#not dead just too busy reading ao3 twenty four seven to actually draw anything

[umblrspectrum]

"smaller mass" you say

[lady-literature]

what a lion cannot manage chp 2

dadmight here we gooo!!!

Ao3 | chp 1 | chp 2 | chp 3 | chp 4

Izumi’s home is a small place. Not suffocating or anything, but the town is too nosy for its own good and word travels fast. When someone new comes to town, it’s not long before everyone is talking about it.

The whispers of a man renting out the old cottage at the edge of town piques Izumi’s interest.

No one’s interacted with him much and he seems to keep to himself, but lack of information has never stopped the gossip mill from running before. He’s kind and polite from what the shopkeepers have seen when he leaves his house for food. That and he is, apparently, absurdly tall.

Besides the mystery of it all, there’s nothing really eye-catching about this particular rumour. Nonetheless, Izumi finds her ears pricking to attention every time he’s mentioned. Unbearably curious, despite herself.

***

For a while, the man seems like more of a ghost story than an actual person. Only showing up at the shops when they’re least likely to be busy. Only walking through town when he must.

Then, out of nowhere, it’s as if he can’t bear to stay in his rented house for anything other than sleep.

***

Toshinori has always been restless. Always moving and fighting and becoming

And here, hidden away in this sleepy town with no villains to fight or people to save, with a wound in his side that aches with every breath, he feels as if it’s clawing at his very skin.

He’s here to recover, far away from the action in Tokyo or Hosu or any place where he's actually needed so he won’t be tempted.

The doctors recommended he take it easy for six months. Mirai—Nighteye, he should say now—told him to retire.

As if that was ever actually an option.

Toshinori agreed to stay out of Heroing for two months, and that’s only because of the combined efforts of Torino and Recovery Girl and David.

He’s not even sure how David found out about it, what with him being on I-Island with Melissa (but Toshinori has a sneaking suspicion it has something to do with Nighteye). The trio were persuasive though, and Toshinori never stood a chance when David pulled his trump card: Melissa’s puppy dog eyes.

It’s nice that they care and worry, but Toshinori isn’t made for sitting still.

He’s restless and the phantom cries of victims he’s not there to save ring in his ears like bells as he tries to relax.

Finally, he decides enough. If he sits still for even a single second more he’s going to tear out of his own skin.

***

He’s been in town for perhaps two weeks (twenty-nine days since he defeated him, twenty-five since he’d woken up in a hospital bed, twenty-four since he realized he’ll never be the same) and it’s not enough time for him to be walking around as much as he is but he can’t help it.

He’s not staying cooped inside for two months.

Toshinori keeps to himself for the most part, stays on the outskirts of things like he normally does when he acts civilian.

Since the beginning of his career, he’s carefully kept Yagi Toshinori and All Might separate. Two different people as far as anyone outside a select few are aware. He’s gone years as unrecognizable from All Might and while he’s not quite worried someone will recognize him, old habits die hard, he supposes.

Even now, when he looks like death warmed over, there’s always a chance. He doesn’t normally stress about it so much, but he’d rather hide the fact that the number one Hero is hiding away in a tiny farming village along the coast. And that means not drawing attention to himself.

He’s only partially successful.

***

The first time Izumi sees him, he’s walking through the park.

She’s walking on her hands across the balance beam because she and Kacchan started taking gymnastics. (Kacchan wanted to take a combat class but was shot down by his parents until they could trust him not to attack another child with his newfound fighting skills. So Izumi got to choose their activity instead.)

The man is hurt. Badly. The heavy tang of blood hangs off him like a coat even from all the way on the other side of the park and she almost falls off the balance beam with the force of it.

But, what almost seems worse is that… underneath the smell of blood and pain and hurt, there’s only… him.

No lingering scent of others, of people who should care for him. Just the cinnamon earth of his own scent drenched in blood and the stale smell of strangers. Even humans, people who don’t purposefully scent their family and friends, smell like each other just by the nature of being close.

Izumi can’t imagine being that lonely. Can’t imagine living in solitude like that, with so many people around her and yet none who are close enough to touch and-

And, well. Izumi’s known around town for sticking her nose in places it doesn’t quite belong. She figures this is just much of the same if you think about it.

***

There are few people Midoriya Izumi has met that she didn’t like and fewer still who didn’t like her in turn.

If asked, Izumi will say this is because she is very good at making friends.

If asked, Katsuki will say it’s because she’s a goddamn freak.

