#bnha trumpet
It was beautiful. And the music at the end… It reminds me of something. Recently. In a preview of Heroes. Oops.
MLA May AUs (Parts 13+14+15/31)
5/13: where are the constellations that guide me
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5/14: never let go of the microscope
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5/15: we’re torn apart
(Three today, just to get nicely to the halfway point. With thanks in advance to leftof and Nal for the brainstorming that led to the first and second of these fills respectively.)
—– — —– — —– — —– — —–
where are the constellations that guide me
Shigaraki. The attack on the hospital was aiming for Shigaraki. Which meant the heroes—or just Endeavor? The HPSC? But that’s just details: someoneknew about Shigaraki, and that means there’s a good chance that…
Tensei isn’t picking up. Think, Tenya, think: where was he supposed to be today? Physical therapy? That big meeting? Something with IDATEN’s business side? Should I try Mother? Grandfather?
The city around me moans. What’s the word—disconsolate? That’s too poetic, but it fits; the city is heavy with emptiness, aching with it, no sounds but shifting dust and distant shouting, voices carrying much farther, audible over much greater a distance, than should ever be the case in an urban environment like this one.
Mother isn’t picking up. Where arethey?
Could the HPSC have found the League without discovering everyone now connected to them? That can’t be possible. If they found the League, they found us. But if they found us, then why hasn’t anyone found me? Would it have been too much a tip-off to pull me? Were they just waiting to get me on my own—?!
…Still just empty streets. And Grandfather isn’t picking up either. My eyes burn, but I don’t dare stop moving to peel off helmet and glasses both to scrub at them. Do I dare stop moving at all? Can I ever stop moving again?
Slow down, slow down. Stop panicking. Where do I need to be? If the Meta Liberation Army—if the Paranormal Liberation Front has been compromised, if IDATEN has been compromised, what’s the next step?
…What do you do when the entire firmament of your life has been ripped down without anyone saying a word?
I know I shouldn’t be relying on you still, Older Brother, I know I’m meant to be training to take the position that was supposed to be yours—but please, please pick up the—
The line connects.
“If this is anyone other than my little brother, I promise on my pipes that I’m gonna—”
“Older Brother!” The words burst out of me on a humiliating hiccough of relief, the tears overflowing. They cut him off before he can finish the uncharacteristic threat—he must be in trouble, if he’s talking like that. “Older Brother, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t know! They didn’t tell us what the mission was going to be today or I’d have reported it, I swear! I—”
“Woah, woah, Tenya, calm down!” I can hear the relief in Tensei’s voice as well, just a hint of it beneath obvious strain. “Where are you? Do you need backup, or are you in a position to provide backup?”
The routine is a lifeline; I cling to it with both hands. There’s a mountain of questions and answers still ahead, but it starts—just like everything—with the things that are right in front of me.
“I’m in Jakku. They’re evacuating the whole city. Shiga—the Grand Commander is awake and fighting. I don’t know his current status beyond that.” And now that I’m saying the words aloud, I already know what the order will be.
“Provide whatever support you safely can. You know what his power can do now—what it could do even three months ago. This was a huge coordinated action. However we can do it, we’ve got to throw that coordination off. I’ve gotta go. Don’t go back to UA. We’re heading to the safehouse in—”
The line cuts out, and the anguish and fear nearly choke me into tripping mid-stride. But I turn towards the north and keep running. There’s nothing to do but keep running, and figure the rest out as I go.
—– — —– — —– — —– — —–
never let go of the microscope
“A few years ago,” the girl says into the microphone, black hair shining under every intermittent camera flash, “a friend of mine was visiting my home and happened to make a comment about how lucky I was, to have my own space to practice in. She said that when she practiced at home, the neighbors complained. It got me thinking. She was right—I waslucky. To have a space of my own, to have all the resources I could ever dream of. Even to have a quirk like mine, that doesn’t create a disturbance just by me practicing it. So, so many other kids—other students who dream of being heroes—aren’t as lucky as I was. They have quirks that need more education than they have access to, more space to practice with than they have available—sometimes even more food than their families can spare.”
Her face takes on an urgent, compassionate cast. Koku watches with a critical eye, but what flaws he can find are at worst superficial—she’s talking slightly too quickly; her makeup is just a touch glossy under the key lights. Still in middle-school, but she really is a natural. Perhaps it’s in her blood.
“What would I have done, I wondered, if I wanted to be a hero and failed a test I could have passed if I’d had more opportunities?” she goes on. “And isn’t that unfair, both to the heroes we could have and the people those heroes could save? That was the idea behind Heroes Tomorrow.”
The photographers sense the moment, and lights strobe around Yaoyorozu Momo’s perfect smile.
