I used to think this feeling would never get old.
The wind against my face at a hundred kilometers per hour. The city spread out below me like a map someone forgot to fold back up — streets and rooftops and tiny moving people who don't know yet that I'm up here, watching. Keeping count.
It never gets old.
My name is Haruki Yotsuba. Hero name: **Solace.**
I've been doing this for seven months.
---
The call came in at 14:42. Collapsed construction site in Musutafu's east ward. Three workers trapped under a fallen support beam, gas line ruptured somewhere in the rubble, one civilian — a kid, maybe eight years old — who'd wandered into the restricted zone on a dare and was now curled under a slab of concrete calling for her mom.
By the time I arrived, two other heroes were already on scene managing the perimeter. Backdraft, a third-year veteran with a water quirk, gave me a nod when he saw me descend.
*"Solace. Gas is still leaking, we can't risk open flames or sparks. The beam's too heavy to lift clean without destabilizing the east wall."*
I looked at the rubble. Felt it, almost — the way I always do. Like my quirk reaches out ahead of me, tasting the air, reading the geometry of the disaster.
*"I've got it,"* I said. *"Keep everyone back thirty meters."*
He didn't argue. That still surprised me sometimes. That they just... trusted me.
---
I dropped into the site slow and controlled, light bleeding off my hands in soft pulses — not the burning white I could do if I pushed, just a warm amber glow, enough to see by, enough to tell my body *easy, easy, we're not fighting anything today.*
The girl heard me before she saw me.
*"H— hello?"* Small voice. Terrified.
*"Hey,"* I said, keeping my tone low and calm. *"My name's Solace. I'm a hero. You're not in trouble, okay? You're actually really brave."*
A beat of silence.
*"I'm not brave. I'm scared."*
*"That's what brave is,"* I told her. *"Scared but still here."*
I found her three meters in, exactly where dispatch said. Small. Dark pigtails covered in dust. She had her arms wrapped around her knees and her eyes were squeezed shut so tight it looked like it hurt. When my light reached her she cracked one eye open — and for a second, just a second, she looked at the glow around my hands like it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
Kids always looked at it like that.
I crouched down in front of her. *"I'm going to get you out. But I need you to trust me for about forty seconds. Can you do that?"*
She nodded. Dust fell from her hair.
*"Good. Close your eyes again."*
---
I won't pretend the next part was easy. The beam was twelve tons of reinforced concrete, the gas was thick enough that I could smell it even through my mask, and the east wall had a fracture running diagonal that meant any significant vibration would bring another section down on top of us.
So I didn't vibrate anything.
I pressed both palms flat against the underside of the beam and pushed light into it — not force, not heat, but *density.* Hardened photon construction, my support teacher called it during second year. A lattice of compressed light woven tight enough to bear weight. I built a cage around the beam. Held it. Then I lifted — not the beam itself, just my construct, slow and surgical, millimeter by millimeter, until there was enough clearance.
Thirty-eight seconds.
I pulled the girl out with one arm.
---
The crowd outside the perimeter erupted the moment we cleared the rubble line.
I heard it before I fully registered what it was — this wave of sound, voices layered over voices, and then I understood. They were cheering. Phones up. Someone had a sign, bright yellow letters, *SOLACE #1* which made me laugh out loud because I was ranked forty-seventh nationally and that was being generous.
The girl's mother broke through the front of the crowd before anyone could stop her. She hit her knees on the pavement and grabbed her daughter so hard I thought she might crack a rib, and she was crying in that ugly, shaking, completely unself-conscious way that people only cry when they thought something was gone and got it back.
She looked up at me.
*"Thank you,"* she said. Like those two words contained everything she had.
I didn't know what to do with my face. I never do, in moments like that. I just nodded and said *"She did the hard part"* and looked away before my expression could embarrass me.
---
On the way back up — rising slow above the city, the sun low and orange on the horizon, the cheers fading below me into the general hum of the world — I let myself feel it.
The warmth.
Not from my quirk. From them.
*They love you,* some stupid, hopeful part of me said.
And the worst part — the part that would matter later, that I'd think about in the dark on nights I don't want to remember —
I believed it.
I believed every single second of it.
---
— Three years earlier —