Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A draft slithered across the Shie Hassaikai compound’s roof and rattled the loose flashing with a metallic hiss. The day was quiet in that way cities sometimes are, breath held, sirens waiting in the lungs of sleeping streets. It smelled like dust and concrete and antiseptic and… something sweet?

Kirby’s nose, or rather face because he doesn't have a nose twitched.

“Fooood?” he whispered, delight and inquiry squished into the same small sound. He was three feet of pink sphere, red shoes planted on tarpaper, stubby arms clasped over a round tummy that growled like a distant drumroll.

All around him, the raid churned like a storm inside the building. Distant booms rumbled up the ventilation shafts. Voices barked orders. But the little puffball wasn’t here for voices or storms. He was here because he’d smelled a hint of apple candy, of mochi, of warm broth threaded through the ductwork like a promise.

...And a star shaped wormhole he jumped through that's the main reason he's here

He flattened himself, (plip!) and slid into a vent grate with a soft metallic ping. The screws didn’t turn; they simply decided to be someplace else. Kirby wiggled, belly first, squeaking down into the dark.

Below, the yakuza maze shifted and writhed as Mimic’s Quirk squeezed corridors and buckled floors. To Kirby, the labyrinth felt like a living mouth. He hummed to himself, unbothered, pinging along on red feet that somehow made no sound. When walls squeezed, he turned sideways like a skipping stone and slipped through cracks that weren’t there a blink ago. The air thrummed with the energy of Heroes and Villains colliding, the taste of quarried stone and old metal and the bitter tang of medical cleaner clung to his tongue.

Food smell got stronger.

Kirby’s eyes shone. “Haaiii~,” he sang to no one, and bumped his cheek to the duct, listening. A shudder, a pain-cry like a swallowed gasp, came from below, a battle cry smashed flat by a blast of falling rock. He scooted, popped a vent, and plopped silently onto a steel beam strung across a service hallway, ten feet above scuffed concrete.

Something small ran.

Something bandaged, with a horn like a pearl splinter, wrapped in a torn red cape.

Eri.

She stumbled. She collided with the beam’s support, caromed, and, bonk, bounced into a round, soft, pink.

“Sorry!” she squeaked. Her eyes were watery terrariums of terror. Even though Kirby was smaller than her,just by a little, she flinched as if she’d struck a grenade pin.

“Haaaiiiii~!” Kirby chirped, smiling so wide his cheeks squished his eyes into crescents. Then he tilted his head, the picture of puzzled kindness. Why was the little one quivering? Why were her hands cold? Why did the cape smell like fear and soap?

He held out his hand.

Well, nub.

Eri stared at it, working her breath in tiny sips. The torn cape fell around her like a wilted sunflower. Somewhere down the hall, a man groaned, the sound of a mountain choosing to move one more inch because someone needed it.

Eri put her tiny hand in Kirby’s soft palm.

He nodded as if they’d just agreed on thunder. “Come,” he said softly, the word toddling on his tongue. “Kirby walk. Friend walk.”

He gave Eri a brotherly head pat

They started. Kirby took small, bouncing steps, his hand light on Eri’s, as if he were tugging a kite string through a storm. They passed a shape slumped in the hallway, a boy really, in a ragged cape’s absence, strong body crumpled like paper that had done its job. Lemillion. Mirio’s eyes were half-lidded, his breath scraping. He stared through Kirby, through Eri, through everything. It wasn’t that he refused to see, his body just… couldn’t, right then.

Kirby tugged a little harder. “Go,” he said to Eri. “Safe safe.”

She looked back over her shoulder at Mirio with a tiny whimper. Then she squeezed Kirby’s nub, as if trusting a balloon not to pop.

From around the corner: impact. Stone cracked like thunderclaps. A cold voice filled the basement like bleach poured over a wound.

“-when I disassemble, the recoil is… unfortunate,” Overhaul said, standing in a world he had made sharp. Chunks of floor hovered, then fused into jagged pylons that screamed upward. “But a human who refuses to give up… is not to be made light of.” He flexed blood off his glove with a flick, as if the droplet itself were a disease. Hives mottled his neck where dust had settled; the mask’s filters whistled.

Midoriya, arm trembling, a shard of stone bitten into his flesh like a fang, staggered upright. He was shaking and smiling and about to fall over all at once. His breath was a furnace trying to light in a windstorm. Behind him, Sir Nighteye lay impaled against the far wall on a spear of reconstituted floor, eyes a haze of pain and stubborn calculation that wouldn’t dim.

Midoriya’s mind spun: (I smashed the floor and reduced his firepower good, good, hold on, hold on!)

Overhaul’s right hand opened; another mouth churned into existence across the palm. Lips peeled back over enamel born of flesh and Quirk, and when it spoke it was Nemoto’s voice hitchhiking through a nightmare: “Eri. Did you want… any of this?”

The basement seemed to hold its breath.

In the hallway, Eri’s feet stopped moving. Her hand in Kirby’s went rigid. Memory crawled up her spine like cold hands, fingers that had come apart and put her together, wrong and again and wronger. That mouth, those hands, the gentle voice that said it was all necessary and the air that became knives.

She turned and ran back, cape flaring in a tattered arc. Kirby trotted behind her, little feet making tiny shh shh shh sounds. His mouth was still a smile, but his eyes had gone very round.

Midoriya whipped around. “Eri- ! You need to stay with-!”

“I don’t want any of this!” Eri said, on the verge of tears

“Do you think he can do this alone?” Overhaul asked. Shin’s truth slid out through the palm-mouth like a scalpel.

Eri stopped at the edge of the battlefield, Mirio’s warmth gone from the torn cape. She looked at Midoriya, at the boy who had reached once and let go, and she did not lie. “No.”

Overhaul’s eyes thinned to needles. “Then what must you do to resolve this?”

“I have to go back,” Eri whispered, toes at the line where the floor became Overhaul’s idea of a floor. “And you have to fix everything back to normal.”

“Of course,” Overhaul said, voice soft as a clean blade. “It will be easier on everyone if only you are hurt.”

“Eri!” Midoriya’s voice broke. “No- !”

Overhaul’s gaze slid to him, to Mirio slumped in the hall, to Sir Nighteye pinned and bleeding, to the nervous system of Heroes above like a whole body trying to make a finger move. “Your faith in Lemillion was misplaced. Your insistence on rescue? Cruel, to her. This is the mess of your hope.” His dermal hives flushed angrier at the dust in the air, at the thought of it inside his mask. “Unwanted.”

Something in the hallway sighed as if the air itself had gotten fed up.

The pink blur came with no warning, no footfall, no intake of breath. One second, Overhaul’s coat lay flat; the next, the fabric cratered inward where a tiny fist, impossibly dense and impossibly kind, buried itself in his gut.

The room hiccuped.

Overhaul folded in half, eyes wide, a sound like a broken accordion punching out through his mask. He stumbled and vomited, bile, blood, breakfast, and fury spattering his immaculate shoes. The hives exploded. He reached for the antiseptic in his mind and found only pain.

To everyone else, the impression was of cotton candy turning into a railgun. Something pink, small, spherical, just existed where Overhaul’s abdomen used to be comfortable. Then it wasn’t there again, except the afterimage quivered on retinas like a smear of sunrise.

“Is it, an adult? A… short… adult?” Midoriya muttered,

Sir Nighteye blinked. “…a child?” he managed.

The pink thing blinked twice. “Poyo?”

Oh, it’s a kid.

HOW DID A KID GET HERE???

“W-what!? What are you!?” Overhaul wheezed, horror and rage tug-o’-warring in his voice. His hand twitched open toward the floor out of habit, to make spikes, to make order.

Kirby tilted his head again, the same gentle confusion. Then the mask stink, metal and plague and cruelty, hit him, and something prim and small inside Kirby sat up very straight.

Overhaul’s fingers brushed the floor

And Kirby jumped. It wasn’t a leap; it was a decision to be elsewhere. Overhaul snatched at air and found a shirtfront in his hand, warm and soft and impossible. Equally impossible was the way the soft thing grabbed his jacket, no fingers, no grip, and yet the fabric belonged to Kirby now.

“Oh,” Kirby said very quietly, nubbins set. “No.”

He threw Overhaul one-handed.

The yakuza boss went through a wall with the offended shriek of limestone. Dust geysered. The mouth in his palm keened. He stood, bones crackling under skin that tried to be his, hives singsonging along his throat.

“I-I’LL KILL YOU!” he spat, and the basement answered with spikes, columns, the floor reconfiguring like teeth. He didn’t care about touching filth anymore. He didn’t care about the blood drying sticky on his gloves. He cared about the tiny thing that had put him on the ground and the way the girl’s eyes had shifted when it had smiled at her.

Kirby’s face did something Eri had not seen yet. It stayed cute, but the edges went firm. The blueish fade in his oval eyes became cold stars.

He moved.

Fists like hail. Jabs like sewing needles going wrong. A drumroll of impact that made the human ear decide to give up. Overhaul’s arms broke at the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder; each time he tried to reassemble, Kirby’s hands were already there too, disassembling with pure physics. Cartilage snapped. Clavicles sang. Somewhere in the flurry, the mask split, plastic and flesh popped like a seed hull, and the last punch was an upward cut that took the lower half of his jaw, mask, skin, pride, and sent it cartwheeling into the dust.

Overhaul collapsed in a shape that didn’t know where its edges were. He clawed at the rock, hand-mouth sobbing, tried to pull himself into himself and found that the blueprint was smeared. Fix it. Fix it. Fix it. Fix-

He lunged again

Kirby flattened like a pancake before kicking him in the jaw

Overhaul could of sworn he felt his adam's apple explode which he did.

"This...This isn't right! You can't be this strong! Nothing about this makes sense!" Overhaul said, Fixing his body

Then The ceiling exploded.

Broken concrete rained in slabs and dust. A dragon’s shadow unfolded across the void, Ryukyu in full, wings mantling, eyes blazing. Behind her dropped Uraraka and Tsuyu, boots skidding, faces white with shock.

“Deku?!” Uraraka blurted, seeing him below, and remembering another Midoriya above.

“Froppy, brace!” Ryukyu roared, catching a beam and hurling it aside. “Why are there two Deku's-?”

Because above, Himiko Toga smiled with someone else’s freckles as the goop fell off. Twice laughed and doubled himself and doubled himself again, shoveling dupes down like an avalanche. Mr. Compress, copied, leapt through the hole, coat flaring, eyes on Eri like a magician fixating on a coin. “Snatch,” Twice ordered merrily. “Snatch snatch snatch.”

Compress landed lightly, hand spiraling toward the girl.

Kirby appeared in front of him and punched. Not hard. Not very hard. Just… enough.

A bright pinprick streaked out of the basement, up, up, up through cement and rebar and winter clouds, dwindled to a star. If you asked a telescope what happened, it would describe math and grief and something that looked like an atomized top hat spreading across a Jovian sky.

“…Okay,” Uraraka said faintly, through her fingers. “Okay... WHAT!?"

Midoriya’s eyes snapped back to Eri. “Uraraka- ! Sir Nighteye, he-!” His voice broke on the impaling. “Please!”

“I’ve got him!” she yelled, racing with Tsuyu toward the wounded mentor. Tsuyu’s tongue flicked, guided, stabilized Nighteye’s weight a millimeter at a time as Ochaco reached gently to brace the stone. “Ribbit, stay still, Sir!”

Midoriya launched toward Eri.

The floor erupted. A rock pillar whipped up between them, Overhaul, ruined face knitting clumsily, riding it like a glaring, desperate, hateful god. He snatched Eri as the column surged. Dust burned Kirby’s nose. Rage burned Overhaul’s veins and scrubbed his phobias clean; he would fix the mess. He would fix everything. He would fix everything if he had to rip this entire building apart and eat the dust.

He started growing the pillar longer, longer the escape tunnel he couldn’t destroy in his head because it was the only clean thought left.

Midoriya refused to stop. He planted a boot on a rising shard, sprang, fingers grazing the stone. “Eri!” he yelled, the name a lifeline thrown up a well.

Mirio’s cape, what was left, fluttered.

It snagged on a bit of rebar, a little red caught on grey. Overhaul sneered at it, at the memory of a boy who’d lost everything and still had the gall to smile. “Disgusting,” he hissed, reconfiguring the pillar, lifting them toward the hole.

Eri’s hand moved on its own.

She grabbed the cape. The torn cloth rasped under her fingers. She remembered Mirio’s words, the way his laugh had wrapped her without hurting, the way the pink creature’s nub had felt like a hand. Something that had been punishing her bones for existing flinched.

A light soft and cruel as time bloomed under her skin.

Overhaul gasped, stumbled; his body twitched as if someone had yanked the plug on a screaming machine. Fused muscle unfused. Shapes peeled apart like wet paper. Shin Nemoto sloughed out of Overhaul’s back with a moan, black fabric slipping from bone, mouth-palm wailing as it became only a man’s mouth again. Overhaul’s monstrous bird-limbs shrank and curled away.

Today, this day was the first time Eri had ever reached back instead of away.

“Don’t-!” Overhaul choked, grasping for her arm as his own body backtracked through his sins.

Kirby didn’t wait to see how far she would go alone.

He inhaled.

It was not a breath. It was a decision. The air bulged toward him; the floor grit skated; Eri squeaked as gravity chose Kirby instead. She sailed off the pillar and into Kirby’s mouth (fwoop!) vanished without a swallow.

Silence.

A beat where the entire basement tried to understand what it had seen.

“HEY! SPIT HER OUT YOU DISEASED FREAK!” Overhaul howled, losing what composure he had left, fingers clawing the air between him and Kirby as if he could sanitize it by force. The idea of that child inside the pink thing, of anything unclean inside anything, everything, hives ate his neck.

Kirby’s eyes slid to him, twinkled. He raised one nub. Carefully. Mischievously. Then, because sometimes petty was a flavor that went with everything, he swallowed.

Gulp.

Overhaul’s heart suffered six small panics in a row. The heroes in the room had two each.

"AHHHHHHH!!!!" Midoriya screamed

Kirby’s shape didn’t change. And then it did. Hair long, white, snowsilk, spooled down the back of his head like laughable wig on a celestial dumpling. A little horn grew, spiraled, gleaming. Power hummed around him, the sound of clocks forgetting how to count, of rivers deciding to go back to the mountain.

Kirby toddled across the floor to Sir Nighteye, who was trembling but still trying to take notes with the eye that worked.

Kirby pulled sir nighteye off the spike

"WHAT ARE THEY DOING!??" Uraraka yelled

“Poyo!,” Kirby said, laying his nub against Nighteye’s side.

The wound stopped being a present problem and decided it had been yesterday’s mistake. Stone unwrote itself gently out of tissue. Blood flowed backward into vessels, clean and warm. Cells remembered their instructions from the last time everything was fine and obeyed them.

Sir Nighteye blinked, gasped, and focused on Kirby as if the puffball were a prediction he’d refused to believe he’d ever see.

"What is this..."

Around Kirby, the air popped like a bubble. Eri appeared beside him in a soft puff of stars, then stumbled forward. She was whole and panting and crying.

“Friends good,” Kirby chirped to her, and patted her hand. The long white hair and horn looked very silly on him, which somehow made it feel okay that he’d been terrible and wonderful a second ago.

He exhaled, the hair became a glittering yellow star that hopped from his head like a soap bubble and tangled in the air. The Quirk he’d borrowed flittered away with the star, toddling into nowhere.

Overhaul, below the hole, watched the power leave with a gaze that tried to hold on through will alone. His fingers, bone-knitted and wrong, twitched. Rage and obsession balled up in his throat. He needed her. He needed her to fix everything he’d broken to fix everything he wanted to fix. He needed-

Kirby, for reasons known only to the theology of small joys, pulled a little flip phone from nowhere.

He flipped it open with exaggerated gravitas. To everyone watching, it looked like a child playing make-believe.

He pressed a single button.

Somewhere beyond the ceiling, a star responded.

The Warp Star descended through the ragged hole like a golden bee, humming a note that made the dust glitter. It hovered at Kirby’s shoulder, tilting, as if it were a loyal dog pretending to be a comet.

The heroes stared. “It’s… a focus?,” someone breathed, because that was the shelf in their mental library where miracles fit.

Kirby put the flip phone away like a businessman who’d just set a lunch meeting. He hopped onto the Warp Star, turned, and held his nub out to Eri again.

She hesitated only long enough to look at Midoriya.

He nodded, tears bright and determined. “Go,” he said, and his smile had all of Lemillion’s sunlight bent through his own grit. “We’ll be right behind.”

(Nope! My friend now!) Kirby thought to himself, proud of himself

Eri took Kirby’s hand. She climbed onto the star.

The Warp Star rose, dust feathering off its wake, and zipped toward the hole like a song finding its chorus. It didn’t rip through the air so much as charm it aside. Eri’s hair flagged in the wind. For the first time in a long time, the inside of her ribs unclenched.

Overhaul tore his remaining glove off with his teeth. He slapped his hands to Rikiya Katsukame’s broad back where Ryukyu’s team had pinned him earlier, and the world around his fingers exploded into pieces and ordered itself again into his idea of monstrous. He fused. He grew. His lower body became a jagged juggernaut of stone and clawed hands and need, his upper half nestling in a cavernous maw.

“All of you are sick!” he screamed up the shaft where the gold had gone. “Hero syndrome! Villain syndrome! A plague! And I was going to cure you-!”

Up in the shower of drifting concrete petals, Ryukyu’s eyes narrowed. She planted her talons in the collapsing ceiling, wings lashing. “Froppy,” she snapped, “protect the others! Uravity, assist!”

Tsuyu tightened the makeshift tourniquet she’d fashioned on Nighteye with a gentle, sure ribbit. “You’re okay now,” she said, confidence a warm knit scarf. Ochaco’s hand hovered over fractured stone, making it light enough to slide without tearing more flesh.

“I’ve seen many Quirks,” Sir Nighteye repeated softly, still looking up where the pink and the white and the gold had gone. The pain had fled; the calculus remained. “But that one, it might be the strongest in history.”

No one corrected him. No one knew to. In a world where everything extraordinary wore the word Quirk like a hat, the idea that something could be otherwise didn’t occur to them.

Overhaul’s new form heaved forward with an avalanche’s promise. “I’m not done,” he snarled, every syllable an itch he couldn’t scratch. Blood ticked out of the rents Kirby’s hands had made. Hives burned anew beneath the mask-shreds on his face, a whole body screaming that the air around him was unsanitary and wrong and he would make it right if he had to tear all the air out and start again.

Midoriya set his feet.

“Deku!” Uraraka called, eyes flicking between him and the newly stabilized Sir Nighteye. “We’ve got him! Go!”

Midoriya nodded once, teeth bared to a grin that understood terror and kept walking. Above, a golden streak turned a corner of sky and vanished into the day with a laughing hum. On it, a little girl clutched a tattered cape and a pink hand, and for the first time, the future felt like something that didn’t want to hurt her.

Down below, surrounded by broken stone and broken certainty, a room full of heroes steadied themselves against a man who would rather break everything than be touched.

The yakuza’s monster took its first step.

The Warp Star burst through the last veil of dust like a golden swallow. The air kissed Eri’s face, the taste of concrete replaced by exhaust and far-off fried batter. She clung to Kirby’s head with both hands, wobbly on her knees, eyes wide at the sprawl of the city, the rooftops like boxes stacked by a fussy giant, the streets drawn in dark ribbons, the sky a pale bowl.

“P-poyo,” Kirby chirped, reassuring, as if the whole world were just a very big kitchen and he knew where the cookies were.

They cleared the shattered roofline. A dragon silhouette Ryukyu, banked below, her roar scattering pigeons. Nejire Hado hovered like a dragonfly at the level of broken neon, hair streaming, eyes round. “What are, who are, so cuuuute, wait, the mission!” she squeaked to herself, orbiting the crater.

From deep under the compound came the sound of a giant grinding its teeth.

The rooftop bulged. Tiles went skittering. Rebar screamed. Then the compound’s entire center erupted like a volcano having a tantrum. Overhaul burst into the sunlight in his fused form, lower body welded to a thundering, clawed mass of stone and meat and malice. He was a cathedral of jagged hands and grasping intent, and in the middle of that terrible mouth, Kai Chisaki’s fox-sharp eyes glared like knives behind broken mask straps.

He saw the gold streak. He saw the white horn peeking over pink. His skin crawled with hives at the thought of wind that wasn’t filtered touching his face. “You won’t get away.”

The sentence cracked the cold air.

He raised a forest of arms. The Warp Star sang louder, climbing, and then one slashing limb, precise, surgical, met it mid-arc. The star didn’t shatter so much as decide to be many stars instead; it burst into a flock of sparks that whirled away like fireflies. Eri squealed as gravity remembered her.

Kirby flipped midair like a skipping stone finding its last perfect bounce. “Poyo!” he giggled, catching Eri against his cheek as if that were always the plan. They landed in a skid of glitter over the compound’s collapsed courtyard, Kirby’s red feet squeaking, Eri’s small fingers fisted in his skin.

Overhaul was already moving, the fused mass roaring across broken ground, throwing pillars like spears, lashing with craggy tendrils. Kirby sidestepped, hopped, bounced. He didn’t look hurried. He looked like someone playing hopscotch in a very rude neighborhood.

“You stupid puffball!” Overhaul’s voice rasped through torn filters, all politeness burned away. His hives flared, his breathing became a spit of steam. “You don’t understand a thing! Why won’t anyone see the bigger picture!”

“Big pik-shur?” Kirby echoed, tilting his head, then executed an unnecessary but joyful cartwheel over a slab the size of a car. Eri yelped and clutched tighter. “Kirby see li’l pik-shur. Friend safe.”

Nejire hovered higher, hands fanning energy, indecisive. “Is that- a kid? It’s got to be a kid, right? Ah! Eri!” Her face folded into determination. “I’ll keep the air clear!”

Overhaul tore up a chunk of street and hurled it like disgust. Kirby ducked and it sailed on to demolish a parking sign. He hurled a streetlight; Kirby twirled under the pole with a squeaky “wheee,” Eri squeaking in echo, terrified but blinking at the strange fun of it. He hurled a van; Kirby flattened and let it skim him like a stone on a pond, then popped back up with an apologetic “poyo” to the van as it clattered away.

“This is not a game!” Overhaul’s voice shredded. He dragged more mass, more rebar, all of Rikiya’s borrowed bulk, forcing it into shape. “People are infected with syndromes. Heroism, villainy, disease! I am the cure!”

Kirby stopped, blinked up at the mountain of wrong, and patted Eri’s hand. “Man mean. We go vroom now, okay?”

“V-vroom?” Eri managed, baffled and still ready to be snatched.

Something big and chrome caught the day light, a big rig, red and white, its cabin skewed against a ruptured loading dock. The side decal depicted a smiling cartoon eggplant for reasons only marketing could explain. Its tank hissed softly where the impact had cracked a valve.

Overhaul snarled and wrenched a whole swath of pavement free, muscles in his jaw jumping under skin that wanted to hive forever. He hurled the big rig as if he could throw the entire messy city back into order with it.

The truck tumbled, end over end, a metal comet.

Kirby looked up, eyes glossy with the reflection of headlights. Then he inhaled.

Eri had time to gasp.

Kirby did not swallow the truck. He couldn’t, not even him (at least not without hypernova) . Instead his mouth stretched. And stretched. Pink skin went glossy, pliant; his whole round body ballooned forward until he popped over the truck like a rosy tarp. For a ridiculous heartbeat he was a pink hood ornament eating the world.

Then he settled, mouth sealed around chassis, kirby was becoming becoming the truck’s shape with his little red feet peeking from behind the cargo.

Eri found herself on a rounded pink roof of the vehicle that was also, somehow, a person.

Kirby’s eyes blinked from the fromt like happy stickers.

“Poyo~!” he trilled, delighted at his own new shape. “Mouf-ful!”

He revved.

It sounded like a cheerful thunderclap.

Overhaul froze for a beat, mouth open, hatred blue-screening into bafflement. “What-"

Kirby popped the clutch.

The big rig, Kirby, shot forward, tires grabbing crumbled asphalt. Eri squealed again, then clung, horn cutting wind, cape flap-flapping. Kirby steered with his whole body, the wheelless not-wheel in his mind turning because he wanted it to. He hit a fallen slab at an angle, turned it into a ramp, launched, and came down biting a hunk of Overhaul’s improvised wall to powder.

Overhaul responded with mass. He dragged everything, EVERYTHING, he’d fused from Rikiya into a tidal wave of flesh-stone that reared, casting greasy shadow. It came down to crush.

Kirby honked politely.

The horn was adorable.

Then Kirby slammed the accelerator.

He met the wave head-on.

The impact sounded like a quarry coughing. The pink truck tore a tunnel straight through meat-rock like a happy drill. Chunks exploded in glittery dust because the world couldn’t decide what else to make of them. Kirby burst out the other side with a squeal of tires and a cheery “poyo!” that said excuse me like an angel in a crosswalk.

Overhaul staggered. That mass had been his shield. He tried to pull it back together and found a truck smile in the middle of it.

“Stop! Stop! Stop! STOP!” he shouted, grabbing at leftover material with the fervor of a germaphobe trying to sop up an oil spill. He knit it into a shape with desperation, making it simpler, stronger, bigger. A hand. A giant hand with fingers like pillars and nails like jagged plates. He poured everything into it, Rikiya’s bulk, his fury, his need. He left his own upper body nestled in the maw, too exposed, but he didn’t care. The hand hoisted, flexed, shadowed the city.

“I’LL TEAR THIS WORLD APART STRAIGHT FROM ITS FOUNDATIONS!” Overhaul screamed, voice echoing between buildings. He launched the hand.

On the street, green lightning skated.

Midoriya tore around the far corner, boots tearing divots, lungs flaring frost. He had followed the wake of destruction like breadcrumbs. His eyes found Eri first, white hair stark against pink, and then the truck. His brain tried to fit those pieces together and invented a Quirk to explain it before it could think to be confused.

“Deku!” Nejire called from above, swooping. “Whatever that thing is He’s got a truck? He’s a truck? It’s fine, we’ll go with that! Eri's safe-ish! Keep him busy!”

Midoriya planted his foot on a gnarled slab; it crumbled. He launched anyway, knees pistoning, percentages of One For All humming up bone. “Hang on, Eri!” he shouted. “We’re coming!”

Kirby angled the rig toward Overhaul like a knight lowering a lance. Eri flattened to the pink hood, teeth clenched, eyes wet. She was ready to be grabbed at any second, ready to be dragged back below ground, ready to be un-made again.

Kirby beeped.

It was a small, silly sound. It vibrated through his makeshift hood into her hands.

She swallowed, nodded to no one, and held tighter.

The hand descended with the weight of ideology, the surety of a man who believed the cleanest world was the one that did not challenge him.

Kirby didn’t blink.

Because he this little puffball from dreamland had faced, Aliens, robots, bugs, nightmares, wish granters, Gods, Eldritch Horrors beyond human comprehension, Ultimate lifeforms, all to the death.

And emerged victorious before taking a nap.

The hand and the big rig met with a bang that made pigeons forget why they were birds.

For an instant, the world was pressure. The fingers clenched. The grill grinned. Overhaul screamed something that was supposed to be a sentence but came out as static.

“I WON’T LOSE TO A PINK MARSHMALLOW! NOT AFTER ALL MY WORK!!! I HAVE TO DO THIS FOR THE BOSS!!!! I HAVE TO PAY HIM BACK FOR EVERYTHING HE’S DONE FOR ME!!”

The hand buckled.

Not dramatically. Not in a poetic slow-motion crumble.

It just… stopped being a problem.

The giant fingers snapped like cheap cutlery under a good steak knife. The palm split. The wrist sheared with a noise like a snapped promise. The energy Overhaul had packed into it fizzled against Kirby’s ridiculous determination. And the big rig didn’t slow.

Kirby roared. or as close to roaring as a pink truck could, which sounded like an adorable blender tackling gravel. “Poyooooo!” Battle-cry bubbled out of the grill as he slammed into Overhaul’s core.

Overhaul tried to hold the truck back. He jammed improvised limbs into the asphalt, sprouting braces, levers, wedges. He screamed. He foamed. He hurled bile and words and justifications.

“This… THIS CANNOT BE! NO! NOOOOO!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

His voice glitched as his body tried to reconcile outcomes it had never permitted itself to imagine. The tidy story he’d told himself was an ice sheet cracking under sudden spring.

Kirby did not hear philosophy. He heard a monster between him and lunch.

He kept driving.

Chrome and pink and stubborn joy plowed into Overhaul’s chest. The rig pushed him across the courtyard, through what remained of the facade, up the little steps the architects had once meant for feet. The last inch was the worst. It always is. Then the last inch was over.

Something in Overhaul, call it resolve, call it anything you like. We here call it the Kirby Effect (TM). His body collapsed in on itself as if embarrassed. The fused stone-flesh imploded. Not into gore. Into light. Into tiny, twinkling stars that popped into being where stress had been. They hung for a breath like fireflies that had forgotten their names, then spiraled upward, indifferent.

Where Overhaul had been was now a scatter of glimmer and a pair of broken gloves.

Midoriya stumbled to a halt on the steps, winded, wind-whipped, eyes dinner-plate wide. He stared at the glimmer raining up and gasped like he’d just watched physics shrug. Nejire descended a few feet, mouth open, then closed, then open again.

“…Did the villain just... turn into…stars?” she asked the general atmosphere, because it felt like the sort of question you had to get out of your mouth or it would live in your head forever.

Kirby idled. He bounced on his shocks. He turned his blinky head-lights toward Midoriya as if awaiting a grade. Eri, still trembling, risked a peek over the curve of his hood.

Midoriya took a step, hand outstretched, words forming, thank you, who are you, Eri are you hurt, where did you even-?

Kirby revved once in a goodbye.

Then he spun the rig in a cheerful half-donut and peeled out.

“W-wait!” Midoriya yelped, lurching. His boot caught on a chunk of former ideology. He windmilled. Nejire zipped to a hover beside him with a flurry of sparkles.

“He’s… leaving?” she said, baffled and delighted and a little annoyed. “With the truck? And Eri? Ohh, Mirio will absolutely have an aneurysm.”

Down the street, citizen phones came up like daisies. People gaped, pointed. “Is that a, pink, semi?” someone wondered aloud. “Is this an upcoming event thing?” asked another. “I think it’s a Quirk,” said a third

Kirby threaded the big rig through the initial tangle of police cordons and civilian curiosity with the uncanny luck of soap bubbles. A barricade would be there; then a gust would flick a tarp; someone would duck; and he would slip by with a jaunty beep. Eri looked back once, twice, at Midoriya shrinking behind them, at Nejire’s ribbon-hands, at the hole in the world where a terrible man had been.

Her hands were still shaking. The city was too big. The sky was too open. The clean fear of captivity had become the messy fear of freedom and she didn’t know what to do with that, didn’t trust it. Any second a hand would grab her ankle and yank her back.

Kirby patted the hood with a reassuring shimmy. “Safe safe,” he said, simple as bread. “Kirby drive. Friend happy soon.”

She swallowed. “O-okay.”

They hit an avenue. Traffic had stopped of its own accord to watch. Kirby used a chunk of fallen sign as a ramp to zip over a stalled taxi. Eri squeaked and then made a sound she didn’t recognize: a tiny laugh that had to sneak past all the tired.

They cut three blocks, ducked under an elevated train just as it passed with a squeal and a wash of wind. They took a left where a ramen shop vented steam and secrets. They slid between an armored police van and a delivery truck whose driver was filming with his mouth open. They left the heroes behind, Midoriya shouting into his comm, Uraraka’s “ehhh?!” carrying faintly up from below, Tsuyu’s “ribbit” an exasperated metronome, Nighteye’s data brain scrambling to file this under something.

They reached a neighborhood that wasn’t watching the raid anymore because it had laundry and homework and the smell of curry in stairwells. Kirby slowed. He eased the big rig into the shade of a multi-story parking garage with a mural of a smiling tanuki on the outer wall. The concrete was cool. The fluorescent lights hummed like flies in summertime.

He parked the rig in a slot that read RESERVED in faded paint.

Eri blinked around, heart still drumfast. “W-where are we?”

“Hide-and seek,” Kirby said solemnly. He looked very funny being solemn with his windshield eyes and pink bumper mouth.

She swallowed another nervous breath. “Okay.”

Kirby wiggled, then puckered. The big rig slid forward out of his mouth with a rubbery pop and an aggrieved hiss, like a whale politely returning a boat. It clanked to a halt. Kirby shrank back to Kirby, round and soft and exactly as absurd as five minutes ago, cheeks rosy.

He hopped. Once. Twice.

Music that wasn’t music, joy pretending to be a melody, bubbled out of nowhere. Kirby raised his little arms and began to dance.

It started with a shimmy, a waggle, a turn. He kicked one red foot out, tapped it twice as if challenging the concrete to a duel, spun, and clapped his nubs with the confidence of a rock star who had never seen a rock or a star. His eyes squinted, his mouth became a confident line, his whole being saying I did a thing and I am proud and also I might like a snack.

Eri watched, rigid for a heartbeat. She looked toward the street through the garage’s shadow, no hands, no masks. She looked back at the pink creature who had swallowed her and then given her back. The sound he was making wasn’t quite a song and wasn’t quite nonsense. It was… happy.

Her shoulders loosened a fraction.

Kirby pivoted and gestured to her with both nubs like a tiny maître d’ of celebration. “Come! Dance,” he invited, vowels smooshed.

Eri’s mouth tried a shape. The shape was a smile’s little cousin. She tucked her bandaged arms in toward her ribs and swayed, a tiny wobble, a test. No one grabbed her. No one told her she was wrong. No one said she had to earn permission to move.

Kirby cheered (“Poyo!”) and added a hop that nearly toppled him. He windmilled stubby arms to balance. Eri squeaked in alarm and reached instinctively to steady him; her hand pressed into his cheek, and it was warm.

He leaned into it for a heartbeat. Then he spun under her hand like a dancer ducking a partner’s arm and did a little heel-toe that he absolutely stole from a video game victory animation.

Eri giggled for real, bright and fast and scared of itself. She tried the heel-toe. She messed it up magnificently and nearly fell on her face. Kirby boinged to catch her, and their clumsy orbit became a pattern, her cautious sway, his joyful hop, the shared little clap, the big finish with arms thrown high because what else do you do after you make a whole bad thing go away.

They ended panting, Eri’s cheeks flushed, Kirby’s mouth wide. The parking garage hummed approval.

Silence rushed back in, but it didn’t feel like the bad kind.

Eri’s eyes slid to the truck. “Is… is he gone?” she asked, voice small. She meant Overhaul. She meant the basement. She meant the hands. She meant forever, and they both knew forever was a big ask.

“Gone now,” Kirby said. He didn’t try for bigger truths. He patted his belly. “Kirby hungry.”

A hiccup of a laugh. “Me too.”

Kirby turned in a slow circle, as if sniffing out a bakery by sheer force of optimism. Then he pointed both nubs at a stairwell door, determined. “Food that way.”

“How do you know?” Eri asked, curiosity elbowing fear for a seat at the table.

“Kirby know,” he said with the absolute conviction of someone who had never been wrong about snacks. Then, softer: “We go slow. Hide if bad.” He mimed ducking behind a pillar and made a silly “shh!” sound that shouldn’t have been funny and was.

She nodded, serious again, but steadier now, like her feet had remembered they were allowed to stand anywhere the floor existed. She took his nub.

They padded across the cool concrete toward the stairwell, little steps and squeaky shoes, leaving behind a very confused big rig, a cloud of stars that had already forgotten the shape of a man, and a skyline that would be arguing over what, exactly, had just driven through Overhaul for the rest of the week.

Far behind them, in the wrecked compound, voices crackled, orders were shouted, medical teams fanned. Midoriya looked up at the empty sky and down at the broken mask at his feet and, against all sense, smiled. He had wanted to be the one to save her. He hadn’t been. He would make his peace with that, because she was out there laughing at something small and ridiculous, and that sounded like rescuing too.

Nejire loop-de-looped, hair fizzing, and tried to explain on the radio that a pink Quirk truck had solved their Overhaul problem while adopting the mission objective. On the other end of the channel, Sir Nighteye pinched the bridge of his nose and said, very evenly, “Understood,” as if that word could tame any of this.

Up in the garage, Kirby paused at the stairwell door, then glanced back at Eri.

“Good dance,” he said solemnly.

She ducked her head, embarrassed and pleased. “Y-you too.”

He beamed, pushed the door open with a proud little grunt, and led the way down toward steam and clatter and the promise of broth. Eri followed, the echo of the dance still warm in her bones, the memory of hands that hurt receding one step at a time behind the reality of a different kind of hand, round, soft, and very determined to find dumplings.

Chapter Text

The sun was already high and a little too bright for everyone’s pupils. Dust hung over the Shie Hassaikai compound like glitter someone immediately regretted. Sirens harmonized with the buzz of drones, and the low thud of Ryukyu’s wings punctuated the morning like a metronome for chaos.

Stretchers. Bandages. Barked orders. Aizawa’s scarf snapping as he stalked from patient to patient. Ochaco and Tsuyu kneeling beside Sir Nighteye, whose suit was soaked at the waist but whose eyes were once again terrifyingly lucid. Fat Gum sat on a curb with a blanket around shoulders that looked much smaller without all that protective fat, while Kirishima and Tamaki, swaddled in IV lines and stubbornness, were loaded into an ambulance.

Midoriya paced in wide jagged loops, hair wind-mussed, eyes blown wide. His mouth tried to decide between words and air and failed at both for five whole seconds.

Then he spun on his heel, flung an arm toward the horizon, and exploded:

“Okay we need to talk… WHERE DID THEY GO AND THAT KID? I THINK THAT WAS A KID. MURDERED CHISAKI!”

Aizawa blinked once, deadpan to the point of art. Rock Lock straightened so fast his back popped. Fat Gum looked up from the blanket with a slow “huh?”

“Who and WHAT!?” they said together, because some things were simply too much to process alone.

“You didn’t, underground, you didn’t see-" Midoriya scrubbed both hands through his hair and left it worse. “There was this- this pink puffball? It looked like a child very small three feet maybe and it he?-"

“Gender uncertain,” Nejire chimed in from above, hovering like a worried kite and peppered with dust sparkles. “Age uncertain. Biology uncertain. Definitely adorable. He referred to himself in the third person as Kirby.”

Sir Nighteye’s head snapped toward her as if jerked by a wire. “WRITE THAT DOWN WRITE THAT DOWN!”

Bubble Girl, already scribbling, nearly poked herself in the eye. “Kir-by,” she said aloud as she wrote, so the word felt real.

“Okay we have a name,” Centipeder said, calm as a spreadsheet. “START SEARCHING DATABASES.”

“Already on it,” Bubble Girl replied, phone in one hand, tablet in the other. “Civilian registries… hero candidate databases… Quirk registry… school rosters… missing persons…” Her brow wrinkled. “Uh filters, filters this is going to take a lot of filters.”

“And that’s if it’s catalogued at all,” Sir Nighteye said, jaw tightening. “There is a non-trivial chance we’re dealing with a brand-new manifestation. Or an out-of-country entry. Or-" He didn’t finish. The rest of the sentence stood behind his glasses like a very neat ghost: or something that doesn’t fit our categories.

Rock Lock planted his fists on his hips. “Back up. You said ‘murdered Chisaki.’”

“Murdered, uh-well-” Midoriya’s hands pinwheeled. “He- Kirby... he slammed a big rig into Chisaki and then Chisaki...imploded? Into stars? I have no idea what that means scientifically or-or morally, there were no pieces, just...light.”

Aizawa’s scarred eyes slid from Midoriya to the ragged crater. “We’re not putting ‘imploded into stars’ in a report.”

“Not verbatim,” Sir Nighteye agreed, closed-mouthed. His gaze ticked to the broken beak of Chisaki’s mask, to the glitter that still drifted from the hole. “We’ll put ‘unavailable for apprehension.’”

Nejire bobbed. “From my angle, on the surface, he punched a Mr. Compress clone so hard it went… somewhere. Spaceward.” She wiggled a finger at the sky. “Which, like whoa. So: super strength.”

“Super strength,” Midoriya echoed, nodding so hard it hurt. “From our side, underground he gut-punched Overhaul and Overhaul vomited from the impact. Then he broke...everything. Bones. All of them.”

“Super speed too,” Sir Nighteye added. “He wasn’t there and then he was. Counterpunch at near-teleportation latency. Midoriya?”

“I... yes. He basically teleported to Overhaul for that gut punch.” Midoriya swallowed, a little pale. “I’ve trained with Gran Torino and.All Might and it was… new.”

“Okay,” Rock Lock said. “So he’s strong and fast. Welcome to hero society.”

“And… no bones?” Midoriya added weakly.

Aizawa slowly dragged a hand down his face. “Explain.”

Midoriya swallowed again. “He turned himself flatter than a pancake before- um kicking Overhaul in the jaw so hard his Adam’s apple-uh...exploded. And also he stretched over a whole truck.”

“Right!” Nejire lifted a hand as if answering in class. “He stretched his mouth over a whole big rig on the surface! He drove it! Eri was on top! It was somehow the cutest traffic violation I’ve ever seen.”

Fat Gum squinted into the distance, as if expecting the truck to loop back for another pass. “A truck?”

“A truck,” several people said, already resigned to whatever their day had become.

“Star power?” Midoriya ventured, almost apologetic. “He summoned a star. With a telephone. A, flip phone. He’s either got a support item or, something else.” He looked to Nejire.

“I saw something starry,” she said, thoughtful. “I didn’t see a phone. But he didn’t seem concerned when it got destroyed. Like he could make another? Also: strong lungs.”

“Strong… lungs,” Centipeder repeated, which was not the strangest thing he had had to log, but contenders were stacking up.

“He sucked down Eri from the top of a pillar,” Midoriya said, guilt and awe and residual horror threading his voice. “One inhale. Then on the surface he inhaled a truck.” He glanced reflexively to Uraraka, Tsuyu, and Ryukyu, who all nodded as if they needed to notarize that sentence for their own sanity.

Rock Lock’s brows climbed his forehead. “He...ate the girl?”

Silence hiccuped.

“WHAT!?” came in a chorused wave from everyone who had not been in that exact hallway: Fat Gum, Aizawa, Kirishima’s medic, Tamaki’s medic, half the local police, the man with the drone.

Nejire’s mouth fell open, then closed, then opened. “He ate Eri?”

Uraraka lifted both hands in helpless emphasis. “And then spit her back out totally fine!”

Tsuyu, steady as ever, nodded. “Ribbit. He gained her hair and horn and… healed Sir Nighteye’s wound. Then, pop it went away in a little star.” She looked down at Sir Nighteye, whose bandaged waist was now a tidy, almost regrettably normal part of a terrifying day. “He saved you, sir.”

“That he did,” Nighteye said softly. “He also stabilized the entire situation in ways that confound our models.”

Mirio, on a gurney near the ambulance doors, had been quiet, eyes fixed on a point that wasn’t here. At the word “ate,” his head whipped around so fast it made the medic swear.

“HE DID WHAT?!”

“GET BACK IN THE AMBULANCE, LEMILLION!” the medic barked, slapping a hand, gently but with the authority of someone who’d seen too much on his shoulder.

“But- Eri-” Mirio’s hands flexed helplessly.

“No, you’re not searching for her yet,” the medic snapped. “None of us are. Kirishima and Tamaki are unconscious, you’re quirkless and still bleeding, and your heart rate just spiked into ‘stupid’.”

Mirio clenched his jaw. Then he lay back, eyes hot, hating the ceiling for being a ceiling.

Aizawa folded his arms, scarf stirring. “We need to move from the emotional to the actionable. What do we know now that we didn’t know an hour ago?”

“Overhaul’s notes,” said a detective jogging up, a clear evidence bag in hand. His hair was grey in the way thoughtful city hair gets grey. “We found the lab. The term is right here in three separate entries. The Quirk Eri has is called ‘Rewind.’ It rewinds organic beings to a previous stage.”

“That tracks with what we saw,” Uraraka murmured. “She unfused that one guy from Overhaul without… you know. Mess.”

“And Kirby” Sir Nighteye pronounced the syllables carefully, as if filing a crucial document “appears to have replicated it, at least temporarily, after inhaling her.” His eyes hardened a millimeter. “He also demonstrated advanced healing capabilities. He rewound my injuries.”

“We can’t let that power get into villain hands,” Rock Lock said flatly. “Eri’s alone is bad enough, especially with her trauma. But this… Kirby?” He shook his head. “He’s on a whole other level.”

“Level of what?” Fat Gum asked, trying to put warmth into the air and only managing worry. “Kid’s not a villain. He saved us. He saved her.”

“And drove off with her,” Aizawa said, each word like a stapled page.

“He’s a monster in physical combat,” Midoriya admitted quietly. “A pink demon. But he… smiled at Eri. He offered her his hand first.” He remembered the head tilt, the soft “poyo,” how the little thing had seemed confused by fear itself. “He’s kind. And terrifying.”

Sir Nighteye pinched the bridge of his nose. “What is this thing,” he said, because questions sometimes had to be said aloud to make room for answers. “One Quirk? Multiple? Experiment? New Nomu type without exposed brain? One very lucky child?”

“Child,” Nejire said softly, and the word gathered heat out of her mouth. “He felt like a kid.” She hugged her own arms, hovering lower. “I know that sounds silly. But he did.”

Centipeder cleared his throat. “With respect, sir, do we inform the Commission?”

Sir Nighteye was silent for a beat too long. Uraraka looked up sharply. Tsuyu did not move but everything about her became attention.

“We do not,” Nighteye said finally. “Not yet.”

Rock Lock exhaled half a laugh. “Because if this is a kid, we lost the objective of our mission to a kid and we will never hear the end of it.”

“Because Eri is our responsibility,” Nighteye corrected, calm and cold. “And our mission isn’t complete. The Commission will be informed if and when it aids that mission. For now, their involvement would add pressure without providing leads.” His gaze flicked over the courtyard: the medics racing, the cops stringing tape, the heroes sagging on their feet. “We’re injured. We’re exhausted. We have no starting point. If we call, we will be ordered to do more than we can.”

“And if things get out of hand?” Aizawa asked, voice like a sharp edge under cloth.

“Then we call,” Nighteye said. It sounded like a promise and a threat to himself.

Fat Gum rubbed his neck. “So… next?”

“Rest,” Aizawa said. “Stabilize. Debrief. Then we search. Quietly.”

“What are we even searching for?” Rock Lock said, waving a hand at the sky Kirby had driven into. “Pink. Round. No bones. Answers?”

“Anything,” Centipeder said. “We have a name. It’s a thread.” He gestured and a sidekick thrust a tablet at him. He typed with frightening speed. “If it’s in any registry, I’ll filter it.” A beat. “If it’s not… we widen.”

Midoriya pushed his hair back again and, through sheer force of will, stopped pacing. “For what it’s worth… I don’t think he’ll hurt her.” He looked at the road, then at his hands. “He’s, already done the hard part I couldn’t. He’s… keeping her away from bad hands.

“Ribbit,” Tsuyu agreed, simple and firm.

Silence settled, not peace but a truce with exhaustion.

“Very well,” Sir Nighteye said. “We proceed on two tracks. Medical and maintenance for our people. Quiet data sweep for-” he was careful “Kirby. We do not discuss this with the Commission. We keep our radios clean. And we prepare for… the realities of a world where a pink puffball with super strength, copying ability, and, apparently, star power exists.”

“Surely it will be manageable,” Centipeder said, because someone had to be the adult.

“Right?” Fat Gum added, because someone had to joke or scream.

Nejire, hovering, gazed up where the glints of star-dust still hung like dandelion wishes caught in a draft. “They’ll be okay,” she said, as much to herself as to anyone. “Eri and Kirby.”

Aizawa glanced at her. “You don’t know that.”

“Nope,” she said, bright. “But I’m going to act like I do until it’s true.”

Sir Nighteye allowed himself one breath that counted as almost a smile. Then he looked down at his notebook and wrote, very neatly, Kirby. Underlined. Twice.

They did not notice, three neighborhoods away, a pink ball and a white-horned girl peering over a counter at a menu they couldn’t read because the clerk had hand-drawn the specials in cursive.

The shop smelled like broth and scallions and safety.

Kirby mashed his face to the glass display with a soft blmp, fogging it immediately. “Mmmmmm,” he hummed, the sound traveling through his whole round body like a purr. “Noodle. Dumpling. Sweet bun.”

Eri stood on tiptoe, fingers white on the counter, trying to make herself small and failing because her existence was unabashedly real. She had watched Kirby sniff his way here like a truffle pig for carbohydrates. Her heartbeat was still too loud for the size of her chest. The world out the window was too big and too bright. Every person who laughed made her flinch; every siren thread in the distance made her ribcage want to fold shut.

She tugged at Kirby’s stubby arm. “You said you’re… Kirby?” she asked, careful, as if it might be a password.

Kirby turned around and beamed so hard the clerk, a man with a gentle mustache and a tattoo of a koi half-hidden by his sleeves, made an involuntary squeak.

“Kirby!” he said, pat-patting his chest with a nub. “Kirby, yup!”

“Okay,” Eri said, and the word put a plank across a little gap in her brain.

The clerk cleared his throat. “You two, uh, ordering?”

“Food,” Kirby declared, gravely. “Lots. For friend. For Kirby. For… tummy.” He patted his middle. It made a cheerful donk.

Eri tensed. Money. She had none. She had never… paid, even in the back-of-the-mind way kind people sometimes pay without saying it. Panic slid cold into her throat. “We- I don’t-"

Kirby looked at her with the serene confidence of a creature that literally had a pocket dimension where his digestive tract should be. “Kirby got,” he announced.

He exhaled .

The clerk took a stumbling step back as Kirby leaned over and delicately puckered at the empty space to his left. Reality obligingly presented… a treasure chest.

It thumped onto the counter. It looked like the sort of chest cartoons use for lessons about greed. Gold bands. Cherrywood sheen. A lock that practically winked.

Eri’s eyes doubled. (How much does he have in there? ) she thought, remembering the glimpse she’d gotten when the world had been all lungs and stars, frying pans, umbrellas, a whole picnic set, so many things just floating, as if his stomach were a separate little sky.

Kirby popped the chest with a clap of his nubs. Inside: coins. Bills. A small ruby that caught the fluorescent light and threw it around the shop like confetti.

The clerk closed his eyes for a long second, opened them, and decided to be very chill about this. “Okay,” he said, throat dry. “Uh. Two bowls? Three? Five?”

“Five,” Kirby said without hesitation sensing 5 to be the largest number. “And bun. And-” he squinted at a picture of something glazed “meat on stick.”

“Yakitori,” the clerk said faintly. “Sure.”

They took a corner booth, Eri tucking herself against the wall where she could see both the door and the kitchen, a habit she hadn’t learned so much as absorbed like a bruise. Kirby sat across from her and then, after two seconds, popped around to her side and pressed his soft hip to her like he had remembered that proximity sometimes out-argues loneliness.

Bowls arrived. Steam like arms.

Kirby inhaled the first bowl in one ambitious slurp that probably violated at least two physics laws and one etiquette. Eri flinched, then startled, then… giggled. She cupped her own bowl as if it might break and lifted a noodle like a string from a harp.

“Good?” Kirby asked, cheeks full, eyes enormous.

She nodded, because her mouth was busy discovering salt and warmth and a feeling that might be now. “Mm.”

Kirby inhaled bowl two. Bowl three. He slowed on four and actually chewed on five, which felt like watching a storm decide to become a breeze out of courtesy. He chased it with three sweet buns and a stick of yakitori, which he did not inhale because the glaze stuck cheerfully to his mouth and he liked to lick it off.

Eri ate slower, but she ate. Halfway through, her shoulders came down a notch. The world outside kept being outside without trying to climb in. No one told her to hurry. No one made her answer questions that became knives in her throat.

She wiped a bit of broth from her lip with the back of her hand, then startled at her own reflex and looked to Kirby to see if he would flinch at the unclean. He stole the napkin holder instead and put three in her lap with grave ceremony.

“Kirby...are you not not taking me back?” she asked suddenly, as if the thought had been waiting behind the soup for its turn.

Kirby’s head tilted. He swallowed his bite with a little “mm.” “Nope.”

“But… they were heroes.” The word felt like a fragile soft toy someone had stomped on and given back. “They, they tried. But then he, he made me say things that weren’t true. That made me sad. And everyone listened because he was loud. And I…” Her fingers tightened on the napkin until it wrinkled. “And you are here.”

“Kirby here,” he echoed softly. “Kirby hear.” He tapped his "Ear" (side of his head) . “Bad man make sad words. Make lie in heart. No more.” He tapped her chest. “No bad hands. No sad words. Friend safe.”

She pressed her lips together. Tears threatened the edges of everything. She didn’t want to be a faucet anymore. She wanted to be a girl in a corner booth with broth on her chin and a friend who said small sentences that fit where big ones didn’t.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay,” he agreed, and went back to licking yakitori glaze with monstrously content focus.

They ate until the world felt less like a floor dropping away and more like a table that didn’t wobble. The clerk brought over candy unasked“for the brave,” he said, not looking directly at Eri so the kindness could slide in sideways and politely pretended to be unfazed by the way the little pink creature devoured an entire skewer in a single, unbroken happy noise.

When it came time to pay, Kirby produced a second treasure chest just because the first one had been fun. The clerk raised both hands. “No, no, that’s, please. Keep your… pirate loot. It’s on the house.”

“House?” Kirby echoed, alarmed at the idea of eating architecture.

“Free,” the clerk translated quickly, smiling. “Take the treasure somewhere it won’t make my accountant faint.”

Kirby considered, then solemnly picked out three coins and placed them on the counter anyway. “Tip,” he said with mysterious adult knowledge, and patted the clerk’s sleeve with serious gratitude.

Back outside, the city felt wider and less hungry. Eri’s hand found Kirby’s without being asked to. They walked nowhere in particular, which was the nicest destination she had ever been given.

On a side street, a rack of capsule toy machines blinked in the sun. Kirby stopped as if gravity had affixed his feet.

“Oooooh,” he said, reverent.

Eri followed his gaze. “Do you like those?” she asked.

“Shiny,” he said simply. “Round. Like Kirby. Kirby likes figures! Kirby likes keychains!"

He fished around in nothing and produced of course a coin the exact size the machine required. He fed it with the solemnity of communion and cranked, tongue peeking in concentration. A capsule clunked loose, rolled against the glass.

He opened it and beamed: a tiny plastic star on a keychain.

He held it up to Eri as if presenting her with the moon.

“For… me?” she asked, terrified that wanting was rude.

“Friend,” he said. “Star for friend.”

She took it. It was silly and cheap and perfect. She looped it around her wrist, the plastic star resting against the bandages she refused to look at too long. It caught the light like the flock of little stars had when Overhaul had stopped being a problem. For the first time, her breath didn’t hitch at the memory.

“What, do we do now?” she asked, voice smaller, because this was new her

Kirby looked up at the sky as if it were a menu. “Nap,” he declared, with the authority of a general ordering a strategic retreat. Then, with a little frown: “Plan later. Find soft. Find… roof? Or tree? Or-" his eyes brightened "Kirby saw place.”

He led her down an alley painted with cats, around a corner where a dog snored in a sunbeam, up an exterior staircase that creaked the way nice stairs do. At the top, a rooftop garden stretched planter boxes, a faded bench, a tarp someone had tied as shade. Laundry lines flapped gentle flags. No one was there. The door had been left open with a brick and trust.

They tucked themselves under the tarp, on the bench, Eri’s head a cautious weight on Kirby’s round shoulder. From here, the city sounded like a heart complicated, but beating.

Down in the crushed compound, the heroes did their paperwork and their wounds and their best. Up here, Eri twirled a tiny plastic star around her finger and felt, for the length of the twirl, unclaimed by anyone but herself and a puffball who didn’t think in paperwork at all.

“Kirby?” she asked, drowsy.

“Mm?”

“Thank you.”

“Welcome,” he said, and his voice went soft in that way it did when the powers hid and the pink was just… pink. He added, almost shy, “Kirby… like friend.”

Eri smiled with her eyes closed. “I like you too.”

They slept.

Somewhere far away, a dozen databases returned no results, a sidekick swore at a blank field, and Sir Nighteye underlined the word Kirby a third time without noticing. Somewhere closer, a clerk told a story about a treasure chest that nobody believed until he showed them the tip: three oddly minted coins that shouldn’t exist.

A few hours later

The rooftop garden was all hum and flutter and warm noon light. Somewhere below, a neighbor’s radio murmured talk-show laughter; laundry lines flicked thin flags; a cat, convinced it owned the building, made its patrol along the parapet and didn’t even blink at the pink sphere and the horned girl under the tarp.

Eri woke first. She had fallen asleep with her cheek on Kirby’s side, which turned out to be exactly the right softness for a nap and also smelled faintly like sugar buns. For a lovely, terrifying second she didn’t know where she was. Then the memory unspooled, truck, stars, noodles, a tiny plastic keychain, and the fear didn’t pounce. It only looked at her from across the rooftop and, finding no purchase, shrugged.

Kirby was already awake, eyes half-lidded with the long blink of the very content. He was watching a sparrow bathe in the shallow water on the tarp, head cocked, as if memorizing the splash for later. When Eri shifted, he looked over and beamed, which is a thing you can do with your whole self if you are built like a bright moon.

“Morning,” she said, then corrected herself because it was definitely past morning. “Um. Day.”

“Day!” he agreed, patting the bench like he’d been personally involved in inventing it.

She rubbed her eyes. The question had been knocking politely at the back of her tongue since noodles. It came out, small and curious. “Kirby… do you have friends?”

“Poyo!” he chirped, as if she’d asked if he liked air. Then he reached into nowhere and came up with his flip phone.

Eri stared. “You… carry that in your… tummy?”

“Stummy,” he said confidently. “Kirby pocket.” He flipped the phone open with a flourish that would have made a magician jealous and pressed a single button with his nub.

The line trilled. Somewhere very far away and somehow very close, the world changed stations.

On Planet Popstar, inside a throne room that had seen everything from formal ceremonies to pie fights, a ringtone blared at a volume carefully tuned so only the people sharing air with the owner had the honor.

“Dedede that’s the name you should know! Dedede he’s the king of the show! You’ll holler and hoot, he’ll give-"

“Aw right, aw right, I hear ya!” boomed the King himself, scooping up a phone that looked very small in his very large, very gloved hand. The accent rolled out like warm syrup; you could pour pancakes with it. “Hello, you little pink menace. You’re more ‘bout textin’ than callin’, so somethin’ must be up.”