Afterward, she and her father usher a small group of journalists and sponsors around the building—the spacious gym, the outdoor court, the library, the cafeteria, the medical office. As they walk, they trade off talking points about their goals for the future, the benefits of funding the place, the experts they’ve consulted, the specialists they’re planning on hiring. Koku knows several of the names, having put the Yaoyorozus in contact with most of them.
It really is an extremely clever idea, one that could, in time, become an excellent source for warriors for the cause. It is, however, an idea that requires a certain amount of money and social cachet to push through, and that benefits from only being supported by the Hearts & Minds Party, not proposed by them. Charity and activism may overlap, but if one is going to challenge the murky borders of what the law regards as “private property” for the purposes of the bans on meta-ability use, the beaming face of well-intentioned and somewhat ignorant wealth will run into less resistance than the well-informed but confrontational rhetoric of the determined reformer.
After the tour, Koku shakes father and daughter’s hands alike, gives them his most polished smile, and wishes them and their endeavor all the best, please don’t hesitate to call my office if you run into any trouble, and so on. The father is magnanimous and noncommittal—he’s spent all his life in this world and knows its rhythms and rhymes. But he’s a man thoroughly charmed by his daughter’s zeal, and she lacks his experience. She all but sparkles at Koku’s expressions of support.
In a few years, if Koku and his people perform up to task, he doesn’t doubt Miss Yaoyorozu will be an excellent warrior herself.
—– — —– — —– — —– — —–
(Content Warning: MAJOR CHARACTER DEATH.)
we’re torn apart
“…And that’s the size of it,” Hawks finishes, some lengthy time after he opened the topic by drawing a feather sword on Best Jeanist. He’s sitting down now, perched at the edge of Jeanist’s couch, barely having touched the cup of tea he periodically turns in his hands. He looks up and gives Jeanist a rueful half-smile, his eyes knowing and much too sad for a man so young. “I promise I wouldn’t ask something like this for anything smaller.”
“That’s quite a grave situation.” On the other couch, his hands knitted together on folded knees, Jeanist dips his head in thought. “Do you have any guarantee you’ll be able to keep my ‘body’? Suspended animation wouldn’t save me from an impromptu cremation. And there are worse things they do to bodies. I don’t want to end up as one of those tattered Noumu.”
“No guarantees, sorry to say. Though if it helps, we think they’re having trouble sourcing more Noumu right now. Since Hosu and Kamino, they’ve gotten a lot stingier with using them.”
“I suppose that is true. Then, assuming you can keep hold of me, how long do you expect to keep me under? I said before that I was to be returning to duty soon—it won’t go unnoticed if I vanish.”
“And it’s that much time you won’t be there to help people who need it, yeah.” Hawks nods understanding. “I didn’t like that part either, trust me. I’m hoping it won’t be long, but it depends on how long it takes to track down the creator of the Noumu. I need to keep in their good graces at least until then. Ideally, we’d be able to keep you as an ace up our sleeve, if we turn out to need that kind of surprise play.”
“Are you expecting to need one?” Jeanist arcs an eyebrow.
“We’re not taking any chances with the League anymore.” Hawks’ eyes harden. “Once we find the Noumu guy, we’ll use whatever methods we have to to sew this whole thing up.”
“Hmm.” Though the set of his mouth remains unreadable behind his high turtleneck collar, Jeanist sounds faintly amused. “Well, I do appreciate your choice in metaphors.” Gaze flicking towards the floor, he falls momentarily silent.
“I can only try to keep up with your fabric puns, Jeanist-sensei,” Hawks teases, though his lowered brows still show his tension. Then he waits.
Eyes still fixed on some point past his floorboards, Jeanist at last pulls out a comb and runs it over the top of his head, following the curve of his hair. His other hand lifts and echoes the gesture, drawing his hair towards a familiar forward point.
There’s a rustle of fabric and the air between them explodes with dozens, scores of red feathers, large and small, lancing towards where Jeanist sits straight-backed and unmoving on the couch.
Thecracksound echoes loudly through the apartment, rebounding off of its polished floors and the clean, flat expanses of its walls and windows.
Still caught in the momentum, the feathers don’t drop out of the air instantaneously, but the contours of them go soft; the deadly precision of their lines of attack swerve and divert, suddenly as aerodynamic as any feather blown free from a bird to drift freely towards the ground. Several of them scatter across Jeanist’s lap as, on the other couch, Hawks slumps forward.
Jeanist sighs, standing up and brushing himself off. He crooks one finger and waves his other hand; Hawks’ body drifts forward over the carpet as all of the living room’s curtains draw themselves closed.
He steps over to the floating body as its clothes turn it upright. Only a scattering of blond hair is visible behind the hood of the shirt Hawks wore underneath his jacket, the mottled red cotton jerked up over his head and twisted firmly awry. Jeanist gently smooths the fabric back and looks with regretful eyes at the Wing Hero’s expression of frozen desperation, at the impossibly sharp alignment of his drooping head to his shoulders.
