed into a pile of goo. The civilian staggered, but Midoriya caught his arm. He was another kid, dressed in a school uniform. He didn’t fall over.
“Get out of here,” Shouta commanded.
Midoriya nodded and tugged at the other boy’s arm. He shook off his hand, but they both hurried past Shouta, back toward the sideline where a paramedic could check them for injuries. Shouta didn’t look after them. The villain would only stay down while his gaze was fixed. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to get to sleep anytime soon.
Midoriya slipped into the passenger seat of the car and closed the door behind him. When Shouta didn’t drive away, he reached over and fastened his seatbelt.
“Three hours,” Shouta said, “Not including the paperwork I am required to fill out.”
“I know, Sensei,” Midoriya said, “I was stuck there for a lot of it too.”
“What happened,” Shouta said, starting down the road at a crawl. Midoriya hadn’t been far from home when Shouta had caught up to him, and they needed to finish this conversation before reaching his house.
“I saw a villain on the way home from school,” Midoriya said. “I was going slow so I could check my surroundings like you told me—and that’s how I noticed him. He was poking out of the sewer and looking around.”
“Why didn’t you leave and then call me?” Shouta said.
Midoriya clutched his backpack tighter. “I hid just outside the underpass, but I had to be still and quiet so he wouldn’t notice. That’s when I heard him muttering—something about robbing a bank and possessing people. Then he ducked back into the sewer and started escaping.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” Shouta demanded.
“He was escaping! He would have been gone by the time you got there!”
Shouta bit the inside of his lip but kept his expression blank. The villain had been gone when he arrived.
“I sent you the location, and then I followed him through the sewers,” Midoriya continued, “I meant to keep sending you updates, but it was too dark. I think he might have noticed my phone screen if I turned it on.”
“That was stupid,” Shouta said, “He could have killed you.”
“If I hadn’t led you to him, he might have killed someone else.”
“I am supposed to be sleeping right now,” Shouta said, because this was an argument he could win. “I won’t be rested for patrol tonight. I’ll have to cancel it. It wouldn’t be safe to go.”
Midoriya fiddled with the zipper on one of his backpack pockets. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m really sorry. I promise I didn’t mean to get in the way of—wait, where are we going?”
Shouta was turning right at an intersection. He ran over the route again in his head—he was tired enough to have made an error—but as far as he could tell this was the right way to Midoriya’s house.
“Are you—are you taking me home?” Midoriya asked, “You aren’t going to—please don’t tell my Mom!”
“No,” Shouta said, “Stop whining. You’re applying to Yuuei.”
Midoriya nodded. “Yes—I’ve been planning to—wait, how did you know that I—“
“No,” Shouta snapped, “That wasn’t a question. You will apply to the Yuuei hero program. If you want to operate like a hero then you need to earn the appropriate support system. I can’t cancel all my plans every time you make a foolish decision.”
“You think,” Midoriya choked, “You really think I can get in?”
“You had better,” Shouta demanded. Belatedly, he saw Midoriya’s apartment out the right window and slammed on the breaks.
Instead of conveniently hopping out of the car and leaving him alone, Midoriya burst into tears. “Sensei,” he managed, “Sensei, I never—“
“You’ll need proficiency with a support item to pass the practical portion of the entrance exam,” Shouta said, reaching over and unbuckling Midoriya’s seatbelt. “Start meeting me after school. I’m not buying you something new, so you’ll have to use my scarf.”
“Thank you,” Midoriya whispered.
Shouta unlocked the car doors. “Get out. Your mother will be worried.”
Nodding, Midoriya slipped out of the car and ran up the stairs on the side of the building. Shouta took a deep breath and let it out slowly. This kid was far more trouble than he was worth, and Shouta had a sneaking suspicion that he was getting attached anyway.