“Dedede!” Kirby sang, delighted, and without ceremony shoved the open phone toward Eri like a treasure he wanted to share.

Eri’s fingers hovered, then took the edge, the way you take a hand when you’re not sure if you’re allowed. “H-Hi,” she said into the tiny hole, as if it might bite.

On the other end: a pause. “Kirby,” drawled Dedede, “who is that?”

“Friend!” Kirby declared, pressing his cheek to Eri’s shoulder as if to annotate the word.

Eri’s mouth bobbed. Then she managed, “Kirby saved me. My name is Eri. Kirby is very soft.”

There was a sigh you could have lain on. “Mm-hmm. He is that,” Dedede conceded, fondness tucked under the grumble like honey under a biscuit crust. “Kirby, where are you?”

Kirby looked around at the skyline, which could have been any skyline if you were from a place where trees were stars and stars were trees. “Dunno,” he said cheerfully.

“Of course you don’t.” Dedede did not even pretend to be surprised. “Bandanna Dee! Put it on the board!”

“Yes, Great King!” chirped a voice just out of frame. A Bandanna Waddle Dee hustled into view, dutiful eyes bright beneath his blue bandanna. He trotted over to a wall-sized whiteboard where, in very tidy handwriting, someone had titled a chart: How Many Dimensions Can Kirby See In A Month. Bandanna Dee uncapped a marker and, with the solemnity of astronomers adding a star, wrote another tally mark. Then he wandered back, stood on tiptoe, and shouted happily into the phone, “Hi, Kirby! How are you doing?”

“Bandee!” Kirby squealed, as if the name itself were a hug. “Kirby good. Food. Friend. City.”

“Good, good,” Bandanna Dee beamed. “Are you safe? Do you uh need spears? Snacks? Directions?”

Before Kirby could decide whether “directions” were edible, a low, smooth voice slid into the conversation, accent curling around the words like ribbon. “Mi amor,” said Meta Knight, and Eri could hear the smile even though the voice wore a mask by habit, “I feel like we should focus on getting Kirby home.”

“Meta kini!” Kirby squeaked, bouncing. He made the syllables into a little song and Eri instinctively swayed.

Dedede made a small noise that, if you could translate it, would have spelled flustered in big, embarrassed letters. “Now don’t you ‘mi amor’ me in front’a the kid ‘less you’re gonna bring me a coffee too,” he grumbled, and there was the sound of a cape, and then the sound of a kiss pressed into the grumble anyway, quick and unapologetic.

Eri’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. Kirby giggled.

Dedede cleared his throat with royal authority. “Mety, who could take Kirby down?”

Meta Knight’s chuckle was warm steel. “Fair enough. No one I can think of. Call us if you do need help, Kirby.”

“Poyo!” Kirby agreed as if that settled the orbit of moons. He leaned into the speaker. “Love you. Bye!”

There was a chorus Bandanna Dee’s “Bye! Stay safe!”, Dedede’s “Don’t eat nothin’ that screams!”, Meta’s soft “Hasta pronto, estrella” and then the line clicked. The ringtone’s echo vanished back into the walls of a throne room where, for a beat after, a king and a knight looked at each other like two people who’d crossed more than one impossible bridge together, and a Waddle Dee put the cap back on the marker with a happy little pop.

Back on the rooftop, Eri handed the phone back like it was a warm stone she wanted to keep in her pocket.

“They seem close,” she said, thinking of the kiss you could hear and the “mi amor” that curled like ribbon. “Are they… friends?”

Kirby shook his head, hard enough that his cheeks wobbled. “Nope.”

She tried again. “They love each other?”

Kirby nodded so vigorously he nearly toppled off the bench. “Love!” he said, patting his chest, then drawing an invisible circle around his own head with both nubs. “Big love. Long. Home.”

Eri’s brain, which had been trained to assume the world came in one narrow flavor, stopped and tasted air. “But they’re both boys,” she said, not as an objection so much as a line she had seen painted and never been allowed to smudge. “Can they do that?”

Kirby nodded again, slower this time, serious. He held up two nubs side by side. “Two boys,” he said. He pressed his nubs together like interlocking rings. “Ring.” He mimed a little party arms up, a wobbly shimmy, the universal sign for cake. “Marry. Yay. Cake.”

Eri stared at the air while her insides rearranged themselves to make room for something that had been missing. It felt like untying a knot you didn’t know your shoelaces had. “They can marry,” she repeated, voice careful. “Boys can marry boys.”

“Mm!” Kirby said. “Girls with girls. Boy with girl. People with people. Good if kind.” He scratched his cheek with a nub, then added with an earnest authority that could have legislated joy: “And dance.”

Eri laughed, a little shocked by her own sound. The rooftop didn’t punish her for it. A breeze went by and did not carry scolding on its back. Somewhere, a kettle boiled and someone shouted that the water was ready, and it didn’t have anything to do with her. “I didn’t know,” she admitted. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought. No one told me things like that.”

“Now know,” Kirby said, as if he had just put a sticker in a book that said Achievement Unlocked. He reached up and patted her horn very gently, like a cat greeting another cat.

For a while they just sat, Eri fingering the little plastic star on her wrist, letting the idea of boys can love boys settle in beside no one is dragging me anywhere right now. It felt strange and good and, most surprising of all, obvious, the way a door looks obvious once someone finally points at it.

Then the other curious thing shouldered its way to the front of her mind, something she’d seen because she had been inside it.

“Kirby?” she said, blushing a little. “Um. Your… stomach.”

“Stummy,” he corrected with pride.

“It’s… a whole other place,” Eri said, words tumbling over each other as if relieved to be out. “When you- when you-” she faltered; he patted her knee in a way that said I know and I won’t do that again without asking. “When I was in there. It was like… floating in space? There was stuff everywhere. Umbrellas. Pans. A picnic? It was… pretty.” She hesitated. “And scary.”

Kirby nodded, unoffended. He tapped his middle with a hollow donk. “Star place,” he said. “Inside-sky. Kirby keep things. Safe. Soft.” He thought, searching for a word he didn’t exactly have. “Pocket… world,” he tried, and looked very pleased with himself.

Eri’s eyes went round. “Pocket world,” she echoed. “Can you… show me? Not-” her breath quickened, then steadied; she pushed the panic down like hair out of her eyes “-not inside. Just… like before. With the Treasure chest?”

“Mm!” Kirby agreed. “No eat friend,” he promised solemnly, holding up one nub as if swearing an oath.

He exhaled very gently. The air tickled. He puckered at nothing and coaxed something out of it like pulling candy from behind someone’s ear. A parasol bobbed into existence, pink polka dots on white, and drifted down. He handed it to Eri. She took it as if it might decide to fly off again.

Another inhale: a scarf, silk and sky-blue, fluttered into his hand. He wrapped it around her shoulders with comic seriousness, tongue peeking out the side of his mouth as he got the ends even. He was very bad at symmetry; she didn’t fix it.

One more: a tiny snow globe, the kind you shake and the flakes tumble. Inside, a castle that looked suspiciously like Dedede’s, except someone had put a hat on it. He shook it; the flakes swirled; Eri gasped and clapped and then hid the clap in the scarf because old habits are sticky.

“How much do you have in there?” she blurted, then clapped a hand over her mouth because greed was rude and she had not earned anything except maybe noodles.

“Lots,” Kirby said blithely. “Kirby ‘splore. Keep.” He tapped his belly. “Stummy is big. Like… sky.” He frowned theatrically. “Sometimes lose spoon.”

She giggled. “You lost a spoon in your… sky?”

“Found,” he assured her at once, affronted at the thought that a spoon could escape him. “Later. In hat.”

She set the snow globe in her lap and watched the last flakes settle. Then, in a very small voice that didn’t want to wake old ghosts, she asked, “When you… took me. Did it hurt you? To copy?”

Kirby shook his head. “Nope. Borrow.” He pointed at his head. “Power visit. Wear hair. Horn. Fix friend.” He mimed spitting out a star. “Then, bye-bye.” He wiggled his fingers as if waving at a departing train. “No keep. No steal.”

Eri nodded. She didn’t have the words for relief; she had the feeling. It was heavy and soft, like a blanket that decided it liked you.

They spent the afternoon that way: learning each other in small bites. Eri learned that “Bandee” was short for Bandanna Waddle Dee and that he had the neatest handwriting of anyone on Popstar. She learned that “Meta kini!” was how Kirby said Meta Knight’s name when he was too excited for syllables. She learned that Dedede called him “menace” but sounded proud about it.

Kirby learned that Eri liked dumplings more than buns, that she didn’t like big doors or small rooms or hands that came at her too fast, and that she found the sound of pigeons comforting in a way she couldn’t explain. He learned that when she laughed unexpectedly she immediately looked around to see who she needed to apologize to, and he made a point of laughing louder so the air would learn to leave her alone.

At one point he pulled out the flip phone again, pressed another button, and swiped with exaggerated care through a gallery of pictures. Eri leaned in.

There were so many friends. A girl with long pink hair and a ribbon, hand in hand with an artist holding a paintbrush twice her size (Kirby tapped: “Ribbon And Adeleine.”). A scientist with pink hair and a fancy suit (tap: “Susie.”). A magician with cat ears and no arms or legs just floating hands (tap: “Magolor.”). Animals stacked like a totem, all looking like they were about to have a very good picnic (tap, tap, tap: “Rick. Coo. Kine.”). A blue blob with googley eyes (tap: "Gooey) The king and the knight in the middle of a festival, fireworks making crowns of their helm and hat, Dedede’s arm around Meta Knight’s shoulders with the casual rightness of someone who’d done that a thousand times.

“They look happy,” Eri said softly.

“Happy,” Kirby agreed. Then he looked at her, tipped his head, and added with great seriousness, “You happy?”

She considered. It didn’t feel like betraying anyone to say “yes.” It felt like giving someone a flower you found on the sidewalk.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled like a sunrise that had been hiding under her tongue.

“Good,” Kirby said, and his relief was so big it made his whole outline brighter for a second.

The sun slid. Shadows lengthened, the tarp’s shade went from bright to cool, and someone downstairs practiced a saxophone with more zeal than aim. A cloud did a very good impression of a fish. Eri yawned, surprised at herself. Kirby’s tummy answered with a tiny mrrrp as if agreeing.

“Hungry?” she asked, teasing now, because she had learned he always was and it was safe to tease that.

“Always,” he said, delighted to be so knowable.

They ate something simple from a stand downstairs onigiri wrapped in crackly seaweed because Kirby had decided the treasure chests should rest and the clerk, upon seeing Eri’s scarf and the way her shoulders were set, refused to take a coin anyway. Back on the roof, Eri told Kirby about the best bite and the worst day and the way Mirio had laughed like he was making the air work better. Kirby listened with his eyes and his little soft “mm”s and no interruptions.

When the first evening lights began to pierce the city, Eri tugged on the scarf. “Kirby?”

“Mm?”

“Do you think… the heroes are mad?”

He thought about this, lips puckered, gaze on a pigeon deciding which antenna to insult next. “Dunno,” he said. “If mad. we make… not mad. Want help. Kirby help later.” He was not flippant; he simply trusted tomorrow like a tool he kept in his pocket world. “But no go back ‘til friend want. No make friend say sad.”

Eri nodded. She still didn’t want to go back. She wanted to be ready before she had to be brave again. Maybe that was what brave really meant, choosing when to go, not just being pushed.

She hooked the little plastic star with one finger and spun it. “When we see your friends,” she said, trying the idea on like a hat, “can we bring them cake?”

“Cake,” Kirby said, as if she’d just discovered a law of physics. “Yes. Two,” he added magnanimously.

“Two cakes,” Eri repeated, and looked properly amazed at the thought of a world where that was a plan you could make.

They watched the city turn its lights on. Somewhere out there were heroes in bandages and friends in ambulances and a very frustrated government committee and a stack of empty folders labeled KIRBY. Up here were a bench, a scarf, a keychain star, and a small, loud certainty: the shape of love wasn’t the problem. The shape of kindness was obvious.

Eri leaned her head against Kirby’s side again. “I’m glad your friends love each other,” she murmured, half-asleep and wholly honest. “It makes the world make more sense.”

“World good,” Kirby agreed, and tucked the parasol a little more over her with the fussy care of a very proud umbrella. “People love. Eat cake. Dance.”

“Dance,” she echoed, and the word was a lullaby.

They dozed like that while the cat finally deigned to acknowledge them with a tail flick, and the saxophone downstairs found something that might be a melody if you tilted your head. On Popstar, a king and a knight stood by a window and watched their own evening collect itself, hands overlapping, talking quietly about portals and pudding and whether Kirby would remember to brush his teeth. In a different city, phones buzzed with questions. On this roof, one answer was enough.

“Kirby?” Eri mumbled, already slipping.

“Mm?”

“Thank you for telling me. About boys.” A yawn. “About cake.”

“Welcome,” he said, voice small and full and sure. “Friend.” He paused, then added, with all the gravity a pink puffball can summon, “We eat cake.”

She smiled in her sleep.

Kirby looked at the sky, decided it looked like frosting, and was very pleased with the universe’s consistency.

Chapter Text

By late afternoon the city felt like it had decided to forgive itself for the morning. The market streets sang: wind chimes like laughter, vendors calling out specials, a busker coaxing a tune from a shamisen that sounded like the sun stretching its spine.

Kirby and Eri walked through it like a matched set of sweets. She had the sky-blue scarf crooked over her shoulders and a plastic star bouncing at her wrist; he had a parasol tucked under one nub like a gentleman cartoon and crumbs at the corner of his mouth because of course he did. When a breeze pushed, he leaned into it; when the crowd swelled, he shortened his steps so Eri didn’t have to hurry.

“Careful,” he’d say, a hand-nub out at curbs. “Step-stairs.”

“Okay,” she’d reply, and take the world one shallow stair at a time.

If anyone stared, at the horn, at the pink, Kirby stared back with the wide, guileless curiosity of a toddler. People broke first and smiled. A few waved. Somebody’s grandma pressed a hard candy into Eri’s hand and then pretended she hadn’t.

They peered into windows. Kirby pressed his face to the glass of a pet shop and fogged it instantly. A retriever puppy pressed its face to the other side. They both thumped their tails (Kirby did not have a tail; he made do). Eri snorted in a way she didn’t know how to apologize for yet and Kirby’s answering “poyo” turned it into a proper laugh.

“Kirby?” she asked, somewhere between a matcha stand and a stall selling keychains shaped like wyverns. “Are you… like a brother? I never had…” She didn’t finish.

“Brudder,” he declared at once, puffing his chest like a marshmallow trying to be a mountain. “Kirby brudder. Soft brudder.” He flexed. It looked like a dumpling trying to intimidate soup.

She nodded, biting a smile. “Okay. Brother.”

They rounded the corner to a bakery that had worked out how to make its smell reach around obstacles. Cakes watched from the cases with naked longing. There was a strawberry shortcake crowned with berries so shiny Kirby could see his own round reflection.

He pressed his nose to the glass. “Cake."

“Cake,” Eri echoed, reverent.

The clerk, who had the supernatural sense for children looking at sugar, appeared with a smile. “Two slices?” she suggested cheerfully. “Or one big one to share?”

“Big,” Kirby said, voice solemn as a prayer. “Share.” He fished a polite handful of coins out of pocket-sky and placed them on the counter with the grave precision of a man paying for his future happiness.

The clerk boxed the cake like it was a tiny, delicious crown jewel and handed it over. Eri took the box because Kirby’s hands had a way of becoming other things and she wanted the cake to feel safe.

They stepped out into the street. The parasol put them in their own little shade. The plastic star at Eri’s wrist pinged the box with hopeful taps. Kirby hummed a low, contented tune, the kind you hum when a nap and a snack are shaking hands at the back of your brain.

The man didn’t mean to.

He was running, hood up, a backpack stuffed wrong and slapping his spine with each step. The water bottles in the shop behind him were still rocking; the owner was still mid-shout. The thief jinked to avoid a delivery guy and caromed into Kirby and Eri’s orbit with the aimless cruelty of accidents.

His arm hit Eri’s hand.

The box flew.

Time hiccuped, the way it does for tragedies of a certain scale.

The cake described an arc that had been designed by a sadist. It turned. It opened. It landed with a soft, wet splutch. The strawberries rolled like little red planets seeking lonely orbits.

Eri froze. Kirby didn’t.

His face didn’t change. Not at first. He stepped between Eri and the running man without looking like he’d moved. His eyes, those simple, oval skies, went very round and very calm.

Somewhere in a memory, a dark star laughed wrong and Kirby had punched it into next week because he thought it had taken his his strawberry shortcake. (It didn't yet it still died)

The running man skidded to a stop because even thieves know when they have stepped on a ritual circle. He looked back, saw the cake carnage, and swore. “My bad, kid, I-"

Kirby’s smile was kind. Very kind. It made the hairs on the back of the thief’s neck wonder if they were on the right head.

“Sorry,” the man tried again, hands up. “Look, I can-"

Eri tugged Kirby’s arm. “It’s okay,” she whispered, because that’s what you learn to say when messes happen around you. “We can-"

The thief’s hand flicked. Water from a fire hydrant down the block bulged, wobbled, and then whipped toward them in a coiling lash. The man’s Quirk kicked on with panic’s gracelessness, more reflex than malice, as he tried to wash the scene, the witnesses, the guilt, away.

Kirby inhaled.

The water didn’t hit them.

It angled midair, developed morals, and sprinted into Kirby’s mouth with an audible decision. The thief yelped and tried to pull it back. The hydrant seemed to shrug and offered him, out of pity, a futile trickle.

Kirby swallowed without swallowing, his form ballooning, smoothing, taking on a gloss. A circlet blinked into being around his brow: gold, with a drop-shaped ornament at the center and two tiny waves curling on either side. A crown fit for a fountain. In his hands, if you can call them that, a column of water spun to happy life, a tame tornado, a tidy ocean pretending to be well-behaved.

Water Kirby blinked.

Eri squeaked. “You’re cute,” she blurted, which was true, and also unwise to say about a creature about to declare war.

The thief took a step back, palms out. “Hey, hey, kid- He threw his hands toward a puddle and it surged into a wall. Water Kirby tilted his head as if admiring technique, then made a small circle with his wrists. The vortex caught the wall by the scruff and turned it into a spiral that wrapped the thief like a very enthusiastic snake.

“Wai-gk-!” he managed before the vortex corkscrewed him off his feet. Up, down, up, down, ducts rattling, crows scolding, the kind of flume that makes carnival lawyers nervous.

Kirby’s eyes narrowed, not mean, exactly, but set. He raised one hand. The vortex tightened. Not much. Enough.

The water-quirk thief knew, intimately and all at once, that drowning is a quiet kind of violence. He forgot how to use a Quirk and remembered he had lungs. He clawed at the spiral and came up with handfuls of river.

“Kirby,” Eri said, voice small and urgent. “Stop. Please.”

The vortex loosened like a fist remembering it was a hand. The thief fell out of it with the graceless splat of wet laundry, coughing, spitting, staring at the crown that was not supposed to be real. Kirby stepped up to him, lifted the water by its throat with a twist, and deposited it back into the hydrant like a librarian putting a book exactly where it belongs.

He bent, picked up a strawberry that had survived the catastrophe by wedging itself under a shoe, considered it, and then very deliberately set it atop the sad ruin of cake on the pavement. He patted it into place with two gentle taps.

“You don’t mess with Kirby’s food,” Eri told the thief solemnly, because she had discovered this is a rule like gravity.

Kirby nodded once, the crown glinting. “No mess,” he agreed, and then added helpfully, “Or die.”

(He did it once and he'd do it again)

“Yes. Or- please don’t,” Eri amended quickly, grabbing his arm and giving it a squeeze that meant please don’t kill anyone today.

Kirby blinked, then tipped his head in a small sorry. He reached into pocket-sky and produced a fresh cake box. The clerk across the street, who had watched the entire sequence with tears in her eyes and a phone in her hand that she had not used because what number do you dial for water crown justice, covered her mouth as Kirby placed the new box on her counter, bowed, and pushed it gently back to Eri.

“Paid already,” he said, which was true in the metaphysics of Kirby’s economy.

Sirens were a part of the city the way pigeons were. They grew louder. The thief looked at the pink thing that had just borrowed his element and almost borrowed his life and decided to become a puddle in his soul. He put his hands on his head and lay down and waited for the heroes who could say you’re under arrest with paperwork instead of with the ocean.

“Are you okay?” asked a hero with a clipboard and a tired smile.

Eri nodded. Kirby pointed at the ruined cake, the crown still gleaming, and made a very sad face.

The hero looked at the replacement box, then back at the sad face . “On behalf of the city,” he said gravely (because sad Kirby makes your soul hurt), “we apologize for the cake.”

Kirby considered this absolution, then brightened and patted the hero’s pen as if it were a very good sword.

They found a bench under a tree. Kirby popped the new box, presented Eri with the first forkful like a knight presenting a boon to a lady, and only after she took a bite the size of courage did he tuck in with honest fervor.

“Kirby?” she said around a strawberry, as the water crown blinked out, leaving hair a little damp and cheeks extra rosy. “Did you… almost drown him?”

“Mm.” He wobbled a hand. “Little drown. Not big. Scare. No die.” He squinted, trying to weigh justice against cake on an invisible scale. “He learn.”

She thought about that, then nodded. “He did knock over our cake.”

Kirby pointed the fork like a moral. “Don’t mess with Kirby’s food.”

“Right,” she agreed gravely. “Rule.”

They ate cake and let the city stitch itself around them. The thief, handcuffed, watched them go by with disbelief that had given up trying to make sense and decided to nap. The clerk slid a small bag with two extra buns across the counter “by accident” to be found later, a gentle conspiracy. Kirby left a coin on the windowsill anyway.

Miles away, in a warehouse that had seen more failed plans than successful ones and smelled like old dust and newer smoke, the League gathered like cats at a broken window.

Twice paced. Then he sat. Then he paced again. Then he paced with a second him, who kept stepping on the first him’s heels. “He went boom!” one of him announced. “He went boom,” the other agreed. They high-fived and then glared at each other for stealing each other’s line.

Toga lay stomach-down on a crate, kicking her feet idly, chin in hands, eyes bright enough to start fires. “It was so cute,” she said, which made Dabi twitch like a man allergic to adjectives. “Pink and round and it turned into a truck and then it ate him and spit her out and then it-" She made a tiny imploding gesture with both hands. “Stars.”

Mr. Compress, sleeve pinned neatly where an arm used to be, inclined his head, the single eye visible above his half-mask narrowed thoughtfully. “I resent the implication that anything was cuter than my performance,” he said, deadpan. “But yes, I noticed my clone didn't show up when you came back.”

"Yeah it punched your copy super far! And the. he killed overhaul." Toga said

Spinner leaned on his sword like it was a soapbox and he was a lizard preaching. “So that’s why we couldn’t find the truck,” he said. “We were all crouched by the overpass like idiots waiting for a show that got canceled.”

Shigaraki sat in his chair like it owed him money, fingers drumming a slow tap-tap-tap that made the crate under Toga suddenly very interesting to look at. Kurogiri’s absence hung in the room like a missing tooth. “Report,” he said, and the air listened.

Toga wiggled her toes and complied. “We got down in the maze,” she said, sing-song syrup hiding a mean slice of steel. “We made the yakuza boy mad, he was so easy to make mad, and then the heroes broke things and went places and we went other places and then-” she grinned, fangs catching the light “this little pink thing appeared. I did not stab it. I could not stab it. It was a truck.”

“Truck,” Twice echoed, then pointed accusingly at the ceiling. “Then not truck. Then truck again. Pick a shape, coward.”

“It punched my copy,” Compress said, dignified even in outrage, “to parts unknown. I am still receiving postcards.”

“Cute,” Dabi said flatly. “Deadly. Adorable murder. Great. My favorite brand.”

“Overhaul,” Shigaraki said, as if tasting a fruit and finding it more bruise than bite.

Twice clapped. Twice slapped his own hands down. “Dead!” “Debated!” Both shrugged, in harmony, which is worse than in dissonance. “He went poof into sparkles like a cheap festival trick.”

“So there wasn’t a transport,” Spinner summarized, flipping his sword over to look at the reflection of his own grimacing. “No truck for evidence, no truck for arms, no truck for bullets.” He looked up at Shigaraki, eyes hot with old anger. “No chance to return the favor.”

Shigaraki’s fingers paused in their tap. He scratched his neck instead, slow, until skin pinked under his nails. “Kurogiri got himself arrested,” he said, voice sandpaper. “Looking for something. So we don’t have our door. We don’t have our driver. We don’t have our get out of jail free card.”

“So we have a puffball,” Dabi said. “And a problem.”

“Okay we need to be strategic,” Shigaraki said, and the word sat oddly in his mouth, but not like a lie. “If you go in guns blazing that thing will kill you.” He looked at Dabi, then at Spinner, then at Compress, then at Toga and Twice, who were inheriting expressions like a coin flipped between them. “Gather intel.”

“On what?” Spinner demanded. “On ‘round, pink, turns into vehicles, possibly an alien."

Toga clapped her hands. “I can shadow the heroes,” she offered, like a girl offering to bring lemonade that might also be blood. “They’re swooning. They’re tired. They’re sloppy. They’ll talk about it. They’ll say the cutest little details. He said ‘Kirby,’ by the way.” She rolled the name on her tongue like candy. “Kirby. It fits.”

“Kirby,” Twice repeated. One of him sighed. The other nodded. “Yeah,” they chorused.

“Don’t touch him,” Shigaraki said, and the warning carried a memory of hands turning to dust, of five fingers and regret. “Don’t touch the girl. Watch. Listen. If he’s a kid” the word made a face in his voice “then he’ll do kid things. Eat. Nap. Show off. We can use that.”

“Can we recruit him?” Spinner asked, pure chaos in the question and not a little admiration. “Kid like that? Pink demon? He’d look great on a poster.”

“Or can we not die,” Dabi said, dry. “Step one: not die.”

Mr. Compress tapped his mask, thinking in the measured iamb of magicians. “Perhaps we borrow the heroes’ eyes,” he mused. “They will start their own search. We ghost behind it. We let their filters filter for us.”

“Fine,” Shigaraki said. He stood up and the chair looked relieved. “Toga. Twice. You saw it. You go. Stay out of the heroes's shadow. Dabi, Spinner, stay. Watch the network. If the Commission breathes, I want to know what it smells like. Compress ” He paused. “Keep the An eye.”

Compress bowed, elegant. “With pleasure.”

“And if you see a pink truck” Shigaraki added, deadpan, “don’t do anything stupid.”

“Define stupid,” Dabi murmured, but even he sounded like he planned to live to turn the question into a smirk later.

The meeting broke with the clatter of small plans pretending to be big ones. Toga stuck her tongue out at the ceiling on her way out because it had been a while since she’d stuck her tongue out at anything and ceilings have it coming. Twice argued the whole way down the stairs about whether he wanted noodles or to avoid noodles because of trauma and settled on both.

Shigaraki was left alone with the open space where Kurogiri should have been. He scratched at the idea of a pink thing eating their schedule, and somewhere deep in his chest something that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a cough shook its head.

“Okay,” he said to the air. “Okay.”

On a different bench under a different tree, Kirby and Eri split the last strawberry with the sacred fairness reserved for siblings and saints. Eri pushed her half toward him at the last second, and Kirby pushed his back, and they both ended up eating the other’s in a messy truce that tasted like trust.

“Do you… want to dance after cake?” Eri asked, emboldened by sugar and rules that didn’t hurt.

“Dance!" Kirby said, because you can put always beside cake and be right.

He hopped down, wiped his hands on his sides because napkins were a concept he respected but did not internalize, and held out both nubs. Eri slid off the bench, set the empty box on the seat like a trophy, and placed her small hands in his.

They wobbled left. They wobbled right. They did a little step they had invented together that looked like two people trying to become a heart and deciding it was easier to be two circles instead. A passerby slowed, smiled, and kept going. The city, for once, minded its business.

When they finished, Kirby struck a pose and Eri clapped, and a sparrow in a nearby tree decided this was a good moment to take a bath in a gutter with sincere, enthusiastic splashing.

Kirby watched, head tilted, and Eri saw his eyes track the water with pure, silly interest. He glanced at her, then back at the sparrow, then back at her, as if asking permission to be amused by small things.

“Go ahead,” she said, mouth tilted. “Watch the bird.”

He did. He giggled when the sparrow sneezed water on its own foot. “Water hat,” he whispered, touching the place the crown had been. “Good hat.”

Eri bumped his side with her shoulder. “You’re a good brother,” she said.

He bumped back. “You good friend,” he said, because some words are truer when you keep them small.

They walked on, cutie patooties with cake breath, leaving behind a rule written in frosting and water: Some things cannot be forgiven. And you don’t mess with Kirby’s cake.

Chapter Text

Hospitals always smell like someone boiled time and added bleach.

Mirio Togata lay in a room that the morning had turned to afternoon turned to evening without asking his permission. He was propped at an angle that made the world look like a slope; a blanket was tucked just-so because a nurse with a power complex about corners had adopted him. Electrodes made a polite forest across his chest. His smile, habit, armor, promise, kept trying to climb onto his face and then sliding off, not because he didn’t mean it but because it weighed too much.

Midoriya sat in the visitor’s chair as if it had asked him to take its confession. His notebook lay open on his knee, but the page was blank and the pen was trembling. The better part of Full Cowl hummed faintly along his veins like a distant train you’re sure you can outrun if the timing breaks your way.

“She must be so scared,” Mirio said softly. His voice was hoarse with use and swallowed screams. “She hates small rooms and bright lights. And those gowns-"

Midoriya blinked. The picture reassembled in his head with painful ease: a little girl with a horn in a tattered hospital gown, bare feet slapping on a filthy corridor, blood tacky on her ankles. He swallowed. “No shoes,” he murmured. “She didn’t have shoes.”

Mirio squeezed the blanket. “The floor’s cold,” he said distantly, as if he’d left part of himself lying on it. “And the tiles aren’t… kind.” His eyes clenched shut, then opened and found the ceiling like a point on a map. “I should be out there.”

“You should be in bed,” said Aizawa from the doorway, voice like sand over steel. His hair hung limp; his eyes were red-rimmed and too awake. He stepped in with the gravity of a man who refused to topple because there were students in the room who would topple if he did. “Both of you should be, one in bed, one at least pretending to sit.”

Midoriya shot up straighter. “Eri-"

“Is not in this building,” Aizawa said, which sounded cruel and was in fact kindness wrapped in a lesson. “We’re searching.” He did not add quietly, because the word had couches and broom closets filled with reasons they weren’t sharing. “Sir Nighteye’s team is running filters. Centipeder has the registries. Uraraka and Asui are resting for the first time in twenty hours. Fat Gum is feeding half the hallway. And you-" He leveled a look at Mirio that was not a scold and not permission and therefore something like respect. “- will be useful when you can stand without clenching your teeth.”

Mirio grinned automatically. “I’m not clenching.”

“You are,” Aizawa said, and then, softer: “And she’s afraid, yes. But she is also… with someone.” He let the absurdity hover and harden into something that could balance on a bedside table. “Midoriya?”

Midoriya looked up, pen knuckled white. “Yes, Sensei?”

“You saw the pink thing up close.” He said it as neutrally as a man could say the pink thing and have it still be truth. “You believe he, Kirby wants to help?”

Midoriya remembered a nub held out to a shaking child. A head tilt that took fear as a puzzle to be solved with softness, not a problem to be smashed. A water crown and a truck and the look on Eri’s face when the star had tucked her onto safety. “I do,” he said, and his certainty surprised him enough to take the sting out of the guilt for a heartbeat. “He… he felt like a kid.” His throat worked. “A very strong, very scary kid.”

Mirio’s eyes warmed. “Then maybe she’s not as scared as we think,” he said, trying the thought on like a shirt he wanted to fit. “Maybe she’s… eating cake.”

A nurse swept in with a clipboard and the authority of a goddess in crocs. “It’s rest time in twenty minutes,” she said briskly. “And if either of you tries to ninja your way out of my ward I will personally call Recovery Girl and have her scold you until your hair turns gray.”

Midoriya blinked. "We're teens-

“Don't care it will be grey,” she said without blinking, and disappeared.

Aizawa let out what, in a different life, might be called a chuckle. “Sleep,” he ordered. Then, when Midoriya opened his mouth: “Midoriya. That was an order.”

Midoriya closed his mouth. Mirio eased back. The monitors ticked. Somewhere down the hall, a machine made a beeping sound that suggested it was thinking rude things about the heart it was attached to.

“She’s scared,” Mirio said again, softer, because some sentences don’t change no matter how many times you fold them.

“And someone’s carrying her,” Aizawa replied. “Let yourself picture that for five minutes.” His voice went even lower, like a hand on a fevered forehead. “Then sleep.”

Midoriya nodded. He closed his eyes and, because his teacher had asked him to, pictured a small, round, ridiculous hero carrying a little girl down a street. The image refused to be anything but tender. It put socks on her in his head so the pavement wouldn’t bite.

He didn’t know that, a few districts away, that picture was deciding to become true.

You can live inside a moment for a long time without noticing the edges until they scratch you.

Kirby noticed the edges when he looked down and his eyes didn’t find red shoes. Eri had been walking beside him across a patchwork of sun and shade up a block of silky asphalt, down a slice of old cobbles and the rhythm of her steps had a flinch in it, tiny and brave. He’d been talking, if you could call poyo and “look bird” and “bun smell!” talking, and she’d been answering with smiles and the kind of nods you give to a baby brother who’s actually ancient.

Now he frowned at her feet.

They were small. All feet are small to a puffball, but these were small in the way things are when they’ve been asked to grow around pain. The bandages he’d wrapped earlier had gray bruises where city had leaked into the weave. Her toes, hugged the ground like it might bring them closer to safety.

He stopped so suddenly that a pigeon, mid-waddle behind them, almost bumped him.

Eri stopped too, because she had learned that when Kirby ceased being momentum and became statue, something was About To Happen.

He pointed at her feet. “Cold?” he asked, because you begin with the simplest true thing.

She blinked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Then, instinctively, she tried the smile that meant I promise I’m fine, please don’t make a fuss. It bent in the middle. “It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t want to… bother you.”

Kirby’s mouth became a tiny o of astonished offense on behalf of the universe.

“Bother?” he repeated, as if he had never considered the word could be attached to you deserve not to bleed when you walk. “No. No bother. Friend feet hurt. Kirby fix.”

Before she could argue, because she would, because children who have learned to be small always do, he scooped her up.

It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t do a superhero dip or a bridal sweep. He simply put both nubs under her knees and behind her back and lifted, as if she weighed what she weighed (which was not much) and the air was cooperative (which it often was for him). She yelped, then steadied, arms going around his round shoulders on reflex. He was warm. He was very good at being portable furniture.

“Kirby carry,” he announced, more to the street than to her, as if warning it to behave.

“B-but-” she tried, because not being a bother is a religion with a hard catechism. “I can-"

“Kirby fast,” he said, and set off.

He didn’t sprint, he didn’t need to. He moved at that Kirby-pace that looks like a bounce and covers ground like a rumor. He took alleys not because they were shorter but because they had less grit. He hopped curbs with the care of a waiter carrying soup. He angled his body so her horn wouldn’t bump street signs. He glared at a pebble as if it personally had something to answer for.

The first store with shoes and clothes was not a boutique with curated playlists and three shirts that cost rent. It was the kind of place where the bell over the door had been there longer than the paint on the frame, where the owner knew five kinds of parents and three kinds of children and stocked for all of them. Mannequins in the window wore the current idea of cool; a handwritten sign promised Socks 3-for-500; somewhere, behind a row of hoodies, a radio cheerfully lied about traffic.

Kirby shouldered the door with the polite intention of a gentleman and a battering ram all at once. The bell went ding with alarm.

The clerk looked up, expression moving from Hello! to …what? to Oh jeez, protect the child in a single clean arc. She was about thirty, hair up in a hurry, the kind of face you trust with picking your haircut when you can’t form words. Her eyes flicked to Eri’s bare, bandaged feet, to the hospital gown swallowed by a scarf and a too-big sense of self-effacement, back to Kirby’s set mouth and round determination.

“Hi,” she said, switching gears without missing a beat. “Welcome. I’m Hana. Looks like we’re having A Day. Let’s get you two sorted.”

Eri, still in Kirby’s arms, tried to apologize with her posture. Kirby said, “Shoes,” like a king ordering the tide to go away.

Hana’s smile softened into something like a blanket. “We can do shoes,” she said. “What size?”

“Small,” Kirby said at once. Then, remembering his research method for bun sizes earlier, he added, “Soft. No hurt.” He paused, then, exquisitely serious: “strawberry.”

Hana’s mouth twitched. “Soft and no hurt and strawberry,” she repeated, grabbing a little long tray, a measuring sticker, and the sense of humor that keeps retail from eating your soul. “We might have something. You know what? We’re doing this right. Do you want to carry her, or should I-?”

Eri stiffened. Kirby’s arms tightened very slightly. “Kirby carry,” he said gently.

“Got it,” Hana said, reading the room like a pro. “We can measure while you hold. Toes to heel.” She knelt on the shop rug without hesitation, the better to be eye-level with a child who had only met kindness at height.

Eri’s breath fluttered. Kirby leaned his forehead against hers. “Safe,” he murmured, and set her carefully on a stool he dragged over with a foot. He knelt, tiny, round, and pulled a towel out of nowhere.

Hana blinked. “Did that...come out of your-"

“Stummy,” Kirby said, busy. He set a shallow basin beside the stool, also out of nowhere. He poured water from a silver teapot that had no business being there and tested it with a nub. “Warm,” he announced.

Eri stared between basin and towel and Kirby’s face as if trying to locate the trick. “Where-"

“Pocket,” Kirby said causally, “For… stuff.” He looked at her feet, then at her face. “Okay?”

She looked at Hana. Hana nodded once, the kind of nod that says I’m on your team even if I don’t know the rules. Eri nodded back. “Okay,” she whispered.

Kirby handled her feet like they were made of the same stuff as his best parasol. He eased the bandages free with the patience of a person who has time for this because nothing is more important than this. The skin beneath was not as bad as it could have been and worse than it should have been, red where friction had insisted, raw in two small places where tile had tried to keep her. Eri watched his face for flinches. He didn’t give her any.

He washed her feet with the warm rag in slow circles, humming nonsense under his breath. He made a game of the worst bits; he blew on a sore spot and made a little boo! noise like a spell. Hana handed him a tiny packet of sample foot balm without comment. He dabbed it on with solemn concentration. He conjured clean, soft bandages and wrapped them lightly, tucking the ends in with a flourish. He did not kiss her toes because some boundaries are holy; he settled for tapping the tips with his nub. “All done,” he said proudly. “Soft.”

Eri was crying. She was trying not to; she was holding the tears in her nose and eyebrows like a person trying to carry too many groceries up the stairs. Hana pretended to adjust a box of belts on the shelf so the kid could have the privacy of a stranger at the right distance.

“Thank you,” Eri managed, the two words doing the work of at least twenty.

“Welcome,” Kirby said, as if he hadn’t just rewritten three chapters of her internal book titled The World.

Hana clapped her hands gently, bringing the universe back into its right shape. “Okay! Socks.” She pulled a package from a display, small, cotton, ankle, with tiny stars stitched at the cuff. She held them out like a secret. “Try these.”

Eri touched the fabric like it might purr. “They’re… pretty.”

“And practical,” Hana said briskly, as if prettiness needed a lawyer. “And if anyone tells you you can’t have both, you refer them to me.”

Kirby took the socks, dramatically shook one out (it poofed), and slid it over Eri’s clean, warm foot. The little star kissed her ankle. Eri giggled, hiccuped, and then made the brave decision to let a stranger put her foot into a sock for her. People came in pairs. Safe and choice. She could have both.

Shoes came next. Hana did the measure, sticker, pen, the ritual lengthening of a child’s toes as if by magic and disappeared into the aisles like a hunter into a forest. She reemerged with three boxes: a plain pair of link sneakers, a strawberry themed pair with supportive cushioning and a little cloud embroidered on the side, and a pair with tiny LED lights in the heel that blinked when you stomped.

Eri’s eyes went to the lights like moths do. Then, because children who aren’t used to wanting ask permission from the air, she glanced at Kirby.

He wobbled in place from the effort of not immediately yelling YES. “If friend want,” he said, straight-faced and adult, then blew it by whispering: “Blinky.”

Hana hid a laugh that would have come out as a squeal. “Let’s try the clouds first,” she suggested. “Make sure we’ve got the right fit. Then you can test the blinkies like science.”

The clouds fit like apologies that actually change behavior. Eri stood. The sole cushioned the memory of tile away. She took a step. Another. Her face did that thing faces do when something good happens to feet, surprise at how close joy is to the ground. “They’re… soft,” she said, wonder cluttering the corners of her mouth.

“Walk,” Kirby encouraged, backward-stepping, arms out like spotter panels.

She walked. She didn’t flinch.

“Blinkies,” Hana said, because rewards shouldn’t be delayed past the point of poetry.

They blinked. Of course they blinked. Eri stomped carefully, then stomped not carefully at all, and when the heels lit up she let out a laugh that Kirby had only heard twice today and every time it felt like winning.

“We can… get two pairs?” she asked, with the caution of a person who has learned that abundance has a test at the end.

Kirby nodded so hard his crown (which had vanished) nearly reappeared from sheer enthusiasm. “Two,” he agreed. “Cloud for long. Blinky for fun.”

“Deal,” Hana said, because sometimes the adult’s job is to agree to sanity.

Clothes were less like shopping and more like excavating a new person. Eri gravitated to a soft hoodie the color of morning sky with a little stitched star near the hem, to leggings that didn’t rub, to a cotton dress with pockets (Kirby shook her hand when she said “pockets” because he respected priorities). Hana found a bundle deal on underwear because the universe can be decent in small ways. Kirby pointed solemnly at a beanie with a pom-pom. Eri tried it on, and then her hand went to her horn, halfway between pride and hiding.

Hana hesitated in the polite, professional way of people who have been trained not to assume. “Do you want hats that… make room?” she asked, quiet.

Eri’s throat did the thing where it closes around three different answers. Then she looked at Kirby, who was watching her as if the choice were a star and he was its friend. “No,” she said, and her voice didn’t tremble. “I want it out.” She lifted the beanie off, smoothed her hair back with both hands, and chose a headband instead—a simple blue one that made her look like what she was: a little girl allowed to be pretty on purpose.

“Excellent,” Hana said, and meant it so hard that both of them relaxed.

Toiletries were a pile of small dignities: a toothbrush that wasn’t grey from too many mouths, a little bottle of shampoo that promised peaches, a hairbrush with gentle bristles. Kirby held the hairbrush like a weapon and then tucked it away with reverence.

He paid with a treasure chest because of course he did. Hana did not count the coins because she knew a plot device when it walked into her shop; she rang up a number that would not make her boss yell and then closed the register with a conspiratorial wink. Kirby, in turn, placed a shiny coin she’d never seen on top of the counter by the stapler and patted it like a tip. “For kindness,” he said simply.

Hana swallowed around the knot that retail puts in your throat when someone remembers you’re a person. “Come back if the shoes rub,” she said. “Or for… anything.” She glanced at Eri’s scarf, at her eyes. “Anything.”

Eri nodded. Her eyes shone. “Thank you,” she whispered again.

“Any time,” Hana replied, and meant it in the way of women who have declared small sovereign nations inside fluorescent buildings.

Outside, the sidewalk felt like a new country. Eri’s socks hugged her ankles and the clouds hugged her arches and the blinkies hugged her inner six-year-old, who had thought perhaps she might not be allowed to live here. She stomped once, for science. The lights flashed. She stomped again, for joy. The lights obliged. Kirby stomped in solidarity even though his shoes did not blink and he was deeply offended by this oversight.

“Good?” he asked, unable to contain the smile that made his whole body become punctuation.

“Good,” she said, and then, because good was not big enough, “Better.”

He fussed the hoodie onto her shoulders (she could do it herself; he made a show of letting the sleeves “mysteriously” find her hands). He adjusted the headband with the clumsy care of a brother trimming bangs. He stepped back and tilted his head as if appraising a painting he’d had the honor of hanging.

“Pretty friend,” he said solemnly.

She blushed so bright the blinkies tried to keep up. “You too,” she said, with the goofy bravery that comes with new socks.

They walked with the lope of People With Errands, a category Eri realized felt weirdly luxurious. Kirby bought a backpack that looked like a star had decided to hug a zipper and packed it with the small life they’d just conjured into being. He insisted on carrying it because he liked the weight. Eri insisted on carrying the toothbrush because it was hers, and the having of it kept unspooling in her chest like a ribbon.

They found a public restroom where the mirror didn’t lie and the sink water ran warm when persuaded. Kirby guarded the door like a bouncer at a very exclusive club that only admitted one small girl and her horn. Eri scrubbed her hands and face until the hospital smell fled. She tried the peach shampoo just enough to make her hair smell like summer. When she came out, Kirby did a little clap without thinking and she curtsied in the ridiculous, wonderful way of children who have just discovered that performance is allowed.

“Food?” he asked after a minute, because joy burns calories.

She grinned. “Cake?”

He put a hand over his heart as if she had just.. well offered him cake. “Cake.”

They split a cupcake on the curb, because sometimes thrones are concrete and frosting is communion. Her blinkies flashed when she kicked her heels against the step. He licked frosting from his cheek and pretended to be offended when she dabbed a bit on his nose and he went cross-eyed to see it.

“Kirby?” she said around a crumb, because there was always another question now. “Can we… get pajamas?”

“P’jamas,” he repeated with reverence. “Soft ones. With stars.” He looked at the sky as if waiting for applause. “Sleep good with soft.”

“And a blanket,” she added quickly, then looked immediately guilty. “If that’s, too much-"

“Too little,” he said, scandalized. “Blanket and friend bear,” he declared, as if conjuring stuffed animals were part of his power set.

They did not buy a bear. Kirby produced one from pocket-sky with a flourish that made a toddler in a stroller three feet away drop his pretzel in awe. The bear had a slightly crooked smile and a belly that asked to be poked. Eri hugged it the way you hug the first safe thing that looks like it might be allowed to keep you.

Evening leaned in. The city’s edges softened. The neon signs blinked awake. Somewhere above them, on a rooftop with functional binoculars and a head full of bad ideas and soft spots, Himiko Toga watched them from a shadow.

“They’re adorable,” she whispered, half disgusted, half besotted. “If I stab the puffball the girl will cry. I hate when girls cry unless it’s-" She stopped. She felt Twice bump her shoulder. “Okay, okay,” she sighed. “We’re just watching. Gathering intel. I can do that. I can. …I could totally, like, adopt them, though.”

“Don’t,” Twice said, both of him, and they wrote KIRBY BUYS SHOES in a notebook because intelligence has to start somewhere.

Down on the sidewalk, Eri tugged at her hoodie pocket, eyes suddenly heavy. “Do we have… a place to sleep?” she asked, the question a feather that still managed to fall hard.

Kirby nodded. He pointed at the sky. “Roof,” he said. “Garden roof. Bench. Blanket. Safe.” He tapped his chest. “Kirby watch.”

She nodded. She believed him not because he could turn into a truck or swallow the sea, but because he had put socks on her and washed her feet like it wasn’t a tax on his patience.

They went back to the rooftop with the tarp and the cat (who had grudgingly decided that perhaps someone else could own this building between three and five p.m.). Kirby shook the blanket out stars, of course and made a nest with the efficiency of an animal that had napped on every planet. He tucked Eri in and then made a show of tucking the bear in, too, because equality under blanket law is important.

“Kirby?” she said into the folds, sleep already putting stones in her pockets. “Thank you. Again.” She looked at her shoes lined up neatly beside the bench. “For… making me a person.”

“You are person,” he said, gently offended. “Always. Kirby just… add shoes.”

She laughed, a tiny, tired bell. “Add shoes,” she repeated. “Okay.”

He settled beside her, round and watchful, little red feet sticking out from under the edge of the blanket like punctuation marks. The city breathed. Somewhere, a boy with a notebook finally fell asleep with his face in a page because his teacher told him to. Somewhere else, a boy with a smile like a sun he’d learned to carry even in eclipse dreamed of a little girl eating cake.

Up here, Eri drifted, one hand curled around the headband she’d taken off and tucked under the bear’s paw, the other resting on Kirby’s side, as if to make sure the roundness stayed between her and the world.

“Night,” she mumbled, almost gone.

“Night,” he said, and the word was a ward.

Her blinkies were lined up like tiny lighthouses, heels to the bench, ready for tomorrow.

Kirby watched the skyline a long time, unblinking and very awake, as a kind of promise. And then, when the cat finally decided to sleep on his feet without asking, he allowed himself to close his eyes.

New shoes. New steps. And a road that, unbelievably, was beginning to feel like it led somewhere that didn’t hurt.

Chapter Text

Morning found the rooftop garden rinsed in gold, the tarp snapping softly, the city yawning into birdsong and bicycle bells. Eri woke with her cheek pillowed on Kirby’s side and the bear tucked under her chin like a promise. For one perfect blink she forgot to be careful. Then memory shuffled its cards, cake, shoes, hoodie, dancing, and laid them down in a pattern that did not hurt.

Kirby was already awake, blinking slow and content, tracing a chalk line with his eyes between two drifting clouds. When Eri stretched, the new hoodie made a whisper sound that felt like a hug. She sat up, tucked hair behind her ear, and glanced at the skyline.

“Kirby?” she said, hesitant, because apologies are hungry little things that eat their way out. “I’m… sorry you had to lose your pretty star. When you saved me.”

She meant the Warp Star: that blazing, friendly comet that had shattered into glitter under Overhaul’s swipe. It had been beautiful. It had been gone. People were like that, mostly.

Kirby blinked once as if he had to buffer the idea of loss. Then he shook his whole round body like a dog coming out of a lake. “No prob,” he chirped. “Star back.”

He hopped to the parapet, dug in his pocket-sky, and, without fanfare, without ceremony, lifted one nub and drew a shape in the air. It was as if he were tracing the outline of a song he already knew. Light gathered in his wake, a golden smear that thickened, brightened, condensed, and then, with a chiming ting, became.

The Warp Star hovered, cheerful as ever, throwing warm coin-colored light on the rooftop, on Eri’s small astonished face, on the cat who pretended not to be impressed and failed.

“Oh,” Eri breathed, a child’s prayer to a solvable universe.

Kirby grinned, hopped once, and the star dipped in invitation. He held out both nubs. “Ride?”

Eri looked at her blinkies lined neatly by the bench, at the bear tucked back into the blanket, at the scarf around her shoulders. Then she nodded. “Ride.”

They mounted like professionals, Kirby scooting to the front with practiced wiggle, Eri settling behind him, hands around his middle, head tucked where the glow warmed her forehead just so. The star hummed like a big cat. The city leaned back to make room.

“Hold,” Kirby reminded, as if she would forget. “Tight.”

“I will,” she promised, and did.

They rose.

The world became soft pieces: the noodle shop steam, the laundry lines, the alley cats scolding breakfast pigeons. Air slid through Eri’s hair and decided to be gentle. She pointed once, twice, there was the park with the tilted swing; there, the mural of the tanuki; there, the river that tried to be a mirror and never quite succeeded. Kirby banked at her finger like a trained thought. He kept low, kept kind, kept out of the sightlines of drones and curiosity and the peculiar gravity of hero work.

They settled in a quiet, empty park tucked between old apartment blocks and a schoolyard deserted for weekend. The grass grew with that stubborn tenderness city grass has; a sandbox waited like a paused story. A fountain, not on, made a circle where wishes could land when it remembered. Eri hopped down, blinkies flashing, hoodie sleeves tugged over her knuckles. Kirby followed, star hovering at his shoulder like a well-trained dog.

He was about to suggest a game (tag, or Kirby’s favorite, which was “touch the cloud with your eyes and feel proud”) when his flip phone sang.

“Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, that’s the name you should know Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, He’s the star of the show! He’s more than you think, He’s got maximum pink-"

It cut off mid-glee because Kirby had already flipped it open. Eri giggled at the jingle one of those songs that burrows into your brain and builds a tiny condo but she didn’t recognize the voice. (Master Hand had recorded it himself, once upon a Smash tournament, upon request after Kirby had heard Luigi's ring tone) Kirby had loved it. Eri, who did not know what a tournament was beyond the's base TV’s confusing noise sometimes, only knew it made her want to clap.)

“Poyo!” Kirby sang into the receiver, standing straighter, as if warmth were coming through the speaker.

“Bonjam, Kirby!” bubbled a voice as clear and cool as the inside of an ice sculpture.

Eri tilted her head. “Bonjam?” she murmured, trying the shape of it.

Another voice burst in, sparking like a firecracker. “Woah! Who is that?! She sounds so Jawaii!”

“Friend!” Kirby declared, popping with pride.

The third voice arrived with command tucked under courtesy. “Compose yourselves, sisters. Kirby, report. Are you whole? Are you-” a tiny, impatient breath “- causing collateral again?”

Eri peered over Kirby’s shoulder, as if she could see through the phone by wanting it enough. Kirby, delighted, pressed the speaker button so the air could listen.

The screen showed three faces arranged in a tidy trio: pale blue hair like a frost waterfall, red spiking like a flame in a breeze, yellow cut in a hime fringe under a beret with a proud sigil. No noses; blue eyes like polished marbles; markings that made their expressions look like they had been drawn beautifully by a very serious child.

They did introductions with a flourish that suggested this had been practiced in mirrors and on battlefields. “Francisca,” intoned the blue-haired one, bowing with a lace of politeness. “Frozen General.”

“Flamberge!” yelped the redhead, nearly toppling her own frame from enthusiasm. “Blazing General, your favorite!” She blew a kiss because kisses are hot.

“Zan Partizanne,” finished the yellow, with the crisp precision of someone who makes lists for fun. The upside-down hearts on her beret gleamed. “Lightning General and the leader of this trio.”

They looked, Eri thought, like a costume book had put its favorites on one page and then animated them. They looked like trouble in the best way.

Eri bobbed a little bow she had learned from watching TV through a partially open door. “Hello,” she said. Then, shyer: “What does… bonjam mean?”

Francisca’s smile softened, the kind of smile that only appears when someone asks for a word and you happen to have one in your pocket. “It is a greeting in our native tongue,” she said, her voice with the cadence of snow falling in a place that knows how to be quiet. “Would you like to learn some Jambastion words?”

Eri’s eyes went round. A new language felt like a secret path down the side of a mountain. She nodded, careful and eager. “Jes,” she said a beat later, trying it on.

Flamberge whooped. “She’s a quick one! So Jawaii,” she sang, elbows on the frame, chin in hands. “Okay, okay, class is in session!”

Zan cleared her throat, because leadership is often just clearing your throat at the right time. “We will keep it simple and practical.” (Which is what people say before they hand you a sword and a poem.) “Repeat after us, Miss…?”

“Eri,” Eri supplied.

“Eri,” Zan repeated with pleasant gravity, as if tucking it into a column under assets. “Very well. First: Bonjam means greetings.”

“Bonjam,” Eri echoed. It felt soft and snug, like a good sock.

Francisca lifted a hand, fingers floating like leaves in a current. “Jamanke means thank you.”

“Jamanke,” Eri tried, and the word sat right in her mouth, firm and polite and proud. She glanced at Kirby, who bobbed with approval, even though he had already decided he would not be learning any new words today if he could help it. He had plenty. He liked the ones he had.

“Vun means very,” Zan continued, pace smooth. “As in, ‘Vun Jawaii’ if you wanted to embarrass Flamberge.”

“HEY,” said Flamberge, who was already grinning. “But yeah. Vun Jawaii! That’s you, kid.”

Eri flushed, and her blinkies would have flashed if she’d been wearing them. “Vun Jawaii,” she repeated, pointing at Kirby.

Kirby struck a pose and nearly fell off the star. “Ha!” Flamberge cackled. “She gets it.”

“Jes means yes,” Francisca added, fingers sketching a check mark in the air. “Janno means no.”

“Jes,” Eri said, half-nod. “Janno,” she said, and felt weirdly taller.

“Majicious means tasty,” Flamberge put in, eyes going half-lidded like a cat thinking about cream. “Use that for cake.”

“Majicious,” Eri said dutifully, then looked at Kirby, who was nodding so hard his whole outline jiggled. “Majicious cake.”

“Goppoko means surprise,” Zan chiseled, with a hint of mischief. “As in, ‘Goppoko! There is a puffball in my kitchen eating my pudding.’”

“Kirby never- ” Kirby began, then remembered times. He put a nub over his mouth. “Maybe.”

“Jonto means soon,” Francisca said. “Jorrow means sad.”

Eri’s eyes lowered, her thumb rubbing the edge of the star keychain. She tried them carefully, looking for splinters. “Jonto,” she said softly. “Not Jorrow.” The sisters, who had also learned to live around sharp words, nodded as if the child had just translated mercy into their dialect.

“Rigga means painful,” Zan continued, and the word cracked sharp like dropped ice. “Japologa means I’m sorry.”

“Rigga,” Eri said, and put it on a high shelf in her mind where it could not fall on her head without permission. “Japologa,” she added, and sent it down a river. She had carried too many apologies that weren’t hers.

Francisca twirled a lock of blue hair, choosing with care. “Ji means me,” she said. “Mafo means lie. Jif means if.”

Eri tried them in the smallest possible sentence. “Ji Eri,” she said. It felt like signing a flower. “Mafo is bad,” she added, making a face. “Jif… we get cake, I will say majicious.” She looked immensely pleased with herself.

“Jaway means I forgot,” Flamberge offered, unabashed. “I use that one. Juh means huh? for when your friend does something ridiculous, which will happen. Mapop means hope. Bastion means heart.”

“Mapop,” Eri whispered, because that one slipped past the guard she kept on her throat and went right where it belonged. She tapped her chest. “Bastion.”

All three sisters softened visibly. Even Zan’s posture unclenched by a degree. “Good,” Zan said, and did not explain what.

Francisca laced her fingers, glanced at the others, and ventured into a thorny thicket. “Merījamasumāsu means merry Christmas.”

Eri blinked. “What is… Christmas?”