“I’m truly sorry, Hawks,” Jeanist murmurs. “If I could, I would have chosen a method that gave me a moment to explain, but you were just too fast for me to give you that opening.
“If it’s any comfort, by this time next week, the League of Villains will be no one’s problem anymore.”
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Notes for Iida:
I said it in my first post on this concept, but the Iida family being MLA just fits.Every part of it–Tenya’s militant attitude, his anger issues, Tensei’s chipper instinct to make sidekicks out of vigilantes, the multi-generational hero family that for some reason all have the same quirk—clicks perfectly.
I don’t have much to say on this fill in particular in terms of cultural notes or explainers, save to note that Iida being MLA is one of those places that would make a huge difference, either because of the damage it’d do to class morale for him to be discovered and taken from them, or because of the damage hecould do if, for example, he’d been buzzing around the outskirts of the Shigaraki fight in Jakku taking out heroes instead of saving them.
Expect a fill for Tensei eventually.
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Notes for Momo:
This is one of those ideas that I think would do especially well for expanding on what the ideals of Liberation are, what’s worth salvaging from them versus what’s been lost to zealotry and radicalism over decades of isolation and groupthink. It’d be devastating for Momo to find out that her good idea was subverted away from her by an illegal cult, but at the same time, if the illegal cult was the first—maybe even the only—group to think her idea was valid and worth cultivating, what does that say about her idea? What does it say about the society she’s living in?
Furthermore, can she rescue this idea, or is it irrevocably poisoned by association? All those people Representative Hanabata introduced her and her father to—are they all suspect? How far does it go? Does she find this out herself somehow, and then has to figure out what to do with the knowledge, or does only find out after the day of the raids? Is she targeted by the arrests herself?
These questions assume that the truth comes out before she gets pulled into the MLA herself, which I think would depend on how much pushback she had to fight to get her project up and running versus how quickly the events of canon catch up to her. But seeing as she’s probably within a year to a year and a half of starting UA here, and from there it’s only one extremely preoccupied year until the raids, I think it’s a fair bet.
This is all naked supposition, of course. Maybe there are places like this in HeroAca!Japan, totally legal and on the up-and-up. A school to prepare you for hero school exams–like cram schools! It’d fit the milieu, certainly! But I feel like we’ve seen just enough characters in middle school flashbacks that we’d have heard about it if it did.
Anyway, suffice to say, I have a lot of questions about just constitutes “in public” versus “in private” where the quirk use laws are concerned; see also the Kaminari fill about all those alleged jobs you can use your quirk at that we’re told exist but never, ever see being performed by anyone who doesn’t already have a hero license.
(P.S. Trumpet means well, at least by his own warped standards, but he’d make a good villain for Momo, and an excellent villain for a conspiracy story. I wish the canon had used him as one.)
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Notes for Best Jeanist:
o There are a lot of ways things could have gone horrifically wrong for Hawks and the HPSC in their spy games if even a single MLA-aligned person found out about the investigation before the investigation found out about them. This is among the more drastic of such examples.
o Fiber Master is one of those quirks like Uraraka’s Float that would be appallingly dangerous in the hands of someone willing to commit murder with it. That goes double when it’s in the hands of someone as decisive and implacable as Jeanist; see for example Kamino, where his instincts and experience led him to attack All For One on sight, leaving the greener Mount Lady shocked that Jeanist would attack a possible civilian.
o In the manga, when Hawks visited Jeanist, they were both out of costume; Hawks was wearing a hoodie. The anime (because the anime didn’t want to spend money on the MVA arc, and model sheets for characters in non-standard outfits cost money) has both of them in their hero costumes. I think Jeanist couldkill Hawks with his hero costume; my alternate ideas for how this would go down (warning for a violent topic here) involved him sharpening and hardening the fibers of Hawks’s bodysuit top enough to either cut his throat or jab some guitar pick-shaped wedges into several points of his spinal column. Either method would have been bloodier, though, and taken precious seconds longer to kill him.
Jeanist probably considered the spinal column thing—he really didn’t want to just kill Hawks without being able to explain why—but he didn’t know Hawks’ quirk well enough to say whether damage to the nerves in his spine would inhibit his ability to control his feathers, so just went for the quick and clean method with the hoodie. Anime!Jeanist would have had to either take the gamble and divert ballistic feathers as best he could with his clothes/curtains or come up with a different tack entirely. This would have been tricky, since Hawks would not have been of a mind to let him contact anyone else or take a day to think about it.
o Jeanist probably feels really bad about this when Shigaraki and the League go on to stomp Re-Destro in the Deika attack, winning the Grand Commander’s loyalty and making themselves more of a problem for more people than ever before. He will have to get over it. He is, at least, in agreement that the Hero System is an untenably polarizing mess, which will have to do in the absence of more substantive common ground.
