Start of Volume 3
...
The ceiling tiles in the U.A. medical wing had a pattern to them if you stared long enough. Megumi had been staring long enough.
'Recovery Girl said school's canceled today.'
He'd caught that much before she'd bustled off to check on someone else, a different room down the hall. Midoriya's, probably, or Aizawa's. He hadn't asked which.
He shifted against the pillows and the ribs on his left side reminded him that they were still healing, still tender under the wrap Recovery Girl had put on the night before. His body ached in the specific, deep way that came after quirk exhaustion. Not injury. Emptiness. Like something had been drawn out of him and hadn't finished refilling.
He thought about yesterday. Nezu's voice, unbothered even with a building still smoking behind him.
'Since your guardian isn't able to be present, I'll stand in as your guardian in an official capacity, as is protocol for minors involved in villain attacks.'
Isn't able to be present.
Megumi had let that sentence go by at the time, too tired to interrogate it. There wasn't a guardian to summon. There hadn't been one in years, not really, and the paperwork that kept the school and the city off his back about it had always been vague enough to survive without anyone looking too closely. He assumed today someone finally would.
Somebody from the Hero Public Safety Commission, or whatever office got assigned to minors when villain attacks made the news cycle and left holes in a file that used to say guardian: deceased, estate settled, no further action required. Somebody with a clipboard and a script, here to confirm he wasn't a danger to himself, sign something, and leave.
He'd dealt with that kind before. He knew how to be boring in front of them. Answer in short sentences. Don't offer anything they didn't ask for. Let them decide on their own that there was nothing here worth pursuing.
The door opened.
"You're awake," Recovery Girl said, stepping in with her clipboard tucked under one arm. She checked the monitor beside the bed out of habit more than need. "Good. How's the pain?"
"Manageable."
"That means yes." She made a note anyway. "Your guardian's here to see you."
Megumi sat up a little straighter, already composing the version of himself he planned to give whoever it was.
"Bring them in."
Recovery Girl didn't move right away. Something in her face held for a second too long, some flicker of a thought she decided not to share.
"I'll bring him in," she said instead, and left it at that.
The door opened again a minute later, and it wasn't a caseworker.
The man who stepped through was tall and elderly, lean in a way that still carried muscle underneath it, the kind of build that didn't come from age being kind to him but from decades of refusing to let it win. His hair was white, mid-length, slicked back to just behind his neck. Long eyebrows framed a pair of gray eyes, and a thin, English-style mustache extended past both cheeks, neat enough to have been trimmed that morning. He wore an olive green yukata tied with a teal himo, and he carried a red gourd loosely in one hand like it was an old habit rather than an accessory.
'I know that face.'
It took Megumi a second to place it, and when he did, something in his chest went tight and alert at once.
'Naobito Zen'in. Sixth-ranked hero in the country. Head of the Zen'in Clan, Head of the biggest agency in Japan.'
He'd seen the man's name on hero rankings broadcasts, half-listened to while doing something else.
'A guy with that kind of ranking, and somebody let him walk into my hospital room like it was nothing.'
The man stopped at the foot of the bed and looked at Megumi for a long moment. He uncapped the gourd, took an unhurried sip from it, and only then spoke.
"Same eyes," he said, mostly to himself.
Megumi's guard went up before he'd even worked out why.
"I don't know you."
"No," the man agreed. "You wouldn't."
He lowered himself into the chair beside the bed with the unhurried care of someone whose joints had opinions about sudden movement, and set the gourd against the leg of it.
"My name is Naobito Zen'in."
'So I was right.'
Megumi kept that off his face.
"I know who you are," he said instead. "You're the No. 6 hero."
Naobito's gray eyes stayed fixed on him, unblinking. "Also the Head of the Zen'in Clan."
"That's supposed to explain why you're here."
"It's supposed to be the easy part of the explanation." His gaze moved over Megumi again, slower this time, almost cataloguing. "You look like him. More than I expected."
"Like who?"
"Your father. My nephew."
The room went very still.
Megumi had spent years building a wall around that particular door, brick by brick, mostly out of necessity. He kept his voice level anyway.
"My father's dead."
"I know."
"Then whatever this is, you're wasting your time."
"I don't think I am." Naobito's tone stayed level, unbothered, the same faint arrogance running underneath it that Megumi imagined never fully left the man regardless of the subject. "Toji was my brother Jinya's son. Grew up under the Zen'in clan same as I did. When he left, we came to an agreement. He surrendered the name. In exchange, the family left him alone for the rest of his life, and he left us alone in turn."
'Toji.'
Megumi's jaw tightened at the sound of it out loud. He hadn't heard anyone say it in years.
"He never mentioned any of that."
"I wouldn't have expected him to." Something moved behind Naobito's expression, brief and hard to name. "He wasn't a man who explained himself. Even to people who deserved it."
"You're saying my dad was some kind of clan reject who ran off, and now, what, you want him back? He's dead."
"I'm aware." Naobito reached for the gourd again, turned it once in his hand without drinking from it. "I've been aware for some time. Men who live the way he lived rarely die quietly of old age. I assumed the obvious conclusion once he went quiet enough that nothing about him reached me anymore."
"So how are you here right now?"
"I watched the news, same as the rest of the country." Naobito said it plainly, no drama attached to the admission. "Villain attack at the biggest hero school in the country makes every broadcast in Japan by the evening. I saw the footage of the students they pulled out. Saw you specifically, for about four seconds, and thought I was looking at a ghost."
