63

Chapter Text

Midoriya slowed his bike to a crawl as he pulled into the headquarters parking lot for the second time that day. He certainly hadn't expected to be back, but as Mei stepped off the bike behind him and Nedzu's driver pulled up alongside the curb, Midoriya found that he could tolerate making the trip.

"So, Midoriya, why are we here quite this…," Nedzu trailed off, checking his watch as he stepped from the vehicle, "late? We'll call it late." In one clawed hand rested the handle of his briefcase, which was, Midoriya hoped, ladened with tests.

"I believe it would be best explained inside. There is another party relevant to this conversation." At Hatsume's response, Nedzu offered her a gleeful grin.

"Far be it from me to exclude the relevant parties from an explanation! Forward then." Midoriya kept his own grin on his face as he walked towards the front entrance. The doors hissed as they approached, signaling the disengagement of the pressure seal and other various locking mechanisms that went into place once the facility was placed in lockdown.

Kid on your left. Rushing door.

The corner of Midoriya's lip twitched up. Even as the doors opened, Midoriya stuck out an arm, grabbing the high schooler around the chest as he maneuvered them back through the doors. The kid struggled under Midoriya's arm, beating at his side with enough strength to make him wincing. He'd be bruised, certainly, but it was nothing he hadn't dealt with before. A grin took over Midoriya's face as he clocked the look of pure shock on young Nakayama Chou, as well as Dabi's clear displeasure.

Midoriya raised one gloved hand as he approached, the cursing child in tow. "Well, good evening, Chou. I'm sure you were surprised to be called down here so late."

The mixture of consternation and horror on Mrs. Nakayama was certainly a sight to see and was yet another piece of the puzzle for Nedzu. "I am so sorry, Mr. Midoriya. I swear, I wasn't aware of my son's actions."

Midoriya hummed, slanting a look towards Dabi. "I believe that we have a better location to discuss this little breach of security. Doesn't everyone think so?"

Dabi rolled his eyes but turned and walked towards the doors behind reception. Pressing his hand against the black pad on the wall, the doors slid efficiently into place before the frowning head of security.

"Come on, Chou, let's head to the meeting room for this." Hatsume gave her materials technician a small, practiced smile as she took her by the elbow and led her deeper into the facility. They followed Midoriya, who gripped Suto under his arm like a discontented sack of potatoes. Chou's eyes flicked cautiously between her son, the man carrying him, and the small, furry creature following behind them with gleaming eyes.

Their group shuffled into the meeting room without much fanfare or notice, the majority of their employees having already left for the night. Midoriya plopped the kid into one of the seats a ways from the door before walking over to the small kitchenette on the opposite side of the conference room. Nedzu placed his briefcase on top of one of the seats. Reaching in, he dug around for a moment before producing a sizable china teapot from, well, Dabi didn't actually know where the hell he'd pulled it from, and that was the most unsettling part. He briefly glanced towards the others to see if they had noticed, but Midoriya and Hatsume were busy communing in the corner over a coffee pot, while Mrs. Nakayama fussed over her dissenting child.

Nedzu handed the teapot over to Dabi with a smile that was entirely too much teeth for any realm of comfort. "Boil this, please."

Dabi stood blinking for a moment as the diminutive president watched, but, as he wasn't getting any kind of help from his bosses, he eventually settled on a shrug. He accepted the teapot from Nedzu's claws, pausing uneasily as a chill lanced up his spine, his muscles stiffening to the point of discomfort near immediately. It was an intricate design on the pot, patterns and shapes made of gold and silver that made Dabi feel a bit queasy to look at. Wanting it out of his hands quickly, he brought his palms flush against the bottom of the pot very briefly and lit up a flame.

The fire lasted for only a moment, but Dabi noted how the president's eyebrows lifted in what appeared to be amusement. He realized belatedly that perhaps exposing something so delicate to his flames wasn't a very good idea, but when Dabi glanced down, he saw with shock that the teapot was perfectly fine. Not a mark, no heat, nothing at all seemed out of place. It was exactly the same as it had been before he'd used his fire.

"Hmm, well, I had expected you to use a more conventional method of heating, though I suppose that works, as well."

Nedzu took the teapot back into his hands and rested it carefully there against his paw pads. "Hmm, yes, that worked fine." Without another glance in his direction, Nedzu strolled casually back to the table with that same polite smile he'd worn since first arriving behind Midoriya and Hatsume.

That water can't be boiling; I barely used my fla- The thought was cut off as Nedzu produced a matching cup from his briefcase and poured out a serving of fresh, hot tea. Dabi felt that chill from earlier return as Nedzu shifted in his direction, eyes entirely too satisfied as he raised a single clawed digit to his muzzle. "I do love bone china. It's so wonderful, don't you think?"

Midoriya turned with his coffee and took in the room. Dabi had left moments before, and while that was fine, he would need him back before they were done here. He briefly asked Phoenix to relay that before glancing at Nedzu. A frown tugged at his lips, and he shook his head. He had no clue where that teapot had come from, but he didn't want to know. There was a lot about Nedzu he simply didn't want to know. It was better to just accept it and move on to something easier to deal with.

