Chapter Text
From Dr. Kyudai Garaki's private notes.
Entry first. Subject: M. The boy in Musutafu who does not calculate as the others do.
I dictated a question to my Master twice, a week apart, word-for-word identical, to see if his answer would change in the retelling. It did not. I chose the wording with more care than I have given anything in years… no adjectives he could object to, no framing he could redirect, nothing but the bare bones of the question, so that if the answer shifted, I would know it was the truth shifting and not my own phrasing leading him somewhere.
What do you want with him?
Eleven seconds of silence. I counted them the way I count everything now, a habit left over from decades of monitoring vitals on a table, the number rising in my head with the same flat patience I once gave a failing pulse.
I have kept my Master's company for the better part of two centuries. I have watched him lose entire cities' worth of usefulness in a single afternoon and reorganize his plans before the smoke cleared. I have heard him hold silence over the loss of an entire Nomu line without blinking… six months of tissue work, gone, and he simply moved his attention to the next line as though the first had never drawn breath. I have never heard him hold it this long over a question about a person. Not a resource. Not an asset. A person, and nothing else attached to the word.
"Nothing yet" he said, and moved on to logistics, and if I had not been listening for it, I would have missed the seam entirely… the smallest hitch before nothing, the kind of pause a lesser man fills with a lie, and my Master filled, for the first time in my hearing, with nothing at all.
I wrote 'nothing yet' in the margin and circled it three times before I understood what bothered me. It is not that my Master lied. He has never once lied to me, in all the years I have kept a record of him…not out of some code of honor, I don't think, but because it has simply never occurred to him that I required managing. It is that for the first time in his service, I watched him search for an answer and not find one, and I have spent two centuries believing there was no question in this world my Master could be asked that he had not already answered for himself, in private, long before anyone thought to ask it aloud.
A servant does not need to understand his master's wants. He only needs to serve them.
I have told myself this for decades, in exactly those words, whenever my curiosity outran my usefulness, the way another man might recite a prayer he no longer entirely believes but still finds his mouth shaping out of long habit. I told myself this again that night, sitting alone with the ink still wet on 'nothing yet', and it did not work the way it used to. It sat in my chest instead of dissolving, the way medicine sits wrong when the body has quietly stopped agreeing to accept it.
I began keeping separate notes after that. Not for my Master. I told myself they were for my Master… that understanding the boy was simply another way of serving him, the same discipline I brought to quirk theory or the Nomu production line, a variable to be modeled like any other. I no longer fully believe that, and I am old enough to know what it means when a man stops believing his own cover story and keeps telling it anyway. I have watched that particular collapse in other men, over the decades, usually right before they did something that cost them everything. I did not expect, at my age, to recognize the shape of it from the inside.
Entry, undated, some months later.
I have had four hundred and eleven sentient subjects pass through my hands in one capacity or another. I know the number precisely because I am the one who logs them, in the same ledger, in the same hand, year after year…vessels, candidates, discarded successors, dead ends, each one reduced eventually to a case file and a disposition. My Master has looked at every one of them the way a man looks at a tool he is deciding whether to keep. Assessing. Weighing. Nothing more.
He has never once watched one of them. Not the way he watches this one.
I do not think it is the power. My Master has held One For All in his hands, in a manner of speaking, for two hundred years…through every empty vessel who carried a piece of it once toward him and lost, through every hand that closed around that inheritance and opened again holding nothing. Power alone does not produce that kind of attention. I have seen him hold far greater power in far greater contempt, seen him discard men who could have leveled a district the way another man discards a report he has already finished reading.
I think and I offer this only to myself, in a notebook no one will read but me, in the small hours when the facility is quiet enough that I can hear my own pen against the paper… I think it is that the boy solves problems the way my Master does. Not with strength. With pattern.
My Master built an empire quirk by quirk, seeing what no one else could see in the space between abilities, assembling power the way another man assembles an argument, one premise at a time until the conclusion was inescapable. And here is a child who can do the same with nothing. Who built himself into something formidable out of raw observation before he ever had power to observe with, who apparently looked at a world that told him he was empty and decided, on his own, without instruction, that emptiness was simply a data point to be worked around.