Megumi's hands had curled into the blanket without him noticing.
"That's it? Four seconds of news footage?"
"That's all it took to make me curious enough to look. What I found afterward is what took the rest of the night." He set the gourd down. "Birth records. A residence paid for through channels that don't trace back to anything. A man in his old line of work doesn't accomplish that by accident. He accomplished it on purpose, and he kept it up for years."
"Shadow Construct," he said, almost idly. "Interesting name for a quirk."
"That's what it's called. Why."
"No reason." A beat passed, just slightly too long. "Familiar, in an odd way. I'll leave it at that for now."
Megumi frowned but didn't push. Naobito's face had already closed back over whatever had crossed it.
Megumi looked away, toward the window, toward the pale gray morning outside it. His throat had gone tight in a way he resented.
'He hid us from him.'
Not a question. A fact settling into place, heavier than he expected it to be.
"He hid us from you," Megumi said out loud. "On purpose."
"Yes." Naobito said it without flinching. "I imagine he had reasons he considered good ones."
"Doesn't sound like you're against his reasoning."
"I'm not." The old man's expression settled into something harder to read, aloof more than anything else, like the whole subject sat at a slight remove from him even now. "This family was not kind to your father growing up. I won't pretend otherwise, and I won't insult either of us dressing it up nicer than it was. He was quirkless in a family that measured a person's worth by nothing else. He earned his place the hard way, the only way this family has ever respected, and he still walked away from it the first chance he got. Given the choice, I can't say I'd have done differently."
"But you're here anyway."
"I'm here because you're a minor, both of your biological parents are deceased, and there is no guardian of record for you or for the girl your father took in. Miss Tsumiki, is it." Naobito's tone didn't waver, but something in the pacing of it slowed, like he was choosing to be careful. "That's a problem regardless of how either of us feels about this family. Someone has to hold that role, on paper if nothing else, or the government assigns someone who's never heard your father's name and has no reason to care what happens to either of you beyond a checked box."
Megumi's mind went, unbidden, to the apartment. The rent that never came due because it never needed to. The account that had quietly covered two lives worth of groceries and hospital bills for years without him ever having to ask an adult for anything.
"The apartment," Megumi said slowly. "The money. That was you?"
"No." For the first time, something like genuine respect crossed Naobito's face. "That was entirely him. Whatever he did after he left, he did well enough, and quietly enough, to leave the two of you provided for without my knowledge or my help."
"So he cut you out completely."
"Completely." Naobito's jaw tightened, just slightly. "Which tells me he thought it was worth the risk of leaving you both with nothing official behind it, rather than the alternative."
"What alternative."
"Me finding you while he was alive to have an opinion about it."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
Megumi studied the old man in front of him, the careful posture, the yukata that probably cost more than the apartment's yearly rent, the faint permanent arrogance sitting behind every unhurried word.
Whatever this man wanted, whatever the Zen'in name actually meant, none of it changed the fact that his father, who never explained anything, had gone to considerable lengths to keep it as far from Megumi's life as possible.
'That means something.'
He just hadn't decided yet whether it meant stay away from these people or his father ran out of time before he could explain why.
"What happens now," Megumi said. Not a question exactly. More a test, to see what answer the man would reach for first.
"Now, I sign whatever paperwork the government requires to make this arrangement official," Naobito said. "You continue living exactly where you're living. I have no interest in relocating you, and even less interest in installing myself in your daily life uninvited. What I want, at minimum, is for a name with actual resources behind it to exist on a form somewhere, so that the next time something like yesterday happens, this school doesn't have to scramble to find one."
"At minimum."
Naobito's eyes held on him.
"You're sharp enough to have heard that qualifier and known it meant something."
"Yeah."
"Then I won't insult you by pretending it didn't." He picked the gourd back up, unhurried. "There's more to discuss. Your quirk, this family, what any of it means going forward. That conversation can wait until after your Sports Festival."
A faint, almost approving curve touched the corner of his mustache. "Recover. Compete. We'll talk properly once it's over and you're not lying in a hospital bed still catching your breath."
"That's supposed to reassure me."
"It's supposed to be honest." Naobito rose from the chair, joints protesting audibly, gourd back in hand with the same unhurried precision he'd used crossing the room. "You'll find I don't do much of the other kind."
He paused at the door.
"There's also the matter of Miss Tsumiki's care. I understand her condition. If this family's resources can improve it in any way, they're available to you. No obligation attached. I'd ask you to at least consider it, rather than refusing on principle because of where the offer comes from."
Megumi didn't answer that right away. He thought of Tsumiki's still hands on white sheets, of the machines that kept her steady but never woke her, of every specialist he'd already exhausted the search for on his own.
"I'll think about it," he said finally.
"That's all I'm asking." Naobito inclined his head, something almost formal in the gesture, and then he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him with none of the weight the conversation had carried.
Megumi sat alone in the quiet room for a long time afterward, staring at the same ceiling tiles as before, except now the pattern didn't hold his attention at all.
'Toji Zen'in.'
He turned the shape of it over in his mind and found it didn't fit anywhere he already had built for his father. Not the quiet, tired man who burned pork cutlets. Not the one who vanished for days at a time and came back smelling like rain and something metallic underneath it that Megumi had never let himself name.
'He spent years making sure this exact conversation never happened.'
'And it happened anyway, the moment I stopped being invisible.'
He lay back against the pillows, ribs aching, the quiet hum of the monitor the only sound in the room, and understood with a kind of tired clarity that whatever came next wasn't going to stay this contained.
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