So Close, But Yet So Far

It wasn't often one was called into a meeting with the Number One hero, All Might, and his only sidekick, Sir Nighteye. In any other circumstances White Spirit would have been honoured, or flattered. As it was, coming on top of everything else, she felt sick and tired and worried.

It didn't help that both of them looked particularly grim. She'd never seen All Might without his patented smile. She sat down across the table and looked over at the two heroes. They simply looked at her. There was another man beside them, a police officer by the badge that was showing on his belt.

"Look, what is this about? I'm rather busy," she snapped and inwardly winced. She was not going to be making a good impression.

"We are here about the raid," Sir Nighteye told her.

The less said about the raid, the better. It was a cluster fuck with a capital C. She wasn't sure what went wrong though. Ruthless Shade wasn't meant to be that dangerous. They knew his abilities. They knew his followers' abilities and yet…

Half way through the raid things had started going wrong. They'd lost contact with Scarlet Scorpion and FreezeStar before they realised anything had gone wrong. And then there was a huge hulk of a man. Phantom hadn't stood a chance and Sage had a long road to recovery. And now, what they were finding as they went through the building was even more worrisome.

Children's toys and clothes. The only consolation White Spirit could take was that the children had their own rooms with proper beds and thus it didn't seem like it was a people smuggling operation. Those crammed the kids into as small a space as possible and definitely didn't give them toys.

"What about the raid?" She snapped, before taking a deep breath. "Look, I'm sorry. Things are not going well," she offered the paltry explanation. She really didn't have time for this meeting.

"I understand," All Might said before Sir Nighteye could say a word. "We want to know what you found," he asked.

"What we found? What we found doesn't make sense!" White Spirit growled. "Look, before I launch into explaining everything, what do you know already?" She demanded, ungraciously. They obviously knew, or strongly suspected something and she was tired. It would be better to get this over with.

Sir Nighteye looked offended but All Might nodded. "Before we tell you anything, I'd like to confirm one thing. Do you have a good photo of Ruthless Shade?" he asked.

White Spirit nodded and pulled out her comm. She tapped the buttons for a few moments, dumping the photo to whoever was in range. Right at the moment she didn't care who saw the image.

All Might brought out his own phone and it pinged when it accepted the image. He tapped the screen, and looked at it before he held it up for Sir Nighteye and the police officer to see.

"That's him," the officer said.

White Spirit knew what they were seeing. They'd gotten an image of Ruthless Shade with his cowl down. He had brilliant gold eyes and almost hauntingly white hair. It reflected whatever light was around, and in this image had taken on a blue hue.

"It is," All Might confirmed before he looked up at her again. White Spirit noted that his eyes were sharp. "Ruthless Shade is not some minor villain," the Number One Hero said.

White Spirit wanted to object but she wasn't quite sure what she would be objecting to. Probably the implication that they couldn't handle one villain.

"He's far more than that," All Might continued before he took a deep breath. "In your dealings, have you ever heard of a man just called 'Sensei'?" he asked. His blue eyes were quite serious.

"He's a myth!" White Spirit objected. She'd heard of him alright. He was meant to be some sort of boogie man villains used to scare each other with. Except no one could tell her what was so scary about him.

"Not a myth," the Number One hero told her with a completely straight face.

"So what does that have to do with my raid?" White Spirit demanded, though she had a suspicion she knew exactly what it had to do with her raid.

"Your image confirms that Ruthless Shade is one of the alias' this Sensei was going by."

For several long moments, White Spirit stared at them, silent. "Did you know?" She roared, coming out of her chair as her hands slammed into the table. "Did you have any idea that this-"

"Please!" All Might held up his hands. "We didn't know," he stressed.

The police officer rose, and bowed. "I'm sorry. When the reports of your raid came through, I had a suspicion," he said, holding his bow to her. "It wasn't Ruthless Shade that tipped me off," he added, "but that large man you team reported."

White Spirit trembled but slowly sat back down. "That wasn't a man," she spat. It wasn't a man, not with the way that he had gone through walls and her underlings. The worse thing was, it didn't look like the man was actually trying to hurt them.

"We believe the large man is his bodyguard," Sir Nighteye spoke finally as the police officer sat back down.

"And the fucking kids?" She demanded.

That brought the men up short. They froze as they looked at her and in a small, petty part of her mind, White Spirit went 'Hah' at their confusion but she knew this was deadly serious stuff.

"Kids?" All Might asked, his voice strangled.

She slumped over the table and initiated a connection to her agency's server which allowed her to pull up the photos of what they had found. She flicked through two bedrooms. The first obviously belonged to a child given the toys scattered around, along with school books. The other probably to a teen. There were multiple game consoles there, and there had been a console set up in the bar. She was somewhat thankful to see the school books. It reinforced that this wasn't a slave ring, or if it was, it was the oddest one she'd ever heard of.

"Do you have any images of the kids?" the police officer asked intently.

"Let me check," White Spirit said. They had captured devices and computers but she wasn't sure if they'd managed to hack into any of them yet. She went to the data dump folder for the case, though to call it a folder was a bit of a misnomer. In electronic terms it was a holding pen for all information downloaded from captured devices, just in case some of those devices had surprises on them. While it didn't appear secure, it really was. There were several data support people at her agency whose sole job was to ensure that. And to actually hack the devices.

There were some days when they deserved the title of hero!

"Looks like we got lucky with one of the devices. The encryption sucked."

