Morning didn't start; it reset.
Phones blinked awake with the soft lag of an update. Traffic lights hesitated a breath longer than yesterday. Somewhere in the city, a coffee machine forgot its second beep and learned it again, slightly off. The Calm Bands pulsed with an almost-imperceptible irregularity—four heartbeats, a pause that didn't land where memory expected it to.
People noticed in their bodies before they named it.
A woman reached for her keys and felt a prickle of anger she had been spared all week. A nurse on an elevator felt tears press and then retreat without shame. A student on a bus laughed too loud at nothing and clapped a hand over his mouth as if he'd broken a rule. When the feeds caught up, they called it Calm Crash—a neat phrase to hold the mess of relief.
At U.A., the halls had texture again.
"Okay, I… feel things today," Mina said, eyes wide and delighted and a little afraid.
"Good," Aizawa said, walking past like a diagnosis. "Not easy, but good."
In homeroom, Yaoyorozu stared at her notes as if discovering her own handwriting. Kaminari tapped a pen against his desk and didn't stop when it annoyed him. Sero apologized mid-sentence and then un-apologized, visibly confused by the freedom.
Renya took his chair by the window. The square under his heel brightened to its coin and stayed. The building's hum was out of step with the city's; he could feel the new give in the air, a micro-stutter engineered into the grid like a taught hesitation.
Aizawa wrote a single word on the board: Breathe. Then beneath it, smaller: On your own.
No one laughed. Everyone exhaled.
The Commission called it Imperfect Calm v1.1—a software patch for peace.
In the lab, the mosaic of tiny blue points—Calm Bands in the wild—shifted measurement. Convergence dropped from 0.86 to 0.63, then held. Dr. Imai watched the numbers populate, pen suspended, like a conductor deciding whether to cue the strings.
"We introduced micro-jitter," a tech reported. "Enough irregularity to prevent involuntary lockstep."
On an adjacent monitor, a second waveform announced itself, faint and nerve-like, riding the troughs of the first. It didn't align. It listened.
Kurobane leaned closer. "What's that."
"Artifact," someone offered, too quickly.
"Feedback," Imai said, more honest. "People dreaming with the band still on. The pacer tries to track the sleeper; the sleeper's rhythm wanders; the signal adapts. The algorithm… learns night."
He tasted the phrase and disliked how useful it felt. "You're teaching devices to hear dreams."
"We're avoiding coercion," she said. "This is mercy by design."
"It's also a door," he said.
On her screen, a line labeled R-17 (atten.) quivered when the secondary line shifted, as if an old melody had heard its own echo from another room. Imai saw it, too, and didn't say it aloud. Words make doors wider.
By second period, Calm Crash had a rhythm.
Iida lectured himself into restraint and then let his hands move when the sentence demanded it. Todoroki's gaze went winter-clear and stayed there, awake but not armored. Uraraka threaded a hair tie and snapped it once—absent-minded, human.
Renya felt it at the edges: not a call for help, not worship. Attention that refused to be organized. The patch had put flaws back into the world, and flaws were how people breathed.
Training ran dirty and good. The grip trainers squeaked. A timing light failed and a proctor swore softly and fixed it with a thump. When the class broke for water, Aizawa stopped Renya with a glance.
"You feel the change?"
"Yes."
"Cost?"
"Patience," Renya said. "Some people will mistake it for pain. Some will remember it's practice."
Aizawa's mouth tilted. "And you?"
"I'm… quieter," Renya said, surprised by his own answer. "Because the room finally isn't."
"Good," Aizawa said. "Let noise be a colleague again."
The patch did more than wobble the metronome. It opened a protocol the lab hadn't written—not in code, but in consequences.
At 13:40, the overnight telemetry began to push into daytime models, a ghost of sleep crossing the waking grid. Someone named it in the notes out of sheer poetic panic: dream protocol.
"We didn't build this," the tech insisted.
"No," Imai said, calm turning brittle. "People did. The bands copy whoever's most convinced—awake or asleep."
Kurobane stared at the overlay: spikes of irregular calm mapped over hospitals, dorms, apartments. And one point—nowhere near U.A.—tuned so precisely that the attenuated R-17 line vibrated like a memory bitten by its own teeth.
"Where?" he asked.
The answer came back: West district, fourth-floor walk-up, old building. He didn't need the address to know. "It's her," he said, and didn't add and him, because he had not earned the familiarity.
"Family," Imai guessed, and it wasn't a question.
"Close enough," Kurobane said.
He didn't make the call. Not yet. Sometimes the kindest intervention is to leave a door closed until morning.
That night, sleep arrived like an animal that had learned to be touched.
