A week.
Seven days since the mansion, and Midoriya still hadn't called Kitty. He told himself he was waiting for the right moment. He knew, if he was being honest, that he was just waiting, full stop, because thinking about the way she'd stood in the garden with Kurt's arm around her shoulders was the kind of thought that got worse the more he poked at it.
So he didn't poke at it. He got underneath cars instead.
The wrench slipped.
It caught the knuckle of his index finger square on, and the sharp, hot pain of it shot straight up his arm. He pulled his hand back, shook it hard, and let out a string of profanity that would have impressed Logan.
"Hey." The man crouching beside the wheel arch looked at him sideways. "You need to calm down."
"Don't tell me how to calm down."
"I'm just sayin. "
"You're also not the one who just took a wrench to the hand." He sucked air through his teeth and scowled at his finger. Not broken. Just furious. He shoved himself back under the car.
Twenty minutes later, he slid back out, reconnected the battery, and told the owner to try the ignition. The engine turned over clean on the first try. He gave a thumbs up, wiped his hands on a rag, and watched the man drive off.
At the sink, scrubbing oil off his forearms, he heard footsteps and looked up.
Irma. Leaning in the doorway with her arms crossed and that particular expression she got when she'd already decided she was going to ask something.
"You okay?"
"Fine."
"You sure?"
"Yes." He turned back to the sink. "I've just got a lot on my mind."
She came over and leaned against the counter beside him. "Kitty?"
He exhaled. "Me andIr went through a rough patch, and I don't really know where we are right now." He grabbed a towel. "It's nothing."
"Sure." She said it without judgment. Then, tilting slightly toward him: "You know, you could just cut loose a little."
He turned his head. She was closer than he'd realized.
"Whoa." He took a step back. "Hey. What are you doing?"
"I'm just sayin. "
"I know what you're saying." He pointed at her. "Old school. That's how I am. If you're going to be that, then at least know me better first."
She opened her mouth. Then she looked past him, and her expression shifted.
"...Hello."
He turned.
Standing in the doorway was a girl who looked almost exactly like Irma, same bone structure, same eyes, same hair, except with a different energy entirely. More direct. Tilted head, studying him like an equation she'd already half-solved.
Beside her, leaning on the doorframe with the easy casualness of someone who absolutely knew this was going to be a whole thing, was Laura.
"Celeste," Irma said.
"Sister." The new arrival looked between Irma and Midoriya with open amusement. "I can see why your dreams have been interesting."
"Don't." Irma's voice carried a warning she didn't fully commit to.
Midoriya looked at Celeste. Looked at Laura. Looked back at Celeste. "You're one of the Stepford sisters."
"Very quick." She smiled. "I came to see what my sister found so interesting out here. You went beyond my expectations."
"You didn't actually answer the question."
"No, I didn't." She glanced at Irma. "She left you just hanging there, didn't she? Heartbroken and everything."
"Celeste."
"I'm having fun."
"You're being annoying."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive." She turned to her sister properly, and the amusement faded into something more purposeful. "I actually came to talk to you. My dreams have been strange. Walk with me."
The two of them drifted out of earshot, leaving Midoriya and Laura.
He looked at her. "Why are you here?"
"Wanted to give this place a shot." She shrugged, perfectly comfortable with the scrutiny. "Logan spent some time in Mutant Town when he was young. Said it did him good." A pause. "I also wanted to ask Mr. M something."
"So do I, actually."
"Yeah?" She studied him. "Is Celeste friendly enough for you?"
"She was a lot."
"Mm." The corner of her mouth moved. "Come on. Let's go find him."
Mr. M's workshop was two blocks down a converted space that smelled like solder and old wood, with half-disassembled things on every flat surface. He was bent over an old microwave when Midoriya came in, and didn't look up.
"What's on your mind, kid?"
"I've been trying to figure some things out."
"Good habit."
"It's not about Mutant Town." Midoriya stopped across the workbench from him. "It's personal."
"I don't pry into personal things. You know that."
"But you look into the future sometimes."
That made Mr. M set down his tools. He straightened slowly and looked at Midoriya with an expression that had become careful.
"...Sometimes," he said. "Yes."
"So you've looked into mine."
A pause. "Yours. A few others. Though I'll tell you now I can't see past certain points. There are places where the future folds back on itself, and I lose the thread entirely."
"I need you to check on something." Midoriya kept his voice steady. "Kitty. Me andIr have had a rough go of it, and one of my friends told me that she might be that there might be something going on between her and."
"Oh." Mr. M's expression shifted. "Kid. I really don't think I should."
"Please."
"If I do this, I could change a great deal for you. You understand that? The moment you know something, you can't unknow it, and the thing about knowledge is it has weight. It pulls you toward certain decisions, away from others." He met Midoriya's eyes. "You're sure?"
"I haven't had peace of mind in over a year." His voice was quiet, but it didn't waver. "I'm finally somewhere I'm actually happy. I don't want to lose that and spend the next six months wondering. Please."
Mr. M looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked away, not at anything in the room, but at something only he could see, somewhere sideways to reality.
His expression changed.
It happened quickly, a flicker of something Midoriya couldn't name crossing the old man's face before it settled into something controlled and deliberate.
Mr. M looked back at him.
"I'll tell you the truth," he said. "That's what you want?"
"Yes."
"Be certain. From this point on, several things will change for you. It may hurt people. It may hurt you. And I need you to promise me that you won't do anything rash. If you do, I will rewind this conversation, and we'll pretend it never happened." He paused. "And yes, I've done that before. More times than I'd like to admit."
Midoriya stared at him. "We've had this conversation before?"
"...I've said too much." He took a breath. "Do you want to know?"