Silence fell in the hilarious way it falls when three very dramatic women discover a gap in a child’s joy. Flamberge clutched at the frame. “Jam, JAM, what do you mean what is-" She flailed for cultural analogies that did not exist here. “It’s food! And sparkles! And presents! And you wear dumb sweaters! And you sing badly on purpose! And- and Francisca cries at lights!”

“I do not cry,” Francisca objected, already misting. “I, glimmer. Zan help.”

Zan, who had once tried to express feeling by lighting a fortress on fire in a very strategic way, frowned at the empty park, at the little girl in the hoodie, at the puffball holding the phone like it could hug them back. “It is a… winter festival,” she said, decisive but gentled. “A time where families or those who choose each other gather. There is food. There are gifts. There is an excuse to tell people you love them and blame it on the calendar.” She paused. “You… have not had this?”

Eri shook her head slowly. “No.”

Kirby made a small noise, halfway between “poyo” and the sound a kettle makes when it is about to sing. He reached up and patted her shoulder twice, then a third time because two didn’t feel like enough.

“Okay,” Flamberge declared, slamming her palm on an invisible table that probably had scorch marks already. “New mission: we schedule a Merījamasumāsu Jonto for you, kiddo. We’ll do it out of season. That makes it punk. We’ll call it Merījamasu-Maybe!”

Francisca, who had already begun mentally decorating with blue ribbons, nodded fervently. “Jes. We will make it Jhappy,” she said, and smiled at her own small joke.

Zan cleared her throat again, but it was less command, more emotion batted into shape. “Continuing. Jamba New Year means happy new year. Jhappy means happy. Jambuhbye means goodbye. Jaitty means good night. Jawaii means cute.”

“Jawaii,” Eri said, pointing at all three sisters in turn with mischief that wasn’t afraid of itself anymore. Flamberge preened; Francisca hid a smile; Zan pretended not to be pleased and failed.

“Konjy means crazy,” Zan added, because vocabulary is incomplete without a word for what Kirby is doing now.

“Konjy,” Eri repeated solemnly, aiming it at Kirby and making him beam.

Francisca clasped her hands. “Jamedetāna means congratulations. Use it on someone who's trying to help.”

“Jamedetāna,” Eri practiced, and then, impulsively, pointed at herself, at her shoes, at the hoodie. “Jamedetāna, Ji Eri.”

“Jes,” Francisca murmured, eyes warm, and then Flamberge, unable to resist the gravitational pull of chaos, leaned in conspiratorially.

“Okay, last one,” she whispered. “This one’s special. Use it wisely. Jamblasted. It means God damn it.”

“Flamberge,” Zan hissed, scandalized. Francisca covered her mouth with her hand pads. “She’s a child.”

Flamberge waggled her brows. “She’s a Jawaii child with a life. She deserves good words.” She winked at Eri. “Say it only when you drop cake frosting on your hoodie, okay? And only when adults aren’t listening. Except me.”

Eri, suddenly conspiratorial too, whispered back, “Jamblasted,” and then clapped both hands over her mouth, eyes huge, as if the air might tattle. Kirby snorted a laugh so big it nearly unseated the star.

Zan sighed the sigh of sisters everywhere, which means: fine. “Majaja means again,” she said, reclaiming the chalk. “As in, ‘Repeat this lesson Majaja when you have slept.’”

Eri drew a breath, heart doing a little dance in her chest. “Jamanke,” she said quietly into the phone. “For teaching me. Ji Eri. Jhappy. Mapop.” She searched the piled marbles of new words and found the one that rolled to her hand. “Bastion.”

Francisca put a palm over her heart. “You’re welcome,” she said, and dabbed very casually at the corner of her eye like someone adjusting an imaginary monocle.

Flamberge pointed a finger at Kirby. “You better feed her something Majicious soon, Pink. Or I will come there and eat your stove.”

“Poyo,” Kirby said, saluting with his nub and somehow conveying both yes ma’am and please do.

Zan inclined her head, the chain between the hearts on her collarette glinting. “Kirby, keep your collateral damage under Konjy levels. Eri-” and here her voice did something soft and careful “-Jambuhbye for now. Jonto we will speak again.”

“Jambuhbye,” Eri echoed, and Kirby punched the speaker off, then flipped the phone closed with a flourish so neat it made the star tinkle.

They stood in the quiet park with a sky that looked like someone had washed it and wrung it out. For a long breath neither of them said anything. Then Eri looked down at her shoes, lifted her gaze, and smiled in a way that showed all the new room in her.

“Kirby?” she said. “Bonjam.”

Kirby threw his arms up, thrilled, as if she had just performed an S-rank combo. “Bonjam!” he squeaked back, mangling the vowel a little and not caring.

She looked at the fountain, at the sandbox, at the star hovering like a tame comet. “Jonto… cake?” she tried, eyes bright, testing the word in a sentence like a sparrow testing air.

Kirby’s entire soul lit up like a heel light. “Yes,” he said, adopting exactly one new word and then pretending it had always been his. “Cake. Delicious .”

They set up a picnic on the grass with the efficiency of friends who had practiced on rooftops. Kirby produced a gingham cloth from pocket-sky because of course he did. He followed it with a small plate that said World’s Best Boss (Dedede’s, liberated by circumstances), two forks, and a cake that should not have fit in the space between molecules. Eri clapped, then put a hand over her mouth, then took the hand down because she was allowed to clap.

“Jamanke,” she told him gravely, and he bowed like a very round waiter.

They ate and practiced, turning the park into a classroom where the lessons were all alive. Eri held up a particularly gorgeous strawberry and said, solemn as a priest, “delicious.” Kirby nodded, mouth full, and echoed

She pointed at a squirrel that stole a crumb and whispered, “Goppoko,” and they watched it dart up a trunk, its tail insulting gravity and manners.

When a cloud swallowed the sun for a second and the breeze stitched a cool seam across the grass, she shivered and pulled the hoodie tighter. “Jorrow?” she said, asking if the sky was sad.

“Tomorrow ,” Kirby assured, tapping the sun’s edge as it returned. “Happy sky. Hide game.”

She practiced apologies that didn’t belong to her and discarded them like wilted leaves. “Japologa,” she said once, and then shook her head, frowned, and corrected herself: “Janno. Not my Japologa.” She peered at Kirby. “Mafo… bad.” He patted her hair gentle, proud, quiet.

She pointed at her chest. “Ji Eri,” she said again, as if she liked the sound. “Bastion.” She touched the little star keychain. “Mapop.”

Kirby, who had never once in his round life been able to sum up everything important in a sentence and had never needed to, nodded hard enough to make the plate wobble. “Me Kirby,” he said. “Friend.”

They played after, because language should end in a game when you can manage it. Kirby chased his own star in lazy loops around the fountain, making Eri shriek with laughter at his pretending-to-almost-fall and actually-falling-on-purpose. They built a castle out of sandbox sand with towers like softened popsicles. Kirby tried to inhale the entire sandbox once and Eri yelped “Janno!” so loudly he swallowed his giggle instead and let the sand be.

They wandered to the swings. Eri sat, new shoes scuffing the dust, hands tight on the chains. Kirby stood behind and pushed with gentle, steady nudges enough to make her stomach flutter, not enough to trigger old alarms. She giggled, hair lifting, hoodie fluttering, shoes blinking faintly in the shadow every time her heels kissed the air.

“Happy?” Kirby asked, breath puffing.

“Jhappy,” she said, and the word fit her mouth like it had been made there.

A train went by somewhere, a long metal sigh. A helicopter flitted the edge of the sky and then meandered away like a bored fly. No one watched them that meant harm; Toga and Twice were blocks away, peering into entirely the wrong deli and arguing over onigiri fillings as if surveillance were a snack, because Kirby did not linger long enough in any one frame to be caught by anything except joy.

When the sun knocked politely at the afternoon and asked to be let in a little lower, they packed up. Kirby brushed the crumbs into his pocket-sky because ants are friends and he didn’t want to throw a party without asking. Eri tucked the plate into the backpack because the words on it made her giggle.

“Jambuhbye?” she said to the park, practicing on the trees and the sandbox and the squirrel, which flicked its tail like a curt bow.

“Soon,” Kirby corrected, pointing at the swings with a promise.

They mounted the Warp Star again. Eri glanced at the sky as if checking if there was a sign she should read. There wasn’t. That was the point. Kirby felt her breathe in and set his own pace to it. The star rose.

As they skimmed rooftops and alleyways, Eri leaned her cheek against Kirby’s back. “Kirby?”

“Mm?”

“When your friends said… Merījamasumāsu.” She sounded out the syllables with care. “Can we do that? Even if it’s not… winter?”

Kirby thought about lights strung where they don’t belong and gifts given for no reason except love and cake that arrived just because calendars are excuses. He thought about Dedede and Meta Knight and Bandee and the Mage Sisters and how they would all absolutely burn a hole in reality to throw a child a party out of season. He thought about Eri’s face learning new words and what it had looked like when she said Bastion.

“Yes,” he said, simple as daybreak. “We do. Big. Very big.”

Eri smiled into his back. “Jamedetāna,” she told them both in advance.

They banked toward the garden roof as the afternoon laid its head in the crook of the world’s elbow. The cat awaited, pretending this was routine. The tarp flapped a hello. The bench remembered their shapes. The city below kept being itself, flawed and loud and important, while above, on a square of sky borrowed by kindness, a little girl and a pink hero set down a star and practiced a language that had words for cake and hope and goodbyes that promised soon.

Chapter Text

The green light came with a stack of caveats and a very long look.

Aizawa leaned one shoulder into the doorframe of the ward where Mirio dozed, the afternoon sun banding the blanket in pale gold. “You get one pass, Midoriya,” he said. “No rooftop heroics. No chasing a comet over traffic. If you spot them, you talk. If they run, you let them run. You hear me?”

Midoriya bobbed his head so hard the chair beneath him creaked. “Yes, Sensei.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I’ll talk,” Midoriya said, steadying the word with both hands. “If they run, I let them run.”

Aizawa’s eyes softened minutely. “Good. Keep your phone on. If anything smells like an ambush, you call.” He turned to go, then added without looking back, “And try a different tack than the Commission would. You’re good at… not being scary.”

That landed like a weirdly warm pat on the head. Midoriya swallowed, nodded even though no one was watching, and tucked his notebook into his hoodie pocket like a talisman he had outgrown and couldn’t quite throw away.

He started with the simplest lead: shoes.

The bell over Hana’s shop door gave a tired ding and Hana herself looked up from pricing a stack of beanies. Her face went through a full conversation hello / are you buying / oh, a hero / oh, that hero, in a heartbeat.

“Welcome-” she began, then caught the way Midoriya’s eyes had already snagged on an emptiness in the corner of the counter, the space where a strange shiny coin had sat for an hour before she tucked it in a drawer and decided it was a good-luck charm. She sighed like someone deciding to be brave in retail. “You’re looking for something.”

Midoriya’s shoulders slumped with relief. “You saw a girl and a puffball Are they were they-?”

“Cute,” Hana said dryly. “And underdressed. Not anymore.” She came around the counter, all brisk competence and a warmth that didn’t feel like charity. “He carried her in, like she was a teacup made of breath and the first thing he did was set up a tiny foot spa he summoned from his… pocket dimension? He called it his stummy. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. I’ve worked this strip long enough to roll with it.”

Midoriya tried not to look like his brain had tripped on the words foot spa. “He washed her feet?”

“Like it was his job.” Hana reached for a little measuring sticker and tossed it back into its drawer because there was no child here to measure. “New bandages. Socks. Shoes two pairs. Hoodie, leggings, headband, underwear, the whole dignity kit. Paid in a way that would give my accountant religion.” A smile pried at her mouth. “He called himself Kirby, if that helps. Girl seemed like she thought she was a burden at first."

Midoriya’s chest squeezed. The notebook stayed in his pocket because any pen he tried to use right now would shake. “Did she seem… scared?”

“Like a person who knows what fear is and is trying on other things,” Hana said. “Wanted blinkies. Picked clouds for the walking.” She shrugged. “He did not let go of her hand unless she wanted him to. That matters more than anything I can put on a receipt.”

Midoriya nodded, once, grateful enough to make the air itself ache. “Thank you,” he said, bowing too deep for a shop that sold socks.

“Don’t bow to me. Bring her by later when it’s less… everything. First fittings are on the house.” Hana’s eyes flicked to his sneakers, beat to hell in a way that said runner, fighter, boy. “And eat something.”

He promised (and meant it), thanked her again (and meant it more), and stepped back onto the street with a map that wasn’t a map. He turned it over in his hands anyway.

The city had already begun its late afternoon murmur, buses sighing, a delivery scooter whining past with a stack of boxes like a precarious wedding cake. Midoriya ran his usual loops in unusual ways, keeping his head down, his ears open. He checked parks, rooftops with easy access, the kinds of alleys that look like shortcuts and aren’t. He asked a street vendor with a face like sun-baked leather if a pink ball and a little girl with a horn had come through.

“Bought two taiyaki,” the vendor grunted, flipping fish-shaped molds with sacred economy. “The round one inhaled them like a vacuum. The girl giggled. The round one laughed at her giggle. It was very tiring. Left that way.” He jerked his chin.

Midoriya followed, heart beating the way it beats when a trail is fresh and kindness is a breadcrumb. He perched on a mail drop, scanned the cross streets, dialed Full Cowl up enough to put a green hum in his calves-

-and froze as a light brushed across the corner of his vision, not sunlight, not siren, something warmer. He looked up.

A star slid between buildings like a coin through practiced fingers. Not a metaphor, an actual star, small enough to ride and bright enough to make the air around it look briefly more honest. Two figures sat astride it: a round pink being in front, a slim child in a sky-blue hoodie behind, hands around his middle, hair teasing in the slipstream. Eri’s horn caught the light and drew a quick silver line in the air. Kirby leaned with the easy instinct of someone who had learned balance in another gravity.

Midoriya’s breath left him in a single, ridiculous oh.

He didn’t know what the thing was called. He filed it in his brain as flying star board??? And the fact nejire was right about him being able to make another and told his legs to go.

Full Cowl flared; the world sharpened. He bounded off a mailbox, up a wall to a balcony rail, across to a narrow ledge that hadn’t asked to be a highway and was being one anyway. He leapt a gap that would have made his mother faint. The star drifted right and he did too; it dipped and he collected the drop in his knees and bled the force into brick like a practiced apology. He was not going to catch them. He knew that halfway through the second leap, his body doing math his brain didn’t have time for. But if he kept them in sight, if he could at least-

“Excuse me!” yelled a woman watering plants as he passed, and he apologized to her petunias without stopping.

The star eased higher, played along the seam where rooftops make a secret road. Midoriya followed until the calves of his soul burned and the little voice in his head that sounded like Aizawa sighed: He told you not to chase a comet over traffic.

He slowed. He watched the star slip into a wash of light and be lost among the reflections like a fish disappearing under sun-blind water.

He stood there panting on a second-story ledge with a laundry line flapping a pink towel in his face that had three cartoon ducks on it. He let his head bump the wall once in frustration, then twice because once had felt petty and twice felt like ritual. He took out his phone, thumb hovering, then didn’t call because what was he going to say? Saw a star. It was fast. He breathed. He climbed down like a sane person instead of jumping, because he could be taught.

He found them hours later, by chance and because some chances are the kind that look like a kindness taking the scenic route.

A pocket park tucked between a public library and a corner curry shop that always smelled better than any menu promised. A bench, a half-dead hedge, a swing set that squeaked like it enjoyed complaining. Kirby sat on the low wall around the hedge, legs dangling, thumping his heels lightly against stone. Eri stood in front of him, her hood down, headband neat, blinkies blinking softly as the shade shifted. She had a small notebook open, the kind you get from gacha machines with holographic cats on the cover, and she was writing very carefully, tongue peeking out.

Kirby watched her with the contentment of a moon. He said something that was half purr and half nonsense. She giggled, then looked up and saw the boy in the green hoodie whose eyes always looked like they were already apologizing for everything.

Her face went through surprise, calculation, then decided on kindness.

“Bonjam, Mr. Deku,” she said, bright.

Midoriya blinked. “H-Hi,” he managed. “Eri.”

Kirby tilted his head. “Green boy,” he announced, pleased, as if he had solved for X.

Midoriya tried not to be delighted at being called green boy. He lifted his hands palm-out, the universal sign for I am not here to net you. “Can I… talk with you? Just for a minute?”

Eri glanced at Kirby. Kirby shrugged, which looked like a marshmallow trying to get out of a scarf, and patted the low wall beside him. Midoriya approached like a deer learning to be brave and sat with what he hoped was a non-threatening amount of butt.

“First,” he said, because it was the only place to start, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Eri bobbed. “Ji Eri jhappy,” she said, beaming. Then, seeing his confusion prickle like a breeze, she added, more normal, “I’m happy. With Kirby.”

“Poyo,” Kirby confirmed, patting his own chest like a stamp. “Friend.”

Midoriya’s shoulders eased a fraction. He let out a breath so careful it wouldn’t disturb a dandelion. “We’ve been worried. Mir-uh-Lemillion. Sir Nighteye. Everyone. We… want to keep you safe.”

“Safe,” Eri echoed, rolling the syllable like candy. “Safe is…” She searched for the word, eyes flicking to the little notebook, where she had underlined a set from earlier. “Bastion,” she decided, tapping her chest. “Heart. My heart.” She touched Kirby’s side. “Kirby.”

Something in Midoriya’s throat did a weird hiccup that might have been a sob’s smaller cousin. “I-yeah. That makes sense.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s… a place we can take you. People who can help. A school called UA-"

"No." Kirby said

“Janno,” Eri said so after, the word clear as a bell.

Midoriya blinked. “It’s not, uh, tests all day,” he added quickly, tripping over his own attempt at reassurance. “And you wouldn’t have to go to classes until you’re ready. We have, friends there. Teachers who-"

“School boring,” Kirby declared, making a face like he had licked chalk. “No. Nap better. Cake better.”

Midoriya’s mouth did a very small, very helpless smile because if anyone had earned the right to veto the concept of standardized education, it was the pink ball who’d beaten statistics into confetti and eaten the leftovers.

Eri frowned a little, not at him, at the idea. “UA?” she tried, sounding out the letters with the careful suspicion you give to pills. “Is it… rigga?” She made a face and corrected herself. “Painful.”

Midoriya shook his head so fast his curls bounced. “No. No! It’s- it’s safe. It’s-we’ll make it safe.”

She peered up at him. Her voice went soft. “Jif… my bastion is with Kirby. Then… Jonto, Mr. Deku.” She spread her hands around the bench, as if to say, Soon, but not now. Here.

He heard soon. He heard not now. His brain tripped on the first word she’d dropped in that wasn’t his. “Jif,” he repeated blankly, not wanting to interrupt to ask, not wanting to pretend he understood and lie to whatever she had rebuilt in her mouth. He filed the syllable under kid language with an apologetic asterisk and moved on.

“Could we-” he tried again, steady and careful, “-meet somewhere? Later? I could bring-" He stopped. He had no idea what to offer. A stuffed animal? She had a bear. Books? She had a language that had shown up like a carnival and she’d learned it in a day. A carrot on a stick? He didn’t know that Kirby would pull the stick apart, eat the carrot, and then ask if the stick came in strawberry.

“I can bring Sir Nighteye,” he said instead, and then winced because that was the wrong tack; she’d last seen Nighteye bleeding. He pivoted. “Or just me. Or-Lemillion. He… he wants to apologize for-” He swallowed. “For not being there sooner.”

Eri’s face softened. “Jamedetāna,” she said sympathetically, like congratulations for trying. Then, seeing his blankness again, she huffed a laugh. “You're trying.”

“Sorry,” Midoriya admitted, ducking his head, thoroughly undone by a child telling him gently that he was, in fact, a grown-up. “I’m a little, uh. slow.”

Kirby leaned forward and patted his knee. “It okay,” he said with immense magnanimity. “Green boy learn. Slow okay. Kirby slow at words. Fast at punch.” He demonstrated a tiny flurry of jabs in the air and then remembered he was being serious and folded his nubs primly.

Midoriya laughed, and the sound came out not like a crack in something but like sun through an old newspaper. “I noticed,” he said. He sobered, looked between them. “Eri-… will you tell me what you need?”

She thought about that, because being asked and being allowed to answer were different sports and she was new at both. “Ji Eri needed… shoes,” she said solemnly, and lifted one heel to blink at him. “Got them. Need… safe. Got it.” She touched Kirby’s arm. “Need… time. Jonto. With Kirby. Then, maybe, UA. When not… jorrow.” She made a face and groped for the Japanese. “When not sad in the belly.”

Midoriya nodded like he was signing a treaty. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He pulled his phone out, thumb dithering. “Can I- this is weird- can I give you a number? If you ever want to call. Or text-"

"No." Kirby said, knowing damn well Marx would clown Midoriya's ass into oblivion if Kirby invited him to talk in the group chat

Midoriya let out a sigh

"Okay...okay." Midoriya said a bit disappointed

“Mr. Deku,” Eri said, very formal, as if entering the number had also entered him into some polite society. “Jambuhbye Jonto. We will go.” She glanced at the sky, then at the hands of nothing in particular. “Kirby?”

“Poyo,” he said, already sensing the wind of the moment shift. He slid off the wall, flipped the phone shut with a snap that sounded like a small door closing kindly, and hopped up to call the star because sometimes you invent your exit and sometimes your exit is a golden friend that comes when you think please hard enough.

“Wait,” he blurted, because wanting things doesn’t make you entitled to them and he knew that and he asked anyway because hope is an idiot on purpose. “Could I walk you to the corner? Or stay here until-"

Eri shook her head, kind and small. “Janno,” she said, gentle as a hand on a fevered forehead. “Mr. Deku… you are kind. You are-" She searched, found it. “Mapop. Hope. But, school-" Her face scrunched. “Boring.”

Kirby, helpful, chimed in: “No UA. Nap. Cake.” He leaned over and stage-whispered, “School have test?” He made a face like someone had said the word beet.

Midoriya choked on a laugh. “Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Jamblasted,” Eri muttered under her breath

"Huh?" Midoriya said, blissfully unaware Eri just swore

(He would have a heart attack if he found out)

He stood back. He didn’t step between them and the star. He didn’t reach. He didn’t lecture. He put his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t betray him and watched a little girl step onto a miracle like it was a bus she had finally learned was allowed to be hers.

“Eri,” he said, and his voice felt like something he had cleaned before using. “When you’re ready… I’ll be there. Not to drag. To walk.”

She blinked fast. “Jes,” she said, one word he (assumed) he knew, and then, because she liked him and he was trying so hard to understand a language without learning it, she added in normal, “Yes.”

"Jambuhbye." Eri said

Kirby tipped an invisible hat. “Bye-bye, green boy,” he said. “Be safe. Eat. Sleep. No cry.”

“I’ll try,” Midoriya promised, and meant it the way you mean it when you are half twenty and half a child and entirely a hero.

The star rose. Midoriya jogged a few steps because his body hadn’t gotten the memo that it was time to be still, then stopped and lifted a hand. Eri lifted hers back, small fingers spread, and he realized vaguely that he had no idea what her favorite color was, whether she liked dogs, whether she knew what it was to be bored in a good way. He would find out.

They slid up into the bright, the star making the air around it look briefly like a nicer version of this world. Midoriya stood in the pocket park between a curry shop and a library and let them go.

He didn’t call Aizawa right away. He sat on the low wall and wrote Jonto and Bastion and Mapop in his notebook with the care of someone cataloguing rare birds. He underlined cake? three times and didn’t know why.

A pigeon landed on the bench, addressed him as the person most likely to have crumbed, decided his pockets were not a bakery, and left.

He stood finally, stretched, rolled his shoulders until something popped, and headed back the long way on purpose. As he walked, he practiced saying, very quietly to himself, “Jambuhbye,” and then, “Jonto,” because he wanted to attempto to understand them more.

Up above, on the kind of road only people who are willing to be surprised ever find, a little girl leaned into a puffball’s back and said, “Mr. Deku is… mapop.”

“Mm,” Kirby said, pleased, and banked the star toward the part of the city where cake was most likely.

Chapter Text

The conference room at Nighteye Agency was held together by coffee and pencils. Morning laid itself flat across the long table where maps and reports had begun to breed. Sir Nighteye stood at the head, alive, pale, crisp, his hands resting on a folder as if it might try to run. Aizawa leaned in the doorway like a cat that had agreed to be furniture. Ryukyu and Nejire took the left side; Uraraka and Tsuyu the right; Bubble Girl and Centipeder hovered with the professional anonymity of very competent wallpaper. A seat was left open for Mirio and then immediately filled by a tablet on a stand, camera pointed at his hospital grin.

Midoriya arrived with the same breathless energy he’d had since forever and also since yesterday, when he had watched a star carry away a child he promised himself not to fail again. He set his battered notebook down like a sacred text.

“Report,” Nighteye said, and the room’s hum trimmed itself into listening.

Midoriya swallowed. “I found them.”

Uraraka sat forward. Tsuyu’s fingers laced. Nejire practically vibrated.

“They’re okay,” Midoriya said quickly, because that’s the bandage you put on the first cut. “Eri’s wearing proper clothes, Hana, the clerk at the shop, helped them get shoes and a dress.” He couldn’t help the smile that climbed into the words. “Her sneakers… light up. Strawberries on the sides.”

Nejire clasped her own face: “I love her already.”

“More,” Midoriya added, flipping to a page where he’d drawn a star that took up half the paper. “Nejirewas right about the star. Kirby made another one. It’s… he called it with his phone? And it just… appeared. He and Eri ride it. It moves like, like it’s listening.”

Nejire flicked a fingergun and winked at no one in particular. “Knew it.”

“Did you engage?” Aizawa asked, a teacher’s calm pinned over a parent’s worry.

“I spoke to them,” Midoriya said. “We walked a block together. I didn’t push. I told her Mirio is okay and that we’re… not trying to take her. I asked if she’d consider a room at U.A. for rest. She said no.”

There it was. The word the room had been avoiding sat down on the table, crossed its legs, and asked for tea. Silence percolated.

“Reason?” Ryukyu asked gently.

Midoriya scratched the back of his neck. “She wants to stay with Kirby,” he said simply. “She called him her… ‘bastion.’ I think it means heart. She trusts him. And Kirby… ah… has strong feelings about school.” A tiny, apologetic smile. “He said it was boring.”

Nejire snorted. “Relatable.” Aizawa gave her a deadpan that would have felled a lesser senpai. Nejire recovered with a chirp: “I meant… kids think that! Kids! Not me! I’m a scholar.”

Mirio’s voice, tinny but bright, pushed through the tablet. “He’s protecting her,” he said, more to himself than the room. “Good.”

Nighteye’s thumb tapped twice on the folder. “Any indication of coercion?”

Midoriya shook his head so hard the curls at his nape tried to play. “No. She’s… giggling. She’s… learning.” He hesitated, flipped to another page. “This is going to sound odd, but Eri’s using… new words. A lot. Like a… code. Or a game. She kept saying things like ‘bonjam’ and ‘jhappy’ and ‘mapop.’ I asked what they meant and she translated a couple, hello, happy, hope.” He lifted his palms. “I think, she and Kirby… made up a language? As a kind of… play?”

Nejire squealed softly. “A secret language! That’s so cute!”

Tsuyu tilted her head. “Kero. Or it might be a way to put distance between the old meanings and new safety. Kids sometimes rename big feelings so they can carry them without dropping them.”

“Whatever it is,” Midoriya said carefully, “I didn’t understand half of it. And Kirby didn’t use it. He speaks… simply.”

Aizawa rubbed two fingers over his mouth as if trying to erase a worry line. “So. Eri’s speaking in a code. She refuses U.A. They’re airborne sometimes. And the pink puffball who murdered the most dangerous sociopath in Japan thinks classes are boring.” He exhaled through his nose. “Well. Shit.”

Rock Lock, bruised and bandaged and leaning on a crutch in the corner like stubborn punctuation, barked a humorless laugh. “Finally somebody says it.”

Nighteye’s gaze drifted to the whiteboard where “KIRBY?” had already accrued a constellation of unanswered questions. He recapped, measured: “Capabilities confirmed, super strength, speed approaching instant relocation, matter manipulation via inhalation, energy projection via ‘star,’ possible power replication via ingestion, regenerative output, healed me with Eri’s Quirk.” He let out a breath. “Limitations unknown.”

“Motives?” Ryukyu asked.

Midoriya didn’t hesitate. “Exploring,” he said, then immediately corrected himself with a sheepish glance. “And keeping Eri safe. In that order?" eyebrows tried to find his hairline. “

Bubble Girl, pen poised, scribbled, reading aloud as she wrote: “Highly curious. Highly responsive to Eri."

“Good,” Mirio said weakly. “She’s… smiling?”

Midoriya nodded. “She told me to tell you ‘jhappy.’ For ‘ji. For her.”

Mirio’s mouth wobbled. Ryukyu reached over and, without looking like she was doing it, tilted the tablet screen so he wouldn’t have to watch himself try not to cry.

“Next moves,” Nighteye said briskly, because love can be logistics. “We watch. We don't want to spook them. Understand?"

Everyone nodded

“Good,” Nighteye said. “Bubble Girl, draw up a friendly network list. Florists. Bakers. Shoe stores. Pharmacies. Parks staff. Anyone who might cross their path without a cape.”

“On it,” Bubble Girl said, already halfway through a phone tree.

“Define rules of engagement,” Aizawa continued, practical. “No chasing. No cornering. If you see them, talk. Do not touch without explicit invitation. Avoid words like ‘custody’ and ‘safehouse.’” He eyed Midoriya. “You did well.”

Midoriya tried not to glow and failed.

Tsuyu raised a hand, finger up. “They like parks,” she said. “Kero. And rooftops. And laundry lines. We can… perch nearby. Not too close. If they look up, we wave. If they look away, we vanish.”

Nejire bounced. “And rooftops! I can float just high enough to look cute and not terrifying.”

“Let’s teach ourselves how to be scenery,” Ryukyu said with a thin smile.

“Mirio,” Nighteye said softly to the tablet, “I know you want to sprint out the window.”

Mirio, who had indeed been eyeing the window in the background like a lab rat contemplating a maze, grimaced. “You know me too well, Sir.”

“You will stay in bed,” Nighteye said, gentle as a judge. “Recover. There will be a time to stand in front of her and say hello. It is not when you can’t run ten steps without someone yelling about your stitches.”

“Bonjam,” Mirio said to himself, mostly so he could practice the word he didn’t understand and still liked the taste of. “Okay.”

Uraraka lifted a finger. “What about… gifts? Not bribery. Just… offerings.” She blushed at her own earnestness. “We could… leave things where they might find them. A plush toy. Bandages. A bento.”

Fat Gum, who had slotted himself into the room in that way big people can when they’re quiet enough to be polite, brightened. “I make a mean tonkatsu bento. We can tape a note to the lid. ‘For Kirby and Eri. No strings.’”

“Do not write ‘no strings,’” Aizawa said immediately.

“Right, because that makes it sound suspicious,” Fat Gum agreed. “Just a heart?”

“That’s also suspicious,” Rock Lock said. “But… do it.” He rubbed his temple. “We’re… babysitting the strongest unknown in Tokyo with snacks.”

Nighteye’s mouth twitched. “History suggests snacks are effective with certain demographics.”

“Are we comfortable with not… using Foresight?” Ryukyu asked Nighteye gently. “On Eri. Or… the other one.”

Nighteye stood very still for a heartbeat. “I am,” he said. “I have misused assurances before.” He looked down at his hands, then up. “And there are ethics. Seeing a child’s future without consent is… an intimacy we have not earned. With Kirby, I suspect it would be like staring at fireworks through a keyhole. Possibly dangerous. Certainly rude.”

“Agreed,” Aizawa said, surprising no one.

Centipeder tapped a list with an efficient digit. “Logistics: If they are airborne, we cannot follow at speed. If they are on foot, they move quickly but with stops. Preferred locations: small parks, rooftops within two kilometers of the noodle shop mentioned in prior reports. Time windows: morning to mid-afternoon most active. Night: indoors.”

“Kirby’s phone,” Nejire added, snapping her fingers. “He called that star with a ‘boop.’ If we can get a bead on the signal-"

“No hacking,” Nighteye said instantly. “We will not turn their lifeline into a leash.”

“Okay,” she said, chastened and then immediately grinning again. “Then we’ll just… watch for sparkles.”

“Names,” Tsuyu said softly. “Kero. Did you tell Eri yours, Midoriya?”

“She calls me ‘Mr. Deku,’” he said, blushing like it was a secret crush and not an honor. “She doesn’t know… Izuku yet. Or U.A. She knows ‘Mr. Deku’ and ‘Kirby’ and… ‘friend.’”

Mirio smiled like he’d been given medicine that actually works. “That’s… enough.”

“Plan, then,” Nighteye summarized, crisp: “Soft surveillance. Civilian network. Friendly offerings. No pressure. If contact occurs, talk, don’t take. If danger occurs, intervene without escalation. We repeat until trust becomes routine.”

“Majaja,” Midoriya murmured, without thinking.

Nejire cocked her head. “What was that?”

“Uh, Eri said it,” he blurted. “It means ‘again.’ I think.”

Rock Lock made a face like he’d just seen a dog wear shoes. “So the kid’s speaking in tongues and Deku’s picking up the accent. Great.”

“It’s not tongues,” Uraraka said, half in defense, half in wonder. “It’s… healing with glitter.”

Aizawa’s mouth might have quirked. Hard to tell.

“Dismissed,” Nighteye said, and the room breathed back into motion.

Midoriya hung back. When the others had drifted away in currents of tasks, Nighteye beckoned him into his office. The blinds were half-open, splitting the light into overly organized lines.

“You did well,” Nighteye said, and Midoriya felt the words land in his chest with the weight of a medal and the gentleness of a hand on your head.

“I didn’t… bring her,” Midoriya said bluntly.

“That wasn’t the task,” Nighteye replied. “You built a bridge. Bridges don’t get medals. They get used.”

Midoriya swallowed. “She told me to tell Lemillion she’s… happy. For her. That she said ‘hope.’ I didn’t know where to put that in the report.”

“Here,” Nighteye said, touching the desk. “Between the stapler and the part where you save the world incrementally.”

Midoriya laughed softly. “Yes, Sir.”

“And Midoriya,” Nighteye added, eyes sharp. “Do not try to speak her new words at her. Not yet.”

Midoriya blinked. “Because-?”

“Because she built a room,” Nighteye said. “It has her furniture in it. We are guests. We knock. We wait to be invited in. We do not show up speaking the house language as if we own the place.”

Midoriya felt a sudden, fierce gratitude for adults who had learned from their mistakes. “Okay.”

“Now go home,” Nighteye said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Shower. Eat. Sleep. Practice being boring so you can be interesting longer.”

Midoriya tried to salute and succeeded in making a small, awkward gesture that meant I’m trying my best.

Hospital rooms are where hope practices walking with an IV pole. Mirio propped the tablet up on his knees and watched the ceiling with the patience of a man trying to convince his body to be a good listener.

A nurse came in with a scowl that was actually concern. “Don’t you dare get up.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Mirio said, then immediately lied with his eyes toward the window.

She sighed. “You’ll see her,” she said, so simply even his heart had to believe it a little. “Let Mr. Deku buy you the time.”

Mirio picked at the sheet. “He said she said ‘jhappy,’” he murmured, too pleased with the soft ridiculous word to care that it sounded silly. “I’m going to make an idiot out of myself learning all her little words, aren’t I?”

“That’s the job,” the nurse said. “Adults learn kid.”

Mirio grinned. “Yes, Ma’am.”

He slept, because he had been told to, and because somewhere a girl had shoes.

Soft surveillance looks like kindness wearing sunglasses.

Bubble Girl walked her beat with a tote that said BUY LOCAL and a list of shopkeepers who now knew to text if they saw a small, horned girl with a round guardian. She didn’t pretend to be invisible; she pretended to be ordinary extraordinarily well.

Centipeder negotiated with park staff to approve a “donation” of new first-aid kits and clean blankets that were then “forgotten” near certain benches. A bento appeared under a gazebo, a neat box with tonkatsu and a little container of strawberries and no note and absolutely no strings.

Ryukyu took to walking in her human form, sunglasses tucked into her hair, buying taiyaki she did not eat and leaving one near a set of swings when no one was looking. She did not look surprised later when both were gone.

Tsuyu perched on a railing across from the noodle shop that had been reported as a maybe. She watched the light move across the door, the chalkboard, the small universe of the window. If anyone asked, she practiced being a frog in the sun.

Uraraja left a plush star at the end of a slide in the quiet park Midoriya had described, then walked away without turning around, which is a skill not everyone has. She did not see who took it. She did not need to.

Aizawa slept. For an hour. Then he woke, fed his cat, and walked the rooftops with the sort of slouch that does not spook birds or children.

Midoriya didn’t chase the sky. He put “Bonjam” and “Jhappy” and “Mapop” in the margin of his notes and drew a box around them labeled words to not say yet with a skull and crossbones doodled for comedic effect. He ate a decent lunch because he’d promised. He texted Mirio a photo of a strawberry he’d bought from a vendor and then thought better of it and brought the strawberry to the nurse’s station instead.

Eri and Kirby did not know any of this, which was the point. They sat under a tree and shared the taiyaki with the meticulous diplomacy of small siblings: one bite apiece, no nibbling on the corner you’re holding hostage. Eri held up the little star plush with both hands and declared it “Jawaii,” and Kirby nodded solemnly because everyone knows acknowledging a star plush’s cuteness is legally binding.

They spoke, occasionally, in words that were not the ones the city had given them. Eri tried out “Jast” (vow), on a promise to Kirby that she would practice double-knotting even when no one watched. Kirby said “poyo” to everything because it was a language that kept treating him well.

Aizawa watched them from a rooftop and, because no one was looking, let his mouth soften half a centimeter. He scribbled a note to himself about buying spare shoelaces. He did not write “well shit,” but it hung in the margin anyway, next to a doodle of a very round star.

Back at the Agency, Nighteye moved pins on a map three inches to the left because his spatial sense told him three inches to the left is where kindness would be on a good day. He turned over his stamp pad and stamped a form and then put the stamp away because not everything needed a stamp today.

“Keeping an eye,” he murmured to the empty office. “Keeping an eye.”

Sometimes, that’s the whole job. Not to catch. Not to corral. To witness. To be the adult who can look at a pink meteor and a girl with a horn and say to the world, we will make room.

Later

Eri had learned a lot of new things lately,how to double-knot laces, how hope feels when it sits down for lunch, how to say hello in a language that tasted like sugar, and when you have learned that many things, the world starts to look like a book with a finger holding your place. There was time for one more page before bed.

“Kirby,” she said, swinging her strawberry-sneakered feet from the bench. “Can we… see more of your friends? Say Bonjam to them?”

She expected the flip phone to appear. She had begun to think of it as a small, dependable doorbell to other worlds. But Kirby, who almost never did the thing you already expected because he was too busy doing the delightful one. tilted his head, went hmm like a thoughtful kettle, and reached into the someplace that wasn’t his pocket and wasn’t the sky either.

He withdrew… a sock.

It was enormous. Not people-enormous; story-enormous. White with a multi coloured line near the top, at the toes , a knit so soft you knew someone had made it by hand while thinking good thoughts.

Eri blinked. “Juh…?”

“Sock!” Kirby announced, holding it up with both nubs like a trophy. His eyes shone. “Magic.”

She looked at it, at him, at the sock again. “Magic?”

“Magic,” he agreed solemnly, then turned the sock so the opening faced them, like a mouth about to sing.

“Do we… call someone with it?” Eri asked, leaning forward, polite to the possibility.

Kirby shook his head, took two bounce-steps back, and, before she could ask how or why or is this what normal feels like now, he vaulted forward and dove into the sock like a salmon into a waterfall.

“Kir-!” she yelped, then reached instinctively to catch him and toppled with perfect slapstick timing. The sock’s mouth was bigger than it had just been, the way doors widen when they like you. Eri tumbled through a sudden softness, a tunnel made of grandma’s sweater and museum carpet, a slide that smelled faintly of clean laundry. The world said whoosh in a good way.

The sock spat them out.

They landed on their backs in a field the color of grass. Eri’s first thought, only barely a thought, really; more a sensation interpreted by a surprised brain, was that the ground felt like pants. Not on-top-of-pants, but pants. Soft twill, stretchy corduroy, stitched in long friendly lines. When she pushed a palm against it, it gave a little and then sprang back. The grass wasn’t grass; it was a perfect, hundreds-of-needles imitation of grass, sewn into the earth with thread you could see if you looked close. Felt, not rocks, dotted the ground. One had a ladybug painted on it, very seriously.

Eri laughed once, not because something was funny but because the part of her that had decided to be a child again had just seen a carousel.

She sat up. Her hand was… yarn. Not a bandage nor a glove nor a trick of light: strands of yarn, neatly arranged into Eri-shape, bound together by some sweet logic that didn’t let things unravel. Her hair was a cascade of soft white string; her horn, a neatly crocheted spiral that looked both adorable and exactly like itself. She wiggled her toes. Her shoes flashed, then stitched little sparkles that settled back into the fabric of the world.

“This is a Goppoko,” she breathed, delighted.

“Poyo!” Kirby popped up next to her, grinning as if he’d known this would tickle her. He, too, was yarn now: a neat outline of pink thread, two big embroidered eyes, his red feet perfect felt ovals. He shook himself like a puppy and made a faint fwip noise, as if he were lighter than air because someone had replaced every atom with a balloon.

“Kirby! You’re here! You didn’t tell me you were coming!” called a voice that bounced like a rubber ball and then landed on Eri’s shoulders like a cape.

Eri turned.

He looked exactly like Kirby after someone had told a story about the sky and then glued that story to felt: round, happy, stitched. Azure instead of pink. Orange feet. Brown eyes with a spark of I’ve thought this through somewhere behind them. A golden felt crown perched on his head, wobbling a little with excitement. His eyebrows were frankly enormous, the kind of eyebrows that have opinions. He waddled toward them with authority and appetite.

“Fluff!” Kirby said, as if saying “water!” at the ocean.

“Who’s your friend?” the blue one asked, curiosity and manners shaking hands. His voice was a little older than Kirby’s and a tiny bit bossier, though he wasn’t trying to be a boss. He was just… a prince.

“My name is Eri,” she said, remembering to stand up and smooth her dress even though it was now, she realized, a dress-shaped arrangement of yarn. It still swished. The swish made her brave. She tucked a strand of string hair behind a string ear that was a suggestion of an ear. “Bonjam.”

“Bonjam?" he tried, then laughed. “So you know jambastion? Well then, a bonjam to you.” He swept a little bow that managed to be both formal and friendly. “As prince of this land, I warmly welcome you to Patch Land!”

The way he said the capital letters made them appear.

Eri looked. Beyond the minty field, a town unfolded like a craft table had imagined urban planning: houses out of patterned fabric, doorways with big cheerful stitches, lamp posts topped with buttons; the castle, Patch Castle, sat like a cake on a cushion, pennants made from ribbon curling in a wind that seemed to know how much to blow so nothing frayed. In the middle, a plaza with a sign that read Patch Plaza in embroidered letters, and a board covered in flyers that were squares of cloth with messages sewn on in tidy script. A daisy’s face turned, and the face was a button.

“Jawaii,” Eri said helplessly, hands clasped. “Cute.”

“Cute indeed,” Prince Fluff agreed, as if very cute were a state one could declare. He turned to Kirby. “You didn’t say you were bringing a guest! I would have had my seamsters lay out a runner!”

Kirby puffed with pride. “Friend! Eri.” He spun once and pointed at a very cozy-looking building on the far side of the plaza. “Kirby pad!”

Eri blinked. “Pad?”

“His apartment,” Prince Fluff supplied with a little smile that said he had long ago made peace with the fact that Kirby owned property in improbable places. “In Quilty Square. He keeps it neat,” he added, which coming from someone with eyebrows like that felt like a compliment. “When he remembers he has it.”

“You…” Eri cocked her head. “You have an apartment?” She’d started to catalog Kirby the way one catalogs stars, mostly by affection and a few simple facts: soft, round, violent about cake. The idea of him having a lease was almost as wild as the sock.

“Mm.” Kirby nodded, very casual. “Kirby house Dream Land. House New World. Pad here.” He counted on his nubs: one-two-three. “Many bed.”

Prince Fluff chuckled. “He’s very popular with furniture.”

Eri laughed, then took a tentative, delighted step, enjoying the way the ground felt like a friendly lap. The idea of a bed in a place like this, stitched and soft and sensible in its kindness, made something in her chest loosen further. Bastion, she thought, and liked that there were now many places the word could mean.

“Do you… live here?” she asked Prince Fluff. His crown bobbed cheerfully.

“I suppose I do,” he said. “When I’m not out in the other pieces.” He gestured with a sweep that seemed to include the sky. “Patch Land is seven lands held together by magic yarn, Quilty Square here, and Grass Land, Hot Land, Treat Land, Water Land, Snow Land, and Space Land.” He ticked them off with prince-ly precision. “They used to be separated, some sorcerer nonsense, but we sewed them back together, thanks to Kirby.”

Kirby kicked the air bashfully. “We help.”

“Jamedetāna,” Eri said softly, trying out congratulations because that was a big grown-up word and no one here made small things of big words. She touched Kirby’s stitched arm. “Good job.”

Prince Fluff grinned. “We also eat a lot. You’ll fit in.”

Eri’s stomach made a tiny, thrilled sound at the concept of an entire land where the ground asked to be petted and the air tasted like sugar. “Majicious,” she told the wind; it approved.

“Come,” Fluff said, and when princes in such lands say come, they don’t mean follow orders; they mean it will be fun. He led them through Patch Plaza, pausing to wave at a Waddle Dee made of felt who waved back with a little string arm, and at a man made of cord who sold bobbins of thread like they were produce. A woman at a stall stitched “Welcome!” onto a square and handed it to Eri as if giving her a sticker; Eri held it like a diploma.

They passed Kirby’s Pad, a cozy apartment with a polka-dot awning and a door-shaped door. Inside: a round bed with a quilt like a sunset; a little round table like a button; a window with a view of an even bigger button. On the shelf, a trophy that might have been a teacup in another life and a model Warp Star made of felt. Eri’s eyes went wide.

“You really have an apartment,” she whispered, as if the furniture might be shy. “You… live.”

“Kirby nap,” he corrected with equal seriousness, then flumped onto the bed, bounced, and rolled off with a fwip and a giggle.

“Fluff,” Eri said, liking the way the single syllable behaved in her mouth. “Do you… have school here?”

“School?” He considered. “Not the kind you mean, I think.” His eyebrows did a synchronized tilt. “We… practice fun. And help each other sew things. And sometimes the Hot Land gets too excited and we all go, ‘No, no, take a breath,’ and put little curtains on the volcanoes.” He shrugged. “If you mean sit in a room and memorize rules, no. If you mean learn the names of clouds and buttons and pastries, then yes, it’s very rigorous.”

Kirby, delighted, jabbed a nub in the air. “School boring,” he declared, then softened and added, because he had learned something new recently: “Eri learn fun.”

“Jes,” said Eri, and Prince Fluff blinked in polite confusion at the Jambastion slip, assuming it was a local dialect of adorable. “I would like to learn the names of pastries. For… homework.”

Fluff beamed. “Treat Land is that way,” he said, pointing toward a distant hill topped with what looked suspiciously like a cookie. “We’ll go later.” His expression softened into something like big-brother-warm. “For now, let’s walk.”

They did. Eri discovered that the ground made a tiny crrk crrok sound if you dragged your shoe, she didn’t, because she had been told be gentle with the world, but it amused her to know it could. Buttons made clicks when you stepped on them; threads hummed underfoot like happy bees. In the plaza, a notice board had quests stitched on it:

•Button Missing! (Yellow. Smells like lemon.) Reward: a hug.

•Need Help: Hot Land Curtain Hemming. Payment: cookies.

•Space Land’s Constellations Coming Loose. Volunteers must enjoy heights.

“Everything is… chores, but nice,” Eri said, astonished.

“Everything is fixable on purpose,” Fluff corrected, with the sturdy wisdom of royalty who has watched people make all manner of messes and learned that patience is a tool. “Sometimes things fall apart. We make falling-apart not a tragedy but an invitation to craft.”

Eri thought about that while they visited Patch Castle (full of tapestries that looked like cousins and a throne that had learned to be sat in by people who didn’t like sitting still) and Patch Plaza’s bakery (a banner: Treats! with a cookie sewn to the T). The baker, an oval of yarn with a mustache, called them “my darlings” and handed them something shaped like a donut but tasted like a cloud with opinions. Kirby ate his in one soft, miraculous gulp and then looked at Eri’s with the solemnity of someone who would never steal from a child but could imagine arranging a trade.

“Majicious,” Eri said, cheeks full, and the baker clapped at the correct use of the word even though he had no idea what it meant.

They wandered to the edge of Quilty Square where a green felt hill spilled into the stitched horizon. Beyond it, the suggestions of Grass Land’s rolling pastures; a crimson flicker that might be Hot Land; a distant glimmer that could be Space Land’s first star. The wind made a tiny sewing-machine sound as it went through ribbon leaves.

“Kirby,” Eri said, quiet and fierce all at once, “thank you.”

He blinked at her, head tipping. “For sock?”

“For… everything.” She touched her chest. “Bastion.”

He went soft in a way that would have been difficult in a world with bones. “Friend,” he said, and bumped her with his round side until she laughed.

Prince Fluff sat on the hill, legs out, crown crooked, watching them with a little smile that said he had seen many versions of this scene and never once gotten bored. He plucked a stray bit of thread from the ground as if tidying even the world could be play.

“So,” he said, half to Eri, half to the sky, all friendliness. “Shall we do a small adventure? The sort that earns you a button and a story but not a bruise?”

“Jes,” Eri said at once, because some words do feel like permission slips.

“Good answer,” he said, and hopped up.

The small adventure arrived right on time, as if Fluff’s “shall we” had been printed in the day’s itinerary. The Button Missing! quest-giver, a little felt duck with a ribbon bowtie. waddled up with distress embroidered on his face. “Oh, Prince Fluff! My lemon button! I was making a hat and it rolled away and, oh dear, now how will anyone know it’s a lemon hat?”

Eri crouched so her eyes were in the duck’s universe. “We’ll help,” she promised with the seriousness of a judge and a kid at recess.

The duck blinked at the unfamiliar word and felt comforted anyway. “Oh, thank you!”

They followed the button trail, literal thread crumbs through the plaza, under a clothesline strung with sun, over a small bridge held up by cheerful stitching. Kirby, in this world, moved differently: he did not inhale the button and declare victory; he extended a little yarn whip from his belly like a lasso and fwipped toward it. The whip curled around a pole, and he swung delighted carrying Eri on his back because why not. She squealed and held on, and the world did not mind squeals in public so early in the day.

They found the lemon button lodged in the hem of a curtain in the tailor’s shop. Prince Fluff frowned. “Ah. A runaway. Happens.” He tugged gently. It wouldn’t give. Kirby fwipped his yarn whip, looped it around the stubborn button, and gave a demonstrative tug. Nothing.

“Rigga?” Eri suggested, pointing to the hem, because her new word for painful was very helpful when applied to stuck thread. “Maybe, oh!” She brightened. “Scissors?” She mimed a little snip. The tailor, a cord man with spectacles so tidy they seemed stitched right to his nose, nodded regally and passed her a pair that felt like a prop in a musical. She snipped one thread. The button popped free into her hand. It was yellow and smelled faintly of lemon, because of course it did.

“Jamedetāna!” Fluff declared. “Congratulations on your first Patch Land rescue.” He looked proud like someone who has taught a child to tie a knot and then watched that knot hold during a parade.

They returned the button to the duck, who did indeed pay them in a hug, light and soft and not too long, and a tiny square of fabric with a stitched lemon on it which, he explained, would look very good on Kirby’s pad if he wanted to hang it. Kirby clutched it like treasure. Eri filed the hug as currency policy under this world is very good at being itself.

They did two more small quests: helped a frog button his vest (Kirby insisted on double-knotting it for safety; Eri told him he was vun good at knots and he glowed), and sat with an old woman made of felt and listened to her tell them about the time Space Land got too big for its britches and someone had to sew it back a little (Eri looked up at the glimmering fabric of the sky and felt big in an unscary way).

By midafternoon, they were back at Kirby’s pad. The round bed yawned. Eri sat on it and swung her feet; the springs went spoing with a sense of humor. Kirby placed the lemon patch on the wall and stepped back, head cocked, appraising. Prince Fluff straightened it with the tiny fussiness of a prince and then pretended he hadn’t.

“Will you stay a while?” he asked, trying and failing to make it sound like casual conversation and not a request.

Eri looked at Kirby to make sure she was reading the map right. He nodded. “Stay,” he said, content. “Play. Eat.” He held up a nub and ticked off their priorities. “Sleep.”

“Jes,” Eri agreed, then caught Fluff’s slightly confused look and translated. “Yes.”

He smiled. “We have extra quilts,” he said, as if this answered all follow-up questions. In Patch Land, it did.

They discovered that eating in Patch Land was like telling stories to your tongue: the soup was a square that you unrolled, the bread toasted itself if you sang at it, the jam told you it was made of strawberries by being very earnest about it. Eri nearly cried laughing the first time a spoon made a clink against a button bowl and then apologized shyly. Kirby patted the bowl and said, “Good bowl,” which seemed to set it at ease.

As evening snuck up. making the fabric of the sky a deeper blue and the stitched-on stars brighter, Eri wandered to the window and pressed her hands (soft yarn palms) to the glass. She could see a corner of the plaza where someone had lit a string of tiny lanterns that looked like fireflies who had learned choreography. A Waddle Dee held hands with a child made of felt hearts. Someone stitched a heart on a patch and someone else stitched a patch on a heart. The castle’s pennant made a soft sound that translated to we’re fine.

“Kirby?” she asked, voice hush-soft.

“Mm?” He was on the floor on his belly, doodling with a stubby crayon in a book made of fabric, drawing a little round Eri with a horn and a parasol and large shoes.

“My… horn,” she said, touching it, a crocheted spiral that felt like someone had decided even the non-soft parts of her deserved to be soft here. “It’s… still here.”

“Eri horn,” he agreed, as if she had pointed out the sky again.

“Do you think…” she hesitated, then tried, because this was a land where trying was applauded. “Do you think it will always be part of me? Even when I am… bigger?”

He rolled to look up at her from the floor, serious in that perfect, simple way of his. “Horn is Eri,” he said. “Good. Pretty. Power.” He pressed his little pink yarn nub to his chest and then to hers, as if performing a very gentle spell. “Bastion safe.”

She breathed out. “Mapop,” she said, and the window fogged a little and then cleared like it had been moved by the idea.

Prince Fluff emerged from the kitchen with three tiny bowls of something that looked like a cross between pudding and a friendly cloud. “Evening snack!” he announced, then paused at the earnest intimacy of the moment and set the bowls down quietly instead. He fussed with the lemon patch again as if covering for their feelings like a good host.

They ate on the round bed, cross-legged, bowls in laps, spoons making polite clinks, and listened to the stitched night. Somewhere, faintly, Space Land’s first star chimed. Somewhere else, a button popped off and someone laughed and someone else threaded a needle. Eri curled her feet under and leaned into Kirby’s round side, which was as warm as a bedtime story.

“Tomorrow,” Prince Fluff said, licking his spoon with princely restraint, “Grass Land? We can turn into cars.” He waggled his eyebrows in a way that suggested this was both an activity and a compliment to their characters.

“Cars?” Eri squeaked, fully ready to accept that she was yarn who could be a car. “Jhappy!”

“Tomorrow,” Kirby echoed, putting his bowl aside meticulously because Patch Land had taught him that dishes deserve dignity. He leaned his head against Eri’s shoulder and yawned a soft stringy yawn. “Sleep now.”

“Jaitty,” Eri murmured, tasting good night on her tongue and letting it sink into the fabric of the bed.

They wriggled under a quilt that had a thousand patterns and not one bad idea. Prince Fluff, who pretended not to be sentimental about tucking people in, adjusted the corner just so, then adjusted his crown the opposite way to prove he wasn’t always adjusting things. He paused at the doorway.

“Welcome to Patch Land, Eri,” he said simply. “We’re glad you’re here.”

“Jamanke,” she replied, and even though he didn’t know the word, he understood it. That’s the other thing languages are for.

The night held them like a promise. Eri closed her eyes and saw knobs of thread and little sequins in the dark, constellations you could rearrange with a finger until they spelled home. Kirby snored once, delicately, the snore of a hero who has battled gods and discovered the truth that quilts are also victories. Prince Fluff’s silhouette stood watch for a minute—because princes in sensible kingdoms do that—and then he padded away with his eyebrows leading the charge.

Back in the noodle shop in a different world, a chalkboard wrote closed to anyone who might have thought to call. In still another place, heroes practiced being patient. In a third, three mage-sisters debated how many cookies belonged in a standard interdimensional care package and argued themselves into generosity.

In Patch Land, the quilt’s stitches held. The quilt of the world did too.

And in the morning, when morning happened here, which was a gentle thing with soft edges, they would wake, and bump noses, and eat something that apologized when it fell off the spoon and forgave itself, and go to Grass Land to become cars and say vroom in at least two languages. They would help sew the day back together wherever it tried to come apart.

For now, Eri slept, yarn-hair haloed on a pillow, horn soft as a lullaby. Kirby slept, round as a period at the end of a chapter that promised there would be another. Prince Fluff slept with one hand on his crown and the other on his heart, as leaders do when they remember they are also friends.

The magic sock waited in a tidy loop on a bench by the door, patient as knitting, humming to itself: Majaja. Again.

Chapter Text

(A few hours earlier)

It happened like this:

A street the city barely noticed, a bit of quiet that had decided to be kind for a while. Two small figures on a curb, one round and one ribbon-tailed, finishing a snack and discussing the weighty topics of the morning, shoes that light up, parasols that make shade prettier, whether clouds look better as animals or desserts.

Eyes were on them without being on them. Aizawa from a rooftop, hood up, trying to be furniture. Bubble Girl leaning on a lamppost with a tote bag and a look that said she knew today’s sales and tomorrow’s trouble. Tsuyu two buildings over, half-hidden by a billboard, practicing stillness. Centipeder at a corner kiosk, reading a map with the kind of focus that prepares for anything. Midoriya two blocks away pacing worry into a radius, telling himself that patience is a verb.

They blinked.

