God of Heroics: Comicman!

The paperwork, it turned out, was not a figure of speech.

Manga spent the back half of the evening in a borrowed office two floors below street level, answering the same questions in slightly different orders from people who wrote down everything he said. What was your assignment? Were you instructed to engage? At what point did you leave your assigned position? Did your supervisor direct you to use your Quirk? Did anyone direct you?

"No," he said, every time that last one came up. "Nobody told me to do anything. Sir Nighteye told me to stay where I was. I left on my own. I made the choice on my own. He didn't know until I was already out there."

He said it plainly and he kept saying it, because the one thing he understood about the room he was in was that they were looking for somewhere to put the blame, and he was not going to let them put it on the man sitting beside him.

Sir Nighteye said almost nothing. He sat with his hands folded and his glasses catching the overhead light and he let Manga answer, and when the woman from the Hero Public Safety Commission finally set down her pen and laid it out, he received it calmly.

There would be no charges against the minor. The footage made that impossible in the other direction; the country had watched a fifteen-year-old pull strangers out of the dark for hours, touch not one villain, and break not one body but the rules. Charging him would start a fire the Commission did not want to be standing next to. But the law had been broken, and the law did not care how many people were alive because of it, and someone with a license and a signature had been responsible for that boy in that district.

"As his supervising hero," the woman said, "the liability is yours, Sir Nighteye."

"I'm aware of how it works."

"Your agency's incident pay for the operation will be withheld. And your authorization to supervise students, your teaching credential, will be suspended for a period of six months."

Manga's head came up. "That's not- he wasn't even- I told you he didn't-"

"Fukidashi." Nighteye did not raise his voice. He never did. "Sit."

Manga sat.

"Six months, when does it start?" Nighteye asked the woman.

"Immediately."

"Then we're finished here." He stood, buttoned his jacket, and walked out, and Manga scrambled up and went after him.

…

"Sir." Manga caught him near the elevators. His bubble had gone tight, the lines pulled in. "That's six months you can't teach me or Mirio. Because of me. You didn't do anything wrong. I was the one who broke the rules, not you. Is there anything I can do-"

"Stop."

Manga stopped.

Nighteye turned and looked down at him through the triangular glasses, and for a long moment he said nothing.

"You are going to listen to me, and you are going to do it without talking, which I understand is a feat for you. The credential is mine to lose. I knew the law when I signed for you. I knew the law when I let you ride out to a giant attack instead of leaving you at the agency, which I could have done, and chose not to. The Commission can suspend a piece of paper. They cannot tell me I supervised you poorly, because a hero who watches a child decide, in the space of a breath, to spend his own future on a stranger's life, and does it properly… has not been supervised poorly. He has been supervised exactly well enough to know the difference, and then to ignore it on purpose, which is the only kind of hero I have ever wanted to be around."

Manga's bubble was very still.

"I built this agency on a man who could make a frightened country smile by walking into the room." Nighteye's voice did not soften. "Today the whole country watched you hold a building off a crowd and save numerous lives. Just because I am being suspended for six months does not mean that I would not sign for you again tomorrow. Do not apologize to me for the paperwork. It is the most worthwhile paperwork of my career."

The elevator opened. Neither of them got in.

"There was one I couldn't reach… A woman. I'm going to find out who she was. I'm going to go to her family."

"I see."

"Is that… Do you think that's stupid? Everyone's been telling me it isn't my fault..."

"It isn't your fault." Nighteye stepped into the elevator and held the door. "And you should go anyway. Both of those things are true. The day you can hold both of them at once without breaking is the day you become the hero you keep announcing you'll be." The faintest curve touched the corner of his mouth. "Now get in. We do, regrettably, still have a great deal of paperwork."

…

The footage played for three days on every channel in the country.

They cut it a dozen ways. The full fight and rescue operation. The building, slowed down, his boots cracking the pavement under four stories of concrete. A montage of faces, the ones he'd pulled out, set to music that Manga found he could not listen to. Commentators called him the heart of the next generation. A morning program ran a segment titled simply THE COMIC HERO.

Not everyone sang.

On a late panel show, a retired hero with a careful voice set his hands on the desk and said the part the celebration was skipping. "A boy with no license did something extraordinary, and I'm glad those people are alive. I am. But understand what we're broadcasting. We are showing every hero-in-training in this country that if your Quirk is strong enough and the cameras are rolling, the rules bend. Most of them are not the Sports Festival champion. Most of them cannot hold a building. The next student who runs into a situation like that to be a hero like the boy on television may not walk out, and we will have helped put them there." He paused for a moment. "Commend the heart behind his actions. But do not celebrate his actions as they were not the ones he should have made."