"Yes."
Mr. M told him.
Midoriya walked out of the workshop.
He walked, and he kept walking, not toward anything, just away past the garden plots, past the library, past the stretch of apartments where he could hear music coming from somewhere up above. The air was still warm. Somebody's kid was running across the street with something too big for them, nearly dropping it. Normal sounds. Normal afternoon.
He stopped at the end of the block and stood there.
His hands were shaking, which surprised him. He'd expected anger. He'd thought he'd prepared for anger. But this was something quieter and colder, a particular kind of hurt that comes from a thing you suspected being confirmed, the slow collapse of maybe into no, this is what it was.
He stood there until the shaking stopped.
Laura found him.
She came around the corner, took one look at his face, and stopped.
"Oh," she said. "That bad."
"Don't." His voice was rough.
"I'm not doing anything." She fell into step beside him without asking where he was going. "Come on. We're getting you out of here for a bit."
"Where?"
"Anywhere. Does it matter?"
It didn't, really. He handed her the motorcycle keys without looking at her.
Irma and Celeste were waiting by the garage. Celeste took one look at Midoriya's face and, for the first time since he'd met her, didn't make a joke. She just got onto the back of Irma's borrowed ride and nodded at her sister.
Laura was already on his bike.
"I'm driving," she said.
"Yeah," he said. "Fine."
He got behind her.
The portal spat them out somewhere on the California coast, and for a moment Midoriya just stood at the edge of the sand and let the sound of the ocean arrive. It was big and constant and didn't care about anything, not about Kitty, not about Genosha, not about the Phoenix, not about any of it. Just water and wind and the smell of salt.
"Where are we?" he asked.
"Near Sacramento," Laura said. She was already dropping the kickstand. "Close enough."
"I don't know where that is."
"Big city. You don't need to." She looked at him. "You need to walk on actual sand for a while and stop thinking."
He didn't argue.
They stayed at the beach until the afternoon cooled. Then Laura pulled out her phone, scrolled for thirty seconds, and drove them into town to an arcade that smelled like stale carpet and electricity, loud and senseless in the best possible way. Midoriya lost badly at every game he played. Celeste turned out to be terrifying at anything that required spatial awareness. Irma cheated twice using her abilities and denied it both times.
He laughed. Genuinely, unexpectedly, at something Celeste said that he didn't fully catch because Laura was too busy complaining about it. It surprised him how easy it was.
Afterward, Laura had the coordinates for another portal in Mr. M's network, stretched across the world, quietly humming. She drove them through it without explanation, and when Midoriya took off his helmet on the other side, he looked up and found himself staring at the Eiffel Tower from about two blocks away.
He looked at her.
"Mr. M uses these to travel," she said simply. "He told me where they are."
Midoriya looked at the tower. At the lights beginning to come on in the blue-gray dusk. The city spreads out around them in every direction.
"Okay," he said. "Yeah. This is something."
"Told you."
They got back to Mutant Town late, riding in through the home portal one at a time, headlights cutting through the dark. Dinner was loud and good and ended with all four of them in Midoriya's apartment arguing about which city they'd visited had been better, a debate that had no correct answer and was pursued with absolute commitment by all parties.
Midoriya stepped out onto the patio at some point in the middle of it all.
The town was quiet below. Not silent, you could always hear something, some edge of music or conversation from a building over, but the particular quiet of a place that was genuinely at rest.
Laura came out a minute later.
She leaned on the railing beside him and didn't say anything for a while.
"You still going to be wrecked about Kitty?" she asked eventually.
"Yeah." He looked out over the rooftops. "Three years isn't nothing."
"No," she said. "It's not."
He glanced at her. "You were an assassin."
"Yeah."
"Does it get better? The carrying it."
Laura thought about it. Actually thought, which he appreciated. "I don't know if better is the right word," she said. "It gets quieter. You stop waiting for it to go away and start learning how to keep it from being the loudest thing in the room." She paused. "I'm still trying to make up for it every day."
"I'm still trying to make up for Genosha."
"It wasn't your fault."
The words landed simply, without weight or ceremony. Just the truth stated plainly, the way you'd note that the sky was dark.
He let himself sit with it for a moment.
"You don't know how many years I've been waiting to hear someone say that," he said quietly.
"Now you have."
The window slid open behind them. Celeste leaned out, ignoring the conversation she'd clearly walked into.
"Are you two going to stand out there all night? It's cold."
"It's the end of summer," Laura said flatly.
"It feels cold."
"You're from California."
"The nicer part."
Midoriya snorted. Laura's expression did something complicated that was probably a smile failing to contain itself.
"Go back inside," Laura said.
"Come back inside," Celeste countered, and retreated.
They stood there another minute. Then Laura pushed off the railing.
"Don't let it be the loudest thing in the room," she said.
He nodded.
They went back inside.
Which was how Midoriya ended up on the couch, at what point he'd moved there from the chair was genuinely unclear, with an empty bottle on the table that he had no memory of opening and a torn shirt that raised more questions than he could currently process.
He sat up.
His head announced its disapproval immediately.
He looked left. Irma was asleep in the armchair with her legs over the armrest.
He looked right. Celeste, on the floor with a throw pillow, deeply unconscious.
He looked at the bottle.
He looked at Laura, who was on the opposite end of the couch and who chose that exact moment to surface from sleep, go pale, and sprint past him into the kitchen.
The sounds from the kitchen were not pleasant.
He sat on the couch with the particular hollowness of a person who knows something happened last night and cannot access what it was, and thought very carefully about every decision that had led him here.
He'd had a bad day.
It had somehow turned into an interesting one.
He wasn't sure yet which of those was winning.