Not long, one heartbeat, maybe two. The kind of blink that keeps eyes from drying out and hope from cracking.

The round boy reached into nowhere and produced, Midoriya would later swear it wasn’t there in the frame before, a sock. A perfectly ordinary, multicoloured sock sock, cuffed, with a little loop of thread hanging like a smile. He held it up, considered it, and then flipped it in his hand as if checking the weather.

Midoriya took a step, a word half-formed on his tongue.

Eri laughed at something the boy said, something small and good that made her shoulders lighten. He tipped the sock, angle just right, the way kids do when they’ve discovered a trick that feels like a secret handshake with the world.

Aizawa’s eye twitched, the warning flare of a man whose career had been built on seeing the half-second that matters.

And then,

They were gone.

No flash. No crackle. No smell of ozone. Not even a sparkle. Just the empty space where two small lives had been sitting and the soft neon of a pair of strawberries stitched into sneakers still faintly glowing in the air where her heels had been. The world had a two-child absence in it that made even the pigeons on the wire above startle and shuffle.

Bubble Girl dropped her tote. It hit the sidewalk with a clatter that sounded like more than groceries. “Eyes, eyes!” she snapped across the comms she wasn’t supposed to have on for something that was supposed to be a stroll. “Where- ?”

Tsuyu was already scanning rooftops, the river, the alley mouth. “Nothing,” she said. “No motion. No star. No…” Her voice was steady because she was.

Aizawa didn’t jump down; he flowed, scarf unfurling in a practiced line, landing in the space like he could shame reality into giving the kids back just by occupying it with authority. He let his gaze take it in: curb, chalk dust, the faint print of a parasol tip, and on the bench, a sock. Multicoloured. Normal. Not glowing. Not doing anything.

He glared at it like it had said something rude.

Midoriya arrived at a sprint and then stopped dead so fast his boots squealed. He went pale. Then he went red. Then he went determined, which is a color some people never learn to wear. “They were right here,” he said to the air, because it needed to be told. “They were right-” He swallowed. “I saw a sock.”

Rock Lock limped into the perimeter with a curse and a crutch and the expression of a man who has been waiting his adult life to be this annoyed at an inanimate object. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Bubble Girl, who was very good at being practical in the way that keeps panic from breeding, pulled an evidence bag out of her tote and held it open. Aizawa looked like he wanted to arrest the sock on principle, then pinched it up by the cuff and dropped it in the plastic with the distinct adult displeasure of a teacher taking a spitball in for processing.

“It’s a sock,” Rock Lock pointed out, because someone had to say the part that made this feel as stupid as it was frightening.

“It’s evidence,” Aizawa corrected flatly.

Nejire streaked down out of the air in a bright spiral that looked like a party had given up and decided to be helpful. “I left for five minutes!” she wailed, then caught herself, landed, straightened her hair with a flick, and peered at the bag. “That’s a sock.”

“Bingo,” Rock Lock muttered.

“Bag it,” Aizawa said, already on the comm. “Nighteye, we’ve got… nothing. They vanished. No warp signature, no star trail.”

Nighteye’s voice came back cool and measured, the slight rasp of someone who’d been injured and then decided not to be anymore. “Define ‘vanished.’”

“Closed my eyes. Opened them. Gone.” Aizawa’s tone made it clear how much he disliked saying those words.

“Physical trace?”

“A sock.”

A pause, then, in the background on Nighteye’s end, a sigh that was either him or the universe. “Bring it in.”

Midoriya stood on the spot like he could will the scene to rewind. He crouched, not touching anything, scanning for impressions. There, the faintest hair of white on a splinter on the bench leg, caught like a whisper. He didn’t bag that. He didn’t dare. He filed it somewhere better: the part of himself that had made a discipline of remembering.

“How?” Uraraka asked, breathless from the run, horror and confusion doing a messy duet in her voice. “How do you lose a child on an empty sidewalk?”

“They’re kids,” Rock Lock said grimly. “They’re not magic.”

“Spread,” Aizawa ordered, and the training kicked in, everyone moving like a muscle that had learned this dance. Drones went up that did not hum, because technology knows when to be quiet. Texts went out to friendly eyes with the kind of coded language that lets civilians help without inviting them into harm. Centipeder pinged the transportation department, no anomalies on the rail lines, no freak gusts at the river, no reports of pink meteors. The network did what networks do when they have nothing: they multiplied attempts and hoped effort could be a kind of offering.

Mirio, on a tablet propped in Nighteye’s office, ran a hand through his hair so hard it should have hurt. “You lost them to a sock,” he said, voice breaking on the absurdity. “A sock?”

Midoriya stared at the bag. “It was… normal-sized,” he said helplessly, as if size might somehow balance the scales of impossible. “He held it like, like a toy. And then…”

“Don’t blame yourself,” the nurse said sharply from offscreen, because she had taken on the job of mothering a group of people who could bench-press cars and forget to drink water. “Anyone could have blinked.”

Nejire took a breath, straightened, and turned panic into a checklist because she could. “Okay. Possibilities: teleportation Quirk—weird trigger. A portal, no visible distortion. A-” She stopped, mind snagging on the ridiculous truth. “A sock did it.”

“It’s a sock,” Rock Lock repeated, but this time his tone sounded less like an argument and more like he was trying to teach himself not to think in genres that didn’t have a chapter for this.

Nighteye, in the background, wrote SOCK on a whiteboard and put a circle around it. He underlined it once. Then, because he’s who he is, he underlined it again.

The search lasted all day and into the edges of night, which is when the city begins to decide what it wants to do with its shadows. They found nothing. Not a scuff that hadn’t been there before, not a rice crumb that belonged to anyone special, not a single button that had decided to roll out of its proper place. Only the sock, in a bag, on a table, being stared at by adults who had seen too much to be surprised and were anyway.

“Send it to the lab,” Aizawa said. “See if it’s got residual energy. Fibers. Anything.”

The lab called back two hours later. “It’s a sock,” the tech said flatly. “Cotton-poly blend. No residue. No Quirk signatures. We can tell you the laundry temperature it’s used to. That’s it.”

“Lukewarm?” Nejire asked, because if you’re going to be helpless you might as well be specific.

“Delicates,” the tech replied, without humor.

They all looked at the bag again. The sock did not offer commentary.

“Keep looking,” Nighteye said, and the room heard the thing under the order: keep believing that looking matters.

Midoriya stood at the window and tried to make his breath useful. “They’re okay,” he said to whatever passed for providence in a world that had just tried to hide a miracle in a shoe. “They’re okay.”

(Present)

They were.

Far away or very near, depending on how you fold the map three small figures stood in a land made entirely by hands, in a district devoted to desserts. Treat Land shone politely under a friendly sky. Cakes rose from the landscape like architecture; cookies served as signage and snack; frosting edged the horizon in the way mountains do in other stories. The ground felt like every holiday tablecloth your grandmother ever washed and ironed and laid out with a sigh. And yet, despite everything looking like fabric and acting like fabric, the slice on the plate in front of Eri tasted like genuine cake. It even left crumbs.

Eri looked at the plate. She looked at her own hands, which were neat lines of yarn gathered into a shape the world agreed to call Eri. She looked at Kirby, who had just successfully consumed a wedge of something that could only be described as a huge sponge that was also a perfectly legitimate pastry. She looked at Prince Fluff, who wore a crown and a smug little smile and was using a fork with princely precision on a confection that looked like a quilt had learned to be a soufflé.

“Juh…?” she managed at last, wiggling her fingers. “How… do we eat if we are… hollow?” She poked her belly, which went fwip in a cheerful, empty way. “Kirby, ji is string.” She patted her own chest. “And this is… cake.”

Kirby, who had no trouble at all thinking with his mouth full, held up both nubs as if to say: this is a problem for later, then took another bite and beamed.

Prince Fluff set his fork down and dabbed the corner of his mouth with a square of something that resembled a napkin and a small handkerchief had had a well-behaved child. “Ah, Patch Physics,” he said, as if hosting a lecture. “My favorite subject after How Many Donuts is Too Many Donuts and No One Knows Because We Haven’t Tried Yet.”

Eri leaned in, eyes bright. “Jes?”

“Here,” Fluff explained, delighted to be a guide on this little safari of sanity, “the world runs on the logic of making. Things behave like what they’ve been sewn to look like. So this looks like cake, so it tastes like cake, and is cake. Your body looks like yarn, so it is yarn. You eat the cake and it becomes the idea of cake you keep with you. It threads into your… hmm.” He gestured at her middle, searching for a word that would not frighten. “Into your pattern. You don’t get full in a heavy way; you get full in a happiness way. Think of it as… adding a row to your scarf.”

Eri’s mouth made a small “oh,” and then widened into a smile that was new every time it happened. “Majicious.” She tried a forkful and giggled because it felt like biting a pillow and tasted like celebration.

Kirby enthusiastically pointed at his mouth. “Cake go here,” he said, then patted his belly, which obligingly wobbled. “Then happy.”

Eri nodded solemnly. “Jes.”

“Also,” Fluff added in the tone of a scientist who is also a showman, “if you eat too fast, sometimes your outline jiggles in a funny way, and that is why we keep napkins handy and dignity optional.” He winked. “I learned that the hard way with a jelly roll.”

They ate more cake. Treat Land expected nothing less. A conveyor of frosting piped decorations in the distance onto a hill politely pretending to be a giant cupcake. A wind picked up just enough to make the sprinkles on a nearby statue glitter without spilling. Somewhere a shop bell chimed the sound of a trifle remembering it had cherries.

Eri pressed a fingertip into the crumb and watched it spring back, then disappear, then appear again on her fork. “This land is… silly,” she said with pure respect. “And kind.”

“Both on purpose,” Fluff agreed, tapping the side of his nose as if imparting state secrets. “It took a lot of sewing to get it this way.”

She leaned back on her elbows and let her sneakered feet swing under the table that looked like it had once been a placemat and a very supportive family. Her mind, which had begun to trust that joy wasn’t a trap, craned to look around a corner. “Do you think,” she said carefully, eyes on the distant sign shaped like a cookie with a bite taken out of it, “that… Mr. Deku and the others… are… worried?”

Kirby considered, scrunched his face, and mimed pacing with two fingers, then made an exaggerated frown, then giggled to show he knew the difference between sad and dramatic.

Eri palmed her cheek. “Janno worry,” she said softly, because she had learned that saying no to the air sometimes helps it behave. “We are… safe.” She glanced at Fluff, then back down. “I will tell them. Jonto.” She held up a hand.

Fluff nodded once, gravity settling into the slight crease between his eyebrows. “We’ll send a postcard,” he said, only lightly teasing. “An embroidered one. It will arrive when it means to.” He picked up his fork. “Until then, more cake.”

Eri laughed and lifted her fork for a toast. “Mapop,” she said, a little shy, a little proud. “For… them.”

Kirby clinked his fork to hers in perfect solemn silliness. Fluff, catching the spirit without needing the word, clinked his too.

They tasted the city’s best slice and pronounced it, unanimously, a grand success of both science and art. When they were done, the plates tidied themselves with a rustle of fabric like someone fluffing a pillow. The person behind the counter, an apron with arms and a cheerful face stitched on, waved and pressed three tiny bakery patches into their hands. “Come again,” they said in a voice that suggested they believed the universe had already scheduled it.

Outside, Treat Land lived up to its brochure. Shopfronts were patchwork patterns, candies spun in slow, soft spirals in windows, and a fountain burbled something pink that tasted like fruit without bothering to be sticky. Children made of felt, yarn, and ribbon darted about, their laughter polite but not too much so. Eri loved them on sight. One waved. She waved back, headband perfectly placed around the crocheted spiral of her horn.

“Fluff,” she asked suddenly, catching the prince by the crown, “what are… those?” She pointed down an alley where a trio of creatures with little mouths and occupation-sized hands were lugging a gigantic rolling pin to a bakery like a team of dedicated ants.

“Helpers,” Fluff said. “Very industrious. Very unionized.” He lowered his voice theatrically. “Do not get between them and a cookie schedule or you will be corrected in public.”

Eri snorted, the laugh of someone who was beginning to savor a joke that didn’t bruise. She peered into another storefront and saw a rack of aprons that looked like capes and capes that looked like aprons. She tugged Kirby’s nub. “We should make something,” she whispered, reverent at the thought.

He nodded at once. “Make.”

Fluff clapped. “To the craft table!”

The craft hall in Treat Land was the sort of place that should come with a seatbelt. Bolts of fabric leaned against the walls like wise elders; baskets held buttons sorted by color and moral alignment; scissors hung in rows, their handles cushioned so they didn’t leave marks on eager hands. The table at the center was a generous square, the kind of generous that makes people gather and behave.

Eri took a spot and immediately did what children do when presented with tools and permission: she made. Kirby brought over felt in her favorite colors as if divining them, which he probably could. Fluff handled needle-threading duty with princely aplomb. Together, they stitched a small square: three little shapes holding hands—a circle, a spiral, and a star—and underneath, in careful, uneven letters Eri sewed herself, Friends.

She sat back and pressed the square to her chest. “Jamanke,” she murmured to no one and everyone, a thanks that fit.

Kirby took the patch and very solemnly affixed it to the little bag he carried when he remembered he owned it. It looked right there, the way certain words look right in the mouth.

They wandered the aisles, trying on aprons that said things like MASTER MIXER and CAKE DEFENDER. Kirby put on a hat that looked like a small frosted mountain; Fluff adjusted it with a sigh befitting royalty. Eri chose a simple band with a tiny strawberry stitched on and set it above her ribbon, smiling at herself in a mirror that reflected enthusiasm more than accuracy.

They lost track of time the way good afternoons ask you to. Fluff entertained them with a prolonged and heartfelt dissertation on the comparative virtues of buttercream and whipped cream. Kirby played percussion on a set of measuring cups and was applauded by a passing whisk. Eri drew an earnest picture of the noodle shop back home, with a star peeking in the window like a nosy sibling.

A bell chimed, gentle and inviting, the kind of bell that calls you to the next piece of joy rather than away from the current one. Fluff perked. “Parade,” he said as if that solved everything.

They stepped back onto the main lane as a ribbon of neighbors moved through Treat Land, carrying trays of this and that, singing a song about sugar that had the dignity of a hymn and the bounce of a playground chant. Eri clapped along, a tiny beat off, delighted to be included in a world where inclusion didn’t ask for anything in return.

At the end of the block, a small stand offered free samples from a cake so large it had a staircase. The sign read: NEW! Lemon Button Cake and someone had stitched a grinning lemon on the corner. Eri burst into laughter and pressed her hands to her mouth, because the world had a way of stitching circles closed here. “Jamedetāna,” she told it, grinning.

They ate another bite (it would have been rude not to) and then, sated in the way that only sweetness and safety combine to produce, they wandered toward a bench that looked like a loaf of bread and sat. Kirby leaned into Eri’s side and she leaned back. Fluff tilted his crown down just enough to shade his eyes and performed the ancient art of micro-napping sitting up.

Above them, the fabric of the sky blued toward evening, stars beginning to blink politely on. Somewhere back in the other world, a group of heroes sat in a room and stared at a sock in a bag and said things like keep looking and we will and meant it. Somewhere even farther, three sisters in a place made of storm and ceremony arranged cookies in neat stacks and argued with joy about icing thickness.

Here, in Treat Land, Eri sighed once in a way that sounded like a page turning and then like a blanket being tucked. “Jaitty,” she said to the day, trying out the good-night word early because sometimes you practice peace before sleeping. Kirby nodded, very serious about agreeing. Fluff smiled in the space between breaths.

They didn’t know they’d left a panic patterned like a grid in their wake. They didn’t know a sock had been promoted to evidence. They didn’t know that a whiteboard now had an underlined word on it that would somehow make perfect sense later.

They knew cake, and craft, and the way a hand feels when it finds another and is not shaken off. They knew, without needing to say it, that tomorrow would bring a new piece of joy to stitch to this one. They knew, in the way some beings are allowed to know on good days, that something in the universe had decided to be silly on their behalf and that they were allowed to accept that gift.

Chapter Text

Patch Land always said goodbye like it had packed you a snack.

They stood at the edge of Quilty Square where the path turned into the seam that held all the pieces together. Prince Fluff had a basket on his arm (it contained an unreasonable number of cookies, a lemon button sewn to the side for luck, and a folded quilt square embroidered Friends in Eri’s careful stitches) and a crown on his head tilted at the friendlier angle.

“Travel safe,” he said, which in this world was a wish and a spell. “Come back whenever later needs help becoming soon.”

Eri hugged him, not too tight, because he was mostly outline, but with full intent. “Jamanke,” she said, the thank-you feeling like a ribbon she could pass hand to hand. “Majaja.”

“Again,” he echoed, He crouched so his crown was level with her horn, solemn and silly at once. “And if the world gets noisy,” he added, “remember what we do here when threads pull loose.”

“Sew,” Eri said, proud of saying a small, strong thing.

“Sew,” Fluff agreed, and his eyebrows did a synchronized nod.

Kirby, already holding the magic sock with the ceremonial seriousness of a kid entrusted with fireworks, puffed his cheeks. “Fluff come?” he offered, because why should good things ever be separate.

“Tempting,” Fluff laughed, “but I have a Hot Land to keep from over-baking and a parade that insists it needs me to wave at it.” He touched the sock’s cuff with two careful fingers. “It’ll lead you where you mean to go, even if you don’t know the name yet.”

Eri hesitated, then leaned in with a small conspiratorial whisper. “If we bring you cake, will you… eat it with us?”

Fluff put a hand to his chest like she’d knighted him. “I would consider it a royal obligation.”

They didn’t make a scene of leaving. Patch Land didn’t like scenes unless they involved confetti. Kirby tilted the sock; it opened with its gentle, impossible logic. He hopped; Eri followed; the world did the soft whoosh of a good slide. Prince Fluff lifted a hand in farewell and didn’t put it down until the air had sewn itself closed again, because being seen while you leave is a kind of blessing.

The sock flipped, folded, and then-

They hit linoleum.

Eri’s hands flew up. Not grass, not quilts, cold floor, too smooth, too clean, with the faint smell of lemon and bleach. The sock spat them onto a metal table and a stack of papers went ffwmp into the air like startled pigeons. A transparent bag tore. Something thunked; something clattered. Eri scrambled to her knees, heart doing a new fast beat it had learned in bad rooms.

It was a lab. Fluorescents hummed like insects. A wall of gray metal shelves glinted with neat rows of boxes and tagged bags. A bulletin board on one wall held forms with boxes checked. On the table in front of them sat a tray labeled EVIDENCE with the kind of authority that assumes it will be obeyed; the corner of a plastic bag was ripped open like a mouth that had tried to speak and been surprised. The bag’s label read OBJECT: SOCK in cramped, tidy ink. The bag was now empty and also in two pieces from their arrival.

“Juh-” Eri said helplessly, then, smaller, “Jorrow.” She pressed her fingers to the table, trying to make the hard surface behave like Patch Land’s kindness. Her body felt like itself again, skin, not yarn; heartbeat, not stitching. The shock of the return made her breath hiccup.

“Lab,” Kirby said, walking his round body between her and everything else without being told. He sniffed, made the face you make at medicine, and announced, “Bad soup.” His eyes cut to the door. There were no people, an odd, heavy quiet stretched like tape across the room, but the cameras in the corners watched the way empty rooms watch when they have been told to be responsible.

Eri edged toward him, fingers gripping the back of his head like the strap on a backpack. “Janno,” she whispered. No. “Janno lab.”

Kirby nodded and put the sock, now perfectly ordinary, even sheepish, under his arm like contraband. “We go.”

He didn’t debate the door. He turned to the wall.

“Kirby,” Eri breathed, torn between a laugh and a gasp.

He coiled his little body like a spring. For a split second he looked exactly like a plush toy about to do something illegal. Then he punched the wall.

The lab had been designed by people who believed in angles and influences and protocols. It had not been designed by anyone who had considered the possibility of a three-foot sphere of determinism. The cinderblock buckled; the safety glass spidered; the metal studs made a noise like “sorry” and then participated in a new architectural project. Dust exploded like a thought made visible. A rectangle of daylight opened the way a mouth does when the right joke finally lands.

A coffee cup on a desk two rooms over slid gently onto the floor in slow motion and spun to a stop like a coin deciding to be paper money.

Alarms started considering their self-worth.

“Come,” Kirby said, holding up his nub. He didn’t call the star yet; the hole was unadorned but useful. Eri grabbed his hand and they climbed through dust and sunlight, out into air that tasted like city again.

Outside, behind the lab, a pale strip of sky lay over a service alley where a delivery truck slept without opinion. The hum of a vending machine and the far-off bark of somebody’s lunch break bounced off brick. The building’s security cameras blinked at nothing in particular.

“Star,” Kirby said, now, and the lemon flip phone sang a crushed-bar melody. The Warp Star knifed into existence with all its familiar cheer.

Eri exhaled tension like a bad dream. “Home,” she urged, even though they didn’t have a word for what that was yet. “Please.”

Kirby nodded once, decisive. He tucked the sock into his not-pocket, which was more principle than storage, and hauled Eri onto the Warp Star with the ease of a kid yanking a sled. The star hummed; the alley narrowed; they shot up with a gleeful shoop that left dust doing its own blinking.

Back in the lab, the alarms finally decided to sing, because that’s what they were paid for.

It took three minutes and an astonishing amount of profanity for the building to fill with people. White coats skidded to a halt at the sight of a wall that had acquired a new idea of itself. A tech with a sandwich in his hand stared at the tear in the evidence bag, then at the hole, then at the bag again, searching for some narrative bridge between them that didn’t involve a sock.

“Where are they?” someone demanded.

“Who?” someone else demanded back, prompted more by the human need to demand than by any actual information.

“The kids,” the first someone said, because every rumor begins with a truth said loudly. “The puffball and the girl.”

A third someone arrived and did triage on the scene with a veteran’s eye. “The bag’s ripped,” she said. “Sock’s gone. Did we… misplace a sock?”

“Sock didn’t walk,” another countered automatically.

“It didn’t,” the tech with the sandwich said faintly, “but it… left.”

Phones came out. Cameras rolled back. Security footage added new fans. There, in the frozen frames: an empty room; an empty table with a bag containing a sock; a sudden blur like a smile; the bag tearing; two small figures spilling into reality with the practiced competence of people who had learned that suddenly was a frequent verb in their lives. The video showed the pink one glance around like someone searching a fridge for what they already know isn’t in it, then punch a wall like someone greeting an acquaintance, and then a small star that made the cameras throw up their little digital hands and refuse to acknowledge anything more.

The tech with the sandwich called his supervisor, who called someone he did not have on speed dial, who called the Nighteye Agency without allowing for punctuation.

Sir Nighteye had been practicing being alive responsibly. He had organized his inbox, delegated appropriately, consumed a meal with nothing caffeinated in it, and allowed his body exactly seven minutes to resent him for stopping. He was mid-sip of water when the phone rang with the tone the office jokingly called our good day just left.

He listened without interrupting. Then he said, very calmly, “Of course it was the sock.”

Aizawa was in the doorway before Nighteye hung up, hair doing its habitual impression of controlled weather. “What.”

“Our evidence lab,” Nighteye said. “Or rather, the one we trust with certain oddities. It has gained an additional portal and lost one sock.”

Aizawa took a breath in that particular teacher way that transforms I am tired into I am ready. “Hole in the wall?”

“Hole in the wall.”

“Cameras?”

“Show what we already knew and what we should have expected.”

“Kid’s okay?”

“Based on the sprinting star-shaped exit, yes.” Nighteye set down the glass very gently and straightened a stack of forms that did not need straightening but appreciated the gesture. “We’re convening.”

Within ten minutes, the conference room looked like a neighborhood watch that had learned government acronyms. Ryukyu slid into a seat with her sunglasses in her hair and a face that managed to be both dragon and woman and bureaucracy’s best friend. Nejire arrived like good news wrapped in glitter and tried to sit still. Bubble Girl brought a notebook already split into columns labeled facts and feelings because both had a way of showing up uninvited and demanding chairs. Centipeder distributed printouts of the lab’s statements with the efficiency of a machine that had passed the Turing test and now spent its time excelling at office management. Rock Lock thumped in late looking like a muscle that had fought a staircase and lost politely.

“The sock,” he said by way of greeting, “has escaped custody.”

“Or was reclaimed by its rightful dimension,” Ryukyu suggested, practical even in her jokes.

“Either way,” Aizawa said, “hole in wall.”

“Which is how we found out,” Bubble Girl added. “No injuries. One coffee cup in a state I would describe as shaken, not stirred.”

Nejire raised a hand like a kid at a pep rally. “They didn’t hurt anyone. Good.”

“They hurt the wall,” Rock Lock pointed out, not because he thought the wall had rights but because facts relax the room.

Midoriya slipped in, half-bow, half-breath, all apology baked into his posture in case gravity was looking. He took a chair, then immediately stood again. “They were afraid,” he blurted. “Eri, bad lights remind her. I should have guessed. I should have-” He bit the sentence. “Sorry.”

“No one was there,” Aizawa said, as flat as rescue. “They were alone in a room with their names on bags. He got them out.” He looked at Nighteye. “We’re past keep this quiet.”

Nighteye nodded. “It appears we are at ‘explain the hole to people who make holes for a living.’” He set a hand on the table. “We bring in the Commission and top pros.”

No one in the room said finally or God help us or I hope they’re in a good mood. They all thought some combination of those and added their own names to the casualty list of feelings about meetings.

“Agenda?” Ryukyu asked, crisp.

“Present what we know. Present what we do not know. Present what we will not do.” Nighteye looked up, pinning each of them as if issuing a warrant and a benediction. “We will not turn this into a hunt. We will not let the Commission shove a net around a child and call it governance. We will not let fear pick the vocabulary. We will, however, tell them about the sock.”

Nejire pressed her hand to her mouth to tamp down a laugh that was half hysteria. “We’re going to explain a sock to the Hero Public Safety Commission.”

“Yes,” Nighteye said. “With charts.”

“Love it,” she said, and meant it, because humor was oxygen.

“Time?” Aizawa asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” Nighteye replied. “I want an evening to decide which adjectives to leave at home.”

Midoriya raised a hand like he was back in class and this mattered. “Sir-can I- if they try to-"he tripped on the words and recovered. “I’d like to be the one to say ‘no’ first.”

Nighteye’s mouth twitched. “I cherish your optimism.” Then, softer, “Yes. If only to take that cut for the rest of us.”

A murmur of assent went around the table like a lazy wave hitting good shore.

“Alright,” Aizawa said, and his voice became the chalkboard. “Homework: assemble footage. Pull reports. Map sightings. Bubble Girl, get statements from lab staff. Be kind. They’re embarrassed. Centipeder, compile a memo that reads boring until paragraph five and then convinces them we’re on this. Ryukyu, draft the talking points for why a star-punching toddler is less of a threat than bureaucracy when the latter ignores context. Nejire-” he paused, because saying what he was about to say to Nejire was like telling a bird not to hum “maybe… write down your thoughts and then only say half of them.”

Nejire gave him two thumbs up and absolutely no assurances.

“Meeting adjourned,” Nighteye said, because letting people prepare is a kindness in any world.

They trickled out, and the room remembered how to be a room.

High over a coast someone had drawn with a ruler and a wide brush, the sky had a visitor.

No wingbeats announced it. It made no sound but the small, inevitable music of air making way. If anyone had been watching, and no one was, not this high, not at this hour, not with a hole in a lab and a meeting to plan, they might have thought it a star that had taken a wrong turn and was reconsidering.

It was a sphere, black in the way new ink is black. Around it, petal-shapes unfurled and refolded, purple with a sheen like oil, number-shifting as if arithmetic were a suggestion. At its center: an eye. Not blinking. Not wincing. Simply looking. It wore no expression because absence is not an expression. It did not burn as it entered atmosphere; the air cooled around it the way a room does when a refrigerator opens. It carried with it a taste the molecules of the sky remembered and did not like.

Clouds skirted its path absentmindedly, the way fish avoid a boat’s shadow without discussing it. Birds turned elsewhere. Satellites made polite adjustments in their logs they’d correct later.

It did not rush. It had the kind of patience only age or hunger gives. Somewhere very far behind it lay the memory of a castle where a king had worn it like a bad dream and been rid of it, and the memory had curdled into something like a plan.

There was no trumpet. No herald. No chartreuse villain monologue. It slid down toward a city that was, at that moment, arguing with itself about socks and children and policy, and no one noticed because the good guys had papers to file and the bad guys had different problems, and sometimes the world insists on comedic timing.

It lowered, unseen, through a slice of blue as clean as lab glass.

Eri and Kirby rode the star not toward any particular address but toward a feeling. The city beneath them behaved: cars didn’t honk at the sky, laundry agreed to be the body language of rooftops, a bus’s exhaust made a little fog that pretended to be weather.

Eri clutched the sock in the crook of her elbow like it might apologize for its sense of humor. Her heartbeat had settled some. She watched the lab shrink behind them. “Japologa,” she whispered into the wind, a sorry that wasn’t for punching a wall (the wall had been in the way) but for the way fear had taken over her hands for a minute.

Kirby patted her knee. “Okay,” he said. “Eri okay.”

“Jes,” she admitted. Then, after a beat, “Mr. Deku… will worry.”

Kirby made a little mouth, thinking. “We show,” he offered. “Soon. Say hi."

She smiled despite the leftover jitters and slid a hand into his. “Bonjam,” she said into the day, practicing the sound again because it had been so well received the first time. “Jonto.”

The star angled toward a small park that liked them. It would wait with them until the world learned to ask the right questions.

High above, where the air is thin and the truths are thinner, a single, unblinking eye narrowed, though narrowing is not quite what it did. It adjusted expectancy. It tasted the word star the way a predator tastes the air where a footprint evaporates.

No one looked up. The city shook dust out of its hair and got on with being complicated.

Tomorrow, they would sit at a long table and explain a sock. Tomorrow, authority would make its case and humor would make its rebuttal. Tomorrow, people would say please and no and listen in the order that best allowed them to remain human in the face of absurdity.

Tonight, a round guardian flew a little girl to a bench that had decided to be patient. A sock behaved itself. A wall learned about persistence. And something very old and very unkind wrote a circle in the sky.

“Jhappy,” Eri told the evening anyway, because she was, as of this day stubborn about joy.

Kirby nodded, solemn as a thumbprint. “Poyo.”

The star hummed. The air moved. Somewhere out of sight, something moved back.

Chapter Text

The conference room at Nighteye Agency had been expanded by the simple expedient of intimidating the walls into being farther apart. Extra tables had been rolled in and made to behave. Microphones sat at tidy intervals like well-trained beetles. Someone had remembered to put tea on; someone else had remembered to plug in the tablet for Mirio so it wouldn’t die mid-speech like a melodramatic actor.

At the head sat Sir Nighteye, exhausted in the elegant way, flanked by Ryukyu and Aizawa. Centipeder and Bubble Girl took notes with the choreography of a practiced duo. Rock Lock leaned in his chair like a man preparing to disagree professionally. Uraraka and Tsuyu had been allowed in on purpose; Nejire had been allowed in because she could not be prevented.

Midoriya wasn't there because he was still trying to figure out the logistics of the sock

Across from them: the top pros and the state.

Endeavor’s presence heated the air even when he was trying not to. Hawks lounged with alertness so casual it had to be deliberate. Edgeshot sat like a folded blade. Mirko bounced a knee under the table that wanted to be someone’s problem. The police liaison pretended to be wallpaper and failed. And at the far center, composed as a stamp and twice as official, sat the President of the Hero Public Safety Commission.

She wore black like an intent, violet like a signature, and a necklace like leverage. Her ash-blonde hair was slicked back so sternly it dared anyone to misplace a comma. Turquoise eyes took in the room and the room remembered its manners.

“Let’s begin,” she said, without raising her voice. Calm, steel-edged, the particular tone of a person who has dismissed panic as a hobby.

Nighteye inclined his head by exactly the amount that conceded logistics and nothing more. “We’ll lead with facts.”

Centipeder tapped a key. The screen at the end of the room lit up with timestamps and stills. He spoke while the images advanced; Bubble Girl wrote while the words threaded.

“Timeline,” Centipeder said. “Eri and the unknown pink juvenile, self-identified as ‘Kirby’ were observed at ten oh-eight in the morning, corner of 3rd and Sumire. Soft surveillance in place. At ten ten, both subjects disappeared from visual without known trigger. One blue cotton sock was recovered on-scene. Evidence bagged. Transported to a trusted lab at eleven twenty-four. At thirteen oh-three, the lab’s cameras recorded the bag tearing open, both subjects appearing on the evidence table via unknown means, a single strike to the east wall creating an egress, and both subjects departing vertically via an unidentified star-shaped conveyance.”

On the screen, the sock sat within its plastic, innocent as a bedtime story. The next frame: the bag wrinkling like it was trying not to laugh. Then two small bodies where no bodies had been, dust behaving incorrectly, the wall revising itself into a door. A yellow smear of light like a five-pointed signature.

“Casualties: none,” Bubble Girl added. “Damages: one wall, one coffee, a lab’s pride.”

Silence, then the low collective intake of breath that precedes consensus or shouting.

It was shouting.

“You’re telling me,” Endeavor said, rising half an inch as if thrust is his native language, “that a child and an unknown Quirk user breached a secure facility and you didn’t call us the moment-"

“We were already in contact,” Nighteye interrupted, cool. “With people who actually saw them. With people who know the context.”

Hawks lifted a hand in the universal sign for may I add mischief. “And by the time anyone could’ve flown over, the wall was already a suggestion. No offense to our dear walls.”

Edgeshot’s voice cut like clean paper. “Definition of the threat.”

Aizawa’s eyes were sandpaper tired. “A traumatized child and a creature who protects her. Strong enough to pulp Chisaki, yes. Also gentle enough to double-knot her shoes.”

Mirko slapped the table, delighted. “So a fight and a babysitting gig. Finally, something fun.”

“Why,” Endeavor demanded, turning flaming attention to the Nighteye contingent, “would you keep critical information like this from us? That there's an unknown powerful quirk user running around unchecked? We didn't even know about this "Kirby" until the report was handed to us!"

Before Nighteye could answer, Rock Lock barked a laugh that had no humor in it. “Oh I’m sorry, let me just tell all of hero society a pink puff ball killed Overhaul with a truck! That would go over well!” He spread his hands. “Half the country would panic; the other half would start a fan club. Pick your poison.”

“Enough,” the President said, and the room obeyed like it had been trained for it. She folded her hands with surgical precision. “We are not here to audition punchlines.” Her gaze swept the raid heroes, then the pros. “We are here to decide if Japan woke up with a weapon in its backyard.”

“We didn’t,” Aizawa said. “We woke up with a kid and someone who acts like family.”

“Family with a starship and a right hook,” Hawks murmured.

Ryukyu leaned in. “He has engaged violently only in defense of Eri or when attacked. He did not harm lab staff. He created an exit and left.”

“After violating a secure facility,” the police liaison put in.

“After being dropped into it without warning and greeted by a plastic bag and a place that scared his friend on it,” Uraraka said, quick and hot before she remembered to be small. “Sorry. But, context.”

On the screen, Centipeder advanced to a list:

•Observed capabilities: extreme strength; movement at or beyond human perception; inhalation/matter manipulation; summoning a ‘star’; possible Quirk replication via ingestion (Eri incident, unconfirmed generality); significant healing output (Sir Nighteye case).

•Observed behavioral constraints: food-motivated; responsive to Eri’s distress; avoids institutional spaces; does not initiate aggression absent threat to Eri or his food.

Mirio’s voice came from the tablet like a friend at the window. “He saved Sir’s life,” he said simply. “And mine. By holding a line no adult could hold.”

The President regarded him with a measured gentleness reserved for the wounded and the useful. “And yet he removed a target from custody,” she said. “Overhaul should have stood trial.”

“Overhaul was actively murdering a child and bringing her back,” Rock Lock shot back. “Trial’s a nice word; that room wasn’t going to give it.”

Hawks’ feathers twitched. “Let’s split the birds we actually have: One, public narrative. Two, containment plan. Three, moral line.”

“Public narrative?” Best Jeanist had slipped in so quietly only the word fabric in the air announced him. Crisp as a crease, pallor betraying recovery, his gaze stitched the room together. “We cannot allow the seams of trust to fray. A lab breach looks like negligence; a mysterious juvenile vigilante looks like a loose thread someone will tug on. I propose we preempt. Issue a statement: unexpected equipment failure during evidence processing, no personnel harmed, internal review ongoing. No mention of socks.”

“Agreed,” the President said immediately. “Containment?”

Edgeshot’s eyes narrowed. “If it escalates, we cut around it. Fast. Clean. No collateral.”

“Escalation comes from us,” Aizawa said. “Corner them and you’ll get it.”

“Then lure,” Endeavor said, practical and unkind. “Food. Open spaces. Force it to ground where the top five can box it in.”

A wave of no rolled down the table from the Nighteye side.

“You corner them,” Tsuyu said, “and you’re not catching prey. You’re catching a guardian. Kero. Those don’t run. They bite.”

“Also,” Nejire added, raising a finger with the zeal of a student volunteering the answer no one asked for, “we tried the ‘we’re adults, be impressed’ thing and he yawned. He likes cake and Eri. That’s our entire equation.”

The President took the verbal temperature; it hovered near fever. She tapped the table once, calling the room back to procedure. “Nighteye,” she said, “your risk assessment.”

“High unknown,” he answered. “High potential for misinterpretation. Low likelihood of intentional mass harm given observed behavior. Highest risk factor is us.”

“What do you recommend?” she asked, calm as a scalpel.

“Exactly what we’ve been doing,” he said. “Soft eyes. Civilian network. Offerings, not orders. No Foresight on Eri. We approach on her terms. And when the moment is right, we ask.”

“Ask what?” Hawks tilted his head.

“For help,” Nighteye said. “For a hello that isn’t a chase.” He met the President’s gaze without wobble. “We do not turn this into a capture op.”

“You’re asking the Commission to authorize inaction,” she said, but there was curiosity under the iron.

“I’m asking you not to create a bigger problem to feel like you’re solving one,” he replied.

Endeavor’s hands flexed; heat rippled. “And if this thing really can copy Quirks at will? If it eats a Nomu and learns to be a god? You expect us to sit and knit?”

Best Jeanist arched a perfect eyebrow. “Perish the metaphor,” he murmured.

Aizawa’s voice lifted, frayed and adamant. “You don’t build a policy around worst-case speculation and then make it true to justify itself.”

Mirko’s grin showed teeth. “You do if you want to live.”

“You do if you don’t care who pays,” Ryukyu said, steel under silk.

The President let the clash ride out, then laid a hand on the table and brought the room back like a conductor wielding silence. “Enough,” she said, and the steam bled off.

“Here is what we will do,” she continued, and pens poised themselves like birds ready to lift. “We formalize what you’ve built: a limited-visibility task force under HPSC oversight, field lead, Sir Nighteye. Scope: locate and maintain contact with Subject Kirby and Minor Eri, assess intent and risk, prevent villain access, prevent public panic. Engagement rules: verbal contact only; no pursuit into confined spaces; no containment attempts unless lethal force is imminent. Reporting cadence: daily.”

Endeavor’s jaw worked. “And when, not if, villains get wind? They already tried to snatch Eri once.”

Hawks’ feathers ruffled thoughtfully. “I’ll handle the wind,” he said, meaning rumor. “Whisper that the ‘pink thing’ is a hero’s support item gone wrong. The underworld loves a bad tech story. Keeps them chasing the wrong toys.”

“Edgeshot,” the President said, “monitor chatter. If the League moves, we anticipate. Ryukyu, maintain the civilian network. Best Jeanist-” she eyed him with a faint, almost fond exasperation “-weave the narrative. Quietly.”

Jeanist nodded. “We will keep the hem from unraveling.”

“Mr. Aizawa,” she added, “you will advise on the child. If any of your colleagues suggest using her as bait, you will remind them why we do not.”

Aizawa didn’t nod. He stared at her like a dare. “There will be no bait.”

The President’s turquoise gaze didn’t flinch. “There will be no bait,” she agreed, and in that instant it wasn’t politics; it was a promise she intended to be held to.

“Sir,” Mirio said from the tablet, voice softened by hospital but not diminished, “Eri is… happy. With him. If we crush that, we don’t get it back.” He swallowed. “We don’t get her back.”

Midoriya’s hands had been fists; he made them fingers. “When I spoke to her,” he said, “she used… new words. It’s her way of… keeping safe inside. If we take those away, she’ll think safety is a joke.”

Nejire’s face lit. “He means she made up a language with him and it’s adorable. Also important.”

The President absorbed this detail with the practiced efficiency of someone who files human quirks next to tactical ones. “Fine,” she said. “No pressuring the child to abandon her coping mechanisms mid-debrief.” A beat. “Do we know the boy’s legal status?”

“Unknown,” Nighteye said. “No records. No registration. He refers to himself in the third person, eats like a small army, and summons transportation with a… phone.” The faintest hint of humor. “We are between boxes.”

“Then we build a new one,” Endeavor said. “Codename?”

Centipeder was already ready: “Provisional designation: STARCHILD. Subject KIRBY. Minor ERI. Incident tag: SOCK.”

Rock Lock barked another of those abrasive not-laughs. “Try explaining SOCK on a form without getting pulled for a psych eval.”

“Public explanation,” Jeanist reminded them. “Equipment failure.”

“Lab discipline,” the police liaison muttered, doomed to paperwork. “We’ll eat that headline.”

“Better the lab than the kid,” Fat Gum said from the back, quietly, surprising everyone who had forgotten he was there. “He doesn’t fit your cages. Don’t build a bigger one.”

The President drummed two fingers, then stopped, aware of the symbolism. She looked around the table and saw, with that dispassionate mercy of hers, the way people align themselves around something fragile.

“Very well,” she said. “We will not go to war with a a six year old and her… guardian.” The word tasted odd; she allowed herself the smallest grimace. “But hear me: if this escalates beyond your control, if civilians are harmed, if villains gain access, if this Subject begins to act as a destabilizer, I will put this under national security. And then the conversation changes.”

“We won’t let it get there,” Nighteye said.

“See that you don’t,” she replied. The turquoise eyes softened a fraction, shifting from policy to the person. “And if you are right, if kindness is the right tool, then do not fumble it.” She rose, signaling the meeting’s half-life had decayed. “Hawks, Edgeshot, Endeavor, stay. The rest of you, do your jobs.”

Chairs scraped. Murmurs resumed. People who had been lions arranged themselves into mice so they could slip under doors.

At the doorway, Uraraka hesitated. “Ma’am?” she blurted, then flushed because she hadn’t meant to be the person who blurts at the Commission President.

Those eyes landed on her, not unkind. “Yes.”

“If he shows up,” Uraraka said, words tumbling out in a spill she couldn’t stop, “and he’s hungry, can I, like, give him a bento without… filing a form first?”

A thin, almost invisible smile. “Ms. Uraraka,” the President said, “if a bento averts a breach, consider it a reimbursable expense.”

Uraraka brightened. “Yes, Ma’am!”

Aizawa dragged a hand down his face as she scampered off. “You are encouraging her,” he told the President, dry.

“I am weaponizing her,” the President corrected. “With rice.”

Left behind with the heavyweights, Nighteye waited for the second phase,?the one with fewer witnesses and more knives.

Endeavor crossed his arms. “You’re gambling,” he said.

“I am,” Nighteye returned. “And I intend to win.”

Hawks twirled a feather between two fingers. “You sure you don’t want me to ‘accidentally’ stumble on them and play the cool uncle?”

“Absolutely not,” Aizawa said, flat.

“Rude,” Hawks sighed. “But fair. I’ll go find out what the League thinks they’re chasing.”

Edgeshot’s eyes slid to the screen frozen on the instant of the wall’s surrender. “What you are really asking,” he said softly, “is whether we can restrain ourselves.”

Nighteye met his gaze. “Yes.”

The President watched them all, then nodded once, a judge granting bail to a suspect she’d rather keep. “Don’t make me regret this,” she said.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Hawks murmured. Endeavor grunted something that, in his dialect, meant I will hold you personally responsible. Edgeshot vanished into a breath.

The room emptied the way rooms do after decisions: unfinished sentences, decisions pretending to be orders, plans pretending to be certainty.

In the quiet, Nighteye sat and allowed his hands to shake for exactly three seconds. Then he folded them, pointedly still. Aizawa leaned in the doorway, eyes half-lidded, presence like a curtain drawn against too-bright sun.

“So they're not being hunted,” Aizawa said.

“For now,” Nighteye replied. “We gave the commission a task force and a codename. With luck, they’ll spend a week arguing about fonts.”

Aizawa snorted. “And us?”

“We go buy bento,” Nighteye said, standing. “And we wait where kindness can see us.”

Outside, the sky kept its secrets. Inside, adults made plans that might hold. In a lab across town, a report was filed that read like a comedy routine with teeth. Somewhere distant, something old adjusted its path and no one in this room thought to look up.

They adjourned.

Tomorrow, they would watch. Tomorrow, they would argue with the Commission again, and probably with themselves. Tomorrow, heroes would do what heroes do when the world presents them with a problem in the shape of a child: they would try to deserve her.

For now, the minutes read: STARCHILD Task Force authorized. Engagement: soft. Narrative: controlled. Sock: missing.

Meanwhile 

Kirby’s phone sang its bright little theme, and Eri already knew this was how new people entered her life now: through tiny singing doors.

They were at a picnic table beneath a maple that kept doing handsome things with the sunlight. The Warp Star napped in the grass nearby like a friendly dog, and Eri’s parasol leaned against the bench, stripes catching the breeze. On the table: a paper bag of melon bread, a juice box, three strawberries, and a napkin that had been given to them by a lady who said “you two be safe now” like a magic spell.

Kirby, who absolutely could not keep still while calling people, bounced once, twice, and then held up the lemon-yellow flip phone with both nubs, chin tipped up in triumph. “Ado!” he chirped at the screen, then, with equal delight, “Ribbon!”

The camera resolved into two faces framed by Dream Land color.

The first was a girl about Eri’s age, or a little older in the ways that matter,wearing a green smock with a neat collar and a red beret that sat on her head like it knew exactly why it belonged there. She had a paintbrush in one hand, palette in the other, and violet eyes that went soft and earnest when she smiled. “Kirby!” she said, happy like a canvas that’s about to be the right kind of messy. “How have you been?!”

The second was a tiny fairy with shoulder-length pink hair and a big red ribbon that must have been at least three times as brave as she was, except that she was very brave. Delicate wings shimmered as she hovered over Adeleine’s shoulder; her blue eyes shone, and there was a little tremble at the corner of her mouth that said, I care loudly and I’m not embarrassed about it.

“Hi!” the fairy waved right at Eri through the screen. “I’m Ribbon!”

“Bonjam,” Eri said before she could remember that not everyone spoke her new sugar-language. She ducked a little, cheeks pinking, but Ribbon only beamed harder.

“What a nice hello,” Ribbon said. “Hello to you too!”

“Friend,” Kirby declared, rotating the phone until Eri’s face nearly filled the frame. “This Eri.” He tapped his chest. “Kirby friend.”

Adeleine’s smile went gentle, pastoral. “It’s very nice to meet you, Eri,” she said. “I’m Adeleine. Kirby says you like parasols and cake and… kindness.” She glanced at Kirby; he nodded as if those had been in his original introduction.

Eri tucked a strand of white hair behind her ear. “I’m Eri,” she echoed, because names feel better when you try them twice. “Kirby saved me.” She looked for the words that fit the feeling. “He is… very soft.” She made big serious eyes, because this was a scientific observation.

Adeleine’s cheeks dimpled. “He is,” she agreed. “Like painting with marshmallow.” She lifted her brush, waggled it, then caught herself and tucked it shyly behind her ear, as if embarrassed that her hands always invented small dances. “Do you like to draw?”

“Yes!” Eri answered a little too quickly, then caught herself, grinning. “I only know… little pictures.” She mimed a heart. “I want to draw more. Kirby draws me with big shoes.”

Kirby puffed. “Shoes best,” he insisted, pointing at her sneakers, which obligingly blinked little lights as if they had been praised.

Ribbon twirled midair. “I like to fly,” she confessed, “and sing badly, and find butterflies and pretend they’re spies.” She giggled. “What do you like, Eri?”

Eri thought about it as if the answer had a weight. “I like…” She glanced at Kirby for permission to say the big thing. He nodded, solemn as a judge with crumbs on his face. “I like feeling safe,” she said. She looked back at the screen. “And strawberries. And learning new words.”

“Those are excellent things,” Adeleine said, sincerity pinking her voice. “I like painting food so my friends can eat, and painting doors when we need to leave, and painting places I miss so they don’t feel so far.”

Ribbon reached out like she might touch Eri’s cheek through the glass. “I like when people tell me about their favorite things,” she said. “It makes the world less scary.”

Eri’s smile went sideways and brave. “Jhappy,” she whispered, pleased at how the world kept lining up with her new vocabulary.

They traded small treasures like kids at recess. Adeleine held up a half-finished canvas: a field of flowers that looked like a lot of feelings had agreed to be petals. Ribbon showed a glittering shard of a Crystal she wore on a necklace. Kirby, not to be outdone, produced from nowhere a single perfect dumpling, then realized it would make the conversation go quiet, and very solemnly set it aside to be admired, not eaten.

“What do you do,” Eri asked, curiosity braver than it used to be, “when you are… jorrow? Sad?”

Adeleine’s brush paused, then resumed its small sway. “I paint a place where I wasn’t sad,” she said. “And I look at it until my feelings remember how to be small again.”

Ribbon nodded. “I find someone to protect,” she said simply, and glanced sideways toward the edge of the screen as if there was always a queen in need somewhere nearby. “It makes the scary parts feel like something I can aim at.”

Kirby, who dealt with sadness by eating it and turning it into stars, offered Eri a strawberry like an antidote. She took it, bit, and nodded at the sweetness. “Majicious,” she told the berry and Ribbon snorted, delighted, at Eri blessing fruit like a priest.

They were still laughing when it happened.

The world did not growl, because the world is polite enough not to give you warning if it can’t offer help. Eri only felt a wrong breeze, a weightless hard thing at the back of her neck, fingers that were not fingers and a pressure that said you are mine if I want you to be. Her breath hiccuped; the strawberry dropped and rolled; Kirby’s head snapped up.

“Kirby?” Ribbon said on the phone, her voice edging toward alarm. Adeleine’s brush hand stilled, bristles midair.

The hand on Eri’s neck turned her, and she saw a face like a nightmare that had learned bad habits. Pale, chapped lips.. Red eyes delighted to be red. On his face and hands, the cracked bone-like plating a child might draw onto a ghost. He smelled like dust and old anger. Behind him, drifting slantwise, men with eyes like arguments: a gentleman in a mask and cape who moved with theatrical economy; a burned man whose gaze was a lit match no one had blown out; someone else lingering in the edges like a laugh with a knife behind it.

“Kirby,” the man cooed in a tone that tried to be a lullaby and landed as a threat. “You’re a tough person to beat, I can see that, but your heart is the weak point.” He tilted Eri like a puppet in a cruel show and smiled at the pink sphere across the table. “You try to attack, and I’ll either use her as a shield or I’ll just decay her. Take your pick.”

Kirby’s phone hit the table with a clack as he hung up. In the rectangle of the screen before it went black, Eri saw Adeleine’s eyes go wide, Ribbon’s mouth open on a sound, both of them suddenly very small and very far away. The call cut out. Silence dropped into the space like a coin into a well.

Kirby’s eyes hardened, and the sweet baby roundness of his face did a quiet, terrible thing: it learned that anger could be held without hurting. He lifted his nubs, then stopped, because the hand on Eri’s neck moved.

“Uh uh uh.” The man’s other hand hovered, flexing, five dangerous petals.

"Good.” His smile widened. “Now let’s talk.”

He was very good at smirking. It was a skill learned on purpose. “You have so much power,” he said, as if delivering good news. “Yet you use it for this?” His chin flicked at the picnic table, the parasol, the absence of blood. “Join us. And if you don’t- ” His fingers tightened, just enough to make Eri’s breath decide to take a careful step backward. “I’ll kill her.”

Kirby held very still. He did not puff. He did not grow. He did not spark. He only looked at Eri, then at the man, then at Eri again. When he spoke, his baby voice wrapped itself around the words the way a hand wraps around a promise. “You let Eri go,” he said, worksquare and soft at once. “Kirby go with you.”

The man’s expression flickered, satisfaction and the surprise of getting exactly what he asked for too easily. A new voice, lower and bored, drifted from the burning-eyed man’s slouch. “Boss,” Dabi drawled, “you sure that’s a good idea?”

Shigaraki, because that’s who he was; even if Eri hadn’t learned the name from whispers, the room would’ve taught it to her, didn’t glance back. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, like a magician setting up a trick. “I have a Nomu that will grab her. And even if that fails-” He smiled at Kirby with all his teeth like a coin purse snapping shut. “We have our main prize.”

He flicked two fingers. Mr. Compress flourished a gloved hand with stage confidence and tossed a marble into the air, its surface glinting like a little moon. Kirby didn’t flinch. He let the trick catch him.

The marble snapped shut around him with a sound like the end of a sentence.

Shigaraki opened his hand and the back-of-the-neck grip let Eri go. For one suspended heartbeat, she didn’t move, as if afraid any motion might break a secret. Then her body remembered the most important verb it had. She ran.

She did not look back because she had learned that looking back is a way to invite the bad thing into your next step. The parasol fell; the phone fell; the bag of melon bread stayed upright because sometimes the universe allows small mercies. She heard Shigaraki’s not-laugh, the burn-man’s sigh; Mr. Compress tossing the marble once, twice in his palm like he was showing off to an empty theater.

Suddenly it felt heavy in Mr. Compress's hand

"Hey what's wrong?" Twice said noticing Mr. Compress's hand shaking

Then the marble hit the ground.

It should have clicked. It should have hopped, spun, been caught. It should have done what clever little props do.

Instead it slammed into the pavement as if it weighed a million pounds and had decided gravity was a personal friend. Stone cracked. The marble sank, not quick but inexorable, like something learning to burrow. Mr. Compress lunged to catch it and nearly dislocated a shoulder. He yelped; the mask turned his alarm into comedy; the comedy didn’t help.

“What,” Dabi said flatly. It was not a question anyone could answer politely.

Shigaraki’s fingers flexed in unkind frustration. “Tch. I hate this guy.” The words landed like a weary admission it’s hard to bully someone who refuses to be your genre.

Compress crouched at the rim of the hole his own magic had created and leaned in. The marble had cut a neat tunnel into the stone, as if the earth had politely stepped aside for something more determined. “It’s… sinking,” he announced, both bewildered and offended. “Who sinks a prison marble?”

“Apparently the pink marshmallow,” Toga said, folding her arms. “So. Plan B?”

Shigaraki tilted his head, red eyes bright with irritation and appetite. “We wait for the Nomu to bring the girl,” he said. “Then we go hunting.” He cast a glance down the hole and made a face. “And someone figure out how to get that out before it resurfaces on the other side of the world.”

Compress threw a line, sleek black ribbon, into the hole, braced, and tugged. The ribbon went taut and then hummed like a violin string plucked by a god. He yelped and let go, fingers buzzing.

“Okay,” he said, dignity rearranging itself. “That’s new.”

They retreated a few steps and discussed logistics like professionals in a very odd industry. If the Nomu returned with the girl, they’d move to the fallback site: a warehouse with enough exits to make heroes consider their choices. If the Nomu failed, they’d scatter, Dabi to his safehouse, Compress to his caches, and reconverge with the prize they had: a being that might be convinced to break the world for them if they could teach it to be lonely.

“Or we can just burn the neighborhood down,” Dabi suggested, casual, the way some men suggest coffee.

Shigaraki scratched at his neck in a way that suggested his own skin annoyed him. “No,” he said. “Not yet. It brings heroes. I don’t feel like playing with the number one today.” A glance at the sinking marble. “And he’d be annoying about it.” He flicked dust from his sleeve and turned his face toward the horizon as if daring it to bring him a good mood.

They waited.

The city, which had not asked to host this conversation, did what cities do: it kept moving in other directions. A bus groaned past at the end of the block. Somewhere, a couple argued in soft voices about whether to buy blueberries. A dog barked at its own shadow and felt brave.

Then the sky to the east flinched.

It wasn’t much, just a small, sharp slice that the wind didn’t bother to hide. A ripple slid along the rooftop line, pushed down the block, and slapped the air in front of the League like a wave putting on a show. Shigaraki’s head snapped toward it. Dabi sighed a small, appreciative sigh, as if someone had set the table after all. Compress rose from his crouch, dusted his knees, and reached into his cape for a marble with unprofessional hope.

The figure that stepped into the street was wrong first, and then it was terrifying.

A hood was drawn low over a small shape, fabric dark as a closed eye. Beneath the hood, a single, visible eye looked out, bright, circular, unblinking. with a depth that felt like falling into a well. In one handc small, delicate, unbloodied, the figure held something by the brain. The thing dangled, jaw slack, wires cut. It took the assembled villains a moment to understand they were looking at a Nomu’s head. It took them another to register it wasn’t struggling because there wasn’t anything left in it to struggle.

Wind worried the alley. The hood didn’t move.

Shigaraki’s smile came back slowly, piece by piece, like an old trick. “Well,” he said softly. “Either my day just improved, or it’s about to try very hard not to.”

Dabi’s eyes narrowed to blue slits. “That’s… not a hero,” he said, tone gone clinical.

Mr. Compress extended a gloved hand and gave a little bow, never one to miss an audience. “You’ve cost us property,” he said, as if this were a comedy bit with unusually expensive props. “Care to negotiate a refund?”

The hooded thing took one step forward. It was a child’s step, small and almost soundless, and it cracked the asphalt like thin ice.

No one in the street said Eri’s name. The parasol lay on its side where she had been. The Warp Star shivered like a coin in a fountain. Under the hood, the single eye swiveled once and fixed on Shigaraki as if picking its first word.

Kirby, deep beneath the street in the stubborn, heavy marble that refused to learn other people’s physics, pressed both nubs against the cool surface and smiled a little terrible smile that meant I am here. I am not done. I am coming back. He had been compressed before; it had never stuck. He could hear dust. He could hear Eri’s fear like a thin wire he could pluck to make a song louder than plans.

Above, the hooded figure opened its free hand and let the Nomu’s head drop. It hit the ground and rolled once, twice, and came to rest at Dabi’s feet facing the wrong way. He didn’t flinch. His mouth quirked, annoyed. “Cute,” he said. “We’re doing theater.”