My Master has spent two centuries collecting followers who obey him and enemies who fear him. I do not think he has ever, in that time, met anyone who reminds him of himself. I am not certain he has ever wanted to. That may be the part that unsettles me most, more than the silence, more than 'nothing yet'…not that my Master is interested, but that I cannot tell, watching him, whether he recognizes what he is feeling any better than I do.
I find that I want very badly to know if I am right. I tell myself this is devotion ... that understanding the shape of my Master's interest is simply another duty, filed alongside the ledgers and the tissue samples. I recognize the dishonesty in that now, sitting in my own chest, wearing my own handwriting. I have diagnosed it in others. I did not expect to have to diagnose it in myself, at this age, over a boy I have never met.
INTERROGATION OF DETAINEE K. GARAKI ... SESSION 41 [ A month after the Paranormal Liberation War]
(redacted transcript)
Q: Dr. Garaki, how are you affiliated with the criminal organisation known as the League of Villains?
A: I was arrested for it, wasn't I? Strange. I was having such a peaceful day when...
Q: Dr. Garaki, what do you know about the League of Villains?
A: Handpicked, every one of them, by my Master's successor... though of course my Master's successor is....
Q: Dr. Garaki, how long have you known All For One?
A: My Master and I met on a night I remember better than any night since...
Q: Dr. Garaki, how far did the Nomu experimentation...
[SESSION TERMINATED. SUBJECT NON-RESPONSIVE TO FURTHER QUESTIONING. See attached: forty prior transcripts, pattern consistent.]
"He hasn't said anything useful. It's been days."
Tsukauchi's fist met the wall. Not hard enough to hurt, or maybe it was, and he was too tired to tell the difference anymore. He left his knuckles against the grimy plaster a beat longer than the impact required, feeling the sting arrive late, the way pain does when a body's been running past its limits for too long to notice damage on schedule. He closed his eyes. Behind them, the last few days sat waiting, patient, ready to collect on thirty-six hours of debt the second he stopped holding them off.
In the corner, Officer Sansa said nothing, tail ticking a slow, disciplined metronome against his own silence ... the only outward sign that he wasn't half as calm as he was pretending to be. The tail gave him away in a way his face never would.
Through the one-way glass, Garaki sat exactly as he'd sat for forty-one sessions ... hands folded, spine loose, face pleasantly vacant, as if two detectives grinding themselves to dust six feet away were no more consequential than weather. The overhead light caught the thin fringe of hair at his temple and made him look, for one unfair second, like somebody's grandfather waiting out a delayed train.
Forty-one sessions.
Forty-one transcripts of a man who never finished a sentence ... not because anyone stopped him, but because he lost interest in his own answer before it landed and veered instead into another loop of devotion for a man two centuries old, delivered in the doting cadence of a father describing his son's first steps.
Not one lie in forty-one sessions. Just praise, circling, wearing the room down the way water wears stone ... patient, mindless, and completely indifferent to how much of the room was left by the time it finished. That was what made it unbearable. Not the nonsense ... though God, it was nonsense ... but the fact that none of it was a lie. Tsukauchi's quirk confirmed it again and again until the itch behind his sternum had become a low, constant burn, something he could feel now even when the room was empty, like a muscle that had forgotten how to unclench. Garaki was speaking in circles wide enough to never once touch the point, and there was a kind of contempt in that precision that no outright lie could have managed. A liar would try to get past you. Garaki wasn't trying to get past anyone. He simply didn't consider you worth reaching.
Tsukauchi had once interrogated a man who spent fourteen hours reciting the names of trees. Technically truthful. Completely useless. He'd thought, at the time, that it was the worst kind of cooperative he'd ever face.
This was worse. That man hadn't been enjoying himself. This one, on the other hand ....
"We can't torture him" Sansa said, low, coming to stand beside him at the glass. Close enough that Tsukauchi could hear the effort in it ... Sansa keeping his own voice level for both their sakes.
"You think it'd work? On him?"
A man who'd spent decades reducing living people to Nomu, who looked at a person and saw component parts, inventory, raw material ... wasn't going to flinch at pain the way a normal man would. If half of what they suspected about his true age was accurate, his relationship with his own body had stopped being anything Tsukauchi could predict a long time ago. You couldn't threaten a man with damage to something he no longer fully believed belonged to him.
"He's a monster" Tsukauchi said. Not dramatically. A fact, stated the way you'd note it was raining.
