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Yin
present
I don't remember much of my sports festival. I don't remember much of my sixteenth year. Before you say Eri this or advanced medicine that, I've chosen to keep myself in the dark. What remains of that time is only flashes, second-hand recollections that had been handed down to me by others, some feelings here and there. For the most part, it's a lot of pain. Memory is funny that way. It wants the most painful things always remembered so that they may never happen again.
If only that's how things worked.
Up in the stands, I watch as the first years pool in like grains of sand in an hourglass. Enji stands next to me, support on an otherwise difficult day. He's the one who set up security with old contacts, heroes around Hawks' Katsuki's age– not newer ones who we don't trust completely. I asked Aizawa to run background checks on teachers at UA he didn't fully know. Nothing came back suspicious, but he's still on alert.
"Those kids aren't from Shiketsu," he says to me now, flicking his gaze from the clipboard in his hands to the three kids leaving Yuki's in the pit of the stadium.
"How'd you know that?" I ask although it's difficult to pretend I care.
"Because the kids that did come from Shiketsu were tied up in the locker room by what they described as a dark-skinned girl who knocked them out by touching them and a boy with fangs who threatened to bite if they didn't give him their uniforms."
I shrug. "If Shiketsu's best can be so easily swayed, I think that means your school is doing great in comparison."
"Yin."
"We can't pull them out now," I say. "It'll look like you can't control your students."
"Between Kaminari and Yuki, it looks like I really can't."
He looks at me then, for real. Then, he sighs. Because from the way things look, I'm in on it. I can't say that out loud, but the gaze Shota and I exchange says enough. The man's known me since I was six. He taught me, partially raised me, he works with me. It's hard to pull one over on him.
"You want to protect your son," he says, quietly, in such a hushed voice even Enji can't hear from a few meters away. "Letting Yuki infiltrate the first years through her little confidants down there to keep him from getting to the final rounds isn't going to achieve that."
"Is that what you think she's doing?"
"Headset." Katsuki walks in, stress and sleeplessness rampant in his eyes. He puts a hand on my back. "Everyone's in position. We have heroes all across the entrances and borders. The police formed a perimeter around the grounds too."
"Anything from Scythe?"
"No. But analysts were able to decrypt some information recovered from the Tartarus base. It may give us clues as to where the masked men ran off to."
"It doesn't matter where they ran off," I say, looking around the stands. "I want to know who they are. Names, faces, real faces." I didn't forget the trick one of their executives pulled with that simulation. It might've been similar features, but it wasn't his real face. I stabbed through synthetic blood and bone. Trust me, I know what they real kind feel like. "They're down there, Katsuki. They're somewhere in our midst. They're just waiting for an opening."
"Then we won't give them one."
I sigh into my hands, running my hands through my hair. I catch sight of Ame with Mu at his side returning inside the tunnels. Katsuki watches too, his eyes gravitating towards the tv screens and back to me.