Midoriya placed a filled cup in front of their materials tech before taking a seat nearby. "So, Chou, I'll be frank with you. This is bad."

The woman stood from her chair. Her shoulders hunched inward as she folded herself into a bow in front of Midoriya. "Please, I'll do whatever I have to. Please forgive my son for this."

Hatsume quirked an eyebrow as she sipped her coffee. "It's not quite that simple, I'm afraid. If it were just this one time, then, of course, we might be able to do something about it. Stupid kids setting off proximity alarms and such."

"Just… one?" The words seemed to rock the woman, and Midoriya grimaced. With a tap of a few buttons, the glass surrounding the meeting room frosted over and security footage was overlaid across it.

"See, Chou, your son has been at this for quite some time now. This wasn't an impulse decision or any kind of spur-of-the-moment action. Your son has actively been trying to break through the security of our front doors for a while."

Both Nakayamas stiffened in their seats, one sinking further down into the chair, as the other sat furious and shaking. As she began to fully realize the implications of what was being said, however, the woman's fury turned to misery. "Why, Suto? Why didn't you tell me about this when it started?" The question, said with such defeat, elicited no response from the young man. Midoriya breathed out.

"We'll get to that. Unfortunately, his attempted break-in is only the beginning of our problems. Now, normally," Midoriya stood, walking over to a small backpack that the kid had carried with him, "pursuant to our wishes, the police would just slap the kid with a warning, since it's his first time doing something like this. Maybe a misdemeanor, if the government was feeling fussy."

For the first time, Midoriya's words elicited a response from the young boy. He sat up straight in his chair. His gaze was wild and focused intently on Midoriya's. "Wha- what?! The government? Why would they get involved?"

Midoriya shook his head. "It's no secret that we work closely with the government, Suto. While we aren't a government facility, that doesn't mean the government doesn't have a vested interest in what it is that we do here." He rifled through the bag a bit before pulling out two black, plastic blocks. "Well, shit, what do we have here? I was expecting to find one, not two."

Midoriya rolled the bricks in his gloved hands until he found what he'd been expecting. One held a series of buttons and switches on the panel. A small LCD screen would display what was likely the relevant information for the user. The other plastic block held only a button. Rolling that one a little more, he found two metal prongs on the end of it. Midoriya let out a slow whistle.

"Well, double shit. This," Midoriya held up the brick with the LCD screen, "is likely to be the hacking device that your son used to breach the security on the front doors. As a side note, kid, this is a damn good piece of work. The security at the front is weaker than the rest of the building by design, but it's still on par with most security firms. Sadly, it would have fried itself in our lobby, as it did outside more than a few times. It is also," Midoriya turned back to the boy's mother, "a felony to own if you don't have the proper paperwork." Suto cringed back into his seat with a muttered, I didn't know that. Chou had begun to lose her coloring at the word felony.

"This, on the other hand," Midoriya set down the first device and held up the second, "I was not expecting to find."He rolled it over in his hand again, looking for a spot to open up the casing, but as there didn't appear to be one to find, he instead placed the corner of the device against the table. Suto threw up his hands with a frantic yell as Midoriya proceeded to bring his hand down, cracking the edge of it on the table to separate the back and front plates from their glue bonding.

Pulling the relatively few pieces from their casing, Midoriya held them up for the occupants of the room to see. Hatsume looked at them and murmured. "Well, that's something. A Li-ion battery, hi-vol pulse module, charging board, button, and some metal contacts. A very effective homemade taser."

"And very much illegal." The occupants of the room glanced from Hatsume to Nedzu. Midoriya gathered from the wide-eyed expressions on both mother and son that they hadn't expected Nedzu to talk. He set the pieces, still connected by their wiring, down on the table with an air of indifference.

"It's for self-defense! I don't know who's out at this time of night."

"I am personally all for carrying something to defend yourself with. Just don't get caught with it, as it is still, unfortunately, illegal here in Japan." Midoriya picked up a thick manilla envelope that had been waiting on the table, reaching in to slide its contents out for the group to see. "By all accounts, Suto, you are an intelligent individual. Until you reached high school, your records were spotless, your grades almost impractically perfect. What happened?"

Midoriya paced leisurely down the table,handing papers off to Nedzu as passed by. Grades, incident reports, and students involved, all thoroughly documented.

"How, how the hell do you know all of that?" Midoriya let his eyes flick disinterestedly towards the teenager before passing over him to his mother.

"We've been investigating you since your first attempt to get in here. Your public information wasn't hard to get, the protected information even less so."

"You have no right to my-" Suto surged to his feet, readying himself, it seemed, for an argument of epic proportions. Hatsume cut him off with a lazy, dispassionate tone.

"Do you know that this little stunt of yours is going to blow back on your mother, too?"

"What?" The boy staggered a step back as he looked at Hatsume, then to his mother. After a moment, he lowered himself back into the chair.

"Did you think this was just about you? You got bored, so you wanted to see what you could do. I get that. I missed most of my high school classes, too. But this was, unfortunately, a step too far."