Shigaraki lifted four fingers and left the fifth hovering, amused. "Interesting,” he said.

The one-eyed thing’s gaze contracted, tightening like a pupil under bright light.

The street’s air pressed in, just slightly, as if something large had exhaled nearby and then forgotten to inhale again.

Something happened.

Chapter Text

Shigaraki spread his fingers like he was about to play a very cruel piano. “You look useful,” he told the hooded figure, voice pitched to coax a monster and belittle a child at the same time. “Join me and I’ll let you keep the world you’re standing on.”

The only answer was light.

It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t sound. It was a tight, black-violet surge that snapped out from beneath the hood and hammered the asphalt where Shigaraki had been a blink earlier. He dodged with a ragged hop, coat tails flaring. The street cratered, glass in nearby windows shivered, and a streetlight down the block hiccuped and decided to be a sculpture for a second.

“Rude,” Dabi observed, deadpan, already flicking blue along his fingers.

“Charming,” Mr. Compress said through his mask, even as he palmed two marbles and a card like he could magic the situation into a shape he liked.

Twice made two of himself with the irritated speed of a man who does better with company. “Great, it’s weird-o’clock,” one groaned.

The hooded figure moved with a smallness that broke things. It stepped once and the pavement protested. It twitched its head and the air did a new pressure trick. Then, there were two of it. Two cloaked things, identical and wrong, fanned out; their weight pressed down as if the concrete had suddenly remembered fear.

Shigaraki lunged, disgust curling his lip. He slapped a hand onto one of them, all five fingers down, and decay spidered out in a hungry bloom that should have dusted anything living.

The cloak sloughed away like dead shadow and regrew, fresh and unbothered.

Shigaraki’s red eyes narrowed. “Hnh.”

The second hood flickered behind him like a bad thought. He spun, too slow. A small fist drove into his ribs with a thud that wasn’t about size at all. The blow picked him up and threw him, body skidding, shoulders scraping sparks. He caromed off a parked car that complained in alarm and bent in the middle like a book.

The hood snapped its attention to Twice, who had been gearing up to be brave. “Don’t you-” one started.

Something opened on the figure’s abdomen. Not a mouth, not really, just a seam that shouldn’t exist peeling into a ring of teeth that shouldn’t be there. It lunged, the ring yawning giddy.

It immediately faced Toga

“NOPE!” Dabi barked, shock cracking even his sardonic, and a sheet of blue flame rolled between the thing and Toga, who’d been darting in with a giggle and a knife. The flame hit the teeth with a oily splash; the ring snarled, shutters closing, smoke spitting.

Toga skidded back, eyes wide, a laugh strangled into a choke. “Okay, ew?”

Mr. Compress stepped left, theatre for his own nerves, and loosed a marble which opened revealing a blade. It pinged off the hood like a raindrop off a statue. The figure twitched, tilted, as if more curious than harmed, and then flicked two fingers. A cone of dark pressure whistled and took a Twice head clean off. The clone collapsed into slurry before it knew it had been lessened.

“Rude!” the remaining Twice protested on principle, then self-soothed by making another two he could argue with.

Shigaraki was already up again, grin not reaching his eyes. His hand cut a dirty arc through the air and caught cloak, he bent fingers, letting decay crawl, trying to tear. The fabric peeled in flakes and reknit beneath his grip. He hissed, swung the other hand, reaching, contact with 5 fingers again. The cloak’s sibling had already arrived behind his shoulder and brought a fist down like punctuation. The hit snapped his head forward; his mask’s edge carved his cheek. Dust coughed up from the street.

“Okay,” he said conversationally, blood in his mouth, “I’m getting bored.”

“Just set it on fire,” Dabi drawled, but his eyes were sharp and measuring. He was used to monsters that wanted to die. This one wanted to play.

Mr. Compress took a step forward to cover Shigaraki’s flank. The hood’s stomach-mouth yawned again in delighted hunger and lunged at Toga’s hair. She squealed, less from fear than from indignation, ducked, and Dabi’s flame snapped again, cruel blue licking along the ring. The hood recoiled with a hiss that was not human.

Then the first good punch landed.

Shigaraki cut in, half-crouch, and swung an arm to parry the little fist. It slipped past, small means sneaky, and hammered his sternum. Air detonated out of him. He went back, boots trenching the pavement. The blow shoved the hood back half a step too, and the fabric popped up, pushed by the shockwave.

The hood fell off her head.

Two eyes, emptied out and black as the inside of a shut door, stared like holes. And where a mouth should have been, there was an eye.

It was very round. It was very bright. It didn’t blink. It looked at them like prey looks at a trap to see which part is worth biting first.

“Ah,” Mr. Compress said softly, and for once his drawl abandoned him. “Ah.”

Toga made a small sound that had surprise and hurt in it. “The kid?”

Dabi swore under his breath. “This city,” he sighed, “has got to stop inventing new problems.”

Shigaraki grinned because of course this day would gift him a blasphemy. “Well now.”

The eye in the not-mouth rolled to him and narrowed without eyelids. A pulse of low, tasteable energy licked along the street. It almost read as a mood.

Ten minutes earlier, Eri had learned a different kind of mood.

She had run until running became the name of walking. She had a sock jammed under her arm and dust in her throat and the word safe in her mind like a lighthouse you can carry.

The Nomu hit the alley in front of her the way ruin does: suddenly and with routine. It was big and wrong like a practical joke that only wants to break tables. Its exposed brain pulsed a queasy mauve. It opened its mouth and strings of spit argued with science. It reached.

Eri did not scream. Screaming invited things.

She jerked back, the world narrowing to fingers and teeth, and a square of light cut itself open in the air behind the Nomu with a painter’s stroke. Adeleine hopped through, beret slightly askew, brush already swinging. Ribbon zipped after, bow flared, eyes wide and fierce.

“Kirby hung up on us,” Adeleine blurted, breathless and indignant in equal measure, then took in the creature fully. “Oh.”

Ribbon’s face did a new thing: her cheer slid aside to make space for bravery. “Step back!” she called, and she was very clearly talking to Eri and very clearly not afraid. She lifted the little crystal gun she’d drawn from the ribbon at her waist. Light gathered at its tip like a helpful thought.

The Nomu roared.

Adeleine swiped her brush in the air. Paint hung in mid-space where she moved, stroked into form by will and wrist. A door appeared, then a door keeper, a painted parasol with a mean face and thick ribs, popping out of the canvas like it had been waiting its whole painted life for this. It spun in front of Eri, planted its ferrule, thunk, and spread its canopy wide like a knight.

Ribbon’s gun coughed a shard of crystal the size of a lemon and the speed of a thrown secret. It hit the Nomu’s shoulder and punched through gristle and sinew, chiming. Black-red spat. The Nomu staggered, turned, saw new prey, charged.

Adeleine jabbed her brush and a wall bloomed. a patchwork of painted brick, slamming into being between monster and girls. The Nomu hit it and it held, paint flexing, reality grudgingly allowing art to be better at physics than usual. The wall cracked under the next impact; Adeleine dragged her brush down like she was tearing paper, and the crack sealed.

“What is that?” she asked Eri, not taking her eyes off the fight.

“I don’t know,” Eri said, because she had stopped pretending to be brave in the wrong ways. “Juh. It looks… konjy.” She groped for the right Jambastion word. “Crazy.”

Ribbon zipped up, fired two more quick shots, shards spanging off meat and bone, chips glittering, tiny rainbows. “It’s not nice,” she summarized. “Stand back more.”

The Nomu reared, mouth opening to a width that suggested it had a poor opinion of boundaries.

The alley’s light dimmed.

A shadow flowered from nowhere, or maybe from Eri’s breath, silk-smooth and absolute. It surged forward like a hug gone wrong. It hit the Nomu in the head and kept going. The head, and the shadow, left the body with the smooth efficiency of a magician palming a coin.

The body stood for a second, confused at the idea of less, then remembered gravity and fell.

The shadow folded itself smaller, denser, like something composing itself into a shape that a story could tolerate. It turned its single eye toward the girls and widened with something that might have been interest.

“Eri?” Adeleine whispered.

Eri’s knees had gone soft. She was aware of her palms. She was aware of how air feels when it makes choices. The shadow smiled without teeth. Eri smiled back by reflex because politeness had been a survival skill.

The shadow moved, fast as a thought, and found her.

A soft, black pressure pressed through her skin and under it. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t heat. It was the absence of questions, and then the rush of answers that nobody had asked for.

For a heartbeat Eri was a field and a storm at the same time. Something looked out through her and saw a world it remembered for all the wrong reasons. It tried a word. The word was hunger. It tried another. The word was joy. It was startled to find both in the same place.

Adeleine grabbed Ribbon’s wrist hard enough to leave a print. “Dark Matter,” she breathed, violet eyes sharpening to an old, bad memory. “I thought-"

Ribbon’s face paled, then flushed with the kind of determination that turns birds into fighters. “We have to follow.”

The shadow, that now had a child’s silhouette and a child’s heartbeat and an eye where no eye should be, turned. It grabbed the nomu's head and slid down the alley, leaving a faint smear in the light like bruised air.

Adeleine and ribbion braced themselves and they ran.

Back in the broken street, present again, Shigaraki wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand and tilted his head at the hooded child-thing that had introduced itself by refusing to be owned. “So,” he said, conversational because he hated to be anything else, “negotiations are going poorly.”

The hooded figure cocked its head. The eye where a mouth should be dilated like it was listening to his bones. Then the fabric thinned, whitened, and changed.

Cloak turned white, clean as hospital sheets, stark as a flag. The hood stayed back on purpose. A visor sealed down over the not-face, red tint, angular, the suggestion of armor protecting something that didn’t need it. Where her mouth-eye had been, a symbol thrummed into being on her chest, a perfect, unkind circle, a pupil that didn’t belong to any human thing, bright with malice and… something else. The new sword it held was a line of night. It hummed a promise.

“Blade,” Adeleine breathed as she and Ribbon burst onto the scene, skidding to a stop beside the dented car. “Ribbon. It’s Dark matter blade.”

Ribbon’s crystal gun rose at once, her hands suddenly very steady. “We get it out,” she whispered. “We do it again.”

“Again” tasted like Ripple Star, like old, brave days. Adeleine nodded, brush already painting a shield between the League and the girls. “Hey! ,” she said without looking, brain trying to inventory threats, “please don’t.”

“Who the hell are-,” Mr. Compress said, and then Dark Matter blurred and crossed the space.

The sword cut like the idea of cutting. It slashed at Mr. Compress’s arm and found more than cloth. There was a mechanical noise, ksshhkt, and a shower of fancy screws. His right arm, complex as a watch and twice as fussy, leapt off his forearm in two clean, apologetic halves. The sleeve beneath shredded. He stumbled back with a gasp that was more wounded pride than wounded flesh.

Shigaraki clicked his tongue. “Enough,” he said, and flicked a glance at Dabi that meant keep me from hating you more than I already do. Dabi tossed a ribbon of blue flame at the blade, a testing lash. It slid off the black edge like water failing glass.

Twice had three of himself now and they did what frightened men do: they talked. “We should go,” one said. “We should stay,” another said. “We should die later,” the third decided, grabbing the first two by their collars and pulling them in the direction that smelled least like annihilation.

Toga had her knife in her hand but her other hand was shaking and she didn’t know why. She saw a small girl under the hood and a big eye under the skin and something in her heart, tricky as it was, didn’t want to stab either.

Shigaraki looked at the small armored thing and, for once, let someone else be sensible. “We leave,” he said, and his tone implied he’d intended that all along. He jerked his chin. “Dabi. Clean up.”

Blue fire veined the air, mean and hot and targeted. A row of parked scooters exploded into metallic screaming. Smoke poured down the street in thick, black ropes, and in that cover the League retreated with a speed that implied practice. Mr. Compress retrieved his dignity and his broken gauntlet in one fluid, one-armed bow. Twice dragged Twice. Toga darted backward, eyes on the child, mouth a thin line. Shigaraki backed away with the lazy posture of a man who believes in returns.

Dark Matter didn’t chase. It looked at the place where prey had been like a cat looking at an empty sunbeam, then swung back toward the new arrivals.

Adeleine and Ribbon stood their ground.

The blade flashed and came forward, cutting the air with judgment. Adeleine’s brush cracked down; a painted wall sprang up and took the hit, paint sizzling under not-light. Ribbon’s gun chimed, three rapid shots, zip, zip, zip, striking the visor with a crackling ripple. Dark Matter flinched, hurt, and surprised to be touched.

It smiled.

With Eri's mouth. With the entire body.

Adeleine’s stomach sank. “It likes this,” she said, grim.

The next exchange was dance and lesson. Dark Matter lunged; Adeleine pivoted, brush flicking, out of nothing, a flock of painted Waddle Dees spilled, the little red minions yelling in squeaky patriotism, charging the blade with tiny, doomed courage. Dark Matter cut through them, paint exploding into color confetti. Ribbon strafed left, shots precise, aiming at joints, at the symbol on the chest. The eye flicked, tracking, fascinated.

A shadow fell over the street like a hand.

The marble reemerged.

It didn’t pop. It shoved its way out of the ground with the stubbornness of a small god. Stone pushed aside. Asphalt sighed relief and cracked. The sphere rose, scratching itself free, and then, without theatre, split. Light washed out, bright and star-yellow, and Kirby stepped from the halves like a pea from a pod.

He was dusty. He was round. He was smiling the smile he wore when he saw cake and friends and a problem he was excited to fix.

“Poyo,” he said, tiny and devastating.

Everywhere at once, Dark Matter’s attention snapped to him.

The symbol in its chest dilated. The visor brightened; behind it, red eyes flashed electric. The air between them took on a taste. If fear tastes like old pennies, this tasted like the first bite of a lemon: shock and delight and a cramp in the jaw.

It moved.

So did he.

Dark Matter came down in a black arc, blade singing, all the gravity in the world behind a child’s arm. Kirby hopped. The sword cut nothing. He popped beside it like a bubble and flicked the blade aside with a nub. Physics looked offended. Dark Matter blinked.

It jabbed. Kirby leaned. It spun. Kirby ducked, then bonked. It slashed. He puffed, catching the attack in his cheeks and spitting it out as a harmless ribbon of night that fluttered itself into boredom. The street forgot to break under him; he got to decide the rules.

Dark Matter struck again and, mid-swing, its eye laughed. Not with sound. With feeling. There was fresh, simple joy in the motion like a new toy had been revealed to it and the toy was fair.

"Hehehehehe HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" Dark matter laughed

For the first time in its existence

The fight lasted ten seconds and filled an hour. Adeleine and Ribbon watched with that particular mix of terror and awe reserved for seeing your friend slowly take apart the thing that tried to end your world once. Dark Matter pressed, pressed, pressed, testing edges, tasting results. Kirby bopped, bopped, bopped, entirely present and entirely gentle in a way that mocked the word gentle.

Then he stopped.

He planted his little feet and held up a nub like a crossing guard. “Stop,” he said. “No.”

Dark Matter froze, blade a finger-span from his head. Its chest-eye quivered with temper. How dare-

“No bully,” Kirby told it brightly, a kindergarten teacher with a meteorite behind his back. He tapped the blade with a sound like clink. “You weak.”

If Dark Matter had had a face, it would have gone scandalized. As it was, the visor brightened in outrage and its small body did a very specific child-thing: it stomped. The pavement registered the stomp and cracked obediently.

“How dare you!” The words were... childish? The tone was a tantrum trying to be a sermon. “Don’t you call me weak! I’m strong, you hear? Strong!”

Kirby blinked once, slow, unimpressed. “Weak.”

“I. am. strong!” The sword wobbled in indignation. “I cut worlds! I unmake kings! I-"

“You’re weak,” Kirby said again, sing-song, and put his nub on his hip in the universal posture of preschool sass.

“Grrrr- I’m strong! I’m strong!” Another stomp. A small crater. The eye-chest glared.

Adeleine choked on a laugh that was sixty percent adrenaline escaping. Ribbon clapped both hands over her mouth, shoulders shaking, eyes huge.

Kirby waved a hand in a circle like he was blending batter. “Fight if strong,” he said. “Kirby fight strong.” He pointed to his own chest, pink, ridiculous, invincible. Then he pointed at the sword, then at Eri’s small hands. “Not strong. Eri body small. No bully.”

The eye on the chest flickered like a thought changing its mind. Confusion braided with curiosity and something embarrassingly new. It had wanted fear. It had found, fun. And now fun was saying no. That felt like theft. It also felt like mercy and it had no file for that.

Kirby leaned in, conspiratorial. “Deal,” he said. “You no hurt friends.” He tapped his chest, then pointed to Adeleine and Ribbon, to the parasol, to the dropped lemon bun on the picnic table, to the spot in the air where a Warp Star liked to be. Then he patted his own head and Eri’s shoulder, careful, soft. “No hurt Eri. No hurt Kirby.” He tapped the sword. “Only fight Kirby. Once week.” He held up one nub-finger. “Only when you ask nice.”

The eye narrowed. A sulk shivered the small frame. Why?

“Kirby want friend,” he said, simple as lunch. “Gooey friend. You like Gooey.” He pointed at the chest-eye, then drew a little circle in the air like a face. “You be friend too. We fight for fun. Not hurt. Only bad guys.” He paused. Added as if it were the easiest addendum: “And people who try hurt you.” He tapped Eri’s chest lightly with a nub. “And Eri.”

Dark Matter’s posture shifted. The blade lowered a hair, a child letting a toy droop as they consider keeping it or sharing it. Friend. It had had brethren. It had had masters. It had had hosts. It had not had… a friend. The word was a new shape. It tried it on. It liked how it moved.

"I...Agree." Dark Matter said, calmly

“No believe you,” Kirby said bluntly, because honesty is its own weapon. “You try to hurt friends.”

“No!” The denial slammed into their heads, fierce and sudden. The little armored feet stomped again. “When I say I agree! It means I agree!” It sounded like a kid caught promising to clean a room and being mad that anyone doubted it.

Kirby looked at Adeleine. Adeleine, who had once been a puppet on Dark Matter strings and somehow survived her heart staying hers, looked back. Then she nodded.

Ribbon lowered her gun a fraction. “We can try,” she said softly. “It’s inside a child. Children can learn.”

Kirby squinted up at the red visor, then nodded. “Okay,” he said, magnanimous as a king with jam. “Deal.”

The sword dissolved like an apology. The white cloak receded into the ordinary one that had been stolen from someone’s laundry line. The red visor blinked out. The eye on the chest dimmed and thinned until it was only the size of a coin, then smaller, then gone. Her void-black eyes filled with iris and fear.

She wobbled.

Kirby caught her before she hit the ground, soft as he had ever been, round body a pad for falling.

Eri blinked. Blinked again. Her throat worked. “J-Jamba…?” She winced; her mouth felt wrong, like a song remembered with the words in the wrong order. She looked down at her hands and saw a new thing and made a small, sharp sound.

In the center of her right palm, an eye blinked.

It was tiny. It looked shy. It was also unmistakably the same kind of eye that had been on her chest and her mouth and too much of this day.

Ribbon floated closer very slowly, as if approaching a bird with a thorn in its wing. “Hi, Eri,” she said gently. “It’s okay. You did so good.”

Adeleine crouched, brush back behind her ear because she did not want to look like anyone who would draw anything that could frighten a child. “Can I see?” she asked, nodding at the small eye. “Only looking. No touching.”

Eri held her hand out because being brave in little ways helps in big ones. The eye in her palm rolled to look at Adeleine. It blinked once. It had no lashes. It had patience. It had… temper. It wasn’t hungry. Not just now.

“Dark Matter,” Adeleine murmured, confirming the thing they all already knew.

Eri swallowed. “Is it… in me?” She sounded like a girl at the nurse’s office asking if a splinter was really gone.

Ribbon hovered closer and, because fairies are brave in ways no one teaches them to be, put her small hand over Eri’s, covering the eye gently. “It’s with you,” she said. “But it listened to Kirby.”

Eri’s eyes filled with tears, quiet ones that made her look more determined, not less. She nodded and sniffed, then blinked because sniff felt weird; the eye in her palm moved. “Juh.” She tried on a smile because the day needed one and because the new people deserved it. “Bonjam,” she told Adeleine and Ribbon, late and sincere. “Jhappy meet.”

“We’re happy to meet you too,” Adeleine said, eyes bright and damp and fierce. She glanced up at Kirby and tried to playfully scold him so she wouldn’t cry. “Next time you hang up on me in a crisis, Kirby, I’m painting a stern letter and making it chase you.”

Kirby puffed, contrite because he had been caught, then pointed at Eri. “Save,” he said. “Eri safe.” He patted his belly, then her hair, then held up one nub-finger. “Fight later. Once week.”

Ribbon tilted her head. “Fight—?”

“Training,” Adeleine guessed, grin tilted. “With the… friend.” She gestured vaguely at Eri’s palm. “Under supervision.”

The eye in Eri’s hand rolled. It felt seen. It tried an emotion it had only tasted at the edges before; it liked the sweetness on its tongue. Fun. The child it lived in had it in stock. It wanted more.

“Jamanke,” Eri told them all solemnly, then looked around at the mess because she had learned the trick of finding humor in what remains. “Jamblasted,” she added, perfectly, and Adeleine made a scandalized noise and then laughed helplessly because she’d been the one who would’ve taught a child the bad word if Flamberge hadn’t gotten there first.

A siren hiccuped in the far distance. Not close yet. Not for this street.

Dabi’s fire had burned itself thin; ash fell like a lousy snow. The hole where the marble had been had become a mouth for the city to complain into. Mr. Compress stared at his destroyed gauntlet and looked offended on behalf of artisans everywhere. The League had left nothing but a bad smell and the tossed-away head of a Nomu, which had come to rest crookedly against a curb and now looked like a grotesque toy. Ribbon made a face and Ribb-gunned it once, because sometimes you do little good things for your own sake.

Eri looked at Kirby and the fear that had been trying very hard to be her whole day failed, finally, with a sigh. She leaned forward and put her forehead to his and he did the same back and the star that was not there yet warmed the air anyway.

“Jonto,” she promised the sky, tiny chin up. Soon.

Adeleine picked up the fallen parasol and dusted it off like you apologize to objects too. Ribbon fluttered her wings and checked the angles of the sun like a soldier checking sightlines. Kirby fished the lemon bun off the picnic table with exaggerated care, as if retrieving a relic, then looked at all of them with monumental seriousness.

“Eat?” he suggested.

Adeleine burst out laughing because that’s what you do when the world doesn’t end. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

Ribbon clapped her hands, delighted, and the eye in Eri’s palm rolled, unsure why chewing should be appealing and then startled to find itself eager to watch. Kirby tore the bun in quarters and distributed them with ceremony. The bite Eri took was a small, careful one. The bite Dark Matter took—through her—was new, and it giggled inside her in a way that tickled and did not hurt.

It liked this.

Kirby looked at Eri’s hand and then at her face. “Weekly,” he reminded the eye. “Ask nice.”

The tiny pupil narrowed in what could only be called a pout and then dilated in assent. Deal.

Eri grinned, full and young and unholy tired. “Jamedetāna,” she told them all, and Adeleine nodded because congratulations is what you say to people who lived through a thing and remembered how to say please afterward.

Above them, the light had a small, temporary kindness to it, as if some very old thing looking in from far away had a plan and then dropped it because somebody laughed and it wanted to watch that instead.

The city breathed. The Warp Star listened. In the distance, sirens changed their minds and turned down a different street. And on a small palm, an eye blinked, for once without hunger.

“Once a week,” Ribbon said, mostly to herself, smiling. “We’ll bring snacks.”

Kirby nodded very seriously. “Snacks important.”

“Fundamental,” Adeleine agreed, relief finally turning her legs to water. She sat down on the curb like a person in love with gravity. “Okay. Introductions, but in person this time.” She put a hand to her chest. “Adeleine.” She pointed to Ribbon. “Ribbon.” She tapped Kirby’s forehead with the tip of her brush like a knighting. “Menace.”

“Kirby!” he protested, then considered. “Menace Kirby.” He liked how it sounded. He beamed.

Eri leaned into all of it and let it hold. “Jhappy,” she whispered again, tucking the word into the same pocket where she kept safe and soon and cake. The eye in her hand blinked, then blinked again because it could.

Somewhere above the clouds, something black and old angled closer without anybody here noticing. That would be a problem for another afternoon. This one, at least, had decided to end with crumbs and a promise and a schedule.

“Week,” Kirby reminded the eye one last time, wagging a nub.

“Week,” the eye sulked back, but less sulky now. It was already imagining the next fight and the next laugh and it didn’t know which it wanted more.

"Okay." Eri said "You'll have fun again."

How was she gonna explain this to anyone?

Chapter Text

By sunset, the city had opinions.

A convenience-store security cam caught the first still: a small cloaked figure standing dead center in an empty street, holding a Nomu’s head by the hair like a ghastly lantern. The face under the hood was swallowed in shadow, only the single, round gleam of an eye visible where no eye should be. In the blur behind the figure, two girls ran into frame, one with a paintbrush and palette clutched like a knight’s lance, the other a tiny winged thing hovering at shoulder height, ribbon burning red in the evening light.

The still hit three private group chats, five public timelines, and a late-night message board in under ten minutes.

An hour later, different block, different camera, there was another set: the same two girls sitting on a curb beside a round pink puff and a small white-haired child, tearing a lemon bun into quarters while the cloaked figure was nowhere to be seen. The fairy’s wings caught the light; the artist’s beret sat at a heroic tilt; the puffball looked like he was delivering a lecture about snacks.

By morning, a helicopter shot added a smear of yellow, a star-shaped something rising from a park, two small silhouettes on its back. A voiceover tried to call it a drone until the thing twirled in a way drones resent.

The Commission didn’t bother with coffee.

“Classification,” the President said. The room had the attentive pallor of a waiting room that knows what kind of news it delivers.

“Unknown,” Centipeder replied, arms folded, voice even. “Subjects: Painter, paint constructs; Flight-type, small fairy, can hover and fire hard-light projectiles; Starchild and Minor Eri our knowns. And the Cloak.”

“Which we’re calling?” Hawks asked, pen spinning. He’d come in through a window again; it was a habit at this point.

“MONOCHROME,” Best Jeanist supplied crisply. “It plays better than ‘Hooded Threat’ in print. And implies a palette that can be… diversified.”

“Don’t get cute,” Endeavor said without heat. He was too busy studying the freeze-frames of the Nomu head and the hooded posture. “This thing decapitated a Nomu and didn’t flinch.”

“Or carried one someone else decapitated,” Ryukyu countered, more diplomat than dragon today. “The still doesn’t prove the act.”

“The second set shows ‘Painter’ and ‘Fairy’ with the puff and the girl,” the police liaison said, tapping a nail against the screen. “If ‘Monochrome’ is hostile, it may be following these four. Or all five are allied.”

“We didn’t see the hood with them in the second set,” Aizawa noted. “Correlations aren’t friendships.”

“Public read?” the President asked.

“Quirked vigilantes,” Jeanist said, too quickly, which meant it was the best lie available. “Painter, quirk-based conjuration. Fairy, flight, light projectiles. Starchild, a complicated support-type. Minor, traumatized civilian. Monochrome, unknown, possibly after them.”

“Then we treat Cloak as a potential villain targeting a minor and an… anomaly,” the President said. “We do not disclose the Nomu head.”

“Do we disclose that the Painter and Fairy… exist?” Hawks asked.

“We minimize,” she replied. “Too many points of curiosity invites recreational panic.”

Nighteye slid a folder across the table. “Field capacity,” he said simply. The top page read a list: STARCHILD Task Force, Heroes in reserve. Two names circled in red at the bottom.

“Kamui Woods,” Ryukyu read aloud. “Mt. Lady.”

“High mobility, good crowd control, PR-hardened,” Rock Lock added. “Also convenient: they already work as a duo. If the Cloak shows in a crowd, one can shield, one can corral.”

“Playbook?” Aizawa asked.

“Watch, don’t grab,” Nighteye said. “If they find Starchild and Minor Eri, they stand between them and Cloak. Contact is verbal only. If the Cloak engages, extract the civilians. No pursuit underground. No incursion into small spaces.” His eyes went to the President, who nodded once: codified.

“Understood,” Endeavor said; it somehow sounded like a warning anyway.

Hawks leaned back. “And if ‘Painter’ throws up a wall and ‘Fairy’ shoots at us, because they think we’re the bad guys?”

“Then we deserve it,” Aizawa said flatly. “We didn’t get to them first.”

“Get me comms,” Ryukyu said. “I’ll be on the line with Kamui and Mt. Lady. We do not spook the child with a horn.”

The President stood. She’d started wearing sneakers to these meetings, someone had told her it made her look accessible; she’d privately discovered it just made it easier to get out of her chair. “Find them,” she said. “Protect them. And do not turn this city into a net.”

No one dared ask what they should do if the Cloak turned out to be the child.

Kamui Woods liked dawn patrol. The city smelled less complicated. He moved roofline to roofline with Arbor threads spooling out, anchoring and reeling him forward. Below, Tokyo’s arteries began to fill, buses yawning, coffee steam curling, bicycles going places on purpose.

“Eyes out for four,” Ryukyu’s voice murmured in his ear. “Painter, Fairy, Puff, Minor. Cloak is priority threat.”

“Understood,” Kamui said. “Any new footage?”

“Helicopter saw a star over Kiyotsu Park at daybreak,” Ryukyu replied. “Direction west-by-southwest. They vanish under the skyline.”

“Copy. Yu?” he pinged to his partner, knowing she hated having her real name used on a mission.

“Don’t call me that on an open channel,” Mt. Lady groused. She was zoomed in on a portable device, mask tucked up on her forehead, hair in a high tail that turned catching wind into theater. “I’m doing the charming among civilians part. You do the tree thing.”

He swung past her vantage an eight-story building with a helpful ledge and she popped him a grin. “Try not to sprain anything, Woody.”

He sighed. “We’re not doing nicknames today.”

“We absolutely are,” she said, bright. “And we’re absolutely bringing them lunch if we find them.”

“Bento is now an official line item,” Nighteye’s voice chimed from somewhere on the call. “Carry on.”

Kamui made a sound like a chuckle pretending to be a cough and launched again. He scanned. Parks. Roof gardens. Laundry lines. He kept half an eye out for cloaks and the other half for a small girl’s shadow.

He didn’t see the star. He didn’t see the Cloak. He did see a very round set of footprints pressed into dew on a playground slide. He stopped, crouched, touched the prints with gloved fingers.

“Fresh,” he said. “Five minutes. Mt. Lady-"

“On it,” she answered, shrinking to normal height to avoid alarming dog-walkers as she moved in. She found the slide, put her hand by Kamui’s to compare. The little ovals were ridiculously cute. The twist her mouth did wasn’t.

“They’re kids,” she muttered. “And somebody in a cloak who wants us to think they’re a grown nightmare.”

“Or is a nightmare wearing a kid,” Kamui said quietly.

“Don’t,” she said, equally quiet. “Not before breakfast.”

He reached up and cut a thin thread of Arbor to mark the spot, his own private breadcrumb. “We’ll find them,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, scanning a line of ginkgo trees that swayed just a little too charmingly. “We better.”

The best place to hide in a city is in all the obvious places with the wrong energy.

They spent the morning in a painting.

Not physically, no doors in the air today, but in the way that a shady corner of a neighborhood shrine can be a studio if a friend with a brush says so. Adeleine set her easel under a maple that liked the way sunlight looked on its leaves. Ribbon floated above the frame like a stern little muse, hands on hips, hair ribbon gleaming. Kirby sat crisscross, red feet tapping, a stack of onigiri at his left elbow like a metronome.

Eri sat on a cushion Adeleine had somehow produced from a purse, knees together, horn glinting, a blank pad balanced on her lap. Her right palm faced upward on her left knee, the eye in it blinking with an attention that would have been unnerving if it hadn’t looked so much like a child waiting for their turn. When it vanished, every few minutes, without warning, Eri’s left shoulder twitched as if someone had just stood up inside her.

Everytime it vanished it would appear where her mouth would be for a few seconds as if getting a better look

“Okay,” Adeleine said, voice pitched warm and steady. “We start with circles. Circles are friends.” She touched her blue-bristled brush to the palette, ghosting in a little round shape on her own paper. “Then we turn circles into things.”

“Cake,” Kirby suggested helpfully, eyes enormous.

Adeleine’s mouth curved. “Cake it is.” She added a scalloped edge. She added a strawberry on top. “Eri?”

Eri looked down at her paper, pencil in hand. She drew a careful circle. It was not perfect. It did not matter. She drew another, smaller. She shaded the second one with gentle insistence.

“Very good,” Ribbon said, as if she’d just watched someone lift a mountain. “Now a plate.”

“Plate,” Eri repeated. “Jaway I forgot.” Her cheeks warmed. Jambastion scrambled with standard words in her mouth; she put them in order again. “How to make… oval.”

“Take your circle,” Adeleine said, reaching over to demonstrate in the air, “and gently squeeze it like you’re hugging a bubble. Not too much. Not too little.” She gave the air an affectionate squish. “Oval.”

Eri squeezed the pencil line into an oval Jawaii and nodded to herself. “Jamanke,” she murmured, grateful.

The eye in her palm blinked. Curious, not mocking.

Adeleine noticed. “Would your… passenger like to try?”

Eri looked at her hand. The eye blinked once, slow, then rolled to look at Kirby. Kirby beamed. “Paint,” he encouraged, offering the small hand a stubby brush he’d been chewing on (no one stopped him; that fight had been lost years ago).

The eye vanished. Eri’s shoulders drew tight. When her head lifted, her mouth was a round, unblinking pupil and her irises were deep night. The pad of paper shivered under her fingers, not because of fear, she wasn’t scared now; the thing inside her was excited, but because the world rearranged its priorities around her.

Ribbon hovered a little higher and steadied herself midair. Adeleine’s brush dipped in blue, ready to become barrier or bird as needed. Kirby leaned forward, eager and unworried.

Dark Matter lifted the brush with interest, as if discovering elbows. It made a mark. The mark was a straight black line, severe and confident, right across Eri’s soft circle. It added another line, perpendicular. A third, diagonal. The lines hummed with a very quiet malice.

“Hmm,” Adeleine said with the smile of an art teacher committed to separating evaluation from fear. “That’s… very decisive.”

"I want to murder." Dark matter said

"No murder. Keep painting." Adeleine said

Dark Matter tried a curve like it had read about them. The curve wanted to be a blade. It kept wanting to be a blade even after it was assigned to be frosting. It tolerated frosting. Barely.

“Maybe,” Ribbon suggested cheerfully, “the cake can be… sharp?”

Eri’s mouth-eye stared at the paper and, for a heartbeat, made the exact feel of laughter with no sound. It added a jagged little smear in the blank space. The smear tried very hard to be a mouth with teeth, discovered it could not eat anyone, and settled for being a shadow.

“Nice value work,” Adeleine said encouragingly. “Now a strawberry?”

Dark Matter stared at the strawberry on Adeleine’s sheet like it was an insult. It made a dot. The dot became a perfect circle again, because circles were unkillable.

Kirby clapped. “Circle good,” he declared. “Fun.”

Dark Matter pulsed with something that might have been agreement. The pupil in Eri’s face expanded, then contracted, then abruptly, slid away. Her lips returned as if someone had placed them there gently; color rushed into her eyes like a tide coming back.

She blinked twice, then looked at the page. “J-juh,” she said, then shook her head to clear it. “I did it?”

“You both did,” Adeleine said softly. “You gave the paper strong bones. Now you give it sugar.”

Eri smiled. It felt like a stitched thing, held together by intent and enjoyed anyway. She made the strawberry, small, heart-shaped, heart-hearted. She gave it seeds like freckles. She colored it with patience. The eye in her palm blinked and was, for once, content to watch.

“Majicious,” she said when she was done, and this time the word tasted properly like sugar.

They painted longer than they planned. Adeleine showed her how to make light darker by putting something darker next to it. Ribbon, delighted to be useful and determined to be kind, fired the tiniest crystal slivers at the edges of Eri’s lines to clean them up, laser-eraser precise. Kirby drew circles until his page looked like soda bubbles and then carefully added faces to them, one of which was a very accurate drawing of a cake calling someone “friend.”

Twice in that hour, Eri’s palm-eye vanished; twice, her mouth-eye returned. The first time, Dark Matter asked "fight?" with the same eager insistence as a kid at the window asking if it was time for the party. Kirby shook his head, mouth full of onigiri. “Week,” he said. “Snack now.”

“Unfair,” Dark Matter sulked at a volume that made leaves twitch. Then it discovered it could taste rice through Eri and went quiet to consider religion.

The second time, it didn’t ask. It seized, quick as a blink, and stood Eri’s body up with too much certainty. Adeleine’s brush hit canvas: barrier snapped into sheerness between body and street. Ribbon’s gun raised on instinct. Kirby put one nub on the small knee and one finger of air in front of his mouth. “Shhh,” he said, and smiled without teeth.

Dark Matter stared at him, caught halfway between I will kill a star and I would like a hug. It vibrated with a battle it wasn’t allowed to have. Then it stomped once with Eri’s foot, a tiny crater in the shrine’s gravel, and sat back down because it had agreed, and it was learning, frustratingly, that agreements you make with people you want for friends are sticky.

“Jambuhbye,” Eri said when her lips were lips again, which was not the right goodbye for a feeling but everyone understood.

They packed up when the shade changed mood. Adeleine wiped her brush carefully and slipped it behind her ear like a promise. Ribbon tucked her crystal gun back into the fold of her ribbon and straightened her dress with two pats. Kirby collected the onigiri wrappers and, after a brief ethical debate, ate them because his ethics staff was out to lunch.

They moved through the city like a rumor. Alley to alley. Rooftop to rooftop when the star was a good idea. Kirby took them across a gap no adult would have risked by simply deciding it was a step. Ribbon tucked herself close to Eri’s ear and told her about a queen who had hugged her and sent her to run when running was the bravest thing. Adeleine kept one hand on the strap of her easel and the other hovering near nothing, ready to paint doors in the air if walls decided to be rude.

Once, on a busy corner, Eri froze because police tape fluttered and the smell of cleaner bit the air. She made a small sound“Jorrow” and it hit all three of her companions like a stone into a bell. Adeleine slid her own hand into Eri’s, sleeve hiding palm-eye. Ribbon pressed a kiss against her temple that she didn’t have to ask permission for because this was a battle and generals improvise. Kirby moved in front without blocking her view, a pink shield with feet, and led them across at the walk signal like a veteran of many cultures.

“Jhappy I have you.” Eri said

Ribbon smiled so wide she almost fell. “We’re happy we have you.”

Kamui Woods and Mt. Lady found a trail and lost it four times.

A woman with a stroller reported a pink balloon with feet. A delivery biker reported a star and then told the officer to stop laughing. A shrine steward reported two girls who left a donation and a sketch of a maple leaf tucked under the box. A street vendor reported a child who said “jamanke” and meant “thank you” and had light-up shoes that blinked half a second after her steps, like they were remembering.

They followed. The trail went cold and came back warm with a text from a shopkeeper who thought she’d seen wings in her security mirror. They ran across rooftops and walked good-naturedly through a street market smelling like vinegar and fresh things. Public Safety pinged them two more stills, grainy, a flash of white cloak on a stairwell, a glimpse of a red beret in a mirror.

“Painter and Fairy,” Mt. Lady said, one finger on her earpiece, balancing the tablet in her other hand. “They look like kids.”

“Powers don’t come with ages,” Kamui said, but his voice had softened.

"Yeah, let's hope we find them before the cloak does." Mt. Lady said

They did not find the Cloak. They did not find Eri. They did not find Kirby. They did, however, find a fresh, perfectly round footprint on a wet rooftop leading to a skylight that had been latched from the inside and was somehow warm.

“We’re behind them by minutes,” Mt. Lady groaned, flopping into a sun-warm rectangle of roof like a cat in the wrong job.

Kamui shaded his eyes, scanning the horizon for a star. “We keep at it,” he said. “Protect them when we do find them. Or from them, if we have to.”

“We won’t,” she said, and made it sound like an order to the cosmos.

Late afternoon, in a pocket park that had decided to be polite, the kind with a slide that looked like a blue dragon and a bench that had never seen a fight, Adeleine taught Eri how to mix green without asking the blue to do all the work. Ribbon taught her how to hold a brush without strangling it. Kirby taught her how to draw circles faster than a person can say “circle,” which is not pedagogically helpful but is very on brand.

The eye in her palm watched, unblinking, and learned a different kind of pattern. Violence had its rhythms. So did cake. This one had room for “again” without “destroy.” That was new. It was confusing. It was interesting. It was a kind of hunger.

“Janno,” Eri said firmly when the eye tried to creep into her mouth. “No.”

The eye stilled, then blinked contritely. Kirby held up an onigiri and shook it like a rattle. The eye couldn’t roll, but if it could have, it would have. It let Eri have her lips and went back to watching through her palm, like putting your ear to a wall to hear your neighbors being happy.

A boy on a scooter came into the park and did not die. A breeze moved the hair at Eri’s temple and did not carry threat. A dog tugged its human over for a sniff and got to make up its own mind about puffballs (verdict: friend).

Adeleine sketched the dog with five lines and a dot and handed the page to the boy, who blinked like somebody had turned the world into his size and handed it to him gently. The boy smiled and didn’t ask questions he didn’t need answers to. He scooted off.

“Jamedetāna,” Eri told the dog in the dog’s general direction, congratulations for being exactly that dog. The dog wagged at the pronouncement; status conferred.

Kirby’s phone chirped his pink theme. He checked it, frowned at nothing urgent (Dedede asking if he’d eaten; Meta Knight answering for him; Bandanna Dee adding a sticker of a star and a knife), and tucked it away.

Dark Matter thrummed, there is the star, there is the killer, there is the promise, then settled because week. It was learning calendar. It was furious about calendar. It felt very, very much like a child told they couldn’t open their present yet and finding out that waiting made the present bigger.

“Soon,” Kirby told the palm.

Eri giggled, delighted that Kirby had adopted her word. “Jonto,” she echoed, tapping her palm with one finger like a knock. The eye blinked back, once, solemn.

At golden hour, someone on a neighboring roof caught a final image from too far away to be used for anything but rumor: an artist’s silhouette packing an easel. A small fairy doing a barrel roll to show off for no one. A child with a horn holding up a paper with an oval on it and beaming like she’d painted the sun. A puffball framing the whole thing with his nubs like a director.

The camera phone in that someone’s hand died at 1%.

The picture made it to a friend’s friend anyway, and by the time Kamui and Mt. Lady learned of it, the bench was empty and the oval had become a strawberry cake, and the park had gone back to being a park.

Kamui closed the loop over comms. “We’re a block late.”

Ryukyu didn’t sigh. You could hear a sigh without hearing it anyway. “Keep the net soft.”

“Always,” Mt. Lady said. She looked at the skyline and imagined a star cutting it and decided the city had room for one more preposterous thing. “We’ll get them before anyone meaner does.”

It wouldn’t. Not today. Maybe not tomorrow.

The Cloak would be a headline until it wasn’t. The Commission would spin, because that’s what it did. The League would sulk and plan new errors. Somewhere out beyond the cloudline another black eye, older than horror and hungrier than policy, was cutting its way toward this particular gravity well because fun had been rumored here.

But in a pocket of the city the maps didn’t mark with a star, a girl learned to paint an oval and turned it into cake. A fairy learned she could shoot crystal so gently it erased fear lines instead of carving them. An artist learned her hands could make a barrier fast enough to keep trust from falling. A puffball learned that telling a darkness “week” might be the kindest cruelty he could offer. And an eye learned that watching was a kind of eating that didn’t make anyone die.

Kamui Woods, on a roof three blocks away, watched night catch on the edges of things and decided to do the same.

Mt. Lady pulled her mask down properly and waved at a TV crew anyway, because hope loves a camera.

Down a quiet street, Kirby held Eri’s hand, right hand, palm-eye turned inward like a secret that had agreed to behave, and pointed with his other nub at a vending machine. “Juice,” he said, pronouncing it like a magic word.

“Majicious,” Eri promised the cans, whole-body serious.

They drank apple, because today deserved sweet. Adeleine drew a straw on the side of Eri’s paper so the cake could join them. Ribbon insisted on a toast. The eye in Eri’s palm blinked at the apple and decided it did, in fact, count as a flavor worth knowing. It was not blood. It was not fear. It was better.

“Once a week,” Kirby told the eye again, because deals are rituals.

The eye blinked, annoyed at being reminded and pleased at being remembered.

“Jhappy,” Eri whispered to the evening, testing the word in the dark. The city, which sometimes understood people better at night, whispered it back by not doing anything rude for three whole minutes.

If you were sitting very high and looking very far, you could have seen a speck in the upper sky that was not a plane. You would not have understood it. It would not have cared. The speck angled toward a place with a park bench, a star, a cake, and two kinds of eyes learning how to share.

And for another small, stolen day, the search could keep looking, the hunters could keep being donors, the headlines could keep getting the names wrong, and four. well, five friends could keep making circles.

Chapter Text

They found them in a pocket of the city that looked like a greeting card, brick plaza, a fountain pretending to be polite, pigeons with pensions. A maple flickered in the breeze as if it had a secret. On the bench by the fountain: a child with a white horn learning how to shade circles into strawberries; a tiny fairy hovering like punctuation; an artist with a red beret correcting the world with a brush; and a pink sphere building a small fortress out of onigiri wrappers.

Kamui Woods and Mt. Lady came in soft.

He dropped a line, reeled himself down, landed light on the lip of the fountain with his hands open. She approached at normal size, friendly smile set carefully, the kind you bring to kids and street interviews. They didn’t call their names across the plaza like sirens; they didn’t draw attention. They stepped into the square prepared to be the sort of adults who don’t make fear worse.

“Good afternoon,” Kamui said, voice pitched warm. “Kamui Woods-"

The syllable fell into a well.

Kirby’s eyes snapped to him and went flat in a way that made the air do a small, guilty shiver.

Adeleine stopped mid-stroke, paintbrush hovering over her palette like a suspended verdict. Ribbon’s wings hummed into an uneasy chord. They were looking at Kamui Woods and seeing, through layers of memory and painted worlds Whispy Woods, Flowery Woods, Clanky Woods, Yaggy Woods, Parallel Woods, Tropical Woods.

Trees that had shot apples like insults. Trees that had chased them on root-legs. Trees that had coughed up puffs and gordos and the audacity to be smug about it.

“Woods,” Adeleine breathed, experience snapping her into a stance that had nothing to do with quirk registration forms. “Again.”

“Woods,” Ribbon agreed, eyes narrowing. “Oh, for Nova's sake.”

Eri glanced between faces, confusion knitting her eyebrows, mouth opening to say Janno, no, no fighting, but it was too late for words to leash history.

The pink puff went red-eyed serious and bounced off the bench.

“No-!” Mt. Lady started, hands lifting in the universal wait we’re nice, but Kirby was already moving, a round comet, a squeaky meteor, battle-joy fizzing out of him like a soda shaken on purpose.

Adeleine swung her brush up with the efficiency of muscle memory. The bristles met air and the air accepted it: a sleek shield painted into being, interposing itself between Eri and anything that wanted to be rude. Ribbon zipped above, crystal gun already chime-ready.

“Hold,” Kamui said, taking a step back on instinct—and the plaza exploded.

Three seconds is longer than it sounds when they’re full.

First second. Kamui saw the kid, small, impossible, dangerous as a nursery rhyme with true teeth, launch at him. Arbor flew from his forearms in a reflex fan, hardwood tendrils spreading to catch, to bind, to protect. Kirby hit the first branch with a puff-cheeked inhale and the wood stuttered, then vanished into him like it had decided to be dessert. Kamui’s eyes widened. “He-he inhaled my-

“Don’t let him-!” Mt. Lady started, leaping forward in a giantess’s reflex to shield the plaza, already throwing her body between civilians and unknowns, her shadow rolling across the bricks.

Second second. Kirby’s eyes went delighted. He did not want Arbor (tree powers had a tone), but the idea had already struck: he spun midair, hands* nubs *empty, and then turned and inhaled again.

“Ado?” Ribbon started.

“Go ahead,” Adeleine said, because trust builds in odd centimeters. She tossed her brush.

Kirby took it like a blessing and swallowed it like a star. Light ran around him in a ring, yellow-white, the color of I get to be something fun now, and then settled into new clothes.

A red beret popped onto his head with a jaunty little tilt. A palette appeared on one stubby hand, blobs of paint shining like candy. The other hand held a long, sturdy brush, bristles loaded with infinite color.

Artist Kirby winked.

Kamui’s brain, which had been trained to process threat profiles, decided to file this under “Support-type quirk,likely conjuration.” Then Artist Kirby pulled out a hammer a chisel and a block of stone and conjured a three-meter marble statue of a king with a hammer, gleaming and perfect, and finished. He chiseled three delicate details in less than a breath.

And used it as a bat.

The statue swung with startling grace and kissed Kamui’s ribs. For a normal person, it would have been the end of ribs. For a pro hero, it was only the end of planning. Kamui flew backwards like a handsome branch freed in a storm, crashed through his own Arbor sprout, and slumped against the base of a helpful lamppost that tried and failed to catch him.

Third second. Mt. Lady went big.

She didn’t grandstand; there was no time. Her body surged up, clothes caught relaxed and built for this, hair whipping, face set. She planted one foot to avoid crushing a bench, the other pivoting into the square to interpose her mass between the kids and any stupidity.

Artist Kirby grabbed another block of stone and in no time flat made another statue, this one a whimsical star with a cheerful face and terrible mass and heaved it one-handed with physics-defying glee.

“Wait!” Mt. Lady managed, hands up, because she was used to catching buildings, and then the star hit her square in the sternum.

It didn’t break her. It just convinced her. She toppled backward in one dignified, what the hell, and laid down across the street neatly between two parked cars, eyes closed, a giantess in the wrong fairy tale, no casualties except her pride and a mailbox that would never be the same height again.

Silence fell into the plaza like a soft hammer.

Kamui slid down the lamppost to a crouch and then to his knees, trying to get his balance back from somewhere under the statue’s opinion of him. He blinked spots, saw a small fairy politely emptying his own Arbor bindings from Kirby’s puff of breath into the fountain so they wouldn’t trip anyone, and made a noise that sounded like the beginning of the world’s grumpiest poem.

He had never felt so earnestly and thoroughly bonked in his life.

“Target neutralized,” Ribbon said to no one, tone cheerfully professional. She zipped back to Eri and saluted. “You okay?”

Eri had both hands clenched in her skirt, small shoulders drawn up around her ears like shields. The eye in her palm had vanished; her mouth was a mouth. “J-jamanke,” she said shakily, then, more collected: “Jhappy I’m okay.” She peeked around Adeleine’s painted barrier at Kamui. “Juh. Why… woods?”

“Long story,” Adeleine said, diverting a laugh into a breath. “With apples.”

Kirby bounced in place, the giant brush bobbing with gleeful menace. He pointed it like a sword at Kamui, Artist Knight to a tree with bad timing. “Woods,” he said with solemn baby gravity. “Bad.”

Kamui looked up, dazed, and decided to try talking again. “We-” He coughed. “We’re heroes.”

“Mm,” Artist Kirby said, unconvinced, and gave him one more boop with the bristles that painted a mustache on his mask before Adeleine gently hooked the brush with hers.

“Kirby,” Adeleine chided, smile betraying her. “We do not graffiti heroes’ faces.”

“Why,” Kamui muttered to the sky, “does the brush hurt.”

“Because art is violence,” Ribbon offered helpfully, then clapped both hands over her mouth. “Wait- no-I mean-it’s powerful! Powerful!”

Mt. Lady groaned the way large people do when gravity has filed a formal complaint. “Anyone get the plate number of that statue?” she mumbled, shrinking down mid-prone so she wouldn’t scare a pigeon that had arrived to audit the situation.

Artist Kirby twirled his brush and in that motion the beret popped off his head like a bubble; color peeled away. He handed Adeleine her brush back and went instantly, disarmingly round again. “Poyo,” he said brightly, as if all he had done was ask directions.

In the space where offense could have grown, there was only confusion. Kamui pushed himself upright and winced; Arbor crawled speculatively from his wrists and then decided against it. He met Adeleine’s eyes. “You attacked me,” he said, hurt and bewildered. “Why?”

Adeleine’s mouth opened and closed. Because your name is Woods and trees have tried to kill us is not a sentence with the kind of PR that makes your day easier. She opted for honesty without context. “We have… history,” she said. “With Woods.”

Ribbon nodded, face serious. “The worst one had gears.”

Kamui stared at them for a heartbeat and then at the fountain and then at the sky like it might explain why this made sense to anyone. “So you-"

“Janno,” Eri said quickly, stepping in front of them, small hands out in apology. “No hurt. Kirby… jorrow about trees.” Sad. She grimaced. “Not your fault.”

“Wh-” Mt. Lady had propped herself on her elbows, hair a sunlit mess. “Did I just get punted because of a last name?”

Artist Kirby looked at her, blinked big, then patted her boot with sincere pity. “Sowwy.”

Her indignation had the decency to trip over a laugh. “Okay, you’re cute, I hate that.”

Dark Matter blinked awake in Eri’s palm like an eyeball pressing a hand to the glass. It had watched Kirby inhale wood, paint, change. Its attention sharpened, not hunger, not quite; something like curiosity turned into a blade. He consumes to become. Data by devouring. Interesting.

It slipped control for a microsecond, just long enough to lean Eri’s head and regard the pink creature as if looking into a mirror that had chosen to be a joke. You can become.

“Mm,” Kirby said to the eye, already back to being a sphere with too much gravity and good intentions. “Copy.” He puffed up proud, then poked his own chest. “Kirby good copy. Best.”

The eye narrowed into a grin that wasn’t on a mouth. We will test that. The feeling curled, mischievous. It loved tests that were fights. It loved them with a child’s pure intensity. It felt a calendar pinch and made a noise like a sulk against Eri’s skin.

“Week,” Kirby reminded it, simple and firm. “No now.”

Mt. Lady struggled upright the rest of the way with a hissed oath and immediate regret. Kamui stepped toward her on instinct and then remembered his ribs protested this relationship. “We don’t want to hurt you,” he said to the group, because that felt like a thing heroes should say out loud. “We were sent to protect you from the… cloaked person.”

Adeleine and Ribbon exchanged a quick look that said, in the elegant shorthand of girls who have fought monsters with paint and friendship, we should go before kindness turns into paperwork.

(DON'T TELL HER IT'S ERI.) is what they were thinking

Ribbon tipped her head, smiled a smile that looked like a bow, and returned to hovering above Eri’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she told Kamui, sincere despite the brusie-blossoming across his side. “For… trying.”

Kamui exhaled slowly. “If there’s something hunting you,” he said, calm because being calm looked better when you were bleeding, “we’re on your side.”

“Jamanke.” Eri Said

“Right,” Mt. Lady said, planting her hands on her hips and choosing dignity over fairytales. “So we… all hit pause, and you-” she pointed at Kirby with two fingers and a glare she couldn’t make stick, “-don’t throw me again.”

Kirby blinked enormous contrition. “No throw,” he promised solemnly. Then, unable to help himself, “Maybe little throw.”

“Absolutely not,” Adeleine said, shepherding him back by his shoulders. “We do not punt super heroes.”

Kamui took that as the closest thing to an understanding he was going to get and decided to spend the rest of his morning hydrating and filing a report full of words like unprovoked and unknown motive and statue. He lifted a hand, grimacing. “We’re going to… step out. Please, don’t run if you see cloaks.”

“Run if you see trees,” Ribbon whispered to Eri, scandalized joke conspiratorial. Eri bit her lip to keep from giggling and nodded very seriously.

Kirby looked at Kamui’s mask, then at his own palette-less hand, then back up. “Tree friend?” he ventured, as if hoping names could be negotiated like snacks.

Kamui didn’t know how to answer that. “I’m… working on it,” he said, sincerity winning against common sense.

They were gone before the siren-lag could catch upc Adeleine’s brush flick made a neat fold in the air; Ribbon took Eri’s hand like a tether; Kirby clicked open his phone and did not call anyone, but the Warp Star arrived anyway out of courtesy. They hopped onto it and it zipped away low, humming, a polite miracle.

Kamui and Mt. Lady sat in the plaza’s aftermath for an extra thirty seconds, because getting up would make the pain complain louder. A pigeon hopped up and eyed Kamui’s painted mustache like a cultural phenomenon.

“Don’t,” he told it.

It cooed like it was going to write an op-ed.

“Why did they attack you,” Mt. Lady asked finally, incredulous laughter hiding under the question like a dare.

“I have no fucking clue that woods thing makes no sense I think they're lying,” he said, which sounded ridiculous even to him.

She squinted at him, at the trajectory of the statue to her breastbone, at the onigiri wrapper that had ended up on her shoulder. “I don’t like them,” she decided, then sighed, because she did, a little, anyway.

“We’ll file,” Kamui said, resigned. “And I will never live down ‘another tree beat.’”

“You won’t,” she agreed, patting his shoulder with sisterly affection. “Also you have a mustache.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “I hate art.”

On a rooftop two neighborhoods away, the Warp Star settled with a happy wobble. Eri climbed off carefully, still slightly star-drunk, and set her feet down like she was telling the roof she appreciated it. Adeleine scanned the horizon, painter’s eye mapping escape routes out of habit; Ribbon did a quick barrel roll and then arranged her skirt because dignity was a hobby. Kirby bounced once, twice, then looked at his friends with the particular solemnity he reserved for we should end a day before it decides to end us.

“Home?” he asked Adeleine and Ribbon.

Adeleine’s mouth tilted with gratitude and regret. “We should,” she said softly. “Artist business. Also overdue naps. Though it was kinda nice to see more humans.”

Ribbon floated closer to Eri’s eye level and smiled with her whole face. “I’m so happy we met you,” she said, and meant the kind of happy that gets sewn to your ribs and becomes part of your structure. “Jhappy,” she added, testing the word, mangling it adorably.

Eri’s grin tipped sideways. “Jhappy,” she echoed, and then, emboldened “Jambuhbye?”

“Goodbye,” Ribbon confirmed gravely. Adeleine’s eyes shone. She reached out and squeezed Eri’s shoulder, careful to miss the palm.

“Mapop,” Eri whispered, and Adeleine blinked.