(He won’t say so, because he’s not quite that articulate, but what he means is that there’s not a person dead or alive who can withstand the sheer strength of her will. Not a goddamn person on Kami’s green earth who can be near her for longer than a few minutes without being irreversibly changed.

It’s just a law of nature.

The sky is blue. The grass is green. Reality and the people within it bend to the desires of Midoriya Izumi.)

***

Toshinori has seen this girl running around town, normally with that loud boy at her side, but sometimes on her own. He’s heard about her more.

Everyone he speaks to seems unable to keep themselves from bringing her into the conversation.

She’s the one who plays chess with the elderly at the park, and who climbs up trees for kittens and always seems to be the first to look for runaway dogs. She reads to the younger kids at the library and helps out with craft activities.

He knows so much, Toshinori feels as if he’s already met the girl.

He continues to think that all the way up until he actually meets her and realizes he’s barely scratched the surface.

***

Izumi is good at patterns. Her mind is a bright chaotic whirl of thoughts and ideas and information at all times and it’s laughably easy to put it all together and find repetitions and relations.

Figuring out when the lonely man is going to be passing through the park again is no different.

He sits on that same park bench again, practically collapsing down onto it. His breath is short and his heart is pounding with the exertion of just walking. Izumi briefly wonders what happened to him. Then, she wonders why he’s pushing himself so much because that seems more pressing a matter.

She skips up to him and the smell of blood and pain is enough to make her dizzy but Izumi is determined, okay?

“Hello!” she greets brightly, hands clasped behind her back and smiling.

The lonely man startles. “Ah, hello?”

“Hello!” she repeats, “People call me Midoriya Izuku. Do you like checkers?”

“Uh…” The lonely man blinks, clearly taken aback. “Yes? Do you-?”

She hops a bit in place, excited. “Great! Come play with me!” she reaches up to grab his hand and tugs him over to the stone tables set up for the games. She’s very careful about the amount of strength she uses in that action, just like Nona taught her to be.

Normal little girls shouldn’t be able to throw around things twice their weight.

The lonely man moves easily, probably because he’s surprised by the action. He follows her though and that’s what matters.

He’s confused and a bit awkward at first which Izumi thinks means he doesn’t spend a lot of time around kids. Maybe he doesn’t know what to talk about. What do adults talk about? Her skulk normally talks about magic and whatever new creature has decided to snoop around their forest, so that's out. And he doesn’t smell like he’s a farmer.

So there goes most of her reference points for this kind of thing.

They’re four moves in and she can tell he’s trying to ‘let’ her win. Her ears flick in annoyance and she sets herself up for a move that will wipe him out in seven turns without taking any of his easy captures.

Maybe he likes Heroes? That’s what Izumi normally defaults to and it works most of the time. Who doesn’t like Heroes?

“Who’s your favourite Hero?” she asks, watching him move a checkers piece without even really thinking about it. He’s not even trying.

“Oh, uh,” he clears his throat. “I’m not really sure. I don’t… don’t really keep up with them anymore.”

Izumi blinks and tilts her head. She doesn't miss the ‘anymore’ part.

“Come on. You had to have a favourite at some point,” she insists. “Someone you looked up to and admired! And you can’t say All Might because, obviously. I mean, he’s my favorite but there are a bunch of other Heroes! Like Ectoplasm! Or Gang Orca! Or! Or! There’s even all those American Heroes? Like the Hulk! Or there’s Spiderman. He’s new but he’s super friendly from what people have seen! He goes around helping people even if it’s not villain related and just generally interacts a lot with everyone. There’s a lot about him on the American forums despite him being so concentrated on a small area. I would-”

Izumi stops, realizes she’s been rambling about nothing again and blushes. “Sorry. I get excited.”

The lonely man is quiet for a second and then laughs. It’s quiet and huffing and sounds a little like it hurts but it also sounds happy and that makes Izumi happy. She giggles too even though she’s not quite sure what they’re laughing at.

“All right,” he gives, raising his hands in surrender. “You’ve convinced me. If I must choose, I’d say I have a… fondness for Titania. She’s a little before your time but-”

“Oh! Titania the Strong? Or the Fairy Queen?” she asks because sometimes Heroes have the same name.  People reuse them or pay homage to someone they liked or carry on a legacy. There’s been an active Dread Pirate Roberts ever since the second generation of Heroes.

She tries to think if there are any other Titanias. Ones who stopped Heroing before she was born. She can’t think of any, but back when quirks first popped up and people started calling themselves Heroes they weren’t all that good at documenting them.