"What do you want to do?"
Tsukauchi pushed off the wall, feeling the ache travel from his shoulder down through fingers he'd bruised on plaster for nothing. "One more try."
INTERROGATION OF DETAINEE K. GARAKI ... SESSION 42
He took the seat across from Garaki and spent a slow moment assembling calm he could not afford to keep spending, the way a man counts out the last of his cash before a purchase he already knows he can't cover.
Thirty-six hours without sleep. Body running on coffee fumes and stubbornness. The certain knowledge that the second he let his eyes close, the last few weeks would arrive all at once ... the bodies, the districts, the names he hadn't had time to grieve yet because grieving required stopping, and stopping wasn't on the schedule.
So he kept his eyes open. It was the only weapon he had left in the room.
"Dr. Garaki. What exactly does the League of Villains want?"
The old man lit up, the eagerness of a man who'd spent the entire session hoping someone would finally ask the question he'd rehearsed the answer to.
"Want, he says! Ha!" Leaning in, hands coming unfolded on the table, animated now in a way that made Tsukauchi's skin prickle ... this was the version of Garaki that made his job hardest, the one who looked like he was enjoying himself too much to be dangerous. "My Master has more wants than I could enumerate in a single sitting, and the League exists to serve every one of them. So whatever my Master wants, they want. And my Master is the..."
"Dr. Garaki."
Two syllables, flat enough to preserve meat.
The old man paused, and something crossed his face that Tsukauchi hadn't seen in forty-one sessions. Not irritation. Not amusement. A flicker of something closer to genuine hesitation, gone before it could be named.
Tsukauchi noted it and said nothing. You didn't spend a career reading people by announcing every crack you found in them.
Then the familiar warmth slid back into place like a door easing shut, and Garaki tried again from a different angle, folding back into the loop Tsukauchi already knew by heart. Tsukauchi let it go, because he had thirty-six hours of exhaustion telling him he'd imagined the whole thing and no proof otherwise ... and because some interrogations you win by pulling threads, and some you win by pretending you didn't see one at all.
"You don't understand your situation." Tsukauchi said. "You give us something worth our time, or we put you somewhere the file gets lost before anyone thinks to look for it." A beat, deliberate, letting the silence do the threatening his voice was too tired to manage on its own. "Nobody's going to ask, the way things are right now. I promise you that."
Garaki studied him ... those round, watery eyes moving with the unhurried calculation of a man who'd spent over two centuries learning to read people, cataloguing something in Tsukauchi's face the same clinical way, Tsukauchi imagined, he must once have catalogued a body on a table.
"I see now" he said, softly, almost warm, "why All For One let you live this long, Detective. Even knowing about your friendship with All Might."
The words landed under the sternum, precise as a blade finding the gap between ribs.
Tsukauchi went rigid ... half a second, nothing anyone else would have caught, a stillness that lived only in the tightening of his jaw and the almost imperceptible pause in his breathing. Garaki caught it anyway. Of course he caught it. And the smile that followed wasn't the vague theater of the last forty-one sessions. It was gleeful, unguarded, lit from somewhere Tsukauchi didn't want to look at too closely. The look of a child who's found the one floorboard that creaks and means to step on it again and again, purely for the sound it makes.
He started laughing. High, bright, entirely unselfconscious, and it scraped at something behind Tsukauchi's eyes that had nothing to do with sleep.
He sat through it, hands flat on the table, breathing slow and even because the alternative, which his hands were already quietly proposing, wasn't on the table. Beside him, he could feel Sansa go very still, the tail stopping its metronome entirely.
Then the door opened. Yamma, phone raised, expression caught somewhere between apologetic and urgent.
"It's All Might, sir."
Tsukauchi stood, took the phone, still breathing through the tail end of that laugh, still feeling it crawl along his skin like something that hadn't finished happening yet ... and his mind hadn't caught up with his body when he answered, still standing three feet from the man he'd been trying not to hand anything to for days.
"All Might. What happened ... is Midoriya okay?"
Something sharp moved in the background of the call, then went quiet ... a voice, maybe, or a chair scraping back too fast. Tsukauchi's grip on the phone tightened without his permission.
"No, no ... everything's fine! Young Midoriya just left a few minutes ago. Fine. A little too consistent for his own good, maybe. But fine."