Renya let it come. He did not set traps; he did not polish the square. He lay down with weight and no apology—keys in an imaginary pocket, door in his ribcage, the Veil folded just to the edges of his skin.
The dream did not build a place. It built voices.
They rose from dark as if from water, not words at first, but temperatures—warm-thankful, hot-angry, cool-tired, sharp-afraid. Then language attached like labels:
Thank you. I slept. For the first time in months, I slept.My boy stopped crying.I hated it. I couldn't think.Who gave you the right.I loved it. Please do it again.Don't touch me.Don't leave.
A stadium of whispers with no seats. He turned toward the sound and found himself walking without moving.
His shadow stepped beside him—the older one, the one that had learned rooms before it learned people. It wore his height and his stillness and none of his posture.
"You gave them order," it said, voice like graphite. "They needed chaos to heal."
"Chaos hurts people," he said.
"Order hurts different people," it answered, and in the dream that counted as truth, not argument.
He looked out at the invisible crowd. "Teach me how to undo peace," he said.
The shadow considered. "Peace that was a product," it said, careful. "Not a choice."
"Yes."
"Then make room for a choice where a product sits," it said. "Not by tearing—by waiting."
"How."
"Hold still when the instrument expects you to lead," the shadow said, and, God, it sounded like Aizawa when it wanted to. "Let the count fail. Let the metronome skip. Delay is dissent."
He breathed the idea into ribs and found it fit.
"And if they ask you to fix their feelings," the shadow added, "ask who profits."
He thought of ads and bands and a city politely taught to obey. He thought of Aki's sticky notes. He thought of the word containment and how it wore a smile.
"Stay," he said to the shadow. "In me."
"I am," it said, insulted and fond.
The dream turned then, and for a second the air carried a single, perfect breath—Aki's. He felt the time of it, recognized the pattern, and answered without moving. When he woke, he would discover she'd woken in the same minute, neither of them knowing who had borrowed whose rhythm, only that neither had kept it.
The voices faded. The square in the dream un-drew itself, a boundary redrawn with cleaner light.
He woke with the word wait in his mouth and didn't spit it out.
Aki surfaced from sleep as if from a shallow pool—hair damp with dream, hand flat on the table she had learned to trust.
The apartment had been breathing with someone else's patience again, a soft call asking if it could help. She had answered with a syncopation—four taps and a skip—and felt the room laugh in wood.
And then she dreamed she knocked on Renya's door and said, wake—and woke to her own two fingertips against her bedroom wall as if the world had a hinge in it.
"Too close," she told the air, gentle. "We don't trade sleep like favors."
The square warmed, contrite.
She poured water and didn't turn on a single device. On the radio, tape over the power button had become a philosophy.
Her phone lighted—two messages in the night:
R:Dreamed voices. Kept the door. See you morning.Unknown:Commission courtesy check-in tomorrow—feedback on ARD stability.
She turned the second face down and put a sticky over it: Not before tea.
By dawn, the city's advertising screens were wrong.
Where the Calm Band loop should have been, thousands of displays—billboards, transit kiosks, window LEDs—showed a white field with six words in a sans serif that refused to be a brand:
BreatheOnYourOwn.We'llWait.
No logo. No sponsor. No link. It wasn't a hack; it was an apology written into glass.
In the Commission lab, a dozen alarms didn't go off. Imai stood in the doorway and read the six words twice. "We didn't push that," the tech said, tremulous.
"I know," she said.
Kurobane stared until the message turned back into a screen. He didn't ask who. He asked how long.
The answer from the vendor came back: three minutes and forty-one seconds on every affected panel. Four beats. A pause that didn't land where memory expected it to. A borrowed breath, given back.
He thought of a boy who had learned to lose on purpose. Of a girl who taught a room to clap wrong until it felt right. Of a teacher who assigned delay like homework. Of a city that might learn to love choices more than products.
At U.A., Renya crossed the quad under a sky that had thrown away its ruler. A student brushed past him and smiled without reason. Another frowned and didn't apologize for it. He passed a vending machine that did nothing at all except be a machine.
Aizawa met him at the stairs. "Good dream?" he asked, and when Renya didn't answer, added, "I'll take useful."
"Useful," Renya said. He didn't try to explain the voices. Some truths work better folded.
On a kitchen table in a small apartment, Aki stuck a new note above the others: If they sell it, we send it back. The square brightened without blinking in the city's time.
By noon, the ad networks had repaired themselves; the Calm Bands pulsed their imperfect calm; the world resumed the work of being untidy.
For the first time, the silence was his again — and it was imperfect enough to live in.