"What-" Suto's face turned towards Midoriya, searching. "What is she talking about?"

"Oh," the word, more of a croak than anything, had Suto turning to face his mother. "My security clearance. They'll pull my security clearance."

"What? They can't do that just because I-"

"They can. They will."

Midoriya stared at the kid, at his mother, and sighed. "Nedzu," he murmured, "are you seeing what I am in those records?"

These records, that quirk. Oh yes, Midoriya has done quite well showing this promising little kit to me. Yes, he has. Nedzu looked up from the papers with a feral grin, the Nakayama family jolting at the sight. "I do like to believe I am, Midoriya, and I do believe I see where this is going."

Satisfied, Midoriya clapped his hands together, bringing all eyes back to him. Chou looked up from the ground, her lips pressed tight. "So what happens now, sir?" The defeated expression on the woman's face, the forlorn tone she spoke with, had Hatsume rolling her eyes.

"We would have just had his ass arrested the first time he tried breaking in if we didn't plan to deal with him, Chou."

Midoryia raised his eyes to the ceiling. "And you were doing so well, Mei. What she says is correct, Chou. If we had just run him off, we would have risked him just going up the road and breaking into another secure building, one that we couldn't have done anything about."

"Then my son…" Mrs. Nakayama trailed off as Midoriya shook his head.

"No, he's still going to face punishment. But this way, he gets a choice."

Nedzu stood from his chair at the segue, took a step around the table, and offered a theatrical bow. "I do believe that is my cue to introduce myself. Am I a mouse? A dog? A bear? I'm the president of our nation's finest institution, U.A. University!"

Mrs. Nakayama froze in her seat. Though it appeared at first that her son would have the opposite reaction, he was held in place by the weight of Nedzu's hungry stare.

"So, here is what is going to happen. You, my young man," Nedzu pointed a claw at Suto, "are going to sit here and take all of theeese." Nedzu snatched his briefcase from the chair, and with a frenzied kind of glee, slapped a stack of papers down in front of the boy. Suto paused, carefully picking up the first sheet to read the title. He blanched.

"Why would I want to do that?" After a moment of silence, "Sir."

"Suto!" Chou whipped to the side, her face the picture of scandalized embarrassment. "Just be quiet and take the-" Mrs. Nakayama trailed off as she read the top of the paper. "Tests?"

Nedzu stuck a single paw in the air, then pointed it at her. "Exactly, Mrs. Nakayama. Tests. You see, quite often in our society, we have students fall through the cracks. Either the student can't keep up with the material, or they keep up too well and get bored. Far too often, we can't catch these students in time. In this case, we have managed to do just that."

"But, uh, what does any of this have to do with my son's crimes?"

Taking this as his cue, Midoriya spoke up. "Because, Chou, U.A. has a restorative course for," he paused, sounding tired, "misguided youths. It's an outreach program of sorts, mainly operating in impoverished areas that have been forgotten about. It has an almost non-existent acceptance rate." Because the rat uses it to abduct promising children. "Almost no one knows about it, but it exists. I brought Nedzu along, hoping that he would find your son interesting enough to accept into that program. We still have to report it, but with the school involved, we should be able to gloss over the details of the report. He'll be stuck with a tracking anklet and won't be able to leave U.A. grounds until he graduates. He'll have a curfew from hell and a strict schedule, but he won't be marked with a record. So there is that."

Mrs. Nakayama took a look at the large, unidentifiable mammal still boring holes through her son. Her expression was deadpan when she turned to Midoriya. "There is no other option, is there?"

Midoriya returned her expression with his own. "Sure there is. It's this, prison, or running for the rest of his life from the authorities."

Mrs. Nakayama turned back to her son and set her hand down heavily on his shoulder. "Do the tests." She turned to look at the smiling chimera and suppressed the shudder that was working its way up her spine. She put her hand out to shake Nedzu's. "Take care of my son, please."

Nedzu's grin widened. "Don't worry at all, ma'am. With his aptitude for machines, I'm sure he'll love it at U.A. We have wonderful departments all around, and we'll be sure to get him the help he needs."

Midoriya glanced at Hatsume, flicked his eyes pointedly to the door. Guiding his partner and Mrs. Nakayama from the room, Midoriya gave Nedzu a thumbs up as he followed the two out. Once he'd closed the door, however, he let the smile from his face. He could hear the faintest sound of laughter from inside the conference room.

Mrs. Nakayama looked back towards the door with trepidation. "Are you sure that it's okay to leave Suto with… Nedzu?"

Hatsume snorted. "Oh, sure thing. He'll teach him all sorts of things. It's fun."

Midoriya shook his head as they walked towards the security office. He supposed it could be worse, but leaving Nedzu with Suto? That may as well have been part of the punishment, itself.

Notes:

It is mildly upsetting to use a phrase I think is perfectly fine, and indeed is referring to ships in the late 18th century, and be told by my editor that it's got racial undertones I was unaware of due to associations and I shouldn't use it. Rip.

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