Sir Nighteye didn't look convinced. Usually White Spirit would agree but she knew her people. If they said the encryption sucked they meant it, and they would have checked that it wasn't because it was a honey pot.

She opened the folder, and saw that there were images there. White Spirit threw the image from her phone to a projector that was in the room and then clicked the display so that it showed thumbnails of the images.

"Could you open the fifth one down from the left?" the police officer asked politely.

She did that and the image opened to show a green haired kid. He was cute and she thought about six. He had matching green eyes that looked huge and expressive. Freckles dusted his cheeks and, at least in the photo, there was an air of innocence about the kid.

The only thing wrong with the shot was that the kid was blowing a jet of fire at a target, which was quite a way distant.

The police officer pulled a satchel from the floor and brought out a case file. He opened it and pulled out a picture which he held up.

"You can use the screen," White Spirit said.

"Operational security," the man shrugged. She understood and was intrigued. Information was limited to paper copy only with very, very secure or sensitive cases. "He's gotten older," the officer stated, and then passed the image to All Might. White Spirit saw as it was being passed that it was just a photocopy of an original. How much security was on this case? Photocopies were used only when the original case file was so sensitive that it was stored in a special vault. Access to that vault was monitored, and if anything was destroyed… There were very few crimes which carried a presumption of guilt. Destroying that special vault evidence was one of them. It didn't matter who you were either. It was a statutory charge.

"That's something," the Number One hero said as if he was relieved.

"Did you find any information about the children?" Sir Nighteye asked. "Uniforms, or other identifiers."

White Spirit took a look at her agency's server. "Not yet," she stated.

Sir Nighteye nodded. He looked understanding. "We want to be appraised of everything," he said. "Ruthless Shade is far more dangerous than you believe," the sidekick added.

She wanted to object to that but White Spirit recognised that desire as her pride and with three heroes lost in the raid, and one probably wounded to the point that she'd retire, there was no room for pride. Instead, White Spirit took a deep breath. "I welcome any input," she said bowing slightly over the table.

She'd organise access for All Might and his sidekick to her servers later because she had a feeling that this wasn't going to be a simple case.

All Might looked over at her, his face serious. It was scary. "I am very sorry for your loss," he told her. The words were sincere and White Spirit wondered who the Number One Hero had lost to Ruthless Shade.

"Thank you," she replied, taking a deep breath as she sat there.

This was not going to be easy.

-ted-

"You can't tell her."

"Excuse me?" Naomasa couldn't help but question Sir Nighteye. "This is the first break we've had on this case."

"And it's the first lead we've had in our case," the sidekick replied.

The Detective ground his teeth together. He knew, if it came down to it, that Sir Nighteye would simply pull rank. The cases Heroes worked on generally got precedence over Police cases. And he knew that despite the fact that his case was dealing with child kidnapping, All Might's case, dealing with what could be the most dangerous villain the world had ever faced would be considered more important. It didn't matter that there was every chance that the child was the villain's son. All the more reason for no one to care about him, and he already knew that public opinion would blame the mother for marrying the villain. It would be her fault, despite the fact that everything Tsukauchi had seen on this case said that this particular villain had acted like the perfect gentlemen to her. It might have been an act, but there was nothing for her to see as being wrong.

He sighed. At least he knew Yagi would be as frustrated as he was with the situation. "I can't even tell her we found some photos?"

"No. If he has someone watching her, he will know that we know."

"He already knows that we know," Naomasa reminded All Might's sidekick. The electronic copies of his case files had been tampered with. The image of Hisashi Midoriya was always smudged. If that wasn't evidence enough that the villain knew they were on to him, he didn't know what was.

Sir Nighteye shook his head. "There's no reason for us to give away knowledge," he said.

"Look, this woman is alone," he tried the emotional angle, knowing that it probably wouldn't go anywhere. "She lost her husband and her son in one day and hasn't had anything since. We've not been able to find anything. Until now. I think she deserves to know that her son is still alive."

The pro-hero shook his head. "We can't take the risk."

"The risk of what?"

"With this man, anything is a risk," Sir Nighteye replied. "And what exactly would you tell her? That we found photos of her supposedly quirkless son using a quirk, on the device of a super-villain, who is probably her husband?"

Tsukauchi grimaced. When it was put like that, it did sound bad.

"I would hold off, and hope that we can locate the child," the pro-hero added and Naomasa could hear the very faint note of sympathy in his tone.

"We don't even know what school the kid goes to," he pointed out.

"We are looking into it."

Naomasa wasn't convinced. The kids room had the standard, government approved second year elementary texts. His uniform was one of the generic ones used across Japan and while they could run a search through biometrics, they had no idea where to look! The kid might have gone to the Elementary School down the road, or across the city. Even so, he knew they had watchers on the local schools, looking for any green haired, freckled boy but Naomasa already knew they wouldn't be able to keep those watchers there for long.

He suspected that whoever Hisashi Midoriya really was, he was already pulling the strings to have the case dropped in importance. No doubt Sir Nighteye was aware of that as well and so was wanting to gather as much information as he could.

Tsukauchi sighed heavily. "I'll wait until we get booted off this case," he told the sidekick.

Sir Nighteye didn't look pleased, but he knew what the Detective was referring to. "It will have to do," he muttered and then went back to looking through the information White Spirit's team had found.

"It will," Tsukauchi said, putting the print of Izuku Midoriya using quite an impressive fire quirk into the file. One day, Inko Midoriya would see it.

One day.