The Commission never said a public word. They buried it. No press conference. No ruling read aloud. The country decided it loved him, and the people who might have argued decided, quietly, that this was not the hill to die on, and the whole thing dissolved into a news cycle already saturated with a name that frightened people far more than a kid with a speech bubble ever could.

Because while a commercial district was being broadcast on one channel, on every other channel was the Hero Killer.

…

Class 1-B came back to a homeroom that had been empty for a week, and instantly was loud.

"It isn’t funny."

"HAHAHAHAHA!!!" Tetsutetsu wheezed, bent over his desk.

Togaru Kamakiri stood in the middle of the aisle with murder radiating from him and a hairstyle that did not belong to him. The sides were tight and neat. The top swept up and over in a soft wave that gleamed faintly under the classroom lights, every strand lying down exactly where it had been told to lie down. It was, by any standard, a very good haircut.

"Best Jeanist said," Kamakiri ground out, "that a hero's, his EXACT WORDS, a hero's silhouette begins at the crown of the head…"

Awase made a sound like a dying kettle.

"He held me down and he had a comb along with a bunch of sidekicks."

"You look- You look like you're about to ask me about my portfolio!!!" Tsuburaba cackled.

“I hate Best Jeanist.” Kamakiri decided.

Across the room, the conversation was less murderous and more wide-eyed.

"We caught actual smugglers! Like, real ones! A whole van! My hero let me horn the door right off it!" Pony stamped her hooves.

"That's cool, all I did was patrol," said Shoda. "It was very enlightening."

"My agency had me on evacuation the whole week," Honenuki said. "Crowd flow, exit routing, getting people calm and moving. No villains. Not one. Turns out that's most of the job. The good agencies make you learn it first."

"I wish mine was like that…" Kendo sighed. "We did nothing but photo shoots and commercials..." She glanced sideways. "Some people clearly had a different week."

Monoma sat very still at his desk.

He sat normally at his desk but whenever anybody got near him, they got a feeling of danger. Like a ferocious beast was hiding behind that polite and unusually silent frame.

"Monoma…" Kendo said carefully. "How was, um. How was the Rabbit Hero?"

Monoma was quiet for a moment.

“It… is a very important skill for a hero to keep going even when their body determines that they cannot continue. To save people, you cannot have a mindset of not be able. You can. You must. You have to…” He didn’t sound like himself at all!

"...Did the Rabbit Hero break Monoma?" Tsuburaba whispered.

"I think the Rabbit Hero fixed Monoma and I think I liked him better broken." Awase whispered back

"I can hear you." Monoma glanced at them and three people flinched.

The talk drifted. Somebody said the word Hosu and the room cooled a degree.

"They still won't say who all was there." Rin said. "But people are saying three U.A. students were in the area when the Hero Killer went down." 

"Endeavor was the one who put him down, they said.” Yanagi brought up.

“One of them didn't make it back," Kendo said. Her voice was soft. "Iida. The engine kid from the Sports Festival. He died in the alley before backup arrived." Nobody spoke for a few seconds…

“That’s awful…”

“He really died…?”

“How terrifying…”

"Stain, though." Kuroiro's pale eyes caught the light. "They say he may be tied to the ones who hit the USJ. The League of Villains. The darkness gathers to itself."

"They say that he was a man of conviction. I have read his words. They are monstrous. And yet there are people calling him righteous, because he believed in something and bled for it. It frightens me how easily people will follow a man who is certain, even when what he is certain of is evil." Shiozaki offered, hands clasped,

"That's the scary part. People actually agree with him." Kaibara said.

"Yeah, well, 1-A can keep their Hero Killer drama." Tetsutetsu said, thumbing his nose. "They didn't get the biggest hero moment of the whole week anyway." He turned, grinning, toward the desk by the window. "Everybody saw who did."

And the whole room turned with him.

Because there was no secret about Manga's week. The country had watched it live, the comic kid from the Sports Festival holding a building on his back and pulling strangers into the daylight with a smile blazing in his bubble. He was, by a margin nobody could argue, the most famous student in Japan that week.

"DUDE! You held up a building on national television!" Awase shouted from his desk.

"Thousands of agencies and they're all over you. My internship hero spent a whole dinner talking about your actions. I was right there!" Tsuburaba said.

"What was it like?" Pony leaned across two desks. "Were you scared? You didn't look scared, you looked like a hero!"

"How many people was it? They keep saying dozens, was it really dozens?"

"You're gonna get scouted by everyone before second year, you know that, right?"