“Hope,” Adeleine repeated, and tucked it behind her ear like another brush.

Adeleine swept her arm in a clean arc; the air agreed to be painted again. A portal opened, edges tinged with color, center a soft ripple of home. Ripple Star waited in that brightness, patient and dear.

They stepped toward it, Adeleine first, Ribbon backward so she could wave longer like a small bright flag. “Eat something sweet for us!” Ribbon called. “And don’t punt any more people with names!”

“Janno,” Eri promised gravely, which was not a promise anyone would be able to enforce, but everyone felt better hearing it.

They were midway through the threshold when the portal burped.

Something blue and smiling and profoundly gooey launched through face-first like a seal deciding the pool party hadn’t gotten loud enough yet.

“Gooo!” it yelled in a voice like a laugh trying on a gurgle, tongue already out to taste a new world. The portal popped closed behind it with a prim little humph that implied, fine, but I did not approve that guest list.

The blue thing skidded to a wobbly stop, grinned with one enormous mouth incapable of faking anything, and then launched at Kirby with the enthusiasm of a comet that had decided hugging was a sport.

“GOOEY!” Kirby wailed, pure joy cracking his baby voice into a squeal. He bounced to meet the impact and the two of them collided into a pile of friendship and nonsense on the roof, rolling in circles while the skyline judged them and found them perfect.

Gooey was, to the untrained eye, about as describable as a daydream: a cobalt-blue blob, rounder than intentions, with googly eyes, a wide, dopey mouth, and a tongue that frankly was out of compliance with most codes. He wore no clothes and cared not; he radiated pal the way a campfire radiates stay. His energy tasted like Dark Matter with all the malice sifted out and replaced with snacks.

Eri gaped, then clapped, delighted. “Jawaii!” she said helplessly. “So jawaii!”

Adeleine, still half-turned toward a portal that had already considered itself punctual, laughed in a way that made Ribbon wipe her eyes. “He made it,” she said. “I thought he might.”

“Hi!” Gooey released Kirby and spun in place like a yo-yo discovering interpretive dance. “Hi hi hi! Gooey came! Gooey friend!” His tongue lolled, then retracted with pleased efficiency. “Eat?”

“Soon,” Kirby promised, patting him like a dog made of pudding.

The eye in Eri’s palm slid open with a will like a decision. Control tugged and the girl’s posture shifted with that tiny, alarming grace. Her mouth smoothed into an eye; her irises got swallowed by night. She leaned forward, held her hand out not like a handshake but like a scientist revealing a specimen, and Dark Matter peered at Gooey through a child’s body and a borrowed life.

“What… am I looking at?” it demanded, the question pressed into everyone’s heads like a thumbprint.

Gooey blinked his googly eyes, then grinned wider, because what else does one do when confronted by a familiar estranged cousin crammed into a darling vessel. “Gooey!” he said, proud of solving introductions. He pointed at himself. “Gooey!” He pointed at Kirby. “Kirby!” He pointed at Eri’s face-eye. “New friend?”

Dark Matter tilted Eri’s head like a bird processing jazz. It tasted the thing’s flavor: almost-us, but sugar-forward, kindness fat. There was a memory folded into it, cold stars, a king fighting, being cut by a pink laugh, and then the memory had been baked into comfort. It tried on contempt like an old coat and found it didn’t fit. It tried on interest and it snapped into place like a toy on the right peg.

“You are…” It rummaged for a word that didn’t exist and attempted honesty. “…ridiculous.”

“Yay!” Gooey cheered, because compliments come in many shapes if you’re generous. He slapped Kirby on the back with a flappy hand; Kirby flapped back with equal dignity.

Eri reclaimed her mouth like a person reclaiming a chair at a party from a friend who’d sat too long. She slid a stare to her palm and then to Gooey and then to Kirby, eyebrows lifting. “That’s… Gooey?” she asked, making sure the vowels did what Kirby’s mouth did.

“Gooey!” Gooey agreed. “Good! Gooey good!” He planted a wet slap of a high-five on her small hand before anyone could mediate. The eye in her palm blinked, offended for exactly one beat, then, against its own sense of theater, blinked again with less offense. Friends had weirder textures.

“Jhappy,” Eri declared, almost dizzy with it. She looked back toward where the portal had been. “Adeleine- Ribbon-” The rooftop answered with a swirl of color; the painters reappeared halfway, both of them laughing because of course Gooey had done that.

“We came to take him back,” Adeleine said, cheeks pink, voice fond. “But since he’s already got his shoes off…”

“Let him stay,” Ribbon begged, hands clasped. “He’s very good at snacks.”

Kirby nodded violently. “Stay!” he demanded. “Gooey stay. Friend stay.”

Gooey had already decided. He wrapped an arm around Eri and did a small, gentle squish that left no damp, only the sense of being hugged by a water balloon with impeccable consent. Eri squeaked and then giggled and then had to restrain herself from saying Jamblasted because the happiness was too big to not knock stuff over.

Dark Matter watched all of it with an expression that didn’t exist because it didn’t have a face, which somehow made the feeling more obvious: cautious, prickly… intrigued. He is us, but happy, it thought, and, unwilling, found the concept offensive and tempting at the same time.

Kirby flopped onto his back on the roof, hands behind his head, looking up like he had decided to be a small, satisfied planet. Gooey flopped next to him and did the exact same posture, eye to eye with the sky. Eri mimicked them both because copying is how children experiment with being, and because today had been complicated and ending it with simple shapes felt like a spell.

Adeleine checked the horizon one more time, then let the portal close with a painter’s flourish. Ribbon tucked a lock of hair behind her ear (a feat of wing-assisted physics) and settled cross-legged by Eri’s side, inspecting the eye in her palm with interest and no fear. "I hope you two become good friends."

Meanwhile Mt. Lady and Kamui Woods limped toward a report that would be difficult to write and impossible to forget. The Commission waited for a call that would make their flowcharts cry. Somewhere not yet announced, something old and grey angled lower in the upper sky, excited for a fight.

On the rooftop where the right kind of story had decided to land, a puffball, a child, a fairy, a painter, and a redeemed piece of darkness lay in a line like five points of a new constellation.

“Week,” Kirby told the palm eye again, not looking, lazy and irrevocable.

The eye blinked, sulky and compliant.

“Another tree beat,” Ribbon said softly, and Adeleine laughed until she had to wipe her eyes again.

Eri held her hand up to the light and watched the small, strange eye wink back at the sun like they had a secret. She did too. Several.

“Byeee!,” Adeleine called from the last vestige of color, and then they were gone, home on the far side of a painting.

Kirby sat up, clapped his hands like cymbals, and declared the only reasonable next step.

“Cake.”

Chapter Text

The conference room at the Hero Public Safety Commission had the polite hush of a library that preferred court transcripts. The President sat at the head, hands folded, the sort of calm that makes other people check if the ground is sturdy. Screens along the wall held still frames: a cloaked figure lifting a Nomu’s head like a broken lantern; two girls, one with a beret and a brush, the other hovering with translucent wings, rushing into frame; a star-shaped blur above a park; a round, pink creature in three different angles of “I’m not from around here.”

Kamui Woods stood straight-backed despite the wrap beneath his costume. The dark bruise spreading along his ribs tugged whenever he breathed too deep, so he’d taught himself not to. Mt. Lady sat beside him, hair tied back in a no-nonsense tail, arms crossed and dignity taped back together with gallows humor.

“Walk us through it,” the President said.

“Contact at 14:23,” Kamui began, voice even. “We approached with open posture, low tone, no sirens. I identified myself. The puff, Starchild, in your classification, closed distance in under a second. Painter conjured a barrier around the minor. Fairy took overwatch.”

“Unprovoked,” Mt. Lady said flatly. “He didn’t flinch. He inhaled Kamui’s Arbor, then inhaled a paintbrush, changed into a painter version of himself, and hit us with a statue that didn’t exist three seconds before it hit me.”

Rock Lock made a choked noise that wanted to be a laugh and failed out of respect for pain. “A statue.”

“A very heavy statue,” Mt. Lady said grimly. “My sternum agrees.”

Hawks leaned back, pen twirling. “And the motive?”

Kamui’s jaw twitched once. “They said… ‘Woods.’” He glanced aside, then committed to it. “Those three have a history with entities named Woods. Trees. They perceived me as a threat because of my name.”

Silence did a circuit of the room.

Endeavor pinched the bridge of his nose. “You are telling us,” he said carefully, “that a trio of unknowns assaulted pro heroes because you share a syllable with a tree.”

Aizawa’s mouth edged. “They’re children or near to it. Children make patterns when the world has tried to kill them enough times. Sometimes the pattern is dumb. Sometimes the pattern keeps them alive.”

"So what? They fell off a tree too many times?" Hawks joked

(More like it threw spikes at them.)

Sir Nighteye tapped a stylus against his pad. “Unprovoked or not, we can’t write that up. The public will read ‘vigilante assault.’” He flicked to the next still: the helicopter capture of the Warp Star. “But intent matters for our purposes.”

Ryukyu nodded, voice mild over iron. “They protected the child first. They fought to create a gap. After the hit, did they press?”

Kamui shook his head. “No. The puff… apologized. Sort of. Then they departed without further damage. They could have escalated. They didn’t.”

Mt. Lady rubbed the place on her chest where the star had convinced her. “I don’t buy the tree excuse,” she said plainly. “I don’t buy much of this. But I recognize a reflex built on history. It’s not malice; it’s… muscle memory.”

“And yet,” the President said, eyes sliding to the Nomu stills. “There is a cloaked entity with unknown capabilities that decapitated or carried a decapitated Nomu; there are two unregistered quirked individuals, Painter and Fairy, cooperating with an unclassified anomaly and a minor with a weaponized Quirk. You’re asking me to call this ‘benign.’”

“No,” Nighteye said. “We’re asking you to call it ‘ours.’” He slid a folder forward. “Protective custody, voluntary if possible. Bring them in, not for arrest, for protection. If those four can’t handle the cloaked figure, only top pros can.”

Endeavor grunted. “And if those 3 are the threat.”

“Then we’ll wish we had them in a room with padding and tea,” Hawks said cheerfully. “We don’t win this with handcuffs.”

Best Jeanist pointed to a bullet-point list on the screen that, if you squinted, resembled a knitting pattern more than a plan. “Soft perimeter. Kamui and Mt. Lady stay primary points of contact.” He gave Kamui a sympathetic glance that acknowledged statues. “Ryukyu’s team on retainer. Hawks airborne. Endeavor on rapid response.”

“Add me,” Aizawa said. “If the cloaked individual is in play, my Erasure buys seconds. Seconds matter.”

Midoriya, seated along the wall like a student who had accidentally become a meeting, leaned forward, hands on his knees, that crush of earnestness lighting behind his eyes. “Madam President, please let me assist.”

Rock Lock half-turned. “Kid-"

“Rock Lock,” Midoriya said quickly, “I know Eri. She knows me. She’s speaking… a mix of languages right now. I’m the only one she’s tried to talk to who didn’t scare her. If you send a squad of pros, she’ll run. If she sees me, she might pause.” He swallowed. “I can keep her from being afraid.”

The President studied him like he was a brief she had to absorb without underlining. “Parameters,” she said at last. “You engage the cloaked entity immediately. If it's not there You don’t chase. You speak. You’re a bridge, not a battering ram.”

Midoriya nodded so hard it looked like the agreement might fly off. “Yes, ma’am.”

Sir Nighteye glanced his way, quiet pride tucked behind professional distance. “He has support,” he said. “We’re not going to get another shot at trust.”

“Fine,” the President said, making the word sound like an order the universe had already obeyed. “Operation Hearth. Priority: keep the minor breathing and the city unbroken. Bring them in if you can. Do not force a fight you can’t finish.”

They broke like a wave that knew where to go. Kamui sent a discreet text to Mt. Lady, we’ll be nicer than statues, and got back a reply that was just a star emoji and a skull.

Midoriya left the building at a run that didn’t look like one. He had a name and a map and the kind of hope that makes poor strategies better.

The sky, for what it was worth, had its own plans.

On a rooftop that had decided many interesting things belonged on it, Kirby, Eri, and Gooey held court with a convenience-store feast. Gooey, who, for the record and the correction of certain narratives, was a small, blue blob with two round, googly eyes and a long, red tongue, had discovered strawberry milk and was prepared to file a patent. When he grew excited, his eyes had the decency to wobble with enthusiasm. When he flapped his arm-like appendages, the world graciously didn’t ask where joints were.

“Gooey good!” he declared, slapping a sticky high-five with Kirby that sounded like two jellyfish agreeing. “Kirby good! Food good! Girl good!”

“Eri,” Eri supplied, charmed by being included in a list with food. “Ji Eri.” Me Eri.

“Eri good!” Gooey amended, satisfied.

The eye in Eri’s palm blinked with a proprietary interest in everything. It had come to terms, grudgingly, with rice. It found apple acceptable. It considered milk as a concept and decided it would be willing to allow the child to digest it.

Kirby was constructing a pyramid out of onigiri when the air above them gave itself a paper cut.

Something descended from the atmosphere. Cold air breathed through from a place that remembered mirrors as mouths. Glassy ripples ran down the edges like rain that had politely turned around.

He landed like a shadow.

Gray armor, not dull, but deeply, seriously gray, caught the afternoon light and declined to shimmer. A mask, much like Meta Knight’s, but scarred with a down-slash across the left side, horns sharper, slit thinner, committing to a permanent scowl. A torn black cape that was cape and wing both; tattered feathers whispering in the breeze. Crimson sabatons struck the roof with the clean, ringing report of a sword’s truth. His eyes, orange, lit as if with an inner furnace, narrowed from beneath the mask.

His sword looked very much like Galaxia had chosen a brother: silver blade split into six tines, hilt cradling a blue sapphire instead of a ruby. When he raised it, the light along its edges shifted with an intelligence that wasn’t quite thinking and wasn’t quite magic, but shook hands with both.

Dark Meta Knight inclined his head a fraction, the smallest possible acknowledgment that did not immediately become a bow.

He had come orginally to see Kirby to tell him shadow Kirby missed him

Then he saw the girl

The girl with untapped potential and a demon in her

Eri went very still in the way prey does when a predator announces itself politely. “Meta-” she started, then frowned. “Is Dark.”

Kirby squeaked in a way that had history. He bounced once, twice, three times, joy with wariness folded inside it, and then planted himself between Eri and Dark Meta Knight with the calm of a storm front that had decided to be kind.

“Poyo,” Kirby said warily. “Dark… Meta.”

“Hmm.” Dark Meta Knight’s voice came out of the mask cool and clipped, like the underside of a blade. “You leave long enough, even your shadow forgets the shape of your back.” One gauntleted hand flicked, the sword describing a circle in the air that turned the mirror’s seam into a closed, patient line. “Shadow Kirby misses you.”

“Kirby miss too,” Kirby admitted, cheeks round. “Sorry.”

Gooey blinked both eyes in delighted dismay. “Shadow! Hi! Gooey friend too!” He waved like a puddle learning semaphore.

DMK’s gaze slid to Gooey, paused at the tongue, catalogued the eyes, and moved on. He scented the air a different way, his attention narrowing, finding something old and familiar and profoundly wrong. He turned to Eri.

“You house a familiar malice,” he said, voice like a bare foot on cold tile. The orange of his eyes flared once. “Tempered.”

The eye in Eri’s palm blinked back with a slow, interested hate. Control tugged. Eri’s mouth smoothed into an unblinking pupil; her irises deepened to night. She looked at him with a child’s posture and an ancient intention.

Dark Meta Knight nodded once. No alarm. No pity. “I will know your edge,” he said simply. “Spar.”

Kirby wobbled, prepared to scold both of them into snacks. “Week,” he told the palm eye sternly. “Deal.”

The eye rolled, if a pupil can roll, and then pressed the feeling of a shrug into everyone’s skull. Not Kirby. The blade. It reached for the night and it came, familiar and eager, black sword drawing itself out of absence, humming like a line through a staff.

Eri’s weight shifted to the balls of her feet the way a child’s body learns balance by stealing it. Her elbows found angles she hadn’t owned this morning. Dark Matter, refracted through a 6-year-old’s joints and terror and brand-new hope, stepped forward.

Dark Meta Knight lifted his sword in salute, economical, no flourish. He did not announce himself. He did not bow. He moved.

His first cut wasn’t meant to land. It was meant to introduce a conversation. The silver blade went low, then high, then stopped half an inch from Eri’s cheek, the wind of it touching hair.

Dark Matter parried late and sloppy, strength in the wrong place. Sparks skittered. Eri’s shoulder jolted. Gooey clapped involuntarily. Kirby’s feet dug into the gravel.

“You lean with anger,” DMK said, stepping back. “It is heavy. Put your weight on your thinking.” He swept in again, three cuts in a pattern that read like a lesson a teacher had written across a chalkboard. Down. Across. Twist.

Dark Matter tried to meet force with force. The black blade shivered. Eri’s knees wobbled. She hissed “Rigga.” Painful. But her eyes, the ones in her face and the one where her mouth should have been, stayed fierce.

“Breathe,” he told her, and there was something like tenderness filtered through a metal sieve. “Children forget. Swords remind.” He slashed low, then tapped the flat of his blade against her shin, a soft scold. “Feet first. Hands last.”

He changed angles, inverted grip, and threaded cuts at a tempo that demanded attention. Dark Matter responded with hunger and curiosity, oh, this, yes, more, but not yet with form. The night-sword tended toward drama. DMK’s was precision and pettiness in equal measure: he took space, then took more, then tricked you into stepping wrong.

“Watch his shoulder,” Kirby called, baby-talk stern, because if there’s one thing Kirby knows, it’s the tell before the meteor. “Shoulder lie. Feet tell truth.”

Eri’s weight shifted smaller. She sank a fraction, knees greasing, center of gravity dropping into the place kids learn to put it when they’re going to get knocked down by cousins. When the next cut came, she slid, not lunged. The black blade kissed silver instead of trying to eat it.

Dark Meta Knight’s eyes warmed a hair. He increased speed.

Clang. Hiss. Tap. Tap. Tap. He never struck flesh, not truly. He cut air close enough to make it complain. He tapped Eri’s knuckles with the flat when her grip wandered to drama. He used the hilt to flick the tip of her blade when it trembled with appetite.

“Patience,” he said once, softer, and the word held a whole mirror-world’s worth of self-hatred and practice. “Power is a child’s toy. Control is a knight’s.”

Dark Matter snarled, insulted by the lesson and hungry for it. A pulse of night pressed outward, instinct looking for shortcut. Kirby lifted a nub. “No.”

Eri drew breath through her nose the way someone would later teach her to; she made her belly steady. The night-press receded. The next exchange was cleaner.

Gooey leaned so far forward he might have fallen if physics had been paying attention. “Go Eri! Go not-Eri! Gooey cheer both!” His eyes wobbled; his tongue lolled cheerfully. When he got too excited, he almost slumped into his Mock Matter slick, the orange filaments starting to whisper out of his back like decorative seaweed, then reined it back, proud of himself.

Dark Meta Knight shifted to a series of cuts that taught a language by forcing you to speak quickly. Down. Up. Stop. Feint. He let her block two, invited her to chase him on the third, punished the chase with a light rap on the wrists. “Do not answer every question,” he said. “Sometimes the right reply is quiet.”

Dark Matter tried quiet like a dare. The world held its breath. Eri’s stance became a small, reliable thing. He came in again. She did not bite. She slid. She let him pass. She turned her wrists and used the flat to guide instead of batter. Their blades sang a new tune, less rock, more reed flute.

“Jamedetāna,” Eri panted through a grin that belonged to both of them. Congratulations. It was for herself and it worked.

Dark Meta Knight’s eyes flashed. He pressed one more time: a quick, merciless pattern meant to expose either panic or pride. Dark Matter, through a little girl’s ankles, a little girl’s lungs, a little girl’s stubbornness, met it with something new: restraint. He drew his blade back a fraction and let DMK’s silver pass. He used the night blade to tap, not strike, mask to pauldron, pauldron to sword-hand, sword-hand to nothing.

DMK stepped back a half pace and lowered his blade. The torn cape breathed. He inclined his head again, smaller this time, which meant more. “You will not be a fool’s weapon,” he said, and it was somehow not a compliment.

The eye in Eri’s palm fluttered with pride it would never name. Control relaxed its fingers. Her lip returned all at once. She sagged, then stood, sweat beading at her hairline, cheeks pink with effort and thrill. “Jamanke,” she told him, bowing clumsily from the waist because she had seen Kirby bow and wanted to do it right.

Dark Meta Knight’s sword tipped to the side, catching a sunbeam and killing it. “Do not thank me,” he said. “You will pay for these lessons later.” It was delivered so dryly it almost counted as a joke.

“Visit Shadow,” he told Kirby, a warning and an invitation braided. “He sulks, and I am tired of hearing it.” The orange eyes flicked to Gooey. “You, continue to be… you.”

“Yay!” Gooey shouted, which is what you say when someone gives you permission to be the exact shape of your joy.

Dark Meta Knight looked again at the city, the way its edges glinted like knives, the way its wind carried siren-threads, and something unspoken bristled beneath his mask. He looked up, higher than clouds. “When an enemy arrives,” he said, almost to himself, almost to them, “you will need more than deals.”

Kirby’s smile thinned. He nodded once. He understood.

DMK lifted his sword. The air remembered it was a mirror. He cut it open with a surgeon’s confidence. Before stepping through, he paused, some part of him that Meta Knight would have called conscience and Dark Meta Knight would have called tactical sentiment looking back. “You did good for your state,” he said, eyes on the small palm that held too much. “No more.” The orange softened a fraction. “You are-” He stopped. He was not good at this. “-small.”

“Janno,” Eri promised, serious as a treaty. “No more. Jonto.” Soon. She could not help adding that. It is hard to teach hope to wait.

He vanished into the slice. The seam sealed with a tidy sigh. The rooftop remembered it was an ordinary piece of the sky and tried to pretend it had not been a stage.

Eri stood there breathing, the night-sword gone, the muscle-memory of it a new thing in her wrists. Dark Matter simmered, intrigued, annoyed, elated, unsated, in the small new room her bravery had carved out for it. It liked the game. It liked being told no by someone who could enforce it. It felt, for the first time in two very long lifetimes, coached.

Kirby bounced over and pressed his forehead to Eri’s, boop, his own odd benediction. “Good,” he said, simple as lunch. “Strong. Not bully.”

Eri beamed at him, then at Gooey, then at her palm, which blinked twice, shy almost. “Jhappy,” she whispered because the word hadn’t stopped feeling like cake.

Gooey did a victory lap that involved two and a half hops and a dramatic flop. “Snack!” he declared, because ritual matters. He produced, no one asked from where, another box of strawberry milk and three mochi. His eyes wobbled with such sincerity that the city below had to forgive itself a little.

They sat in a triangle: puff, girl, goo. Eri took the mochi and held one up toward her palm, giggling when the eye looked back, baffled and slowly charmed by the theatre of eating.

“Week,” Kirby told the eye, one last reminder, like a bedtime story’s refrain.

The eye blinked, annoyed, compliant, hooked.

Somewhere across town, Kamui Woods and Mt. Lady stood before a bank of microphones and said careful things about an encounter with unknowns and the importance of protecting minors. Nighteye’s office pushed soft language. The President let the word “custody” sit next to “voluntary” like two cats making it work.

Midoriya checked the places where a girl might practice circles and waited for the city to deliver him a star.

On the rooftop, Eri practiced a guard position with a broomstick. Kirby clapped at the right moments. Gooey tried to mirror the stance and invented a new martial art called “Languid Jelly,” which would never catch on but which made Eri snort-laugh so hard she had to sit down.

Chapter Text

Seven days can be forever if you’re small.

Eri counted them like sugar grains. On the first morning she drew circles until the lines obeyed her hand. On the second she walked beside Kirby along the river and learned how to tell the wind “no” when it tried to push her. On the third Gooey invented a new sport called “rolling” and made her laugh so hard she forgot to be careful. On the fourth she practiced the way Dark Meta Knight had said to hold a blade with nothing but a broomstick and a stare. On the fifth she slept an entire afternoon without waking up afraid of hands. On the sixth she woke up and didn’t cry because it was real and still here.

On the seventh, the deal knocked politely on the door of her chest.

Week, the pink star had said. We fight once a week.

Dark Matter had been counting too, an old predator pacing in a brand-new nursery. Hunger makes time loud. So does anticipation. It thrummed under Eri’s bones in a rhythm she recognized now: not panic, not pain, something nervous and bright and embarrassing that, if she’d had the right word, would have been excitement.

“Jonto,” she whispered to the eye in her palm as the sun slid down the buildings and made the city edges look like swords. Soon.

The eye blinked back, agreement with teeth.

They chose a place that understood echo: a disused shipping yard near the river, concrete lots gone to weeds, steel containers with faded logos stacked up like the world’s rough draft of a skyline. Dusk laid copper on everything. The water talked to the pilings below in a language you could learn if you were very patient.

Gooey brought snacks, because rituals are glue. He set down a paper bag with exactly the reverence buns deserve, then slurped a juice box in a way that made it religious anyway. “Gooey watch!” he announced, eyes wobbling with glee. “Cheer both! No fight Gooey. Gooey clap!”

Kirby bounced once, twice, three times, like he couldn’t help it, and landed with his little red feet planted, puffed cheeks set. He looked at Eri’s hand, then at Eri’s face. The eye blinked. Her lips softened into a flat, unseeing circle as control slid with a gentle rudeness.

Dark Matter pulled the hood up over Eri’s hair like a stagehand closing curtains. It stepped forward into the middle of the lot, cloak whispering, refusing the blade because appetite enjoys foreplay. In Eri’s small body it felt huge, and carefully did not break her. Even monsters can mind their manners if the stakes are shaped like a child.

Kirby rolled his shoulders and did an absolutely unnecessary stretch that ended in a little wiggle. He lifted a nub like a referee. “Ready?”

The mouth-eye smiled in a way that wasn’t supposed to be possible. “Yes.”

They met.

The first exchange was old as math: a rush and a dodge and the pleasing collision of momentum against will. Kirby flicked forward like a thought, then bounced (boof) off the concrete to change his angle without touching the ground again. Dark Matter didn’t jump so much as tilt, gravity deciding to be a suggestion. Eri’s red lights in her shoes (she’d insisted on wearing them to every important thing) blinked half a second after contact like they were remembering.

Kirby struck, no copy yet, just bare, star-sincere hands. Dark Matter swayed and let the punch paint a line of wind against the cloak. It came back with something that wasn’t quite a kick and not quite a sweep, Eri’s thigh moved, the world agreed to be moved with it. Kirby let it take him, rolled, came up, grinning.

Gooey clapped every time physics tried to file a complaint and got sent home. “Go Eri! Go not-Eri!” His tongue lolled, then zipped back in like a magician apologizing to a handkerchief.

They played like that for a minute that had no seconds, testing and bumping and discovering. A twist of the cloak that wanted to be a blade feint. A Kirby dash that tasted like sugar right before it gives you a headache. A squeak of sneaker against concrete; a little, ridiculous beep from Eri’s shoe-lights that made Dark Matter, unexpectedly, happy.

They weren’t alone.

Heavy feet chew up silence. Dragon wings cut it. The clash of intent makes a sound longer than shouting. All of that sprawled out of the yard and into streets that liked gossip. It carried up and down and sideways until it found ears trained to hunt it.

Ryukyu scythed down first, dragon silhouette knifing across the river and blotting out the copper. She hit the lot with the kind of grace only deep, earned strength gives you. Sir Nighteye followed, the kind of calm that makes catastrophe check its tie. Midoriya vaulted the fence a breath behind them, hands up, heart doing double-time.

He had been dreaming in circles all week. Hearing Jambastion in daylight makes you learn to look harder.

“Visuals?” Nighteye asked without looking away.

“Two knowns one unknown,” Ryukyu answered, voice low and even. Her eyes flicked past a blue blob doing a very professional cheer and snagged hard, what is that. “Puff… the Cloak. And, what… is that.”

“Gooey,” Gooey said, proud. He waved. “Hi!”

Ryukyu’s dragon head tilted in a way that made an entire species reconsider integrity. “We’ll classify you later,” she promised faintly.

Midoriya’s breath caught. “Where are the fairy and artist?” He couldn’t help checking the fence-line for a beret and the glint of wings. He saw neither. “Where’s Eri?” he asked, the name hitting his throat like a bruise. “Where is she? Why else would-"

“-why else would Starchild engage,” Nighteye finished, eyes scanning, mind clicking. “Agree. Priority: extract minor if present; prevent loss of information; do not force escalation.”

Dark Matter flicked its head at the new arrivals, laughably unimpressed; it had been old before this world learned how to name homework. Kirby glanced once, met Ryukyu’s gaze, and gave a small, apologetic shrug as if to say: deal’s a deal; please don’t step in it.

Ryukyux who had listened to briefings about Warp Stars and puffballs and something that might be a cloak and might be grief with hands, chose not to ask permission.

Her dragon body flowed. Her claws closed around Kirby in a grip firm enough to drop a building, careful enough not to bruise a fruit. She lifted him off his red feet with a roar that made bollards take notes and held him like a package you truly intended to sign for.

“Hold,” she told him. “We’re not doing this in a city.”

Kirby squeaked indignantly and tried politeness first. “No,” he told her, very firmly, as if the word could change the structure of a dragon.

It didn’t.

“Cloak!” Midoriya called, because names are leashes and he had none. He sprinted low, Full Cowl crackling emerald along his bones, while Nighteye angled to flank. They moved like a pair practiced, student and strategist, one messy, one exact. “Where is the girl you took?” he demanded, and he meant please say she’s safe and he meant please let me fix this and he meant I will tear holes in time and rules if you made her cry all at once.

Dark Matter tilted the hood and laughed. It sounded like a mirror breaking politely. Then it met them.

It didn’t use the blade. It didn’t need to. Eri’s body moved with a competence she hadn’t owned last week. Dark Meta Knight’s lesson had grafted to bone. A twist of the hip redirected Midoriya’s punch into air; a small step took Nighteye’s Hypermass Seal and made it stomp a shadow instead of a child. A hand (Eri’s hand, Eri’s hand) shot out and smacked Midoriya’s wrist with the flat of a pretend sword. It stung. It was humiliating because it was also a blessing: You don’t get to hit me without learning first.

Nighteye slid in from the side with something wrapped in courtesy that didn’t look like violence until it arrived. He didn’t have time to touch and read, a good thing, perhaps; a glimpse into that future might have set his heart on fire, but he had a practiced body and a conscience you could set your watch by. He aimed for joints, not the child’s face; for the cloak, not the horn.

Dark Matter used Eri’s elbow like a lever and tossed him. He rolled, came up, adjusted his glasses, betrayed nothing but a new entry on a mental ledger.

Then The hits started to land

Because Dark matter allowed it

They needed inspiration

Kirby decided the nice way was over. He squared inside Ryukyu’s grip, inhaled like he meant to inhale the sky, and popped.

It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t dramatic. It was simple: suddenly he wasn’t there. Ryukyu’s claws clenched on nothing; she blinked once, surprised despite being very, very hard to surprise. Kirby booped back into reality on the ground like a magician cheerfully refusing to explain an unpleasant trick.

“Excuse,” he told her, and that was all the apology he could afford.

Something bright and round and alarming tumbled from the small, impossible pocket of his stomach. It wasn’t a star yet, not exactly; it was a color and a shape and a promise: a red core in a halo of white, crackling, humming, that precise flavor of danger sugar gets if you cook it wrong. It spun in his hand and every hair on every arm in the yard wanted to stand straight up.

Midoriya’s brain did the thing it did when analysis got into a car with awe and floored it. Unknown power... what is it

Kirby looked at Dark Matter, at the hood and the posture and the light-up shoes blinking almost merrily, and his face sobered in a way that had broken gods.

“No hurt Eri,” he told himself out loud, because sometimes you have to hear your own rule to remember you mean it.

He flipped the thing up; it glowed brighter, condensed, and snapped into a familiar, terrifying, shape: a five-pointed ability star that pulsed like a heartbeat. It hit concrete once (ting!) and then bounded toward Dark Matter in that jaunty, inexorable way authority has.

Dark Matter turned its head and felt its whole long life drop a pebble into a new kind of well.

(What wonderful inspiration... is this…) It could taste the years in it, the deaths like jam, the pauses like polite knives. It had seen Kirby swallow the world and burp up a new shape a hundred times. It had envied and despised that trick. It had thought it wanted to break it.

It wanted to do it.

(It's Death.)

In the same thought: (I bet I can do it now… LIKE HIM!)

It didn’t even have to lie to itself.

Nighteye and Midoriya hit it then, because heroism is often a mistimed miracle. Midoriya drove in shoulder-first, Full Cowl fizzing, eyes wide, a wordless stop that was the best sentence he had. Nighteye flanked again and brought the edge of his seal across the Cloak’s knee. Dark Matter continued to let them land. It wanted a bruise to remember this by.

“Don’t-!” Ryukyu started, seeing too many angles and not liking any of them.

Dark Matter’s body the body it was borrowing, the small body that had learned to sleep again because a puffball had declared no on her behalf, took a breath that belonged to a different kind of life. Its hood flicked back as its head tipped, and the heroes got their answer in a horror-quiet beat.

Eri’s face was there.

Not her mouth.

Where her mouth should have been, the single, terrible, honest eye opened wide ecstatic.

And it's stomach mouth had formed and wide gaping void with no end

Almost like Kirby.

Sir Nighteye stopped a fatal inch short of driving a seal into a child’s sternum. Midoriya’s punch died in the air with a little scream only he heard.

“No,” he said. His voice cracked on it like a child’s. “No, no, no-"

Dark Matter smiled with a child’s muscles and a god’s lack of pity. “Copy ability: "

The ability star hit the stomach and...

(CHOMP)

...Vanished like a promise kept in reverse.

The air answered with a sound like a hundred clocks choking on their own hands.

A shadowy mass surrounded Eri's body pushing them away as to not interrupt this transformation

A hat arrived on Eri’s head, nonsense and divine: a golden top hat with a shining hourglass set like a crown jewel, a timer dial ticking in place of a feather. Gears winked into being and ran lazy circles along her arms; numerals floated like moths. The field around them went the color old photographs do when love keeps touching them. The tick in the world’s throat skipped a beat and looked up to see who had entered the room.

“TIME CRASH!” Dark Matter finished, delighted.

Midoriya’s eyes went huge in a way that made him look eight. “No way! It copied what Kirby did!?”

Eri, Dark Matter tipped the hat with one finger, almost courtly. It looked at Kirby and something like gratitude, hot and brand-new and inconvenient, punched up through its ribcage.

“I’m so… grateful,” it admitted, as if tasting the word for the first time and finding it absurdly edible.

The world stopped.

Not perfectly; not the way death stops things. Time obeyed the letter of the command and sulked about the spirit. The air went syrup, sticky and sepia. Dust hung in a shape as precise as memory. Sirens on a road three blocks away elongated into a single endless vowel. Ryukyu’s draconic pupils contracted to knives and then forgot how to widen. Sir Nighteye’s glasses caught one last flash of streetlight and held it like a breath. Midoriya’s sleeve froze halfway through flapping, a flag undecided or arrested.

The shockwave that rolled out from Eri’s small, impossible body wasn’t blast; it was priority. Everything else dropped back a step and let this have the stage.

It did touch. It touched with authority. Ryukyu’s dragon body felt it like a giant’s hand saying, sleep. She went to a knee, caught herself on a claw, rage and training both pressing against the syrup and getting politely told to wait their turn. She snarled with her eyes since her throat wouldn’t carry it.

Sir Nighteye took it along his spine and cataloged a dozen injuries he would choose not to have. His arm went numb. His heart stuttered and then remembered itself and kept to time with the only metronome left in the lot: the hourglass on a child’s hat.

Midoriya felt it as a letter from the future that said NOT YET in a handwriting he didn’t like and couldn’t disobey. He tried anyway. It made him love himself a little more and hate himself a little less that he tried.

Gooey, wonderfully, made a noise like “oooo,” eyes wobbling so slowly they approximated normal. Time took one look at him and decided, sure, whatever, which is as close to a get-well card as time ever sends.

The hat’s glow deepened. The clocks along Eri’s arms spun. The minute hand in the lot two blocks over paused halfway between numbers and felt extremely judged.

And of course Kirby… moved.

He always had. He always would. Because he's Kirby. He trotted through the molasses like it was spring grass, cheeks pink, eyes intent. He reached up and gently booped the hourglass with a knuckle. It chimed in a way only malice could hear.

He met Dark Matter’s gaze, and for a full second they were two old enemies sharing a new kind of joke.

“Go,” he said, pointing with a nub at the edge of the yard where the fence was a suggestion.

Dark Matter, Time Crash wrapped around Eri’s small shoulders like mischief, looked at the heroes, at the dragon pinned in syrup, at the strategist suspended mid-step, at the green-eyed boy trying to pull the world back into motion by sheer will. It had a feeling like being seen for the first time. It did not permit it to become softness.

It tipped the hat again, this time to them.

Then it ran.

Kirby scooped Gooey with a practiced, shameless efficiency that made Gooey squeal “Whee!” very, very slowly. He tucked the blob under one arm like a beloved, gelatinous briefcase and jogged after Dark Matter, light, quick, unstoppable. They crossed the lot and the fence behaved like it had promised to try harder.

Time Crash’s field followed them as long as they made new introductions, each fresh enemy, each new touch, a refill on the clock. But there were only a few heroes in the yard and Kirby refused to count as ‘enemy’ even for mechanics. The glow faded as they reached the alley; the sepia peeled; the world cleared its throat and pretended it hadn’t just taken a nap in its chair.

The hat winked out. The clocks slid off Eri’s skin like confetti tired of pretending to be metal. Dark Matter felt the ability evaporate in its mouth and, hilariously, missed it.

It also felt something else: a girl tugging her mouth back like a stubborn blanket.

For a moment Eri’s lips were lips; the hand with the eye squeezed itself into a fist as if it could hold the world in. She didn’t say anything, there wasn’t time, but she looked at Kirby and at Gooey and the look was a whole paragraph with mapop scored across the top.

Then Dark Matter shut the door again, not unkindly. It had a date with weekly joy and more importantly a promise not to be a bully.

They vanished into the city’s maze. The river carried the rumor away with the dusk.

The yard remembered itself.

Ryukyu exhaled hard enough to make debris skitter. She shoved herself upright with an assertion that offended the concept of syrup and shook out her wings, scales rasping on scales like applause. “Status,” she rasped into comms, voice ragged with rage turned into restraint.

“Conscious,” Nighteye said, getting his glasses straight and his soul back into its assigned seat. He took inventory with a professional’s quick brutality. “Minor unaccounted for; Starchild gone with anomaly and… slime. Cloaked entity absorbed a star and produced a time effect.”

“Slime?” Hawks’ voice chirped in, both horrified and delighted. “Say more about slime.”

“Blue. Friendly,” Ryukyu said, the way a dragon says I cannot explain what I saw and I am embarrassed. “Possible ally. Possible hazard. Horrible tongue.”

Midoriya staggered to his feet, chest heaving. He had a handprint on his wrist that would later bloom into a bruise exactly the shape of a small lesson. “It was Eri,” he said, and nobody corrected him into maybe. “It was Eri’s body.”

Silence, again, did a lap.

“She… copied him,” he added, eyes huge, voice somewhere between terror and awe. “She, no, that thing inside her copied the star like Kirby does when he eats.”

Nighteye’s mouth thinned. “Which implies that the anomaly’s power set includes… mimetic absorption, given a catalyst.” He hated every word. “We cannot let that get near any of the truly catastrophic Quirks.”

“Or me,” Ryukyu said dryly, still shaking crystallized time from her joints. “I do not need a dragon in a top hat on my conscience.”

“Did anyone else move in the stop?” Aizawa asked over comms, voice coming from someone else’s rooftop. He was already running toward them; they would later swear they saw him slip between seconds because sometimes he simply refused to be told no.

“Kirby,” Ryukyu said. “Of course.”

“Of course,” everyone else said, and it didn’t even count as sarcasm.

Midoriya looked at the ground where the star had pinged and died and felt a complicated gratitude. Kirby had not used it. Kirby had created a problem and then declined to shove it down their throats. That had to count as mercy in a world where mercy got misfiled under weak.

A Hypermass Seal lay embedded in the concrete where Nighteye had thrown and missed; he retrieved it with a motion that made pain take notes. He looked at the line where the fence had let three miracles through without protest and then at the dragon and the boy. “We regroup,” he said. “We revise language. We recover leverage.”

Ryukyu flexed her hands to ensure they were still claws. “We tell the Commission that an unknown with a child’s body weaponized a time effect and that only a puffball and a puddle left with her. And no sign of the other 2."

“Until we have to,” Nighteye said, because truth is a patient brawler.

Midoriya started to run, then stopped because running without a plan is just exercise. He put his hands on his knees, blinked hard, and then straightened with the kind of fire that doesn’t burn you unless you stand in its way. “She looked at me,” he said softly. “Just for a second. It was her. She saw me.”

“Then she’s still in there,” Ryukyu said, which was both hope and assignment. “And you’re still our best shot at getting her to stop running.”

He nodded. He would bleed to do it. He would be careful because bleeding on purpose is just drama.

Gooey, two alleys away and traveling like a very pleased suitcase under Kirby’s arm, peeked up and waved backward in the general direction of the heroes. “Bye!” he called, because friendliness is a kind of armor.

Dark Matter, hat gone, clocks gone, old as hunger and giddy as trouble, did not look back. It did not need to. It had gotten what it wanted: a week kept, a new trick learned, a promise to remember.

And deep, deep in the city’s spine, gears that had never belonged here began to tick a President revised a speech to the nation in her head three times in a row and threw them out.

On the edge of a roof, Kirby set Gooey down, reached for Eri’s hand, and squeezed once in a language older than the Jambastion words she’d pinned to her heart. The eye in her palm blinked and, for a breath, did not mind at all.

Chapter Text

The Commission’s largest briefing theater could swallow a school assembly and still be hungry. Banks of screens waited like silent jurors. A nation’s worth of bandwidth ran through the ceiling. The President stood center-dais, no warm lights, no podium; just a woman who had decided the room would obey her.

Behind her, the paused footage from the riverside yard inhabited the air: the sepia choke, the child in a gold top hat, clocks skating along small arms; heroes slowed to syrup while a pink sphere strolled through stopped time. In the lower corner, a freeze-frame of a blue blob waving to the camera like a mascot who’d gotten lost.

“Good morning,” she said. It wasn’t. Her tone made it one.

Rows of pros filled the tiered seats, rank-and-file, agency heads, the top three in a line that looked like a weather front. Endeavor’s heat distorted the air even when he wasn’t angry. Hawks sat a fraction slouched, eyes half-lidded, wings folded like patient knives. Best Jeanist was immaculate enough to make dust rethink its life.

Sir Nighteye’s contingent stepped in quiet: Ryukyu, Aizawa, Rock Lock; Midoriya on the end of a row like an apology that refused to leave.

The President didn’t delay. “We attempted soft contact,” she said. “We granted leash to those with rapport. We gave patience all the room it could use. Last night, the cloaked entity used a time-domain effect while in control of a minor’s body, assaulted a triad of pros, and exfiltrated with the anomaly you’ve labeled Starchild and an unknown organism. My duty is to public safety. I am done waiting for the perfect moment.”

She turned slightly. On the primary screen, a still of Eri, hood thrown back in the half-second before the hat, filled the room. Her mouth was not a mouth. The single eye stared the lens down without blinking.

A sharp intake of breath went around the theater. Even pros, even the ones who had been there, flinched before they remembered they were paid not to.

“Separate the threat from the child,” the President said. “By force if necessary. Containment and extraction are now the order of the day.”

Murmurs rose; she lifted a hand and cut them to the floor.

“I will hear arguments for method,” she continued, “but not for mission.” Her gaze ticked to Nighteye. “We have indulged careful. Now we will indulge competent.”

Nighteye kept his face composed. The stylus in his fingers stayed still; only his eyes moved, marking allies, exits, consequences. When he spoke, it was measured, each word wearing a vest. “Madam President. Forced separation risks lethality for the host. We don’t know how the entity binds.”

Aizawa’s voice came low from the row behind him. “If I can maintain line of sight, I might be able to suppress active effects. But I can’t erase whatever it is. You’re asking me to hold a thunderhead in place while someone surgically removes the lightning.”

Rock Lock leaned forward, elbows on knees. “And if the pink one decides to step in? He walked through stopped time like it was a crosswalk.”

Ryukyu folded her hands, talons in human shape. “I’ll say it plain. That creature, Starchild, doesn’t posture. It chooses when to be gentle. If you aim heat and speed at that child while the sphere is watching, you will get a war.”

The President listened like a stone listens to the tide, impacted, unchanged. “We respond to wars. We do not let children become battlefields because we’re afraid of starting one.”

Endeavor’s chin lifted a few degrees, firelight murmuring along his chest. “Good,” he said simply. “Clarity.”

Hawks rolled his pen between fingers that could snatch a bullet. “Two tracks,” he offered, tone breezy enough to hide maps. “One: lure. The puffball doesn’t do subtle, but it does patterns. Food, maybe. Routine. Two: snatch. Feathers can thread under a cloak and pull a prize in under a second.”

Best Jeanist knit his fingers together like cables spliced. “If I can hold host and exogenic mass separately, I can bridle movement without crushing either.” The phrasing was neutral enough to pass for clinical; the intent was kind if you knew how to read fabric.

Midoriya stood. He didn’t fidget. The circles under his eyes looked like he’d traced them with a compass. “I’m asking for five minutes of talk before any operation,” he said, voice steady-urgent. “She knows me. She trusts me, more than anyone in this room. She’s speaking… a mix right now. If she sees me walk in with Endeavor and Hawks, she will run and we lose her again. If she sees me first, maybe she listens.”

“Student,” Endeavor said, not unkindly, “you stood in that field and couldn’t move.”

Midoriya’s mouth twitched into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “I’ll move sooner next time.”

“Emotion is not a plan,” the President said, but her eyes had flicked to the clip where the child’s gaze flicked toward the green-haired boy just before the hat. “You will have your five minutes,” she allowed, and the room twitched with it. “On a leash.”

She faced the top three. “Enji Todoroki. Keigo Takami. Tsunagu Hakamada. You’re lead. Objective: contain the pink anomaly; immobilize and separate the entity from the host. You will not use lethal force on the host. If you must choose between the entity and the anomaly, choose the child.”

“Ma’am,” Hawks said lightly, which meant I have a thousand questions and I will improvise most of the answers. “And if the anomaly decides to take a bite out of containment protocols?”

“Then you bleed,” the President said flat. “And you hold.”

Nighteye tried once more, not with argument but with arithmetic. “He will escalate to protect her. He has already copied a Quirk-adjacent function. If he adds flight with force, we lose the sky and the ground.”

“Then ground him,” the President returned. “We are not writing a fear memoir today.”

She lifted a finger and the screens changed, schematics of a downtown block ringed with subtle nettings and discreet blind corners. Air corridors with Hawks’ signature speed vectors. Thermal plumes mapped for Endeavor’s approach. Fiber snare points for Jeanist that looked like street furniture to the unkind eye.

“This will be clean,” she said. “Minimal collateral. No cameras. No civilians. Tonight.”

Ryukyu drew breath. “I request to remain on-site,” she said. “If we’re wrong and it goes wrong, I am the largest shield you can put between a mistake and a body.”

“Approved,” the President said without looking away from Endeavor, and that was respect.

“And I go with Midoriya,” Aizawa added. “If he gets his five minutes, I keep his five minutes safe.”

“Two minutes,” the President corrected. “Five is a luxury. We don’t indulge.”

Midoriya lowered himself back into the chair. He wasn’t trembling. He wanted to, and didn’t. He looked at the still on the screen, gold hat, small arms a-glisten with impossible clocks, and he memorized the angle of her shoulders so he could recognize it in a crowd. He memorized where her eyes had looked. He memorized the way the puffball had pointed Go because it meant he could ask for the same.

The meeting broke like a bone set without anesthesia. Plans limped to their stations and then straightened.

The President lingered with her deputy and a wall of screens that began quietly swapping maps for streets and schedules for traps. “No press,” she said. “If this leaks, I will personally audit every hero’s comms.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

“And brief the med teams. Pediatric trauma, both physical and… otherwise.” She didn’t say eldritch. She didn’t have to. “Prep containment that doesn’t assume human joints.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

She exhaled once, long. Alone, it sounded like fatigue. In a mic, it would have sounded like strategy.

“Do not lose the child,” she said, and for a fraction of a heartbeat there was something under the steel that might have been memory. “We have already lost enough.”

The city shifted under evening like a cat under a blanket, stretching, settling, pretending sleep. Windows softened; traffic thinned and then surged because this is what cities do to prove they’re alive.

In a little apartment that wasn’t actually an apartment, four walls and a roof and the idea of a door, Eri slept on a pile of pillows that had opinions about clouds. She was a comma on a sentence that wanted to end with okay. The small eye in her palm was closed. Dark Matter had curled itself into a corner of her dream where it could keep watch without admitting it was watching.

Gooey snored with his whole smile, which is to say: cheerfully, wetly, not at all sorry. Every third inhale his eyes wobbled under their lids like he was chasing a snack he would not catch on purpose because catching it is the end of the game.

Kirby stood by the window with a phone shaped like a toy and a mind like a switchboard. The city’s night brushed his cheeks; it tasted like soy broth and secrets. He angled the screen away from Eri’s face because light matters when kids sleep, and his thumbs did fast, decisive work for someone whose vocabulary preferred poyo to please specify digits after the tone.

He did not coo into the mic. He did not give away anything a microphone could later blame him for. He did not say Christmas out loud, because the last time she’d heard that word it had been in a crash course of Jambastion where Merījamasumāsu had landed like a fairy tale and then floated away because she didn’t know what a tree in a house meant, and anyway houses had been bad things.

He called people who did not live in this sky and some who did. He made the list with the solemnity of a knight choosing witnesses.

He called King Dedede, because no party in any branch of reality happens without a monarch who thinks every occasion is an occasion for food. The ringtone on that end started to belt, “Dedede that’s the name you should know!” and Kirby stabbed accept before the chorus could finish threatening the neighbors.

He called Bandana Waddle Dee, because if you need chairs and strings of lights and twenty hands that never complain, you call a Waddle Dee with a bandana and call it done.

He called Meta Knight and Marx in that order, because balance is important and because one of them would keep the other from planning a surprise that involved a black hole. Somewhere in the middle of the tone, Kirby remembered Marx’s feelings about schools and grinned to himself.

He called Rick, Kine, and Coo, which meant three calls because time zones should be kind to friendships. Rick would bring jokes, Kine would bring splashing and a very sincere hat, Coo would bring something handmade from the wind.

He called Susie because you cannot beat a corporate logistics network repurposed for joy. He called Magolor, and if the line clicked like a cash register and a conscience at the same time, Kirby pretended not to hear it. He called Taranza, because Taranza knows webs and weaving and the difference between trapping and holding. He pinged Dark Meta Knight on a channel that felt like a blade and got back a single punctuation mark: … which inexplicably meant yes.

He called Adeleine and Ribbon, because art and flying make a room true.

He called Daroach because he knew Daroach Would likely steal a gift and they Could really use the speed.

He would've called Elflin but the portal maker didn't have a phone to call.

He called Master Hand because while he couldn't get all the friends he made he could get some gifts from them with Master Hand's help

He hung up each call sometimes after a syllable, sometimes after three with a grin he didn’t have to perform. The reactions on the other ends weren’t words he could render, but they were promises. Stars bend for the right kind of promise.

By the time the window reflected more room than sky, Kirby had a plan stretched across three worlds and a sock, which is to say: a guarantee. He stuffed the phone in the little pocket of nothing he kept behind his ribs and turned to the space that would be a celebration in a day if everyone kept their promises and no one bled.

He started with lights. Strings and strings and loops of them, papered with stars he punched out of candy wrappers and sunbursts he cut from old flyers. Bandana Dee had taught him to hang them without nails, clever knots, the right structure, bowlines you can undo with a tug if you need to disappear a room in a hurry. Kirby’s nubs were faster than fingers because intention is a tool. He draped gentle glow across the ceiling, tucked little galaxies into corners Eri liked to hide in, traced the window frame so dawn would feel like it clapped.

He started a tree and then stopped, thinking of how trunks had been and how certain names sat wrong in certain throats. He scrapped the plan in a breath and made a star instead, four points and then five, then a body of paper and ribbon and soft sticks of cinnamon to make the air smell like merījamasumāsu even if the word wasn’t ready to land. He threaded it with the colors Eri reached for when she painted strawberries, and one slender strip of white for the horn she had been told to hate.

Gooey woke long enough to blink at him, smile cracking around the edges from sleep. “Whatcha doin’?” he stage-whispered at a volume that could have qualified as indoor thunder.

“Secret,” Kirby whispered, actually quiet. “Eri first Christmas.”

Gooey blinked twice. The word rolled through his head like a marble through Jell-O. He didn’t know everything, but he knew when a friend had a mission. “Gooey help?” he offered.

“Mm,” Kirby said, already handing him a box of paper snowflakes. “Stick. Not tongue.”

Gooey very seriously stuck them to the glass with exactly not his tongue. It took a long time. He congratulated each one.

Kirby turned to presents with the practicality of a veteran of boss chests. He pulled a ribboned bundle out of his stomach-space, pop, and set it aside, then a small wooden box, pop, then a stack of books, pop pop pop whose covers had been drawn by hands he trusted. He had gone shopping through memories and come back with a sensible haul.

On the table: a pair of slippers with stars on the toes so house floors would know her feet and be kind; a scarf soft as apology, in a shade of blue that made her eyes look like things, not targets; a box of watercolors with Adeleine’s tiny hibiscus stamped into the corner; a bag of glow-in-the-dark stickers in the shapes of constellations that Ribbon swore were accurate in at least one sky; a knitted hat with a little hole you could tuck a horn through without it getting cold (Bandana Dee had insisted, unblinking, that horns should be warm); a music box that played a tune Eri didn’t know yet and which would therefore belong to this memory and not any other.

He considered food. Dedede would bring enough to feed a small army and one very large ego. Kirby set aside his own cake mix anyway, because the tradition mattered, because the strawberry on top of this one would be a different strawberry than the one that had started a war in his heart, because sometimes you make the cake just to prove you could if you had to. He lined up sprinkles like soldiers and told them to behave.

He hung a paper banner across the far wall in letters big enough to trip over. It didn’t say a word she didn’t know. It said Jhappy. He folded the first J wrong and liked it better crooked.

The small eye in Eri’s palm cracked open as if it had heard laughter it wanted to dislike. It watched the star shape grow and had an emotion it also wanted to dislike and couldn’t quite: curiosity. Dark Matter had never celebrated anything except victory. It did not have the abbreviations required for this. It… took notes.

Gooey finished the last snowflake and sat down on the floor with the weary satisfaction of a craftsman who has stuck good. He gazed up at the lights with eyes that wobbled in approval. “Pretty,” he declared. “Like… like sugar water if it was sky.”

Kirby trotted over and booped his forehead with a string of tinsel. “Help tomorrow,” he said, ticking invisible boxes. “Bandee hang. Susie boxes. Magolor, ” He made a face, half fond, half stern. “No portal in cake.”

Gooey nodded, solemn as a judge. “No portals in cake,” he echoed. “Portal in presents okay?”

Kirby considered this with the gravity of a saint. “Small portal,” he conceded.

The phone hummed once in his pocket, Rick sending a picture of a tiny, lopsided star he’d carved out of driftwood; Kine replying with a mitten he’d insist belonged on a fin; Coo attaching a feather and a note that said, loosely translated, catch me if you can. Kirby’s chest felt like a Warp Star warming up.

He moved through the little room, checking corners with the kind of care that refuses to call itself fear. He tucked a folded blanket near the door because sometimes the safest place is not the bed. He lined up three cups, one for juice, one for milk, one for the strange tea Taranza sent in silk sachets that tasted like spiderwebs and honey and winter. He made sure the sock was where he could reach it and where Eri wouldn’t trip on it and where the Commission couldn’t photograph it.

He paused by the window. The city outside was a map of amber and hush. Somewhere, wings would already be on the wind, a line of sight stitched between rooftops. Somewhere, a hero with flames for a heart would be planning how to turn heat into cage without cooking hope.

Kirby’s eyes went soft and then bright. He had no illusions about tomorrow. He intended to smash any that got near him. But tonight, the plan was simple: teach a child a word she didn’t know, and mean it. Add a memory to her blood that wasn’t fear. If the week had taught him anything, it was that joy can be a weapon if you swing it hard enough.

He pressed his palm against the glass, left a little circle there that fogged and vanished. Behind him, Eri shifted in sleep, the corners of her mouth turning up in a dream that might have been about candy, or hats, or a dragon being silly. The eye in her palm closed again, annoyed that rest felt good.

Kirby looked once at the paper star, decided it needed one more loop of ribbon, and nodded to himself when it sagged just right. He set the phone face down, turned off the brightest light, and left the room lit like a secret.

He climbed onto his pile of cushions with the serenity of a creature who has wrestled gods and now desired a nap. Gooey oozed over and flopped half-on, half-near, the way a dog decides it’s a blanket too. Kirby didn’t move him.

Tomorrow, Eri would experience her first Christmas,

Tonight, a star hung in a room because a puffball had decided to hang it.

Kirby closed his eyes, and in another world, many calls began preparing gifts

Tartarus did not creak. It did not sigh. It did not do anything so human as settle. It was a geometry you punished people with. The sea hammered at its pylons and only got the satisfaction of spray for its trouble. Corridors stacked like nightmares. Doors led to doors that led to doors that led to nowhere unless nowhere had a warden. If despair had an architect, they’d have asked for notes.

In one of the deepest throats of this place, a man hung upright in a metal cross of a chair. He wore a straightjacket fitted with an engineer’s hatred. Chains fed from wall to bracket to skin, humming with the low, smug power of systems that assume they are the end of the sentence. The only softness in the room was the sound of his breathing through a damaged instrument.

Above him, harmless as a thought, an orange butterfly drifted through a seam of light that hadn’t existed until it did.

It fluttered once. Twice. A third time, like a benediction given with a blade. Its wings were not actually orange if you watched them long enough; they were a story of orange that had decided to be true. When it came to rest on the metal face of the primary lock, the lock remembered it was a door and felt ashamed of itself.

