The police station hallway was too bright.
Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The kind of buzz that gets under your skin after a while. I sat on a plastic chair that was somehow both hard and unstable, a scratchy orange blanket draped over my shoulders.
I didn't remember who put it there.
My uniform was still damp. Dried sludge flaked off my sleeves when I moved. I tried not to move.
Down the hall, someone was screaming.
"DO YOU MEAN YOU JUST WATCHED? HE'S MY SONNNN."
Bakugo's mom. It had to be her.
The voice was raw, cracking at the edges. The kind of sound a person makes when the fear finally turns into anger because anger is easier to carry.
A door slammed.
More muffled yelling.
I stared at the floor tiles and started to count the stains.
...
The door to my right opened first.
A woman with sharp eyes and ash-blonde hair stormed out, dragging a boy by the wrist.
It was Bakugo's mom who was dragging him. His uniform was shredded. His face was bright red.
He stopped when he saw me.
Just stopped.
His mother kept walking for a step, then turned, irritated.
"Katsuki. Now."
He didn't move.
His eyes stayed on me. Not grateful. Not angry either. Just studying. Like I was a math problem he hadn't seen before.
I looked away first.
"Tch."
Footsteps. Then the front door banged shut.
The hallway was quiet again.
Huuuu.
I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.
The next door opened twenty minutes later.
Not the one Bakugo's mom came out of. The other one. The one at the very end, where they'd taken the green-haired boy.
A police officer gestured at me.
"Hayashi? Come in."
I stood up. My legs felt wrong. Like they belonged to someone else.
The room was small. Gray table. Gray walls. A recording device on the table with a little red light that blinked every three seconds.
Two people sat across from the empty chair.
The first was a detective. Thin face. Tired eyes. I recognized him from TV—Tsukauchi. The one with the lie-detector quirk.
The second person. It was a thin, blond man with sunken cheeks, wearing baggy white t-shirt that hung off his frame like it was ashamed to be there.
All Might.
Not the hero. The other one. The one the world never saw.
He looked at me and I felt like he was seeing straight through my skull.
"Sit down, young man."
Tsukauchi's voice was calm. Professional. The kind of voice that made you want to tell the truth even if you weren't being quirked.
I sat.
"Can I get you anything? Water? Something to eat?"
I shook my head.
"I'm Detective Tsukauchi. This is my associate, Yagi Toshinori."
He didn't say All Might. Of course he didn't.
"We just want to ask you a few questions about what happened today. You're not in trouble."
I nodded.
"Tell us what you saw. In your own words."
I took a breath.
"I was walking home from school."
Pausing a little, I again continued.
"I heard noise. From the underpass. When I got closer, I saw the villain. The sludge one. He had Bakugo inside him. The pros were there but they couldn't do anything. Every time they tried to attack, they almost hit him."
Tsukauchi nodded. His pen moved across a notepad.
"What happened next?"
This was the moment.
I could lie. But his quirk would catch it. And lying to a detective and All Might in the same conversation seemed like a special kind of stupid.
"I saw another boy," I said.
"Green hair. He was standing at the entrance. Frozen. But his face—"
I stopped.
"His face?"
"He looked like he wanted to run in. Even though he didn't have a quirk. Even though he would've died."
Yagi's eyes moved. Just slightly. Toward Tsukauchi. Then back to me.
"And then?"
"I don't know. I just, I couldn't watch anymore. I thought if I could distract the villain for one second—just give Bakugo room to breathe then maybe."
I trailed off.
Tsukauchi waited.
"I didn't think it would work," I said quietly.
"My quirk is useless. It's just nothing."
"Show me."
Yagi's voice was soft. Kind, even. But there was something underneath it. Something that made me want to obey.
I raised my hand.
Focused.
The sphere formed in the center of the table. Invisible. Silent. A patch of air that simply wasn't there anymore.
I held it for three seconds.
Let it dissolve.
Tsukauchi leaned forward, frowning.
"What exactly did we just not see?"
"It's a void," I said.
"A space where nothing exists. Not empty air. Literally nothing."
Yagi's eyes sharpened.
"Nothing," he repeated. "And if you put that nothing inside something?"
The room got very quiet.
I stared at the table.
"I don't know," I said.
"Today was different. I wasn't thinking. I just reacted."
Tsukauchi's pen scratched against paper.
Yagi leaned back. The movement looked exhausting on his skeletal frame.
"Detective Tsukauchi's quirk allows him to detect lies. Would you answer a few more questions for me? Just to clarify things for the report."
My throat tightened.
"Okay."
"Did you know the villain would be there today?"
"No."
It was the truth.
"Did you know Bakugo Katsuki before today?"
"No. I mean, I knew who he was. Everyone does. But I never met him."
It too was the truth.
"Did you know the green-haired boy?"
"No. Never seen him before."
Another Truth.
Yagi was quiet for a moment.
"Why did you do it?"
The question sat between us.
Simple. Direct. Impossible to answer without sounding insane.
Because I read a manga where you gave him your power. Because I knew he was about to run in and die. Because I spent fourteen years telling myself I was just watching and today I realized I was lying.
"I don't know," I said.
My voice came out smaller than I wanted.
"I just... I couldn't stand there and do nothing."
Tsukauchi's expression didn't change.
But something in his eyes softened. Just a little.
As it too was the truth.
They let me go an hour later.
My mom was at the front desk. Her face was pale. Her eyes were red. She didn't say anything—just grabbed me and held on so tight I couldn't breathe.
The police gave her paperwork. She signed it without reading it.
On the way out, I saw him.
The green-haired boy.
He was sitting on a bench near the exit, alone. His mother was at the counter, talking to an officer. His hands were in his lap. His eyes were on the floor.
He looked small.
Smaller than he should've looked. Smaller than the protagonist of the greatest hero story ever written had any right to look.
He looked like a kid who'd just watched someone else do the one thing he'd spent his whole life believing he was meant to do.
I wanted to say something.
What do you say to someone whose future you just stole?
I walked past him without a word.
On the bus home, I stared out the window.
The city passed by in blurs of light and color. Heroes on patrol. Civilians going about their lives. A world that had no idea its future had just cracked open.
My phone buzzed.
A news alert.
"Sludge Villain Apprehended—Mystery Student's Quick Thinking Saves Explosive Hero Candidate."
There was a photo. Someone had been filming. There I was, small, stupid, visible standing at the edge of the underpass with my hands out.
My face.
It was everywhere on the Internet now.
I turned the phone off.
Pressed my forehead against the cold glass.
The sunset painted the buildings orange and red. Pretty. The kind of pretty that made you forget, for a second, that the world was complicated.
Bakugo said he'd remember me.
All Might was in that room.
Tsukauchi took notes.
And Deku.
I didn't know what Deku was thinking. Whether he still believed. Whether he'd even try.
The bus turned a corner.
My reflection stared back at me from the glass. A fourteen-year-old boy with a useless quirk and a head full of someone else's story.
Somewhere out there, a hero was supposed to be born today.
I just didn't know anymore if it was him.
Or me.