"Save some fame for the rest of us, man,"

The questions were tangled over each other, envy and awe braided together, every one of them a little jealous and happy for him.

And Manga, at his desk by the window, smiled at them, and answered.

He told them the giants were the biggest things he'd ever seen. He told them the pros had it, that his part was the people the pros couldn't reach yet. He told them about the sinkhole and the truck, about a kid who recognized him, about a grandmother who'd kissed his bubble. He answered every question they threw and he tried to keep his voice normal and his bubble warm.

But it was wrong. All of it was a half-step off.

There was no confetti in the bubble. No tombstone gag, no spinning stars, no little cartoon of himself flexing. He wasn't bouncing in his seat. He wasn't talking over anybody to get to the good part. He answered like it had happened to someone else, and the longer he did it, the quieter the room got, because they had known this boy for months and they had seen him happy and they had seen him exhausted and they had seen him beaten bloody in a sports festival with a grin still on his bubble, and they had never, not once, seen him like this.

"It wasn't…" Manga said, and stopped, and started again. "I want to be straight with you guys, because it's been on TV like it was, like it was this great thing."

The room went still.

"I didn't save everyone." His bubble flickered. "There was a woman. I had a building on my shoulders and a crowd under it and she was thirty meters away and there was a wall coming down on her and I couldn't save her..." He swallowed. "She looked right at me. Like she knew I was going to make it in time. Like I was the part of the story where the hero shows up. And I didn't make it. And every time I close my eyes she's still looking at me with that face right before, and it doesn't go away, and it didn't feel like the me on TV. It didn't feel good. It felt like the worst thing that's ever happened to me. So. That's what it was actually like."

Nobody said anything.

It was the first time any of them had ever seen Manga Fukidashi without a single bright thing on his face, and that, more than the building, more than the news, more than the dozens, was how they understood it was real.

Then a chair scraped, and Setsuna Tokage was up and across the room before he'd finished the sentence, and she pulled him out of his seat and into her arms and held on.

"Okay," She said into the side of his bubble, fierce and quiet. "Okay. Come here. I've got you."

And the rest of them came too.

"Fukidashi-kun." Shiozaki's hand found his shoulder. "You are fifteen years old."

"You're a first-year student…" Kendo said, crouching to his level, her voice comforting and kind. "You've been a hero-in-training for a few months. You ran into a disaster that a hundred pros couldn't fully cover and you saved dozens of people. Dozens, Fukidashi."

"Even All Might can't save everybody… Nobody can." Honenuki said.

"You thought you were gonna save every single person in a two-giant collapse?" Awase said, eyes wide. "Dude. That's- I'm sorry- that's a little delusional, man. In the best way."

"I know you tried your hardest, Fukidashi-kun." Pony's voice wobbled. "Everybody saw you try your hardest. You can't blame yourself when you saved so many people..."

"It's okay. It's okay to be wrecked about it. But it's not yours to keep. You hear me? It's not yours." Tokage murmured, still holding on.

Manga stood in the middle of all of them, his classmates pressing close, every one of them reaching for him with logic and reason, and he let them, and deep down, in the part of him understood, he knew they were right. He was a kid. A strong Quirk and a stubborn heart did not make him invincible. No one alive could promise to save everyone, and pretending he could was its own kind of arrogance.

He knew it.

It didn't lift the woman's face out of him. But it was the first time since the dust that he hadn't felt like he was holding it alone.

The door slid open.

"Good morning." Sekijiro Kan filled the doorway and the room peeled back toward its desks on reflex, though more than one hand gave Manga a last squeeze before it let go. The big man's red eyes swept the class and snagged, for a second, on the boy by the window.

"Welcome back," he said. "I hope your week was worth the experience. We'll go around and you'll each tell me what you learned, and Kamakiri, the hair looks very nice." A blade sprouted from his body in anger. "Tokage, seat."

They settled. They told their stories. And around the room, more than one of them kept half an eye on the desk by the window, hoping it had helped, even a little, because the homeroom did not feel like the right homeroom with one of its brightest lights turned that low.

…

Kan caught him at the door at the period break, one hand landing light on Manga's shoulder.

"Walk with me a second."

The hall outside was empty. Kan reached into the satchel over his shoulder and drew out a thick bundle held together with a band, and another behind it, and another, until there were more envelopes in his hands than seemed reasonable, in every size and color, some typed, most not.

"These came to the school for you," Kan said. "They started arriving the day after. They have not stopped. The front office gave up sorting them by this morning." He held them out. "They're from the district. From the people who were there."