A hairline fissure spidered through the seal. Not breaking, rewriting. Chains forgot to hum. Sensors forgot to see. The jacket’s buckles unclenched like fists in the presence of a god.

The man smiled where no one could see it and where sight would not have mattered.

Zen Shigaraki All For One, Demon Lord, collector of futures and fingers let the chair do the work of lowering him and made the restraints think they were assisting. He stepped down on bare, scarred feet and rolled his shoulders. Joints popped like punctuation. A line of pain bloomed up the left side of his neck and then flattened back into the long, thin ache he had lived inside for years.

“Ah,” he said to the room, to the butterfly, to the idea of witness. His voice had the pleased dryness of someone who had expected the wine to be poor and found it merely adequate. “A jailbreak. How nostalgic.”

The orange wings tilted, yes, said a language older than bars, and then, with a tremor that wasn’t movement at all, the butterfly was elsewhere. It left behind a taste of steel and heat and endings.

All For One lifted his ruined face toward where eyes would have been and felt the infrared whisper across edges. The world returned to him in waves of temperature and vibration. Footsteps in other corridors, guards, slow, confident, moving toward him in the belief that no one moved away from here. The sea, a vast animal breathing. Air currents where they shouldn’t be.

“Your vigilance is admirable,” he told the prison, imagining the audio logs someone would play later, looking for contrition in modulations. “Your hubris is delicious.”

The first squad hit the anteroom at a sprint, slammed to a halt at a scene that did not belong in this catalog of never. One of them got as far as freeze! All For One did not bother to hear the rest.

His palms lifted, those small obscene mouths in the center drinking in air like it were a throat. Quirks answered his call the way wheat answers the scythe: Subtle Flames. Spring-Heel. Overpressure. Infrared. Hardening. He layered them with a gourmand’s care. He did not need to prove anything with flash. He needed to remind this nation that a man with a good memory and no conscience is a crowd.

The door rebuckled its metal into his hand. The air around the nearest guard pressed like a fist. He stepped into the pocket of power he’d built in the time it takes lesser men to blink and took what he liked.

Alarms started because that is what they do when the world stops doing what you paid it for. Red washed the walls. The sea roared. Tartarus narrowed its eyes and tried to understand the butterfly.

By the time the warden in the tower reached for the manual override that pulls power from the entire island so a single cell can be bright, the orange wings had already brushed the circuit that mattered. Lights flickered. Doors, for a criminally brief interval, could not make up their minds.

All For One walked. He did not run. Running is for men who suspect their luck might have a clock on it. He passed cameras that recorded static and rooms that would later be noted with phrases such as “total systems failure” and “act of god.” A guard grabbed for his mask, the old, skull-like filtration unit he’d worn to keep breath going through wreckage. The guard’s hand closed on air. All For One did not bother to crush him. He did not need to. He had other throats to step on today.

He reached the last door between him and weather and found it already unpersuaded of its purpose. The butterfly rode its top edge like a coin. It opened with the meekness of a confession.

Outside, the air hit him like truth. Cold, salt, unfiltered. The night smelled like a country he owned and had graciously allowed to forget him. He filled his lungs with it until the ache became glory.

Helicopter blades chopped at the dark, stupid and brave. He looked up, watched the machine through heat instead of color, and raised a hand in greeting that was mistaken for a threat.

Overpressure tuned, twisted; the air around the rotors thickened harder than physics had promised. The craft dropped one terrifying meter, the pilot saved it with a prayer and training, and All For One laughed into the wind. He spared them. Not mercy. Appetite management.

He leapt, Spring-Heel and Air-Ride stacked like cards, and landed on a service catwalk that had never expected feet like his. From there, into the night: a stitched run of rooftops and walls; a stolen launch he did not steal so much as imply; a boatman who found his oars moving without instruction and later told the story badly at bars.

By the time Tartarus convinced itself it hadn’t dreamed, the man it had kept as a trophy was a rumor moving toward a city.

The city, for its part, had updated its prayers.

Digital billboards along a ring road threw light across wet asphalt. Some hawked perfume. Some made lies about cars. Some carried the new public service advisories: a grainy still of a pink sphere bouncing off a dragon’s claw; a cloaked figure raising a top hat to a world that had not asked for it; a blue blob in the corner waving enthusiastically because it did not know it should be ashamed.

The caption: UNKNOWN ANOMALIES REPORT SIGHTINGS DO NOT ENGAGE.

All For One paused in the mouth of an alley and tilted his head. Infrared drew lines where color would have written pictures. The sphere was a cold, bright thing in the middle of a warm fear. The hat spoke of time the way good watches do: with contempt. The blob… confused him and delighted him. He chuckled, a sound that made a rat change its mind about crossing his path.

"How curious." All for one said

He let the city pour around him. He did not hide so much as blend; All For One had always been less a man and more a pattern of agreement. People moved past him with the curt politeness of people telling themselves this shadow had always been here. A child pointed at the mask he no longer bothered with, then frowned because the outline of a face under scars does not present as a face to eyes still learning metaphors.

He didn’t go to the League. He arrived at them, in the way gravity arrives: ignored until the bones remember.

The bar, new, shabby by design, all edges and an aesthetic of temporary villainy, stank of dust and smoke and the kid-sour scent of anger that hasn’t learned to aim yet. The television on the back wall ran stock footage of heroes doing nothing useful. The coat rack held one coat and a few hands.

Shigaraki looked up from a spread of charred plans and saw his teacher and saw his god and saw, for a mean, flickering heartbeat, an inconvenience. His eyes went wide in a boy’s way and narrow in a man’s. He did not stand. He did not have to. The air stood for him.

“Sensei,” he said, and the word behaved like a cutting tool. “You’re early. We weren’t done ruining everything yet.”

All For One stepped into the dark like it belonged to him. “You should ruin things faster,” he said mildly. “The public is learning new nouns without you.”

Dabi was slouched along the bar, flame eyes half-lidded in a head that had decided it was bored as a life skill. His smile sharpened. “The old man crawled out of a hole,” he drawled.

All For One glanced at him, entertained. “I had...Help,” he said. “I accepted the gift. Tell me about your… pink problem.”

Twice’s mask tilted. “He’s small and squishy and our problems get big when he shows up,” he said helpfully. “Also he ate a truck with his mouth.”

Spinner made a noise that might have been a laugh or a cough or the last gasp of his patience. “He killed Overhaul,” he added, as if the sentence needed a weapon to hold.

Mr. Compress, one arm neat and mechanical where a hero had insisted he learn humility twirled a marble with the grace of a man who understands drama better than addiction. “He is… disconcerting,” he said. “I do not like participating in gags where I’m the punchline.”

Toga’s smile was thinner than her knives. “He’s cute,” she said, “and I hate that about him.”

Shigaraki leaned back until the rickety chair remembered it was being watched. “He doesn’t care about rules,” he said, fingers tapping the edge of the table and making the wood whisper. “He makes his own. Copy thing, looks at the world, eats an idea, becomes it. Star phone. Truck mouth. Water. He fights like a toddler and a god at the same time.”

All For One laughed, not long, not loud, but delighted. “What a wonderful Quirk,” he said, savoring the syllables the way some men savor the way knives fit between ribs. “I’ll take it.”

The room did not quite flinch. They had become connoisseurs of contempt. But there was something about the way he said take that made even Dabi’s scar tissue remember it had nerve endings.

“Good luck,” Dabi said dryly. “He’s candy that fights back.”

“And there’s the girl,” Spinner put in, because someone needed to say it out loud so it would have to be reckoned with. “Used to just have a horn now has a cloak. One eye.”

Toga’s mouth thinned into something that wasn’t a smile. “He ate her, and then he spit her out, and then she had a hat and clocks,” she said, not at all helpfully, but very truthfully.

“Eri,” Shigaraki said, almost gently as he rolled the name around like a marble he might swallow. “Overhaul’s little curse. We wanted to take her and break the world with her. Didn’t get to. Puffball did… something. Now the thing wears her like skim. She can rewind irgabic beings.”

All For One’s ruined face tilted. Infrared saw the heat around the names, the rises, the hard flares. He did not need eyes to look indulgent. “A rewind function,” he mused. “Organic only, I’ll take that too.”

The television at the back switched to a live traffic map and then to a security notice, as if the city had decided to participate in the conversation. SIGHTINGS: RIVER DISTRICT. The photo was grainy, but the curve of the Warp Star was a signature you could forge a policy on.

Hawks’ wings would be in that air already. Endeavor’s heat would be tracking through the alleys like a sunrise that had lost its temper. Best Jeanist would be putting invisible leashes on furniture. The President would be standing somewhere without windows, rephrasing don’t die into legislative language.

All For One turned toward the door as if a dog had barked. “Stay,” he told the League not because he thought they’d obey but because it pleased him to say it. “I’m going to meet our new friend. It’s not often something new shows up at this age. Kleptomania is so tedious when all the jewels look the same.”

The bar breathed out when he left it and remembered how to untighten its grip on itself. Shigaraki exhaled through his teeth and let the chair put his weight back under him. His laugh was a broken plate gluing itself back together out of spite.

“Let him try,” he said. “Let him take a bite and choke.”

Toga licked her canine the way cats consider murder. “If he kills the puffball,” she said, “I’m going to be very bored.”

Dabi flicked ash that hadn’t arrived. “You’re going to be bored either way.”

“Maybe,” she said, and smiled like a cut.

Back on the edge of the sea, a sentinel watched the place where the butterfly had gone and considered it work well done.

But It was not a butterfly any more than a sword is a compliment. It was Morpho wearing a small, harmless face. It had brushed a lock, made an opening, whispered a disaster.

Above the city, it lifted on a thermal with the effortlessness of someone who has sold his body to gravity and taken it back at a profit. Its wings cut the dark into cleaner shapes. Far below, it could taste a thousand deaths brewing, little ones and big, necessary and cruel. It was hungry in the way endings get hungry when they smell a banquet.

Its plan was simple: set the board; let the Demon Lord take the move he cannot resist; let the pink star answer; eat what falls out of the sky when pride remembers it has gravity.

It was patient. It had nowhere to go and everywhere to be.

It turned its slow, terrible attention toward an alley where a small child slept under a paper star, and where a puffball was inventing a holiday to use as armor. It did not intervene. Not yet. It was counting. It had all the time in the world until it didn’t.

All For One stepped into a street bled copper by the last light and smiled with a mouth that had done nothing but take. “Kirby,” he said to the night, tasting the unfamiliar name like a fruit you plan to plant in someone else’s orchard. “Let’s see if you are a Quirk user after all.”

Above him, a butterfly folded its wings and became a shadow of a knight.

For now it would make sure that no one knew its next target escaped from prison.

Chapter Text

Eri woke to soft light and the quiet rustle of friends trying very hard not to squeal.

Paper stars glowed along the ceiling. A big, fat ribboned star, Kirby-made, hung over the window like a captured sunrise. The room smelled like cinnamon, strawberries, and something buttery that made her stomach sigh. She blinked, sat up in her little galaxy of pillows, and her horn bumped a dangling string of paper snowflakes. They wobbled. She giggled.

“Jhappy…?” she tried, voice small and a little raspy with sleep.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS, ERI!”

The shout leapt at her in a dozen voices. Some she knew, some she didn’t, all of them smiling. She flinched, then didn’t, because Kirby was there, springing up from behind a mountain of wrapped boxes, arms wide, face split by the kind of grin that makes walls trust you.

“Eri!” he chirped, bouncing twice, then three times. “Sur-prize!”

“Bonjam, Eri!” sang Francisca, hands clasped under her chin, eyes shining. “Merījamasumāsu!”

“Merījamasumāsu!” Flamberge hollered, throwing both arms up so hard her beret nearly flew off.

Zan Partizanne, trying to be dignified and failing just slightly, inclined her head. “Bonjam. Jhappy day to you.” Even her sternness wobbled into warmth.

“W-woah,” Eri breathed, and then the names crashed over her like warm water. “Dedede… Bandana Dee! Meta Knight! Adeleine, Ribbon!” She spotted them all, the big king in a beaming robe already eyeing the dessert table; Bandana Waddle Dee in a perfect little bow, hands full of tape; Meta Knight, arms folded, cape tucked just so, a pleased light in his eyes the mask couldn’t hide; Adeleine waving her paintbrush like a wand; Ribbon hovering and clapping; Dark Meta Knight leaning against the wall like a shadow pretending to be polite; Prince Fluff, azure and earnest, giving her a little bow that made his crown wobble; Then some new people she never met all with name tags for her, Rick, Kine, and Coo in a tangle near the door (Rick with a box of meat pies, Kine with a tiny gift floating in a bowl of water, Coo preening a feather straight); Magolor’s smile too wide to be innocent; Taranza with a spool of silk; Susie in a perfect blazer, tablet in hand; Daroach flipping a coin he’d probably already stolen back from the future; Shadow Kirby almost-but-not-quite invisible near Kirby’s shoulder, mirroring his bounce like a silent echo with Marx laughing like a gremlin.

“J-Jawaii…” Eri whispered, eyes huge. Then, louder, “Jhappy!” She flung her hands up, and the little eye in her palm, today just a wrinkle, blinked once, curious and quiet.

“Poyo!” Kirby beamed, lifting a tray. “Eat first! Then box smash!” He set the tray on her lap: triangle sandwiches with smiling faces, a little glass of juice with a star-shaped ice cube, a bowl of strawberries so bright they looked painted.

Gooey slid in from the side, presenting a plate of buns the size of meteors. “Gooey baked!” he announced proudly, then whispered, “Susie helped.”

Susie coughed daintily. “Quality control,” she said, eyes twinkling. “Also fire control.”

Dedede clapped his enormous hands. “Right! Feast! Then gifts! And then more feasting! This is how Dedede does holidays!” He thumped his chest with his scepter and nearly toppled a tower of cream puffs. Bandana Dee dove, caught the platter, landed in a perfect superhero pose. Applause erupted.

Eri took a bite of sandwich. It tasted like ham and happiness. Something uncurled behind her ribs.

“Jamanke,” she told Kirby, because that was the right word. “Jamanke vun.”

Kirby pressed his cheek to hers for exactly one second. “Kirby make more,” he promised solemnly, as if promising a sunrise.

They ate. They talked. They laughed with full mouths and then apologized, and then stopped apologizing because the room made it okay. Adeleine painted little sprigs of holly in the air that turned to candy canes; Ribbon strung them like comets across the ceiling. Taranza’s silk made the paper star swish as if delighted. Magolor produced a fountain of sparkles that turned into jelly beans until Dark Meta Knight looked at him and he wisely turned the fountain off. Rick told a joke so bad Coo groaned and Kine bubbled out a giggle Marx drank a whole gallon of punch, . The Mage Sisters taught Eri a round in Jambastion, a soft “Jhappy, Jhappy, Jhappy” that looped like a contented cat.

Then Kirby bounced to the mountain of presents and slapped a label on the top box with both nubs. “Eri!” he announced. “Box smash time!”

Bandana Dee handed her the first present like a medal. The tag read: To Eri, from Bandana Dee. Inside: a knitted hat, soft as clouds, with a little slit neatly edged in ribbon.

“For your horn,” Bandana Dee said, cheeks pink. “So it won’t get cold.”

Eri held it like it might fly away. “Jamanke… vun, Bandee.” She put it on. The slit hugged her horn just right. It felt like “belong.”

Next: a little wooden box from Prince Fluff. Inside: buttons shaped like stars, hearts, and one very determined tomato.

“For your clothes,” he said earnestly. “Buttons are very important in Patch Land. They hold things together.”

Eri nodded solemnly. “Buttons hold Bastion, too,” she decided, because hearts need holding.

From Adeleine: a watercolor set in a tin stamped with a tiny hibiscus, and a thick pad of paper that begged for colors. “Paint,” Adeleine said shyly, tucking her hair behind her ear. “When… when you want to tell without words.”

Ribbon set a little box on top of the tin. Inside lay glow-in-the-dark star stickers in constellations. “So you can pin the night on your ceiling and make it listen,” she said. Eri squeezed them both vun time each.

Splat, Dedede’s gift hit her lap like a happy anvil. Inside: a cake mold shaped like a star, a giant wooden spoon, and a recipe card written in surprisingly neat handwriting. “Official Royal Shortcake Protocol,” he boomed. “I, King Dedede, permit you to make better cake than me at least once.”

Susie presented a slim rectangle. “A phone,” she said, businesslike but gentle. “Preloaded with only the numbers that won’t get you in trouble. Parental controls and a privacy core I designed myself. No accidental livestreams.” She winked. “Company gift.”

Eri blinked at the black glass, felt it weigh her palm like a new kind of power, and nodded. “Jamanke. Jaway if I break it.”

Susie smiled. “We’ll fix it.”

Magolor’s box had magnets on every side, and when she opened it, the flaps popped and turned into a little cardboard theatre with a twinkly background. Inside: a plush boat with a smiling face and a tiny scarf. “Souvenir from a theme park I absolutely did not borrow overnight,” he said, hands behind his back.

Taranza’s gift was a silk scarf, spider-spun, blue as winter dawn, with a pattern of little hearts that looked like upside-down diamonds if you squinted. “To be brave in,” he said simply.

Shadow Kirby handed her something that looked exactly like nothing until she tilted it. It was a mirror. Her face (and her horn) looked back. She studied it, then made a silly face. The mirror copy did too. Shadow Kirby smiled with his whole self.

Gooey flopped a lumpy package into her lap. Inside: a handmade drawing, crayon and joy of Eri standing on a Warp Star, arms out, Kirby and Gooey on either side, Dark Matter drawn as a big friendly eye with a smile. Eri snorted a laugh, then clapped a hand over her mouth. The eye in her palm cracked open, regarded the crayon eye, and as much as an old, sharp thing can looked bashful.

The Mage Sisters presented a little book they had stitched themselves, cloth-bound, decorated with the Jambastion emblem. Each page held a a bunch of spells

Then Kirby set a big, oddly heavy gift in front of her, the tag a little lopsided: To Eri, from friends far away. He rocked on his heels, cheeks puffed, vibrating with the effort of not spoiling it himself.

Eri pulled the ribbon. The lid popped with a satisfying whoomf. Inside lay a riot of colors, logos, and shapes she didn’t know-

On top, a neat card in elegant script: With compliments of Master Hand.

Meta Knight stepped forward, a rare softness flattening the rigid line of his shoulders. “This,” he said, “requires explanation.”

Dedede jumped in. “There’s a tournament,” he boomed. “Big one. Other worlds. Master Hand runs it. The Super Smash Bros. Every kind of guest you can imagine. Kirby fights there sometimes. So do I. And-” he gestured grandly toward Meta Knight “-he cuts people’s dignity in half there with a smile.”

Meta Knight cleared his throat. “We told them about you,” he said, so simply Eri’s eyes stung. “Your first Christmas. Master Hand asked the others.”

Kirby nodded very hard. “Friend Hand good,” he added. “Heard Eri story. Tell fighters. Fighters send gift. For Eri.”

Eri made a little squeak she did not plan. She reached in.

The first thing she pulled out looked like a mushroom with white spots and eyes, jaunty as anything. It hummed with a shy, warm power that felt like applause. A note taped to the stem read, in rounded block letters: To Eri, Have-a great first Christmas YAHOO! From Mario.

She held it up. “Is… this food?”

Dedede leaned in. “Sometimes,” he said cautiously. “This one? Maybe don’t eat without supervision.”

Next: a pair of shoes, white and red, with little gold buckles and a tilt that screamed speed. A folded card fluttered out: Enjoy the new kicks! -Sonic. She slipped one on, and the little lights in the sole winked like mischief. Her grin was involuntary and perfect.

A boomerang, polished and carved with little triangles, lay beneath, wrapped in a green cloth and tied with a simple knot. The card: From Link. Eri held the curve, felt its balance, and imagined throwing it at a problem and having the answer return to her hand.

A tin of cookies shaped like dots and ghosts, tied with a yellow ribbon. A round, smiling face on the card: Wakka wakka! -Pac-Man. She opened them right there; everyone cheered. Kirby ate his in one bite and looked delighted.

A scarf, blue and precise, patterned with a little E-shaped symbol. The note typed in careful, polite caps: An E Tank scarf. Rest when you must. Recharge. Mega Man. Eri rubbed the fabric against her cheek. Soft. Cool. Right.

A slim envelope with embossed edges, when she opened it, a pass shimmered like a soap bubble, words floating across it: All-access Super Smash Bros. tournament guest. Admit: Eri. A tidy gloved signature: Master Hand. Her mouth made an O. “I can… go?” she whispered.

Meta Knight inclined his head. “When it is safe,” he said. “When you are ready.”

There was a jester hat in deep cherry red with a little star pin

"So you can got some options for chaos!" Marx said before laughing

There was a little handheld console from Susie already set up, loaded with gentle games about building worlds and watering plants, her contacts locked to Kirby and company. There was a star-shaped backpack from Daroach (“to stash totally legitimate snacks”), a tiny ocarina from a boy who never wrote his name, a ribbon from a princess with a hand-written message: Friendship is a power, too.

Eri’s hands shook by the time she reached the bottom. Her breath trembled. She looked up and around at the sea of faces, at the paper star, at Kirby vibrating with contained joy, and words came out all wrong and perfect.

“Jamanke… vun, jamanke, jamanke,” she babbled, then stumbled into English, then back to Jambastion. “I… this is-" She laughed helplessly, tears warm and confusing. “Jhappy,” she finished, because that one sat right.

“You’re welcome,” Ribbon said, dabbing her own eyes. Adeleine made a quick, watery sketch of Eri and Kirby under the paper star, then tore it free and pressed it into Eri’s hands.

Dark Matter, quiet in the palm, watched. It did not understand customs. It did not celebrate. But Eri’s heartbeat had a new rhythm and the room’s warmth pressed against it and some old edge in the eye’s iris… rounded. It did not admit the word friend. It did not need to. It simply did not fight Eri when she reached for a cookie and offered a bite to the hand, giggling when crumbs tickled her palm.

“Try,” she whispered to it. “Majicious.”

The eye blinked. Not a no.

“Games,” Dedede declared, mercifully too loud. “We can’t go five minutes without fun, or my royal hide starts itching!” They played. Ribbon taught Eri how to fly-pretend, holding her under the arms as she “whooshed” past the paper star. Prince Fluff demonstrated Lasso Toss, which involved buttons, yarn, and squeals. Rick, Kine, and Coo made a nonsense competition out of balancing cookies on noses. Gooey invented a new dance that was mostly falling over on purpose.

Meta Knight and Dark Meta Knight sparred once, very, very slowly, wooden swords making soft clacks, Eri copying the footwork with a broomstick, serious as snow. “Elbow up,” Dark Meta Knight said, tone dark and almost, almost, fond. “There. Better.”

Zan Partizanne, stone-faced, showed Eri how to fold paper into small cranes. “Mapop,” she said quietly, tapping the finished bird’s head. “Hope. Put them on your string. They will not break.”

“Mapop,” Eri repeated, and hung it near the star.

When the cake appeared (a perfect strawberry shortcake, Dedede’s card recipe followed with religious fervor by Kirby), everyone sang, half in key. Eri closed her eyes to make a wish and found that for once, she couldn’t think of one that wasn’t already happening. So she said, very softly, Bastion, and blew.

Berries shone. Candles went out as if soothed. Everyone cheered like it was a miracle, because to children, it always is.

Between bites, Eri padded to the window and tapped a glow star sticker against the glass. Outside, the city was a hush of amber and frost. Somewhere far away, plans with hard edges were being made. Somewhere closer, Kirby had his phone set to silent and the sock tucked safe under a cushion. For now, the world couldn’t find them. For now, the room was a spell.

“Kirby?” Eri said, tugging gently on his hand. He turned, frosting on his cheek.

“Mm?”

“You did… phone calls,” she guessed, proud of the word. “Jonto, soon, so everyone could come?”

Kirby puffed up with pride. “Kirby call friend Hand,” he said. “Tell story. ‘Little Eri no Christmas.’ Friend Hand say ‘okay!’ Friends send boxes! Kirby say ‘yay!’” He wiggled like a happy comma.

Meta Knight added, softer: “You made this happen.”

Eri looked at him, then at Dedede, then at Kirby, then at everyone, and put both hands over her chest. The eye in her palm peeped out between fingers, watching. “Bastion,” she whispered again. “Jamanke.”

The party flowed. Susie helped set up the phone; Bandee created a contact list with emojis (Dedede: a cake; Meta: a sword; Kirby: a star; Adeleine: a paintbrush; Ribbon: a ribbon; the Mage Sisters: three little hearts). Magolor tried, only once, to sell Eri a “season pass” to his theme park and got glared into contrition by three mages and one knight.

“Jamedetāna, Eri,” Francisca told her as they folded napkins into hearts. “Congratulations for your first Christmas.”

“Jamedetāna,” Eri echoed, then burst into giggles because the word felt like confetti.

Late, when plates were licked clean and the paper star hummed itself drowsy, presents stacked in a happy mess and the scarf already around her neck, Eri curled between Kirby and Gooey on the cushions. The E Tank scarf was perfect for naps, it turned out. Her new shoes sat by the door, buckles glinting. The mushroom sat on a high shelf, a promise for a day when she’d need it. The boomerang leaned against the wall, waiting to come back.

Meta Knight watched them with a stillness that wasn’t stiffness. Dark Meta Knight had gone, slipping into a mirror with a nod. Dedede dozed upright with a fork in his hand, Bandana Dee gently prying it away and setting it on a plate. Adeleine and Ribbon whispered about colors. The Mage Sisters curled together like matching commas. Prince Fluff tucked a blanket over Eri’s feet, eyes bright, crown crooked.

In Eri’s palm, the eye half-lidded in a way that, on anyone else, would be contentment. It looked out through her fingers at the paper star and the people and the quiet, heavy joy in the air, and did not reach for the wheel.

Friend? the idea tickled it. not a word it liked, not one it would admit. But the hand was warm, the cake crumbs were pleasant, and Kirby’s soft snore was oddly reassuring.

It closed without argument. Just for a little while.

“Good night ,” Eri murmured, against Kirby’s body.

“Night,” Kirby breathed back, patting her hair with a small, careful nub. “Happy, Eri.”

Outside, the city kept its own strange vigil. Somewhere, a butterfly turned in the dark. Somewhere else, hard plans unfolded.

In here, under a paper star and a web of lights and a blanket that smelled faintly of cinnamon and silk, a little girl had her first Christmas. And in the tight, tender circle of that, the world’s teeth, for one blessed night, did not touch.

It was the kind of quiet that purrs. The paper star breathed a drowsy glow over the nest of cushions. Half the guests were snoring; the other half were pretending not to. Eri slept between Kirby and Gooey, scarf tucked under chin, new shoes by the door like small promises.

Marx’s eyes pinged open.

He lay on his back, hat askew, juggling nothing in particular with his fingertips and a thought he could not ignore: fun. Also: Eri hasn’t seen my brand-new, totally safe, absolutely responsible wake-up trick. He rolled to his belly, chin on palms, grinning at the tiny rise-and-fall of her blanket. Responsible, he mouth-shaped again, to see if the word fit this time. It didn’t. Oh well!

“Eriiii~,” he sing-songed in a whisper no one could hear beyond a continent. “Let’s play.”

A bead of star-light collected at the corner of Marx’s smile. Then another. He breathed in. The bead swelled, then lanced out in a neat, perfect line, a magical laser with the courtesy to be thin, straight, and silent.

It zipped through a paper snowflake. It threaded a gap between two fairy wings. It slipped out the cracked window and across the city like a mischievous idea.

Three miles away, on a rooftop stakeout, Midoriya and Aizawa stood in a posture heroes know: tired, watchful, quietly stubborn. Aizawa had been explaining exactly how many rules Midoriya was breaking by… existing in a place he’d been told to go, when the world flickered.

A hair-thin line, no sound, just a sudden, delicate tap on the sternum. The breath left both of them with a surprised oh? They crumpled in unison, as if the night had pinched their off-switches.

“Midoriya?” Rock Lock said over comms. “Eraser? Report?” Silence answered. The line hissed. Somewhere behind Rock Lock, a coordinator swore. Alerts bloomed.

Below, in the city’s slow rivers of light, three names moved like weather fronts. Endeavor. Hawks. Best Jeanist.

Back in the apartment, a dozen heads popped up like prairie dogs. Susie’s eyes widened; she was already tapping a tablet. Meta Knight’s mask tilted. Dedede snorted himself awake mid-snore, scepter halfway lifted in reflex. Bandana Dee slid into a defensive crouch so smoothly the cushion thought it had dropped a gear. Even Dark Matter’s eye in Eri’s palm clicked open, a slit of suddenly… interested.

Eri blinked. “Juh?”

Marx kicked his feet, utterly pleased. “Time to play!”

Ribbon hovered an inch with her hands over her mouth. “Marx… what did you…?”

“It was very small,” Marx said, deeply offended at the suggestion of collateral. “Like, small small.”

Kirby’s ears (he did not have them; and yet) turned toward the stairwell. Steps. More than steps. An atmosphere.

“Poyo,” he said softly, already standing, putting his body between Eri and the door without thinking about it.

The latch clicked. The door didn’t so much open as step aside for, presence.

Hawks came first, slipping in on a current of his own air. Best Jeanist’s cables lifted like a stern warning. Endeavor filled the doorway with a daylight no one had invited.

For a breath, the room went statue-still: two worlds pointing at each other and failing to name what they saw fast enough.

Hawks counted. Puffball (small, deceptively harmless); blob (blue, smile, existentially wrong); artist (brush, eyes, I have a bad feeling); fairy (wings, speed); child (Eri, scarf, new shoes); and then a constellation of unknowns, steel smile; floating arachnid; azure prince; living tree-people; shadow-thing; three mages dressed in thunder, ice, and flame; two knights, light and dark; a monarch with a mallet and gall, and at the room’s heart: a star.

Best Jeanist’s voice stayed level only because he had made it so in worse rooms than this. “By order of the Hero Public Safety Commission,” he announced, “all present are to accompany us for questioning. No one needs to get hurt.”

On the President’s secure channel, the calm voice that made prime ministers blanch cut through. “Bring them all in.”

Meta Knight’s arm moved in a way the eye could not fully catalog. Copper cables hissed through the room toward Kirby, toward Eri, suddenly they weren’t. His cape rustled; Galaxia hummed. Jeanist saw it happen and still could not say how. His fibers whipped back like startled snakes.

Endeavor stepped into the room’s middle, flames running up his arms like punctuation. “You’re all coming in,” he said, and it was not a request.

Dedede laughed in his face, a rich, rolling sound that turned heads and redrew lines. “Coming in? Hah! You march into my boy’s party, you threaten the kid we’re throwing it for, and you expect a parade?” He set the scepter aside with theatrical care. “I can give you one. Won’t like it.”

Endeavor’s eyes were fire and focus. “Enough.” He jerked his chin; Hawks was already in the air, feathers fanning out like bright knives. Best Jeanist’s fibers surged again.

“Bandee,” Kirby said without looking, and Bandana Dee was there, shield up.

Then the room exploded into motion.

Meta Knight met the fan of feathers with a flicker. Where the blades flew, he wasn’t; where they curved, he already had been. His blade rang off hard air a hair’s breadth from Hawks’ knuckles. Hawks’ smile thinned. He went up and out the window, wings a red flood.

Meta Knight followed like a cut in the night.

“Questioning,” Endeavor repeated, and Dedede’s mallet hit his open palm.

"Nah." Dedede replied with a smug grun

“What is your Quirk?” Endeavor probed, already cataloging, already mapping heat shapes he could detonate.

“I ain’t got one of those,” Dedede said, grin spiky with delight. “Everything I can do, I taught myself and climbed over all my limits.” He cocked the mallet over one shoulder. “Come on then, Mr. Number One. Let’s see your homework.”

Endeavor’s lip curled. “Then I’ll be your wall. You won’t climb this with effort alone.”

Dedede’s eyes glittered. “I like walls,” he said. “They make good drums.”

He swung.

Endeavor met the first blow with a Hell’s Curtain—flame billowed in a sheet meant to erase options. Dedede waded in, heat beading on his fur, boots digging divots in the floor. The mallet cracked the wave like a bell breaking water. The blast slapped the room’s air; the windows gave up the fight and shattered out.

“Outside!” Susie snapped, pointing. Bandana Dee was already shepherding Eri to the interior wall, shield angled. Kirby planted himself at her side, every inch of his three feet reading no.

Hawks and Meta Knight burst into the open sky, two signatures slicing the winter air. Feathers knifed past with a lethal whisper; Meta Knight was and wasn’t where they were. A feather grazed his pauldron—the contact sent a bright spark spinning. Hawks curved, hard and smart, trying for the angle, the blind spot. Meta Knight’s cape flared, wrong as a door in a wall that had never had doors. For a heartbeat, there were two Meta Knights; for two heartbeats, there were none. Hawks’ brows twitched. He heard himself grin anyway.

“Okay, you borb,” he called, gliding backward as he launched a storm. “Last chance to back down before I-"

“Know my power,” Meta Knight said, almost gently.

He vanished forward.

Galaxia drew a line across the day. A sound like silk tearing, like a promise unspoken, Hawks’ breath left him in a rust red spray. The slash hit true, not deep enough to kill, precise enough to stop. His wings spasmed; feathers burst reflexively into a ragged halo. He dropped, caught a stray current, dropped again. Rooftops swelled.

Meta Knight was there before the ground was, one gauntlet on Hawks’ shoulder, turning the fall into a skid that left rooftop gravel screaming. He stepped back as the pro slumped, breathing, bleeding, alive.

“Yield,” Meta Knight murmured, but the wind took the softness and left the steel.

Down on the street, Dedede and Endeavor turned the block into a lesson in confidence.

Jet Burn roared, a lance that sent air twisting itself into knots. Dedede met it with a sideways slam, mallet raised, the impact spilling fire into the margins instead of the core. He laughed; not mocking, delighted, challenged. His footwork was rude poetry: wrong steps that became right because he decided they were. He slid under a Hell Spider with insulting ease, came up on the blind side, and punched.

Not the mallet. A fist like a piledriver, hitting high center mass. Endeavor grunted and rode it back three steps, flame soaking his skin from the inside out. His heat spiked, air screaming, pavement sweating. Dedede shook his knuckles out and grinned. “That tickled.”

Phones were out. Of course they were. Japan didn’t breathe, Japan inhaled. The fight took a corner and the corner tried to take it back.

Endeavor drew deep. Flame pulled to his core as if his body had become a star. Flashfire Fist, cranked. He launched, Prominence Burn blooming, white, terrible. The beam would have vaporized steel.

Dedede met it head-on.

He planted his boots and swung the mallet in a whirling guard, a kingly pinwheel that clubbed the light aside in huffs and grunts, carving flaming spray into harmless confetti. He dug in, every line of him a bar of defiance. The shockwave rattled windows in a five-block radius. Food stalls trembled. A shrine bell chimed just because.

The crowd’s gasp rose to a roar that had no words. Endeavor’s jaw set. He cut the stream—not because he couldn’t keep it up, but because the man in front of him had decided no and the beam had listened.

“Not bad,” Dedede panted, delighted. He popped the mallet to his shoulder, then changed his mind and threw it.

The hammer blurred, a meteor in a small, stubborn sky. Endeavor crossed arms, braced, took it, the impact ripped the street, sent flame spitting like swearing, rattled his bones. It knocked him back into a building so the building could get jealous.

Dedede exhaled. Smiled. Walked forward with the unhurried confidence of a man on his third helping. Endeavor launched, fist, knee, flame, Dedede slipped, blocked, countered. It stopped looking like brawling and started reading like music: fire’s staccato; king’s percussion.

“Justice,” Endeavor said between blows; it came out half-roar, half-reason.

“Cake,” Dedede said cheerfully, and put his forehead into Endeavor’s nose.

Best Jeanist had a worse afternoon.

His fibers fanned wide, perfect with practice, angles elegant enough to be taught in design school. They whipped toward Eri, the blob, the puffball, Dark Meta Knight’s blade hissed once, twice, snip. Cables fell to the floor like polite eels.

“Apologies,” Jeanist murmured, and went wide. He took the room the way a good tailor takes a client, measure, cut, stitch. Susie’s heels anchored to the floor. Taranza’s silk tangled, then suddenly remembered how to un-knot itself with a tiny offended noise. Rick got yoked; Kine wriggled out like soap; Coo shredded a handful of strands with a single, rude wingbeat.

Francisca pointed; a neat sheath of ice jacketed the nearest cable bank. Flamberge twirled; fire licked along threads and burned them to ash. Zan raised a finger; lightning hopped, laughed, and made the fibers twitch wrong. Ribbon’s crystal shots pinged off the walls and pinned cuffs to the floor with outrageous neatness. Adeleine painted a man-sized scissors midair; it snapped closed with a satisfying shnink on a hank of thread. Daroach flicked a coin; it went through two loops and came back with three more, each loop now tied to itself. Susie’s mech-sleeve unfolded with a barely-audible whirr, captured a bundle of denim in a clamp, and politely set it down in the alley outside.

Best Jeanist remained, somehow, graceful. He rolled with the insult and made it a bow. He shifted his stance, exhaled evenly, turned his attention toward, Bandana Dee?

The Waddle Dee slammed up his spear in a perfect block and pushed back with zero malice and 100% competence. Jeanist blinked. Then three Bandana Dees were on him, no, one Bandana dee, two painted by Adeleine, moving real enough for the eye to trip.

Then the alley rushed up to meet him.

He landed on his feet, barely. Silk wrapped his wrists. Yarn tied it with an adorable bow. A small ice block kissed the knot until it stopped pretending it would move. A polite sign was set on his chest, written in Ribbon’s neat hand: Please do not disturb. Party in progress. —

He lay back, staring up at a square of sky. He sighed. “At least they’re… tidy.”

Shadow Kirby leaned out the window, waved once, and disappeared inside again like a cheerful conspiracy.

Up above, Hawks felt the cut across his chest clean as a line on a map. He pressed a hand to it and looked up into a mask that had spared him by intent. Meta Knight’s eyes were embers behind steel.

“Didn’t know puffballs did swords,” Hawks managed, wincing, and regretted the joke when it tugged the wound and made his lungs hiss.

Meta Knight inclined his head, as if accepting the compliment on behalf of his species. He tapped his mask with a knuckle don’t move and went, cloak fluttering like a punctuation mark.

He passed the fight on the street in a wide arc, taking its measure as a man in a hurry takes a room. Dedede caught his eye, grinned without looking, and threw Endeavor again. Endeavor continued to be thrown and continued to get back up, which Meta Knight respected, and then continued on back to the apartment.

Inside, Eri had not moved. Bandana Dee’s shield kept a clean circle around her like a spell. Kirby stood in the gap of the window, eyes on the street, coatless, round as defiance.

“Kirby,” Meta Knight said, landing like a sentence. “We must go.”

Kirby didn’t blink. “Friends safe,” he answered. “Then go.”

“Already safe,” Susie said crisply from the door, checking feeds. “Top three? Down or delayed. Reinforcements… hm. Pinned in traffic by a very unfortunate parade. How tragic.”

“Jamanke,” Eri told everyone, because it seemed like the right moment to make the gratitude loud. She tugged Kirby’s hand. “Poyo, go?”

He glanced at the paper star. He glanced at the still-steaming shortcake. He glanced at the hats and the hearts and the Bastion this room had built in a night.

“Go,” he agreed. “But bring cake.”

Gooey stuffed an improbable wedge into his mouth and managed a thumbs-up with his eyes.

Prince Fluff tossed Kirby the sock. “Quilty Square?” he offered.

“Jonto,” Eri said soon shaking her head. “Not yet.”

Magolor’s eyes glittered like coins thinking about politics. “My ship’s… not here ar the moment ,” he lied beautifully.

Zan raised an eyebrow. “Konjy,” she muttered crazy, and lifted a palm. Lightning kissed the ceiling; the lights went out for precisely one second; when they came back, the hallway camera was a very well-done marshmallow. “Go.”

Kirby took Eri’s hand. The eye in her palm squeezed once; she squeezed back. Dark Matter stayed still—watching, withholding, learning.

They moved: Kirby first, Bandana Dee flanking, Susie backstopping, Adeleine and Ribbon covering with brush and shard. Meta Knight took point like a good story takes a reader. Dedede, still in the street, still laughing, saw them flash at the edge of the fight and gave Endeavor an extra two punches as a parting gift, then bounded backward, mallet to shoulder, ankles light. “Round two later, hotshot!” he boomed. “Bring water!”

Endeavor’s chest heaved. He did not answer, which was answer enough.

They vanished into a thin place the city didn’t realize it owned. The air shivered where they had been, then fell back into itself with bad grace.

Later, Japan texted itself: did you see?? Videos clattered across social. News anchors swallowed adjectives. Analysts used words like unknown force, illicit party, anomalies, and massive restraint. Fans called it the best fight they’d ever watched and then remembered they’d watched a man and a king hit each other in the bones and went a little quiet inside.

Hawks woke to expensive paramedics with very gentle hands and a very unimpressed Commissioner. Best Jeanist extricated himself with dignity and a hairpin. Endeavor sat on the curb long enough to be human, then stood and was a wall again.

The President stared at a screen that refused to lie and said, almost to herself, “So the puffball invited an army.”

On a nearby rooftop, Marx lay on his back, smiling at the stars like someone who had gotten away with borrowing one. “Responsible,” he told the sky, trying the word again, and giggled when it still didn’t fit.

In the apartment, the paper star hummed. A note was taped to the door in Ribbon’s hand: We cleaned. Please recycle the cake crumbs.

And in an alley that turned twice and thought about it, Kirby and Eri walked hand-in-hand, a bag with a cake slice tucked safe, friends at their edges like parentheses. Eri’s new shoes blinked little red checks. The eye in her palm blinked once, slow.

“Play later,” Eri whispered down to it, conspiratorial. “Now we run.”

“Poyo,” Kirby agreed, and smiled like a weapon that had chosen to be a hug.

Chapter Text

They were done.

You could feel it in the way Dedede’s shoulders sat lower than usual, mallet resting on his paunch like a nap that had become a lifestyle. In the way Susie had all their luggage stacked in a neat, impossible tower and a suitcase of hard light humming, “everyone-please-stand-in-single-file.” In the way Meta Knight’s cape already held the fold that meant home if you stepped through it with intent. Bandana Dee had checked the snack bag six times. Taranza had tied Eri’s scarf just so, the little slit easing around her horn with ceremonial tenderness. The park was quiet, morning gold through leaves, pond pretending the world was polite.

Kirby held up his star phone like a conductor’s baton, thumb poised over a favorite number.

“Okay,” Susie said, brisk but soft. “Inventory complete. Passports theoretical. Heartbreak minimal. Warp procedure in five-"

“Hello-"

The voice arrived like a stain, polite, empty, important only to itself.

Kirby didn’t even look. The pink arm nub snapped out in a blur of fed-up and punched the air where the word tried to happen.

The air buckled. The ground remembered it had a downstairs. The man who had decided to be a Demon Lord instead of a person slammed into turf hard enough to make ducks rethink physics. Dirt geysered. A bench gave up on being a bench.

All For One lay there, more insulted than injured, because his confidence had not prepared him for punctuation. He started to sit up, infrared painting the pink dot that had interrupted his sentence-

-and an orange butterfly landed gently on the wreckage of his chest.

Every Star Ally, every Popstar veteran, every being who knew the shape of conclusions went very still.

“No—!” Dedede roared, too late.

“Juh—!” Eri yelped, hand flying to her mouth, the eye in her palm dilating.

It knew that butterfly

Meta Knight’s sword flared halfway out of his cape like a curse catching itself.

The butterfly burned red as a verdict. Its wings folded down into silence.

All For One had time to feel surprise, and then he was a shape being eaten by an older shape. Lines pulled inward. Scar tissue remembered fire. A lifetime of theft met a mouth that knew how to end stories.

When the light peeled away, something was standing.

It was small in the way knives are small. Red armor calm as a confession. Mask with horned sweep like antennae, eyes white and unbothered. Cloak in two cruel wings that glittered like a holy lie. Sword the color of old victories, guard etched in butterfly.

Morpho Knight tilted its head at the gathered, the way judges do when the verdict has never been in doubt.

No one moved.

And then it moved for all of them.

The red blade blurred. It carved their reflection out of the pond, folded space to step through the wound, and came up inside their circle with a whisper that was also thunder. One lazy cut drew a line in the grass that smoked and did not dare be ash.

Meta Knight was already there to meet him, Galaxia ringing a note only other swords could hear. Sparks like tiny molten butterflies leapt and died. The first measure of the song was speed.

Morpho vanished.

Reappeared beside Kirby.

Raised his free hand, fingers aflame with a power he had not been born to and did not need the kind of power you use when ending things is both plan and personality. Something in the air flipped, a wrongness too neat to be evil.

A thin, invisible ripple went through the park and found the one target it had been designed to fit.

Kirby’s eyes went wide. His cheeks puffed.

“P-po-”

A purple nightcap with yellow circle popped onto his head.

He yawned so sweetly the ducks forgave the dirt explosion.

“Poyo…”

He tipped backwards like a felled dandelion and fell asleep, a perfect little puff, hat askew, a bubble of a snore swelling and shrinking at his nose.

Silence stabbed the air.

“What did you do?” Dedede thundered, mallet up, reality mad.

Morpho Knight did not answer. He did not have a mouth and had no interest in borrowing one.

Susie’s eyes were ice and algorithms. “He forced an activation,” she hissed. “Copy ability: Sleep. He plucked it straight out of Kirby’s pocket dimension and told it what to be.”

“How-" Taranza started, strangled with indignation and awe.

“Because he’s a butterfly and an ending,” Magolor breathed, delight and terror braided. “He cheats.”

Gooey blinked. “Kirby nap!” he announced, then planted himself over the sleeping hero like a blobby shield. “Gooey guard!”

The Star Allies didn’t need more prompting. Positions bloomed like instincts.

Dedede charged first, because kings who like cake and fights are choreography waiting to happen. His mallet came down like a book closing.

Morpho lifted his sword one-handed and caught the mallet’s entire thesis on the flat. The ground around his boots cracked in a precise square. He leaned into it and pushed, and the king’s grin widened because resistance.

“HA!” Dedede laughed, and uppercutted with the mallet’s handle. Morpho pivoted; the wind took a swing and missed.

From above, Coo stooped, a gray dart with talons reckless. Rick and Kine coordinated the impossible, land and water throwing themselves in the same direction. Morpho’s wing flicked. A ribbon of red-light butterflies peeled off and kissed the air. The trio met it and tumbled through; Coo’s feathers smoked, Rick yelped, Kine steamed. They recovered, stubborn, circling back.

Meta Knight and Dark Meta Knight bracketed Morpho, mirror and its shadow, slashing in a cross that would have halved worse things. Morpho answered with a tilt of his wrist that parried both in the same arrogant motion and stepped between their afterimages like he had written them.

Zan Partizanne’s spear cracked lightning across the grass, Francisca’s cold dropped the air like a lifted veil, Flamberge’s fire roared a counterpoint to Endeavor’s earlier arrogance. The three elements braided, a crown of the Jambastion faith brought low and honest for a friend… and Morpho walked through the weave as if brothers had braided his hair and he’d outgrown family.

“Plan B,” Susie snapped. Hard-light plates flowered, hexes around Kirby, Eri, and Gooey. “Containment.”

“Okay!” Eri squeaked and then remembered the lesson and grabbed Adeleine’s hand. “Paint!”

Adeleine had already set up her easel as if that had always been where it sat in the park. Brush blurred. Canvas bled a lion out of yellow and a dragon out of teal and a mountain out of argument. They stepped down and took their places without asking questions.

Ribbon zipped, crystal gun spitting sharp blue slivers that sang like ice bell-chimes. Morpho swatted them out of the air with a contemptuous flourish and then seemed surprised when they curved around his blade mid-flight and caught his pauldron from behind. The armor did not dent. He nodded once at the math.

Daroach flicked a card and it became a storm of cards and then a storm of knives. They hit like his grin hit: refined, delighted, mean. Morpho’s wing spun and the storm learned about weather, scattering harmlessly.

“Everyone, rotate!” Meta Knight called, crisp, soldier clean. “Keep him off Kirby. Do not get greedy.”

“Hah!” Dedede barked from the side, already halfway greedy. “You’re no fun.”

Morpho Knight pointed his free hand at Meta Knight and the air thrummed. For a flicker it smelled of old halls and older judgments. Meta’s step hit a seam and didn’t land. The red blade was there without crossing the distance. Meta’s mask rang like a temple bell and split a new, bright scratch along its left horn to match the old right-side scar. He slid back, boots grooving turf, eyes lit behind the slits with Good, finally.

Dark Meta Knight intercepted the follow-up like a petty god of grudges, sword sparks throwing little angry butterflies of their own. “You are not the worst mirror I’ve fought,” he growled, compliment and insult.

Prince Fluff looped yarn around Morpho’s ankle. The yarn learned embarrassment. It sloughed off and curled up, blushing.

Magolor opened a portal under Morpho’s feet. Morpho’s wing dipped like a gentleman acknowledging a trick he’d seen and did not mind. He hovered instead of falling. The portal spit a muffin in protest.

Susie’s hardlight bit, a dome, an iris, a bold snare. Morpho sliced it with a lazy vertical and it fell into hexagonal petals that glowed mournfully before going out.

“New plan,” Susie said without missing a beat. “Annoy him.”

“Good plan!” Flamberge whooped, and hurled a spiral that tasted like festival and arson.

Eri darted forward and back like a small moon caught in the gravity of courage, staying close to Kirby’s bubble, fingers white-knuckled on her scarf’s edge, eyes flicking between red and red and red. Dark Matter in her palm stared hungrily at Morpho and then at the sleeping Kirby and did not know which hunger was fashionable.

“Do not,” Eri whispered to the eye. “Janno. He sleeps.”

The eye rotated to regard her, then returned to the fight, sulking without eyelids.

Best to worst, they tried everything.

Bandana Dee’s spear struck red armor and did not find purchase, but it made a sound like someone knocking at the door of a cathedral and that counted. Taranza’s silk kited him sideways out of a cut that would have been an unpleasant hobby for surgeons. The Mage Sisters Jambastion’s own sisters of element and stubbornness ran their ancient drill with the grace of a language learned in pain and love: bolt, wave, blaze, together. Morpho answered with a single, simple vertical that asked, Are you done?

Adeleine painted a door on air and opened it; a stampede of painted Waddle Dees poured through with little shouts and determined faces. Morpho’s wing breathed and the Dees fell asleep mid-run, tumbling in a harmless pile of naps. Ribbon zipped and peppered Morpho’s boots and made faces when it only made sparks.

Gooey, bless him, launched into Mock Matter dark appendages flaring like he’d borrowed rage from a storm cloud and swept at Morpho with genuine, guileless oomph. The blade met him, pressed, and slid him back like a squeegee returning a puddle to lake. Gooey shook his head, eyes spinning, then laughed and came again. “Hehe! Fun!”

“Back!” Meta Knight barked, and Gooey dutifully oozed two steps of retreat and then did not retreat in his heart at all.

Dedede feinted high, actual feint, for once, swept low, caught Morpho’s ankle with mallet head, and yanked. Morpho hopped, balanced ridiculously on nothing, touched down as if dance had consented to be a battle, and thrust.

The tip of the red blade stopped a hair’s breadth from Dedede’s nose. The king went wall-eyed and cross-eyed in the same moment. Everyone froze instinctively; even Magolor’s smirk took a breath.

Morpho paused.

Tilted the blade sideways.

Booped Dedede’s beak.

Dedede blinked. Then giggled. Then roared. “Heh this guy got jokes now!"

“Don’t encourage the extinction event,” Susie muttered.

Morpho Knight looked, finally, at Eri. Not the child, the edge of her. At the eye in her palm that belonged to a different kind of story. He tilted his head again, an almost-bow to an ancient colleague, mortal enemy, distant cousin, it was hard to tell which when categories are older than species.

The eye narrowed, dilated, whatever the equivalent is when you are a will with a pupil. Curiosity and hunger and something tender that wasn’t there last week moved in its iris.

“Stay,” Eri whispered to it. “Jaitty later. Fight Kirby jonto. Not now.”

It simmered, then stilled, petulant, but obeying a girl who had an entire party’s worth of Bastion still holding fast in her chest.

Morpho’s sword drew a slow, horizontal arc. The grass it pointed at turned to tiny embers and remembered green a heartbeat later. He vanished again, no, walked through a slice of noon into their evening, and reappeared behind Meta Knight.

Meta turned as if forewarned by the way the world failed to make a sound. Dark Meta Knight met Morpho’s blade. The two locked in a narrow glare of metal and decision. The pressure made the park groan.

“Know my power,” Meta Knight said again, quiet and not to boast. Then he vanished too, Dimensional Cape swallowing him into a slit, and reappeared over Morpho with a descending strike that had ended so many sentences.

Red sword came up like a rebuttal you can respect.

They traded clean. No wasted motion. No theater. Dedede watched with an appreciative grin that was almost reverent. Gooey clapped in little flobbing slaps. Eri forgot to breathe until Ribbon nudged her and she started again.

“Susie,” Taranza hissed between exchanges, “if you have any… gadget for butterflies that end men-"

“Working on one,” Susie growled, thumbs flying. “He modified a biological ability to function with those not of the same species. That should be illegal. I’m filing a complaint with the universe.”

“Get in line,” Magolor sighed, then made a portal under his own feet and popped up behind Morpho to drop a star mine. The butterfly wing brushed it aside into the pond where it ate a lily pad and belched politely.

Zan Partizanne slammed her spear-butt down. “Good there's a line if we live long enough!” she barked and lightning shot up into the sky and came down everywhere else. It hit Morpho. He noticed. He did not care.

Flamberge screamed “JAMBLASTED!” and hurled an arc that would have knocked Endeavor clean into next week. Morpho kissed it with his blade and turned it into a fan of fireflies that spelled out a rude word in Jambastion and then winked out. Francisca, appalled and enchanted, covered Eri’s ears a second too late. Eri giggled. The eye looked smug.

Adeleine painted a Kirby, pink, proud, perfect,and the paint-Kirby charged in, stubby feet a blur, shouting a painted “Poyo!” you could almost hear. Morpho watched it come as if remembering a photo; he let it reach him and then, very gently, with the flat of his blade, tapped it back into paint.

The real Kirby snored, a huge Z bubble forming and bobbing at his nose. The bubble popped with a tiny, perfect plip and formed again. Eri leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek. “Wake jonto,” she begged. “Please.”

Morpho’s helm turned fractionally toward her. Dedede saw the angle and threw himself into the gap.

“HEY!” he bellowed, and brought the mallet down like he was closing a door on a fire. “Fight me! I’m loud!”

Morpho obliged because he was not petty, just priorities. He met the mallet. Dedede grinned into the grind. “That’s it, butterfly boy! Feel the KING!”

The park was a battlefield painted by a child who’d seen too much and learned to laugh anyway. Cookie crumbs on a bench. Paper stars tangled in a tree. Eri’s scarf tied tight. A blue blob guarding a god like a puppy guarding a mountain.

Morpho Knight adjusted his grip. The air grew thinner. He lifted his sword and the tip traced a lazy infinity, a sideways eight, a butterfly wing. The space inside that loop went quiet.

“Everyone, out!” Susie snapped. “Do not be in that!”

They moved. Even Dedede moved, which took an effort and a bribe of later cake. The loop fell. The grass within it aged and then forgot it had, and where it touched the edge of Susie’s hardlight, the hexes went sepia for a heartbeat and then blazed back to cyan, offended.

"I hate this." Susie said

“Focus,” Meta Knight said, voice low. He lunged again, Dark Meta Knight flanking, swords crossing, X that was not an ending but a signature. Morpho took it, tested it, returned it with interest.

The first round lasted a life and a blink. It ended because Kirby snored louder, the bubble so big this time that it gently lifted him an inch, and Dedede, in the middle of swinging at a demi-death, glanced and beamed, and in that half-glance Morpho could have ended him. He did not.

He stepped back. The red blade dipped. He looked at the sleeping hero, at the eye in the child’s hand, at the gathered foolish bravery of things that would dare to love a world like this.

He raised his sword to his mask in a small, old salute.

Then he vanished into a cut in the air that closed like a mouth.

Silence took one hiccuping breath. Birds reconsidered schedules. The pond remembered it was supposed to have lilies.

And reappeared in front of Dedede and kicked him in the face

Dedede wobbled, mallet on his shoulder, chest heaving, face alight. “Hah-! Round two! I like him! Someone hate me for liking him!”

“I hate you for liking him,” Magolor offered, grinning into his own panting. “But I understand.”

Meta Knight stood very still, sword low, eyes bright behind the mask. He did not sheathe Galaxia. “He will return,” he said. “He did not come to end us. He came to remove what would end him.”

Eri slid to her knees beside Kirby. “Wake,” she begged, palm cradling his cheek. The eye in her hand looked at Morpho’s after-image, then at Kirby’s dream, then at her. It blinked once. It did not reach for the wheel.

Gooey patted Kirby’s cap. “Sleepy-hat strong,” he observed solemnly. “Morpho mean.”

“Thank you for not cutting us in half,” Ribbon said faintly, then shook herself. “No, not thank you. Boo.”

Morpho made his sword bigger and slammed it into the ground

“So… we can do that?” Flamberge asked, eyes big with bad ideas.

“No,” Susie and Meta Knight said in perfect, horrified unison.

Dedede flopped down beside Kirby and, very gently, with a tenderness that had no dignity and did not need it, tapped the snore bubble. It popped. Kirby snuffled and made a contented “po.”

“C’mon, buddy,” Dedede murmured. “We got a butterfly to bully.”

“Haaiii…?” Kirby breathed on autopilot, then sank deeper, hat sliding to cover one eye.

“He will wake on his own cycle,” Meta Knight said. “We hold.”

Zan Partizanne put a hand over her heart, fingers forming the old shape. “Bastion,” she said, as if the word were both prayer and plan. Francisca and Flamberge echoed it. The sound knitted into Eri’s chest like a stitch you stop bleeding with.

“Round two,” Magolor mused, eyes on the place the air had healed. “He’ll bring new games.”

“Then we bring cake,” Dedede declared. “I fight better sugared.”

Ribbon giggled, a little too sharp. Adeleine drew Morpho’s mask with a quick, furious hand, then scribbled over it in pink until it looked like a heart and then a butterfly and then something else.