Something in Tsukauchi's chest loosened, slightly, the first real slack he'd felt in hours. "Good. At least the kid's safe."
For now, remained unsaid, sitting behind his teeth the way it always did lately.
"Endeavor called ... said you weren't picking up. He needs officers deployed; some families won't relocate."
"I'll handle it." He pressed a hand to his forehead, eyes closing for one unguarded second before he made himself open them again. "Take care of yourself. Take care of Midoriya."
"You too, friend" All Might said, and the line went dead.
Tsukauchi lowered the phone, already turning toward his partner, already halfway into the next problem in a day made entirely of problems. "Sansa ... send a unit to Endeavor's location, I'll send coordinates."
He was already dialling, thumb moving on habit alone, when the room changed.
Not loudly. No shift in sound or light, nothing he could have pointed to and named. It changed the way a room changes when something in it becomes an entirely different thing ... the way a house changes the instant you realise you're not alone in it.
"Midoriya."
One word. Quiet. Unhurried. Spoken with an attentiveness that had not existed in this room in days.
Tsukauchi turned slowly, phone still half-raised, the unfinished number forgotten in his hand.
Garaki wasn't performing. The warmth was gone, the theatrical drift, the pleasant unfocus ... set down all at once, like a mask placed carefully on a table by someone who no longer needed it. He sat very still, spine straighter than it had been in forty-one sessions, and his eyes, which for days had wandered the room looking for somewhere to land, had found it, and weren't moving again.
"Were you speaking of Izuku Midoriya?"
It didn’t sound like a question. He said the name the way a man touches something he's been told not to touch ... slow, testing what it would cost, savoring the fact that it hadn't cost him anything yet.
"So. You are talking about him!"
Tsukauchi had gone still, half a second, and that was all it took. A man who has had over two centuries of reading people doesn't need more than that.
The realization arrived slowly, then all at once, the way falling does ... the vertigo of understanding, one full breath too late, exactly what he'd just handed someone. He had said the name. Out loud. In this room. Three feet from a man who'd spent days insisting, over and over, that he served someone older and more dangerous than anyone should have to survive ... and whose reaction to that single word had looked nothing like the practiced devotion of the last forty-one sessions. This was hunger with the leash finally off.
Knowledge is power. He felt the air thin, felt the phone still warm and useless in his hand.
"Ya" Sansa said, the word landing like a hand bracing him upright before he'd even known he needed it. "What about him?"
Garaki's hands, folded on the table, came open. Slowly. Palms turning up, fingers spreading, reaching for something that wasn't there ... a gesture so gentle it took a full second to understand it wasn't affection. It was hunger, wearing the only shape this man had left for wanting something he did not, himself, fully understand wanting.
"Bring him here."
He said it the way you'd ask for water.
Then he lurched ... fast, faster than anything that frail-looking had a right to move ... chains snapping taut, chair legs shrieking back across the tile, the whole restrained bulk of him thrown forward against the table with a violence that didn't match anything in his face a moment ago.
"Bring him here."
Tsukauchi was already moving, both palms on Garaki's shoulders, driving him down as the old man thrashed with a wiry, desperate strength that belonged nowhere near that body ... the strength of something that had forgotten, for these few seconds, that it was supposed to be old at all.
"Bring him to me, and I will tell you anything you want."
Tsukauchi's quirk fired, unbidden, the way it sometimes did under enough pressure, whether he called for it or not.
Truth.
"Everything." The word cracked, close to a sob, close to a prayer, stripped of every trace of the man who'd been performing devotion for forty-one sessions. "Every name, every location ... just bring him here."
Truth.
Tsukauchi shoved him back into the chair hard enough to bark the frame against the floor, his own pulse loud in his ears, thirty-six hours of exhaustion burned clean off by adrenaline he'd pay for later. His hand found his holster ... not drawing, just resting, a promise with the safety still on.
"Sit" he said. "Move again, and I put you down."
Silence, thick enough to feel.
Garaki stared up at him, eyes wet at the rims now, searching his face for a door he seemed certain must still be there, must still be findable if he just looked hard enough.
"You can't be serious." Barely a whisper.
Tsukauchi didn't answer. He didn't trust himself to, and for the first time in all the sessions, that felt less like restraint than like the truest thing he could have said.