Manga took the bundle. It was heavier than he expected. He slid the top envelope free with a thumb that wasn't entirely steady, opened it, and unfolded a page covered in the wide unsteady crayon of someone who had not been writing letters for very long.

Dear Comicman. You saved my mom and my grampa from the hole in the ground. My grampa says his back hurts but the doctor says he is okay. You said we were already okay we just did not know it yet. You were right. I am going to be a hero like you when I grow up. I drew you holding up the building. Sorry it is not very good I am still learning. Thank you thank you thank you. From Daichi. I am 6.

Below it was a drawing. A blocky brown rectangle, and under it a stick figure with a big white circle for a head, and inside the circle, in careful crayon, a smile.

A tear hit the page before Manga knew it was coming.

"Sensei…" he sniffed. "Can I- is it okay if I'm excused to read these? I don't- I can't do it in front of…"

Kan's hand tightened on his shoulder, warm and steady and heavy as the man himself.

"Listen to me." The gruff voice had gone low. "You did something out there that I have spent decades trying to teach kids to be ready for, and you did it before anyone gave you permission, and you lost one, and it's eating you, and that-" he gave the shoulder a small shake, "that is exactly right. A hero who loses one and feels nothing is no good to me. I don't want that hero in my class. I want the one it beats up." He looked down at the boy. "I'm proud of you. Don't let me hear you say otherwise. And that woman you couldn't reach, you remember her. Like a hand at your back that pushes. You get faster. You get stronger. You get better, so the next time the world hands you that choice, you've closed the gap a little more, and one more person goes home. That's what you do with her. You understand me?"

Manga was crying openly now, the bubble blurry and unable to hold any shape at all.

"Y-Yes, sir…" He bawled.

"Take as long as you need. I'll explain for your next teacher." Kan straightened. "Go."

"Thank you, sensei." It came out broken. "Thank you."

He left toward the boys' bathroom on the second floor. It was empty and the afternoon light came through the high window in a long pale bar, and Manga sat in a toilet stall with a bundle of strangers in his lap and read.

He read Daichi's letter again. Then he read the next one.

To the young man with the kind face I could not see,

I am eighty-one years old. I have lived through more than I will write down here, and I have watched a great many heroes do a great many brave things on my television. Not one of them ever carried me out of a burning tea shop. You did. You smiled at me the entire way out, as though I were already safe, and because you smiled I believed it, and because I believed it I was. I am sorry I kissed your cheek. I was not entirely myself. I am a little sorry. When we rebuild the shop, you will come and have tea, and I will save you the good cushion by the window. This is not a request.

Hatsue, of Hatsue's, third street, the one with the blue door, or the one that used to have the blue door.

He laughed with a sniffle.

He kept reading. There were so many. A man whose dog he hadn't even known he'd freed, the leash snagged under a beam he'd lifted to reach a person and never thought about again. A teenager who'd been frozen on a ledge and wrote three pages, mostly about how she was going to apply to the hero course now. A father who couldn't spell well and didn't care, every line of it held gratitude.

And then one that had been rewritten several times to get it right.

Comicman,

You will not remember me, and you never saw me, which is the point of this letter. I was under the building. The four-story one, on the east block. My daughter was with me. She is seven. We were in the crowd that ran out from under it while you held it up.

I have watched the footage more times than is healthy. I have seen, now, the thing the cameras caught that you could not have. I know there was a woman across the street that you could not reach. I have seen people online say unkind things about that, people who were not there, and I want you to hear this from someone who was.

If you had let go of our building to cross that street, my daughter would be dead. So would I. So would several other people whose names you will never learn. You did not fail to save that woman. You chose, in a moment no one should ever have to choose in, and your choice is asleep in the next room as I write this, breathing, seven years old, with a scrape on her knee and a drawing of you on her wall.

I am so sorry about the woman. I will grieve her for you, a little, if it helps, since I owe her more than I can say. She bought my daughter's life without ever knowing it. So did you.

Whatever you are carrying, carry this with it. We are alive. We are alive. We are alive.

Thank you for my daughter.

Manga read it twice. Then he set it down very carefully on top of the others, and he put his face in his hands and he cried, alone on a bathroom floor with a lapful of people who were alive.

We are alive. We are alive. We are alive.

It did not erase her. Nothing was ever going to erase her; he understood that now,  she was going to walk into every situation with him for the rest of his life.

And then he was going to get better.

He sat in the stall reading every single one until the afternoon. The worst weight he had ever carried got just light enough to stand up under.

When he finally pushed himself to his feet and looked in the mirror over the sinks, his bubble was wet and tired and a little crooked.

But it was smiling. And this time, he meant it.

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