Eri stayed kneeling. She pressed her forehead to Kirby’s. “Jonto,” she whispered. Soon. The eye in her palm closed at last, just once, like agreement.

They tightened the circle around a sleeping pink god and the girl who would not move, and waited for the second wing-beat.

The hush before a second wing-beat felt like the world deciding which memory to keep.

Kirby slept on, cap askew, a slow snore bubble swelling and shrinking at his nose. Gooey hovered over him, mouth in a firm little line, eyes a wobbling worry. Dedede rolled his shoulders and tested his grip, every inch of him the kind of ready you get from too many mistakes and all the cake in the world. Meta Knight stood with Galaxia low and bright, cloak skimming the grass, Dark Meta Knight at his shadow’s edge like a thought you try not to think twice.

Eri knelt by Kirby, scarf bundled in her fists. The little eye in her palm watched the air with a predator’s patience.

When the seam opened, it was as neat as a paper cut. Red poured through in a single step and became Morpho Knight, sword angled downward, wings flicking a single ember into the morning.

He moved toward the sleeping star like endings keep appointments.

Eri’s palm-eye flooded black.

“Stay—” she started, then the sentence caught in her throat as her own eyes went wide and void, her mouth softened at the edges and became a pupil, and her small body jerked to a stop not because someone pulled the strings but because someone else took the wheel.

A sound came out of her that was not a child’s sound: not cruel, not kind, an old echo recognizing an old mask. The cloak at her back spilled from nothing, the red of it like a wound seen in a storybook. The eye in her face blinked once, delighted by the familiar weight of gravity on a borrowed limb.

“Kirby,” said Dark Matter through Eri’s little throat surprised at how soft the consonants had to be. It raised her hands, fingers curling like it remembered them. It stepped.

Morpho tilted his head, not in greeting, not in pity. His sword lifted to a neutral.

Dark Matter laughed, high, chiming in a way that would have been tragic if it belonged to anyone else. It moved forward in a line too clean for a child, cloak streaming, little shoes skidding sparks on dew-damp grass. The red blade met no blade; Morpho had already shifted one pace to the left, and the world decided that had always been true.

Adeleine’s brush jerked, Ribbon’s wings flared, Susie’s interface spat a stream of profanity in six polite languages. Dedede swore and grinned at the same time because he adored terrible opponents. Meta Knight cut the space behind Morpho to force him to choose.

Dark Matter didn’t give him time.

It threw Eri’s weight into a spinning sweep and sang with joy when balance obeyed. When Morpho slid inside the arc, the tiny body folded, hands clapping the grass, and those hands weren’t hands anymore, they were a blackness that didn’t eat light so much as ask it to step outside. The stomach mouth opened along Eri’s centerline with a neat, horrible smile, rings of teeth like a little sun’s corona.

Eri did not scream.

The mouth snapped wind howled Morpho’s wings fluttered and did not tear because he is, unkindly, built not to. He flicked one butterfly of red light at the ground Eri’s hand had been, and the dirt there aged and crumbled, a tiny future rehearsed and dismissed.

“Stop!” Ribbon cried, uselessly, because the whole world was a moving target and the warning couldn’t find a place to land.

Francisca launched a lance of cold that froze the ember Morpho had shed. Flamberge made three bad decisions with fire and one good one, and the good one licked at Morpho’s blade, wrestling with color. Zan Partizanne pulled the storm down by its ears and threw it where she imagined a heart would be inside a legend. None of it stuck.

Dark Matter laughed again. breathless, alive inside a body that wasn’t born for it, and then everything in that laugh stopped when Morpho drew a curve in the air that wasn’t geometry; it was a verdict.

The red sword traced a crescent. The grass inside the crescent went pale at the edges.

Meta Knight’s voice cut across everything. “Move!”

Dark Matter looked and did not see Eri.

It saw a vessel that had not asked to be a battlefield.

With a shudder like a child waking in a strange room, the shadow inside Eri unmade its claim.

The cloak peeled off her in a spill of night. The eye at her mouth collapsed to a glistening ring and then to a stomach-mouth a circular wrongness centered just below her ribs that panted once like a fish on a dock and then began to shrink, very slowly, very stubbornly, as if apologizing with bad timing.

Eri sagged, quick hands catching herself. “J-Juh-” she gasped, eyes her own again, tears hot and confused. “Jorrow,” she croaked sad because the word was the only handhold on a cliff.

Dark Matter stepped out of her, tearing along the seam between host and habitant not like cruelty, not like compassion, exactly like a decision. It shed the child-shape and took the one it remembered more accurately:

White cloak fanning; visor hiding the eye;a sword in its "hand" that wasn’t metal so much as a sentence: Dark Matter Blade.

The air around it tasted of old endings and new beginnings that never quite took. It hovered half a toe above the grass, delighted to find it could again. It rolled its sword in a wrist it did not have and felt the weight of it with pleasure.

“Better,” it said, and it meant honest.

Morpho Knight accepted the correction without nodding. He simply appeared in front of Dark Matter and let the swords speak.

They clashed, a simple, clean chime that rang out over the park. Dedede’s grin went feral. Dark Meta Knight leaned forward half a degree. Meta Knight’s shoulders dropped the way old soldiers’ do when they meet a rhythm they recognize.

Dark Matter pressed, a joy it hadn’t discovered until Eri’s body had reminded it spreading through the motion: not killing, fighting. It danced, if the word can belong to a blade. Morpho, not bored, not thrilled, unsympathetic to the concept of enthusiasm, answered.

They traded things that were not feints but were polite lies. Morpho carved a loop that tried to be time and Dark Matter cut through it, delighted to find it could be rude to history. Dark Matter slashed high, then lower, then in, and Morpho stopped the third stroke with two fingers on the flat, because sometimes cruelty is just demonstration.

“Bad,” Dark Matter said cheerfully, and vanished.

It reappeared behind Morpho, sword already through, a clean lance aimed for the gap under the pauldron. Morpho turned without moving and the lance met the guard instead with a sound that felt expensive.

The Allies moved on the edges with the grim competence of people who have learned to wait their turn. Susie kept a hex dome shimmering between Eri and the duel. Ribbon kept her little crystal gun trained on any stray physics that might remember to be rude. Adeleine painted Eri a chair and then threw it away when Eri refused to sit. Bandana Dee wedged himself at Eri’s knee because doors can be small and still brave. Taranza held silk ready to be a net or a bandage, whichever the world demanded.

“J-Jamanke,” Eri whispered to all of it without looking away from the white cloak in front of her thank you and somewhere in that a sob hid and did push-ups.

Dark Matter laughed again, that good laugh, and then for the first time made a mistake on purpose.

Morpho raised his blade to a middle guard that invited something stupid. Dark Matter took the invitation and brought its blade down in a line that would have killed anything that wasn’t this, and because it was learning play, it overcommitted.

Morpho’s wing flicked.

Butterflies of light a dozen, a hundred, who can count spun off and drew a net that wasn’t space, wasn’t time, wasn’t anything but caught.

The net dropped.

Not on Dark Matter.

On Eri.

Susie’s dome groaned. Ribbon’s crystals shattered trying to thicken air. Meta Knight was already moving, too slow for this. Morpho’s sword tilted a degree. The net fell, a red veil of after.

Dark Matter did not choose.

It was the choice.

It threw itself between the net and the child, cape flaring wide, eye laughing like it had finally found the punchline. “No,” it said, and for the first time in all the time it had been hungry, the word wasn’t a refusal of kindness; it was a refusal of inevitability.

The net struck.

Light didn’t meet shadow. It met a story that had been told too many times and was trying for another ending. The red butterflies cut through the white cloak like gossip through a promise. They found the eye in Dark Matter’s chest and wrote a scar across it with a pen that had only ever signed its own name.

Dark Matter flew apart in two clean halves.

There was no blood because there has never been blood where ideas die. Just light and not-light, and a silence where a sound should have been. The halves hung for a heartbeat like arguments left on a table.

The sword dropped point-first into the grass. It did not fall over.

Eri’s breath left her like a small house losing heat. “No,” she whispered, and the word in Jambastion would have been Janno, but her mouth couldn’t find it. “No, no, no-"

A voice spoke from nowhere and everywhere and also very near, gentle and foolishly pleased with itself.

“Eri,” said Dark Matter, and somehow used her name like it was trying on something expensive and deciding to wear it every day. “Thank you.”

She choked on air. “Wh-"

“For letting me borrow your steps,” the voice went on, a little rush in the rhythm like a child calling down a hallway. “They were… Happy. Next time...Be greedier."

The halves tilted toward her. The eye split in two blinked in one sincerity. A ripple went through the Allies like the first row of a theater trying not to cry too loudly.

Meta Knight lowered Galaxia, the point kissing earth. Behind his mask, his eyes were bright and very old.

Dark Matter spoke again not to Eri, not only. “And Kirby,” it said, and something in its tone tried to be a tease and couldn’t quite get there, so it landed as brother. “You bully. Sleep and make me do your work” It made a sound like a shrug. “Heh.”

Kirby’s snore bubbled and popped in the silence, perfectly timed, indecently adorable.

The halves shivered. Ribbon clutched Adeleine’s sleeve. Dedede made a noise like a laugh swallowed wrong.

“Friends,” Dark Matter said, and the word hurt it in a way that was fine. “You are. All of you are.”

The halves began to unravel not thread, not smoke, something that looked like both and neither, a confetti of night and memory. Energy threaded through the unraveling like a silver needle, careful not to touch anyone it shouldn’t love.

A swirl of shadow reached out, hesitated near Eri’s cheek, and then tapped it like a kiss that didn’t want to scare her. She leaned into it, tears sliding into the place it wasn’t.

It turned looked with half eyes at Morpho.

The butterfly did not bow. He did not gloat. He simply accepted that this was an ending he had not written and allowed it to sit beside his own.

“Next time,” Dark Matter said to him, and it grinned without a mouth. “I will win.”

And then the halves burst, not loud, not violent, a soft flower of light and comfortable dark that rolled out and made the grass lie down for a breath. It washed over the Allies and took nothing with it except some fear and some sharpness from a day that had been trying to take all of both.

When the glow folded itself away, the park exhaled. Eri’s hair lifted and settled. The stomach-mouth on her midriff, which had been shrinking and breathing and being wrong, hiccuped once, shrank another finger’s width, and kept shrinking, stubbornly, refusing to vanish instantly because stories like to leave weird souvenirs.

On the grass in front of her, Dark Matter’s sword stood buried to the guard, not falling, not wobbling, a marker and a promise. The metal (if metal) was the color of eclipse. Along its fuller, faint sigils blinked like sleepy stars before going still.

Eri crawled to it on her knees and put both hands on the hilt. The eye in her palm opened as if to look at itself and then closed, as if that were manners.

“Jorrow,” she whispered sad into the grip. Then, quieter, like an apology and a prayer, “Jamanke.”

Gooey leaned his head against her shoulder and made a small humming sound that might have been Bastion if he knew the word. Bandana Dee knelt and rested his spear against the blade in a salute that belonged to many armies and one little boy who decided to be brave. Dedede rubbed his nose with the back of his glove and scowled at the sky like it owed him an explanation for being unfixable.

Meta Knight stepped forward. He did not touch the sword. He bowed to it, shallow and sincere, and then to Eri, deeper.

“He chose,” he said, and his voice was the kind that makes rooms still. “That matters.”

Dark Meta Knight huffed, sharp and hiding, and turned his head like there was dust. “Wasteful idiot,” he muttered to the sword. “Welcome to the club.”

Morpho Knight watched.

He did not move to strike the child while she was kneeling. He did not take the sword. He did not leave. He simply existed like a punctuation mark that hasn’t yet decided if it is a period or a colon.

Susie rose, smooth and angry and grieving in engineer. “New objective,” she said softly, like she’d filed the moment under “we will not break here.” “Protect the child. Retrieve the blade. Wake the hero. Survive the butterfly.”

“Order,” Taranza murmured, offering silk to Eri’s wrists like a ribbon to anchor her. She didn’t tie anything. She just let Eri choose to hold it.

Eri did.

She stood, small and straight, Dark Matter’s sword in both hands. It was taller than she was; it seemed to agree to be light for her, just for now.

She looked at Morpho through tears and did not step back. “He was my friend,” she told a legend that does not care about ownership and somehow heard her anyway.

Morpho’s mask did not change. He lifted his sword to the place where you aim at truth and waited.

The wind ran a hand through the grass and found it soft again. A duck, wholly unqualified, quacked.

Kirby snored.

And somewhere, in the space a voice leaves behind when it learns the shape of the word friends, a new rhythm settled into Eri’s chest, stitching itself into the place the mages called Bastion.

The second wing-beat finally fell. Red cut daylight into a promise of more.

The fight would go on.

But the world, in that breath, held a sword like a gravestone and a gift, and a little girl’s knuckles white around it, and a group of fools kind enough to arrange themselves between her and the next ending.

Chapter Text

They found the fight the way storms find ships, by accident and because the sea insists.

A police chopper tilted over the park and saw a child with a horn plant a sword in grass. A rooftop camera panned and caught a red knight stepping out of a paper-thin seam. Hawks, blood seamed under fresh bandage, limped onto a balcony and looked down with a face that had decided to be calm later. Ryukyu circled high and tight, dragon eyes wide, heat-sense slipping along shapes that did not read like flesh. Aizawa crouched on a parapet and went stone still; his scarf hung, waiting for a good idea. Endeavor, wet soot on his coat from a fountain that did not deserve the blame, stood at curb’s edge and set his jaw so hard sound declined to pass.

“Report,” Madam President said into a line that felt like a nerve in the heart of a city.

“Target child located,” Hawks rasped. “Puffball asleep in a hat. Unknown red knight with sword. Unknowns known. And… uh… All For One is-” He watched the butterfly knight and decided that the sentence could not be improved by finishing. “-he was there now he's not.”

“Confirm what took him,” she said.

“Orange butterfly,” Hawks replied, perfectly serious. “Turned into a red knight with a sword and bad manners.” He paused. “Sir, ma’am- he just back handed the knight that one shot me.”

Across town and much closer, the League of Villains clustered along a skeletal apartment’s broken rib of balcony and watched through a stolen scope. Tomura’s fingers flexed and unflexed over the railing, scratching absent circles into rust, falling into the groove trauma always makes. Dabi leaned a shoulder against a pipe and let a blue flame drip lazily off his fingertip. Toga rested her chin on her hands and made little worried noises she pretended were giggles. Twice whispered encouragements and arguments at each other. Spinner clutched his sword and tried not to be a fan of anything. Mr. Compress,fresh mechanical elbow joint still so new it clicked kept his gaze on the child below and listened for any excuse to be worse.

“What is that,” Tomura asked without inflection. Not a question. A favor he wanted from the world and would take if it was slow.

Dabi squinted. “Sword butterfly,” he said. “Hate it.”

“Pretty,” Toga murmured, then curled in on herself with a shiver. “And icky. Like a doctor’s office that can fly.”

“Is that… is that Kirby sleeping? In a hat?” Twice said with both his voices, then hissed, “Why do I find that threatening?”

“Because you are correct,” Compress muttered. His remaining hand fluttered at his chest, phantom joints clacking where metal now lived. “He slept through physics once and woke up with dessert.”

On the grass, Morpho Knight tipped his sword a degree in acknowledgment of witnesses he would not allow to affect his calendar. His helm turned to the girl who had just finished crying.

He stepped to meet her. The ground took one polite step backward.

Eri lifted Dark Matter’s sword with both hands, the blade almost taller than she was, and the weight obeyed as if it remembered choosing her. She did not retreat. She did not summon Dark Matter back; there was nothing left to summon but a promise. She held the eclipse blade like a question asked in the correct tone.

“Stay behind me,” Bandana Dee said, already in front of her.

“Janno,” Eri told him without looking no and his chest puffed, insulted and proud.

Meta Knight crossed the field in three clean steps. Dark Meta Knight’s cape snapped, a shadow snapping to attention. Dedede popped his shoulders and set his mallet on his shoulder like a starched memory of a throne. Susie spun out a web of hexes around Kirby and Gooey and Eri with a soft shff, hardlight kissing air, layers interposed like good intentions rendered in geometry.

Morpho moved first. He never charged, he arrived. One frame he was at sword’s length, the next he was inside it, blade an unhurried line that proposed to separate Eri’s hands from her wrists so politely that grief would have needed a translator.

Galaxia intercepted, singing a hot gold. The red blade sheared against it with a scream like two altars arguing. Sparks skittered over the grass like butterflies that had picked the wrong major. The block pushed Eri back a half-step; Bandee pushed forward half an inch. Ribbon peppered the space behind Morpho with crystal fire; the shots bent like commas around his wing and shattered against his mask, offended to have been expected to work.

“Hold,” Meta Knight said, not to his own feet; they didn’t need it. To Eri’s. “Breathe.”

Morpho’s free hand lifted, fingers spreading. The air tilted. For an instant, a smell of antiseptic and ambition, AFO’s hospital drift, threaded the park. Something grew from Morpho’s forearm: pale rods that shivered and then fired in a bouquet of knives Rivet Stab. They came high and low all at once, a surgeon’s shrapnel.

“Down!” Dedede roared.

Susie’s hexes flared and took three. Adeleine’s brush drew a shield in one stroke and swung it up paint rang and turned bone. Taranza snapped silk strings and plucked three projectiles off-course with spider harp. One lanced for Eri’s face-

Bandana Dee parried it with the little flat of his spear in a motion so clean it made Meta Knight blink. The rivet hummed off into the duck pond, where it convinced a lily pad to have a midlife crisis.

Morpho had already replaced the growth with nothing, arm smooth again, and glided sideways. He flicked his sword and the world felt like a blade had been drawn through a book. Red butterflies ribboned out in lazy arc, and wherever they landed time hiccuped—the grass brown-and-green, a leaf falling twice.

Eri’s grip tightened. Dark Matter’s last words sat in her throat like a name she would grow into.

Be greedier.

She took a breath. Another. The stomach-mouth below her ribs, wrong, shrinking, stubborn, opened with a little wet chik like an eye deciding to look at you now. It gaped not at air, but at the idea of choice.

Morpho stepped in with a vertical, very deliberate, line, a cut so simple it bordered on contempt. Meta Knight moved to intercept and realized he’d been outflanked by a concept. Morpho’s sword fell, the edge a red note.

“Copy ability:” Eri said, and her voice wobbled and steadied. Her little body folded forward with outrageous trust in legs she hadn’t earned yet and-

CHOMP.

The stomach-mouth bit down on Morpho’s descending blade.

It shouldn’t have. That was an ending you don’t get to bite. But Kirby had taught the world to make room for a shape it hadn’t expected, and Eri wore that lesson like a scarf.

For a heartbeat the red sword lodged at the rim of a wrongness and the wrongness held, teeth like crescent moons digging in. Eri’s knees trembled; her arms locked.

Morpho’s helm tilted, a fraction of surprise, a butterfly in a hurricane noticing a lily. He lifted his left hand and opened it, and a new red blade blossomed there, taking shape like a sentence repeated. His mask regarded her with white patience.

Eri’s stomach-mouth gulped. The stolen blade slid inside with a slurp that made Susie’s face go three shades of apology. The mouth shuddered, hiccupped a little contented hiccup, and then vanished, sealing closed in a smooth ripple of skin. The shrink that had been taking its time jumped as if the body had decided it could be done with indignity now.

A red flare ran from Eri’s middle up her spine and out her shoulders. Her horn tingled. She staggered, clutched Dark Matter’s hilt, and then,

Her outline doubled.

A helm settled over her messy hair, smooth, red, sweeping, horned like butterfly antennae. Wings ruptured from her shoulder blades, carmined, sparkling like a thousand tiny hearts, unfurling with a fsshh that made Gooey clap despite himself. Armor set over her sweatshirt, fitting because power likes to fit the willing. In her right hand, a sword that was not Morpho’s but true to its lineage,red, butterfly guard, jewels along the blade like blue eyes that decided not to blink.

Winds on three different rooftops gasped as one.

“What- what did she just do?” Midoriya blurted into a rooftop mic he didn’t remember keying. “She-she-copied? How did she copy? She doesn’t have that thing anymore- that’s not a Quirk! That-!”

“Kid,” Aizawa said flat, “eyes.”

“Right. Sorry. Sorry.” Midoriya’s brain burned through seven notebooks and a bar graph. “Uh- Mr. Aizawa- I think the butterfly is using All For One’s- that’s- those were Rivet Stabs, and now Eri- Eri just- Copied- like Kirby- but she ate the sword. This is a- this is a-” he groped for a term and settled on honesty- “nightmare.”

On the League’s balcony, Tomura made a small ah sound he didn’t admit to. “He can’t even keep his own face,” he said to the world, not to his people. “Now he’s a moth in armor.”

“Butterfly,” Toga corrected absently. “He’s pretty.” She hugged herself and swallowed a bubble of panic. “I hate him.”

“Join the team,” Dabi muttered.

Below, Eri planted her feet and raised the Morpho Sword. The wings at her back tilted, caught the light, then shivered like birds thinking about being knives.

She felt it-like putting on a coat that had kept other people warm. Strength that wasn’t hers and didn’t try to be. The logic of slashes that cut stories instead of skin. And beneath those, uglier tools-Air Cannon humming in her lungs like wind in ruins, Rivet Stab squirming under her skin asking for wrists to bloom, Springlike Limbs flexing ghost-stiffness in her elbows.

Her stomach went cold. Then hot. She looked at the sword in her left hand, the eclipse blade, and at the one in her right, the red wing, and decided.

“Morpho Sword!” she shouted, because names have power and because it felt good to say a thing before doing a thing.

The helm’s eye-slits flared white. The wings tightened. Her right arm moved.

Morpho’s red blade came down to meet it, calm as rain.

They hit. It rang right. The park juddered; the pond hiccuped a duck into indignant silence. The red-on-red glare made Dedede laugh out loud. Meta Knight’s mask inclined a fraction, conceding admiration and worry.

Eri’s left sword came in, Dark Matter’s eclipse, late and almost clumsy and entirely honest. Morpho caught it along his guard and shoved, spinning her, wings compensating, feet skidding. Bandana Dee yelped encouragement like a coach at recess.

Morpho’s free hand opened. Bone grew again, Rivets blooming and firing point-blank, a bouquet of needles aimed to stitch Eri to an ending.

She turned her head and the helm, kind, clever, spat a fan of tiny red butterflies that drank the rivets’ momentum and dropped them like dull toys in the grass. Eri’s eyes widened. “Jopoko!” she blurted. Surprise. “I can-"

Morpho’s wing scythed. She stopped thinking.

She moved.

She drove Dark Matter’s sword down to lock the arc. She brought Morpho Sword up to push the scythe. She slipped into a stance Kirby had once used to chop a cake and make eight friends happy.

Her wings flashed and she was airborne without permission, a little red comet in a circle. Morpho followed without visibly moving; he was simply there because he always is.

On the periphery, the Allies rewrote their playbook in pencil.

“New rule,” Susie said, sarcasm subdued by awe. “Do not let the child overdraw on the murder bank.”

“Agreed,” Taranza breathed. “Also send the murder bank a thank-you note.”

“Jamedetāna,” Zan Partizanne murmured under her breath "congratulations" at Eri’s form, then louder: “We hold the rim. No stray endings through the crowd.”

“Crowd?” Dedede said, bemused, then noticed a hundred people at the park edge collectively holding their breath and their phones. “Hah! Autographs later!”

The red-on-red duel tightened.

Morpho feinted, actually feinted, for once, drew a line that whispered Eri’s throat would be prettier if it were elsewhere. Eri dropped her chin and met it with the butterfly guard, the blue jewels along the blade lighting like startled eyes. Air Cannon asked to be used, she held it.

“Greedier,” Dark Matter’s laugh echoed in memory, be greedier, and she realized it didn’t mean take more. It meant ask more from what loved you.

She asked.

The helm hummed. The wings split their arcs and closed, then opened with a snap that kicked her sideways through her own afterimage. She reappeared at Morpho’s left where a child’s logic insisted nothing should be. The Morpho Sword raked. The Dark Sword chopped. Morpho caught one on his guard and let the other drag a scarlet spark along his pauldron that was not damage and still felt like win.

He answered with a line from nowhere that was not dimension slash but the cousin you don’t introduce to polite company. It would have cut Eri from shoulder to hip in a story with fewer authors.

She didn’t parry with either sword.

She lifted her left hand open, palm-eye shut tight and there, and the air curdled. A shadow of Dark Matter’s presence bulged, a soft bubble of not-light where the cut would have traveled. Morpho’s line hit it and skipped.

Kirby snored louder, as if to say nice.

“Did… did she just deflect a time-lean?” Susie demanded of anyone with the confidence to lie fast. “With a friend-memory?”

“Yes,” Meta Knight said. “She did.”

Morpho tilted his helm. You could not see emotion in that mask. You could feel it in the way the sword lifted by a hair’s breadth higher. He took her measure again, adjusting to include something that had not been there a moment ago: grief leveraged into technique.

He swung in a clean diagonal.

Eri crossed her swords.

Red met red. Eclipse kissed ending. The sound was a bright pain and a prayer.

Then Morpho cheated.

He looked at her and a dozen bones erupted in a ring around her, Rivet Stab called out of nothing from twelve o’clock to eleven, a murderous halo collapsing. She couldn’t see them all. She couldn’t avoid them all.

“Eri!” Ribbon cried, small voice huge.

Eri didn’t look.

She decided.

Her right hand, Morpho Sword, swept in a wide circle, red butterflies bursting out in a shield. Her left, Dark Sword, stabbed down, pinning one rivet to the dirt like a butterfly to a collector’s card. Four spears hit the red fan and died. Two scraped her wing and burned without mark. Three scissored in,

Bandana Dee vaulted, parasol popped, caught two, and pinged them into a tree where they stuck like modern art. The third...

A small blue blur intercepted. Gooey’s tongue snapped out, wrapped, and flung the rivet into the pond with a happy sploot. “Hehe!”

Morpho, who does not change plans, changed plans.

He stepped through the space where she had been guarding, red blade already arriving at a line that would have been final if not for the love of stubborn little things.

Eri stepped into it.

The wings at her back folded, sacrificial. The blade skated the helm. Sparks. A hairline along the red. No blood. The helm liked her more for not being soft.

She felt power wanting , Air Cannon like a scream in the ribs; Springlike Limbs in the elbows. She picked one.

She inhaled, sharp, deep. The Morpho helm drank the breath into itself and taught it how to leave.

Eri exhaled and a cone of pressure leapt from the butterfly mouth in her guard, a polite, devastating shove Air Cannon in a red accent.

Morpho did not stumble. He recognized the trick and accepted the push as a ride, gliding back three body-lengths to a cleaner angle.

On the rooftops, Endeavor’s breath steamed for reasons having nothing to do with temperature. “The child has two blades,” he said, to hear a sentence that could not be true and accept that it was.

“The child has so many more,” Hawks muttered, a hand pressed to his ribs, eyes glassy with pain and fascination. “We just see two.”

Aizawa swallowed, hard, and did not blink. He watched Eri’s stance, not the swords. He watched the way she looked at the red knight, not like prey, not like god, but like a homework problem you can solve if you breathe through the panic.

“Okay,” Tomura said to the balcony railing. “Okay. New rule. We never go near that thing.” He meant Kirby. He meant the child. He meant the butterfly. He meant futures.

“Boss,” Dabi said dry, “we haven’t gone near a good idea in months. Why start.”

Down below, Morpho drew the lazy figure-eight of infinity with his blade, and the loop began to fall. Time in the park slurred, the edges of everything smearing, the duck in the pond quacking and then hearing its quack a breath late and frowning.

Susie shouted, “Out of the loop! Out!”

Eri did not jump. She asked.

“Morpho Sword,” she whispered, not a spell, an agreement, and her wings flared. The red loop halved itself to let her out, then tried to snap closed like a trap. She skimmed the closing arc with a little shiver and popped free, landing in a neat skid, knees bending, two blades up.

Morpho swung down.

She crossed her swords and caught it. It should have crushed her wrists. It did not. Something in the helm and in the hand and in Dark Matter’s sword said not today.

He saw the math change and adjusted again. This is what he is. He does not rage. He converges.

Eri’s bones hummed with too many things wanting to be used. She heard Dark Matter laugh inside her, not voice now, feeling, shouting from a balcony she’d built for it: Greedier! Ask more! Ask more!

So she did.

“Sword beam.” she breathed, this time into her own red blade, and the helm’s eyes brightened.

She moved first.

Two blades drew red arcs that did not touch grass and still cut shadows. Morpho met one, then the other, then both. Sparks fell like fireflies. A phone at the park edge recorded myth and added a sticker.

Kirby, on the ground, yawned, hat askew, bubble popping. He murmured something that sounded like “cake.”

“Jonto,” Eri told him over her shoulder without turning, soon, and swung again.

The fight climbed. Heroes and villains, audience who thought themselves actors, watched with a shared horror that did not soften in the sharing.

“How did All For One escape?” Midoriya blurted to nobody official and everybody listening. “How did Kirby hit him once? What is that butterfly? How is Eri-"

“Later,” Aizawa cut him off, but his voice was gentler than it deserved to be. “Right now you watch how she stands and you remember it.”

Morpho Knight drew another loop; Eri cut through it. He threw more rivets; the helm drank them with red butterflies and the pond collected a bouquet. He lifted a hand and the air pressed like a wall; Susie’s hex braced, Bandana Dee braced, Eri leaned into it and pushed back with Air Cannon until the two pressures sang against each other and cancelled out with a tired sigh.

He vanished; she jumped without seeing and was in the right place anyway because wings sometimes mean instinct gets a map.

He cut; she crossed; he slid; she asked; he answered.

At the edge of the park, Endeavor’s flames guttered, then steadied, then dropped to a pilot light he did not admit to calling respect. Hawks blew out a breath that hurt and kept watching because this kind of wrong demands evidence. Madam President didn’t speak into any line for three heartbeats and then said, softly, “Containment plans change.”

Down below, the red-on-red duel paused for a breath like a comma. Both blades dipped a degree. Eri’s chest heaved; her horn glinted; her hands shook and did not drop. The helm’s eyes narrowed, pleased. Morpho’s mask did not change.

“Jambuhbye.” Eri said

Morpho raised his blade in a very small salute that was not kindness. It was acknowledgment that the wing-beats were not over.

Then he moved again, and the child with two swords and too many promises stepped in to meet him, greedy for a future where endings could be shared.

Then...

The second round broke into thirds steel, breath, stubbornness, and Morpho Knight took each like a course he’d ordered.

He pressed, calm as gravity. When Dedede met him head-on and hammered down a blow that would have throttled a skyscraper, Morpho lifted his free hand and the impact disappeared into him, Shock Absorption swallowing force like a bottomless throat. He returned it a heartbeat later with a casual backhand; the shock rode Dedede’s ribs like a horse and threw the king twenty meters into a park bench that forgot it had ever been a bench.

When Dark Meta Knight slashed a line that folded shadow into razor, Morpho simply held it with brute strength, blade locked, muscles that were not muscles humming with stolen redundancies, and shoved D-Meta back three furrows. Meta Knight took the gap, slashing for the joint; Morpho’s wing snapped, a red shield that rang like a struck chalice.

He moved without hurry, a man collecting debts in a dream. Rivets bloomed and burst, bones fired like javelins. An invisible wall pressed forward, Air Cannon inverted. He stepped through hexes, over paint, around crystal. Every answer you threw at him learned that it was an answer to the wrong question.

And then he found the right one.

Eri rose into a mid-air cross, Morpho Sword in the right, Dark Matter Blade in the left, wings fanned, and Morpho vanished. He reappeared point-blank, sword already falling with the simplicity of a guillotine.

The impact hit her guard, drove through, hit her. The red helm screamed light and went dark. The butterfly wings shattered into a thousand falling embers. The Morpho Sword banged out of her grip and spun, de-solidifying in the air into a drifting, ruby ability star that winked away before her fingers remembered to close. The eclipse blade tore from her left hand and stabbed into the turf at a tilt, quivering.

The shock rolled outward, Susie’s shields blew like glass; Bandana Dee pinwheeled and skidded; Ribbon yelped as wind took her, Adeleine’s easel toppled, Zan’s spear dug a trench to keep her upright. Dedede spat grass and an oath and forced himself up on a laugh that didn’t quite make it.

Eri hit the lawn. Every nerve went bright. The horn rang in her skull like a bad bell. She turned her hand by instinct, and saw skin.

No eye peering from the palm.

She touched her belly, breath stuttering.

Smooth. No wrong mouth.

Her tricks, all the borrowed doors were gone.

Footsteps like edits approached. Red metal kneeling; a sword angled. The pond had the gall to glimmer.

Morpho Knight planted the tip beside her throat, so close she could feel the cold on the throb of her pulse. Not cutting. Measuring. The wings cast a butterfly-shaped shade over her face.

“Stand proud, child. You are strong,” he said, voice the hush of altar stone and old verdicts.

Eri swallowed. The swallow hurt. “I’m not done…” She got one knee under her. The world bucked. She got the other knee there anyway.

Morpho regarded the trembling, the dirt on her cheek, the ridiculousness of a horned girl trying to stand where gods were falling. “How is it you can fight like this? Stripped of everything and in terrible pain?”

Eri’s eyes flicked past the edge of his blade to a memory no one else could see: white tile, soft gloves that were never soft, a man’s voice explaining kindness like a punishment, the smell of antiseptic too clean to be honest. “I’ve felt worse,” she said, and the words were small and enormous in the same breath.

"Then I shall relive you of that." Morpho Knight said

The red blade lifted a hair, enough to end, if he wanted. The wings drew in a fraction, as if to give the moment privacy.

And Kirby woke up.

It was not dramatic, unless you were physics. He inhaled, cheeks puffing; the little star nightcap slid back from one eye. He blinked twice, blew a snore bubble that popped on his own nose, sat up, looked at the sword at Eri’s throat, and stopped being cute.

The pink foot planted. The little arm came up.

He punched Morpho Knight so hard the sky said “excuse me” and made room.

Red armor went up like a punctuation mark thrown into a sermon. Morpho flashed through three layers of air, hit a cloud, split it, and kept climbing until he remembered to stop.

Kirby was already moving again. He pointed at Magolor without looking.

“Maggy, por’ull!” he chirped, words tumbling, demand clear.

Magolor, delighted, terrified, snapped a portal open like a fan. Space bent, and Super Blade Knight stepped out of the elsewhere: taller, gleaming, tassels long, pauldrons spiked, a bright yellow star blazing on his helm, sword arcing with multicolored aura.

“Ah, try not to-” Magolor began, and then remembered who he was talking to.

“Haaiii!” Kirby sang, inhaled, and the knight’s world ended politely.

He swallowed the shimmering warrior in a neat gulp, cheeks stretching, star aura drawing into his small round. Power flooded his little body like sunlight into a glass. He wobbled, giggled, and transformed.

A green hat blossomed on his head, orange brim, a star at the tip that throbbed like a merry heartbeat, tiny crystalline sidepieces catching morning. The aura that had wrapped Blade Knight now wrapped Kirby, brighter for having permission. In one hand that wasn’t a hand he held a sword that began sensible and then remembered who it was with.

“Uuuuultra!” Kirby trilled, hopping once, the ground tremoring under his adorable.

Up above, Morpho steadied, wings snapping once, mask angled down to reassess the possibility of pink. He lifted his blade and drew a line in the air that would have been a wall if walls were honest.

Kirby readied himself.

He jumped.

The sword grew.

Not grew like boast. Grew like an answer: from long to longer, from cathedral to mountain, from big to shouldn’t. The park went small under its shadow. The city watched a new skyline unsheathe itself. The blade’s edge kept going until it stole the horizon and made it a toy.

Phones on rooftops tried to keep it in frame and learned humility.

“What-” Hawks said, and did not finish because he ran out of mouth.

“We have to-” Endeavor began out of habit and then remembered he was nobody in this sentence.

Aizawa said nothing and locked the picture behind his eyes because people would lie later.

Morpho Knight looked up at the small city of sword falling and, for the first time in any memory that had survived him, adjusted posture in a way that said: respect. He raised his blade to meet it because that’s who he was allowed to be.

Kirby came down in an arc you could write a religion on.

KRAAASH.

The world rang. The park leapt. The pond went vertical and came down as rain. The cut slid through Morpho, through the air, through the wrongs that had gathered and waited for their turns. For a long heartbeat there was only light, plain and honest as noon.

Silence fell like a petal.

Red held red for an impossible second, and then Morpho’s mask tilted a fraction and a small, soft chuckle escaped a being that did not have a mouth. Not mockery. Not even amusement. Something like gratitude pried loose from a habit of conclusions.

“Does… does this mean I lose?” he asked no one and Kirby and the part of himself that prefers duels to funerals.

Kirby landed lightly, all enormousness already gone, hat still starry, cheeks lifted. He put his little fist to his mouth and mffed a smile.

“I wish… we could have fought a little longer,” Morpho said, and somehow every Sword user present, Meta Knight, Dark Meta Knight , Eri, Flamberge, understood the sentence in their bones.

Morpho Knight split along the line Kirby had written him in. The halves did not slump. They opened into swarms, red butterflies spinning up and out, lifting in a quiet storm. They did not scatter like fear; they rose like incense. For a breath they were all around, on the blade of Dark Matter’s sword, on Bandana Dee’s spear butt, on Dedede’s mallet, on Eri’s horn, little red shapes landing and leaving a kindness no one asked for.

They lifted, thinned, and were gone.

Kirby let the Ultra Sword wink smaller in his hands until it was a big sword, then a regular one, then a laugh, then nothing. The green hat with orange brim bobbed; the star at the tip blinked and went out. He wobbled, shook himself, and beamed.

Magolor was already spinning up circles of light. “Exit, stage Dream Land!” he sang, for once un-ironic.

“All of us,” Meta Knight said, not because they needed the order but because the order helped give the moment a handle. His cape spread and became a gate with stars sewn into the seam.

“Everyone grab a snack for the road!” Dedede bellowed, because grief and adrenaline needed sugar. He yanked up a picnic cloth that definitely hadn’t been there earlier and somehow it was loaded with onigiri and pancakes and something that might have been a fruit from five universes. Bandana Dee stuffed a rice ball into Kirby’s hand. Kirby stuffed half of it into his own face.

Ribbon scooped Eri with both arms and a flutter and then set her back on her feet because: capable. Adeleine scooped up the eclipse blade and offered it hilt-first; Eri took it, reverent, the weight agreeing with her. Susie snapped a last hex around them like a travel bubble. Gooey oozed a goodbye at the ducks.

“Warp!” Kirby sang, flipping open his little star phone with ceremony and swagger. The Warp Star sang back as light and fell out of nowhere like a favorite toy meeting a child’s hand halfway.

They piled, graceful, chaotic, practiced. Kirby hit dial; the star answered. Magolor’s portal yawned; Meta Knight’s cape accepted; Taranza threaded silk from one to the other and made a safety net for anyone who forgot which door was theirs. The lot of them became a comet with opinions and left.

By the time the last butterfly of red had winked from the air, the park was a wound cautiously scabbing.

Sirens dopplered closer. The first wave of heroes breached the playground’s edge with the careful speed of people who have learned that late can still be dangerous. Endeavor walked into the clearing with his flames low and his jaw ironed. Hawks landed barefoot on the grass and winced because ribs make you honest. Aizawa stepped through the bent fence and did not blink.

They found: scorched divots, a bench that had stopped pretending, a hedge cut with surgical indecision. They found rivet bones stuck in a tree like a modern sculpture and a dozen red embossings in the lawn where butterfly shapes had sat a heartbeat. They found the pond pretending to remember which way was down. They found, half-buried and tilted, a sword unlike any on their registries, black like eclipse, its hilt catching a late sun. (When Aizawa reached for it, his hand paused without knowing why. He left it there, as if it needed to be found by someone else.)

They did not find a pink puffball.

They did not find a horned girl.

They did not find a butterfly in armor, or a blob with a good heart, or a trio of mages, or a king, or a thief, or the smell of cake that had been here a minute ago like an alibi.

The park exhaled.

“Where did they go?” Endeavor asked, making the words heavy enough to break on purpose.

“Home,” Aizawa said, and for once it wasn’t a metaphor; it was an admission that somehow didn’t feel like defeat.

"Then where's Eri?!" Midoriya asked

"Probably with them." Aizawa said

"No..." Midoriya said falling to his knees

Hawks stared at the sky like it might cough up answers if he glared charmingly. “Some days,” he said, “I think the sky is a door and we’re the only ones without the key.”

Madam President’s voice crackled in their ears, clipped and held together by will. “Situation?”

“Resolved,” Aizawa said. “By… external parties.”

“Victims?”

He looked at the half-healed grass, at the pond’s damp apology, at the absence that felt like a promise kept. “None. Yet.”

There was a pause long enough to imagine budget committees. “Understood. Debrief. And… keep an eye on the sky.”

Hawks huffed a laugh that hurt. “Copy that.”

Endeavor stared a long time at the place the Ultra Sword had made the city feel small. “That thing,” he said to the air, to no one, “cut a cloud.”

Aizawa said nothing, because some truths don’t require multitasking.

Up and over, on the other side of a friendly universe, a Warp Star touched down on a soft green hill and spilled a party onto the grass. Eri landed on her feet, knees shaking, smile real. Kirby bounced twice, held his arms up, and Eri leaned down and hugged the little hero so tight he squeaked.

“Jamanke, Kirby,” she whispered into his cap.

“Kirby!” he answered into her scarf, as if that were a full paragraph. Maybe it was.

Behind them, Dream Land exhaled, a promise of beds and bread and being safe without having to prove you deserved it. The eclipse blade hummed a note only brave children hear. Somewhere very far away, red butterflies spun in a draft and agreed, without malice, to end this chapter and see what the next would dare.

A few months later

Spring burned into summer and cooled to a gentler blue. The city scabbed over its strange cuts. News cycles made room for other, more comprehensible disasters. But certain people kept going back to the same places, as if a door might open if you were kind enough to knock forever.

On a rooftop with good wind and bad railings, Midoriya leaned into the chain-link and stared at the park where it had all gone wrong and right. The grass was whole again. The ducks had forgiven time for folding them once. Joggers made loops that carefully skirted a blade planted near the south copse.

They’d tried to move it. The crews failed gently. The winch sighed. The cord snapped. The sword, black like a shut eclipse, hilt just visible, stayed where it had chosen to wait.

Eventually, the city gave up on construction and discovered reverence.

Someone taped a paper crane to the crossguard. Then a ribbon. Then a drawing, crayon wings and a girl with a horn and a pink circle with a hat. A stone painted with red butterflies. A little plush of a blob with googly eyes. A hero trading card rubber-banded to a daisy stem. A sign in a child’s handwriting: THANK YOU DARK SWORD with the R backwards and the sweetness weaponized.

By the second month, a semicircle of low posts and rope had gone up, not to keep people away so much as to teach them how to get close. An engraved plate set in the grass said what the city could say without lying:

Here fell a blade from an unknown friend. We keep watch for the child who was brave with it.

Aizawa had signed the work order in a curt hand and then not looked anyone in the eye about it for a week.

Midoriya visited whenever the searches thinned from grid to ghost. He brought notebooks he didn’t open. He stood there and tried to imagine what he would say to a little girl if a door opened in the sky and let a star and a puffball and way too much everything fall back out.

Centipeder stiff with kindness, Bubble Girl with coffee too strong for law, kept the informal watch together. Sometimes they found Midoriya there and pretended not to notice he’d cried, because that courtesy is how you grow a hero you’re proud of. Sometimes Nejire dropped in upside-down like a bright exclamation point and told them, for the fourteenth time, about the phone and the star and that name, and every time Rock Lock said “Write that down” even though they already had, because some rituals are rope bridges.

Mirio Togata jogged laps around the block of Nighteye’s building with knees high and grin ferocious, and every now and then he would run a hand through a wall just to feel the familiar sleight-of-self slide back into place. Permeation was his again. He never said how. He never had to. He kept a promise in his breastbone for the day a horned girl came home and needed to hear that sorrow is not a lifetime appointment.

(Elsewhere, in a place human maps wouldn’t recognize, Eri had stood under a giant golden face in the sky and said please without knowing how to bargain. Nova had listened like a god who enjoys being surprised and granted a wish that put a boy’s Quirk back where it belonged. No one in Midoriya’s world knew. That didn’t stop it from being true.)

The Commission grudgingly shifted from hunt to watch. Madam President read reports with a pen that never got to sign what it wanted. Hawks healed crooked and sharp, and sometimes, when he thought about a sword that had filled the horizon, his new feathers hummed with respect that embarrassed him. Endeavor kept his flames lower in public. Public trust charts did their peculiar weather. Somewhere, a memo about interdimensional contingencies got an acronym large enough to hide behind.

And the sky kept its secrets, stubborn and kind.

Dream Land had fewer secrets. It loved being seen. It loved being lived in.

Eri learned the paths where the grass felt like someone had ironed it. Waddle Dees waved with both hands, because that’s how you wave when waving is your job and your joy. The bakery in town started keeping a strawberry shortcake on the end of the counter just in case. Bandana Waddle Dee took his spear seriously and took his promise to watch over her even more seriously, which is to say he learned how to nap sitting up while still looking intimidating.

Most mornings started the same way: a warp star humming down to the hill behind Kirby’s round little house like a bird coming in for a landing, Kirby tumbling out of bed with a hat over one eye, Eri already on the doorstep with her shoes blinking because she tapped her heels together when she was excited.

“Haai!” Kirby would declare to the day.

“Jhappy,” Eri would agree, happy, and mean it so hard her horn shone.

Some days were for treats. Treat Land had laws of physics that negotiated with dentists, but Kirby had connections, and Prince Fluff’s passbook could get you into any cake you could name. They went through a door in a sock and came out on a plaza tiled like a quilt. The ground felt like someone’s favorite pants. Prince Fluff, azure, crown a felt promise, swept them into his orb-tailored world with theatrical delight.

“Welcome back!” he’d say, pinwheeling a tassel. “Eri, I saved you a slice bigger than your head!”

“Jamanke, Fluff,” Eri said, solemn with gratitude and freckles of frosting.

Other days were for lessons. Meta Knight brought a wooden practice sword that had spent time being a tree and taught Eri a guard that didn’t pretend to be bigger than she was. He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. He put a gloved hand against hers and let her feel where to put the no in a stance.

“Your feet,” he said once, very gently, tapping her ankle with the flat. “They tell the truth first.”

Dark Meta Knight appeared unannounced twice in the first month, once stepping through a mirror as smoothly as a thought deciding to be dangerous. He flicked Eri’s horn with one knuckle, declared, “Again,” and made her do the same three cuts until the air decided to move correctly. He did not praise. He did leave a smear of orange in the sky when he left that she decided was his idea of congratulations and that was enough.

Adeleine set an easel on a hill and lined up cups of color like friendly soldiers. “Paint what you want, not what you remember,” she told Eri. Ribbon hovered at her shoulder with a cloth and a courage that made the sun have to try harder.

Eri painted a red butterfly and, next to it, a soft black circle with an eye in the middle. Then she drew a little smile next to the eye because she could.

Sometimes she spoke Jambastion because it felt good in the mouth, like a carved word fits a hand. No one else, Kirby included, bothered with the syllables. It made her heart a Bastion when Francisca called out Bonjam! from the lip of a cloud and Flamberge whooped Jamblasted! at a marshmallow that wouldn’t toast. Zan Partizanne taught Eri one more word on purpose: Mapop. Hope. “Put it here,” Zan said, touching Eri’s sternum. “And here.” Her forehead. “And keep it even when the world is Konjy, crazy.”

Dedede tried not to spoil her and failed spectacularly. He insisted on showing her how to hold a mallet, then insisted on making sure she never had to. He arm-wrestled a tree for laughs (the tree lost, but only because it agreed to). He declared himself her honorary uncle and changed his ringtone to something softer whenever she was around, then pretended he hadn’t.

Susie sat Eri down one afternoon and slid a box across the table. Inside was a phone, pink case, star-shaped pop-socket, a contact list full of absurd names and weirder emojis. “Enterprise grade,” Susie said, tilting her head with a smile. “And there’s a filter that routes Kirby’s calls to me first when he’s ‘goofy.’ You’re allowed to call me when you want to talk about anything except quarterly reports.”

“Jamanke,” Eri said, holding the phone like a small promise.

Magolor rigged her light-up shoes with a mode that spelled her name when she ran. He asked permission first. She said Jes. Yes. When she jogged circles on the grass in the lavender evening, the letters E R I played tag with fireflies. It looked like a spell that only worked if you believed children deserved easy things.

Gooey took her hand once and tugged her toward the pond. He didn’t say words, he rarely needed them, but he made a shape with his smile that said look. The water reflected the sky and the sky reflected the two of them and for a breath she felt very large and very small at the same time, and both were safe.

At night, on the roof of Kirby’s round little home, Eri would lie with her head on a borrowed pillow and her feet on Kirby’s belly. The stars over Dream Land moved like music written down. Kirby held up his phone sometimes, and the Warp Star answered, and the star field changed channels, showing friends waving from other worlds. Once, a huge gloved hand made a silly heart shape with its fingers, and Dedede muttered that Master Hand was a ham, and Meta Knight refused to admit he laughed.

Eri would whisper, “Jaitty,” good night, to each of them, and the sky seemed to whisper Jhappy back.

Once, toward morning, a wish drifted up out of her like steam off hot cocoa. It wasn’t a spell; it didn’t need a god. It was simply a thing she wanted that didn’t hurt anyone.

Mr. Deku, Mr. Lemillion… be okay.

Dream Land is very good at holding wishes while they grow.

Back in the city, mid-afternoon light slanted across the black hilt in the park. A breeze fussed with the ribbons and the paper cranes and the painted rocks. Someone had tucked a strawberry candy in the grass by the guard, carefully unwrapped it from the crinkle and then wrapped it back up so the ants wouldn’t get ideas.

Midoriya stood at the rope, hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t try to pull fate closer. He closed his eyes and listened. He could almost hear a laugh that sounded like a stubby arm thumping a table, a quiet “Poyo” next to a bite of cake, a little voice practicing Jamanke into a scarf so she’d get the vowels right.

He opened his eyes at a flicker, just a flicker, like a yellow petal passing.

Up there, very high, a small shape crossed the blue, a star with an outline of joy. It flashed just once as if someone had waved.

He waved back and felt a little like a fool and a lot like a person made of Hope.

“Soon,” he told the hot city, the strange sword, and the part of himself that doesn’t know how to stop.

He didn’t know the word in Jambastion. He said it anyway.

“Soon.”

On another hill, Kirby fell asleep halfway through a cookie. Eri pulled a blanket over him and tucked it in at the edges, because that’s what you do for heroes who will always be little and larger than the sky. She lay down beside him. The horn that had once been a reason for sorrow glinted like a kiss the sun had time for.

“Jonto,” she whispered to her own busy heart soon and felt the answer arrive from very far away and very close by:

Yes.

Chapter Text

Omake: What if all for one recognized kirby? 

The park was a suitcase, half-zipped, bursting joy. Warp Star idling like a golden taxi. Dedede herding snacks into a picnic blanket with the authority of a monarch and the chaos of a dad. Susie tucking a hardlight bow on a stack of gift boxes because aesthetics are a quirk. Bandana Dee counting heads (he got distracted at “one,” pointed at Kirby, and declared “hero”). Meta Knight doing the silent “are we forgetting anything” patrol. Eri bouncing on her light-up shoes, practicing Bonjam under her breath and getting it right four times out of five.

Then the air did that thing it does when a capital-v Villain arrives: all the pigeons collectively remember other countries.

A tall iron silhouette at the path. Blank face where a face should be. Suit pressed like a threat. Chains you could feel even when you couldn’t see them.

All For One took two steps onto the lawn, tilted his head, and saw Kirby (With infaread) , who, at that precise moment, was swallowing a cupcake tray whole, cheeks making architectural decisions.

Silence landed like a fourth wall breaking.

All For One went very still. Something ancient behind the mask… squinted (without eyes) at a very modern memory.

“…Nope,” he said flatly.

“Sensei?” Tomura jogged up behind, shoulders hunched, hands hovering. Dabi sauntered a few paces back, blue flame idling like a nervous tick. Toga peeked around a tree and made a small delighted knife noise.

“I am not fighting that,” All For One announced to no one and everyone, tone that of a man choosing long life and good choices for the first time in centuries.

A handful of heroes—Endeavor, Hawks, Aizawa—arriving from three directions at once, skidded to a halt mid-charge.

“Pardon?” Endeavor managed, flames dimming out of pure confusion.

All For One pointed—not a menacing point. An identification point—at the pink creature licking frosting off his own eyebrow. “That’s Kirby,” he said, as if revealing a classified weapon system. “The video game character from two hundred years ago. The one who kills gods.” He paused, voice turning faintly incredulous with memory. “He was Yoriichi’s favorite.”

Everyone blinked in the exact same language.

“Sir,” Hawks said carefully, “are you… citing pop culture?”

“Historical case study,” All For One sniffed. “You children call it ‘pop culture’ when a deity-slayer is packaged sensibly.”

Dabi’s eyes slid to Tomura’s. “Did Sensei just say god-killer?”

Toga clasped her cheeks. “He’s so cute though.”

“Exactly,” All For One replied, with the tiny, unhinged laugh of a man who has seen too many things and is now saying the one sane thing. “He’s adorable. He’s lethal. There is no upside in antagonizing a creature whose hobbies include pastry and patricide of pantheons.”

Across the lawn, Dedede cackled. “Heh. He gets it.”

Meta Knight inclined his head a millimeter. “For once,” he allowed.

Bandana Dee saluted so hard he nearly toppled. “Kirby’s the best!”

Kirby looked up, frosting moustache askew. “Haai!” he chirped, and waved his cupcake at All For One like it was a peace treaty he could eat.

All For One took an instinctive step back.

Some heroes, who had arrived on the periphery with the grim endurance of people who bring forms to hurricanes, stared, pens paused. Bubble Girl whispered, “Is the Demon Lord… declining?”

Endavor's flames sputtered. “You’re retreating,” he said, accusation fraying into gratitude.

“I am exercising judgment,” All For One corrected crisply. “I did not amass centuries of power by walking into pink buzz saws.” He gestured at Kirby again. “That thing inhales the abstract concept of ‘problem’ and burps out stars. Do I look suicidal?”

Shigaraki, conflicted between worship and bewilderment, gestured vaguely at Kirby and Eri. “But- power. The child. The plan—”

All For One actually shuddered. “I am not laying a finger on the girl guarded by a cross-dimensional strike team, a sword that writes meteorology, a hardlight CFO, three religious fanatics, two masks with a personal grudge, a wobbling folk hero with a spear, a monarch with a mallet, a thief with bad boundaries, a spider prince with a conscience, a paint witch, a crystal fairy, and the aforementioned god-eater.”

Susie adjusted her glasses. “Ms. CFO,” she corrected, then smiled sweetly. “But the rest is accurate.”

“Bonjam!” Francisca sang helpfully, freezing a nearby sprinkler for emphasis.

“Jamblasted!” Flamberge added, setting the ice on fire because she could.

Zan folded her arms, chin high. “We confirm,” she announced on behalf of the universe. “Kirby kills gods.”

Hawks, halfway through unfurling feathers for a tactical intercept, slowly furled them back. “So… hero society’s official briefing is going to include the sentence ‘the demon lord declined engagement on account of the pink puffball’s deity body count?’”

Aizawa pinched the bridge of his nose, then let his hand drop. “Yes,” he said. “Because it’s true.”

Midoriya, somewhere between a fugue state and field notes, whispered, “He… he kills gods?” and then wrote KIRBY: DIVINE-CLASS THREAT? in a margin he would never show All Might.

In the middle of them, Eri looked between the tall scary man and her small brave friend, utterly unaware of geopolitics and scale. “Jif you hurt Kirby,” she informed All For One with perfect child gravity, “I will be Jor-row.” (If- sad.) She folded her arms with great difficulty because the cupcake demanded a hand. “And then I will be Konjy.” (Crazy.)

All For One glanced at the cupcake, then at Kirby, who had resumed eating it with the single-mindedness of a singularity. Even through the gauze of stolen senses, his danger instinct elbowed him in the ribs.

“Tomura,” he said, already stepping back. “We’re leaving.”

“But- Sensei—” Tomura’s fingers curled, uncurled, dusted the railing with decay that looked very much like a sulk.

“Consider this a masterclass,” All For One said, already turning, already calculating a different century. “Knowing to not fight gods.”

He pivoted, cloak snapping. The League trailed after him like a confused storm cloud.

“Wow,” Toga murmured, eyes huge, heart doing the worst possible thing, imprinting on the idea of mercy. “He’s cute and terrifying. Perfect.”

Dabi scrubbed a hand over his face. “I feel weirdly… reassured?”

“Appropriate,” Compress observed, tugging his new joint. “Watching a dragon avoid a blender.”

Endeavor watched the Demon Lord recede down the path and then looked back at Kirby, who had now fallen asleep upright against the Warp Star, crumbs on his face, Eri draping a napkin over him like a blanket. Dedede was arguing with a cooler. Meta Knight was negotiating with a cloud. Bandana Dee was counting “one… one… one…” and seemed satisfied.

Hawks exhaled. “So we’re… not fighting today?”

Aizawa rolled his eyes at the heavens. “For once,” he said, and didn’t even try to erase it.

Across the park, Magolor clapped his hands. “Great! Since no one’s dying, who wants to portal-hop before traffic?”

“Warp!” Kirby mumbled in his sleep, which was somehow still a fully actionable plan.

The Warp Star chimed agreement. Dream Landers waved. The civil servants braced for paperwork. And far down the path, the Demon Lord of a nation decided, with uncharacteristic humility, that he valued continued existence more than winning a headline.

Later, at the press conference, a reporter, trembling with delight and duty, asked Madam President to comment on rumors that “the notorious mastermind All For One refused conflict because the childlike entity Kirby has, quote, a history of deicide.”

Madam President took a long breath, put both hands on the podium, and said in her best national-calming voice, “Hero society will be… revising certain assumptions.”

Behind her, on a monitor, a grainy photo: Kirby hugging Eri, frosting on both faces. The lower-third chyron, added by a producer with either a sense of humor or a death wish, read:

TRANSDIMENSIONAL PINK PUFFBALL: PROTECTOR / PANTRY RAID / POSSIBLE GODSLAYER.