They’ve only just started to get better at that.

The lonely man stares at her in surprise and oh. Right. He doesn’t know.

Most people in town do, but he’s new. He doesn’t know of her fascination with Heroes or how her memory is near eidetic. The knowledge bank in her mind is massive and a large part is dedicated to Heroes (to their quirks, to the power they wield, to the ways they use them because it’s always best to have plenty of tricks up your sleeves).

“…The Strong. Young Midoriya, how do you-?”

“I like Heroes,” she says before starting to rattle off what she knows about the Hero. “Titiana wasn’t very well known outside her prefecture but those in it were said to love her. She saved a lot of people and interacted with civilians regularly on patrol. Personable and kind. If she didn’t confine herself to such a small area it’s likely she would’ve become quite popular even without a flashy quirk.” Izumi pauses, “She reminds me of my mom, actually. Only funnier. They say Titania liked to make jokes.”

The lonely man is quiet for a long moment as he moves another of his pieces into a position that makes him easy pickings. Izumi ignores it as she takes her turn.

He clears his throat, then, “She did.”

Izumi snaps up to look at him so quickly her neck cracks. Her eyes are wide and amazed as she looks at the lonely man. “You met her? That’s so cool!”

His lips quirk at the corners. “I did. She was…” he clears his throat again and it’s then that Izumi notices he smells… sad. That’s not what she wanted! “She was one of the best women I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.”

“Oh.”

Izumi feels bad now. She didn’t mean to make him sad. And he sounds like, like he misses her. Izumi’s heart breaks, just a little bit and she hops down from her chair to stand in front of him.

Did he used to smell like her? Is she why he stopped getting close to people? Did he lose her?

Izumi’s mind spins and spins and spins. She doesn’t know. Too many variables. She needs more data.

But not now.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad,” she says. “When I feel sad, I get hugs and it makes me feel better. But some people don’t like hugs so Mom says I’m supposed to ask first. And, and you’re sad and I think you need a hug so do you want a hug?”

“I- I don’t-” the lonely man looks flustered now. Wrong-footed. Izumi tries to smile at him reassuringly.

“Mom says I give the best hugs!” she encourages. “So I’m sure you’ll feel better.”

After a long moment, the lonely man softens. “Well I- I suppose a hug wouldn’t hurt.”

“Great!”

She has to stop herself from launching at him, wary of how he’s still hurt and smells of blood. She’s not quite sure where it is but she’s very careful of where she puts her hands and is careful not to squeeze too tightly.

After a few seconds Izumi asks, “Do you feel better now?”

“Yes,” he answers, like he’s surprised by their truth. “Yes, I do. Thank you.”

She nods, satisfied. “Good.” Then, she turns and barely looks at the board before clicking her piece in a series of jumps that takes out half his side and leaves her at his home base. “Queen me, please!”

The lonely man blinks, opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again and laughs. Then, he does as she asked.

***

They play four more games after that with the lonely man actually trying after his sound beating in the first round. Izumi even lets him win the third one.

They talk about random things, Izumi driving most of the conversation by bouncing around random topics and babbling aimlessly. The lonely man doesn't seem to mind too much, and comments on things whenever she pauses long enough for him to get a word in edgewise.

By the time Izumi has to go home for dinner, the lonely man doesn’t smell as sad and Izumi finds she really likes him. He even ruffles her hair before she goes scampering off into the woods. He flattens one of her ears unintentionally but she can forgive that. He can’t see them after all.

He’s also familiar in a way. Almost like Kacchan was familiar, but just a bit different. She’s not quite sure what it is, but he’s nice and friendly and Izumi likes him.

“Did you have a good day, sweetie?” Mom asks her when she gets back home.

Izumi smiles up at her with all her teeth and says, “Yeah! I made a new friend!”

***

Her lonely man introduces himself the second time she finds him.

He calls himself Yagi Toshinori but his name tastes strange on her tongue. Not quite a lie, but not a truth either.

Yagi Toshinori may be his birth name, but it is no longer the name that holds power over him, at least not completely.

Izumi calls him Yagi-san and wonders what he called himself for so long that it changed his very being.

***

It’s somewhere around week two when Yagi-san first coughs up blood around her. He was laughing, a sound she takes such joy in creating, when he suddenly began coughing. A second later, the smell of fresh blood, thick and heady, filled that air and Izumi nearly had a conniption.

They’re in the park and her worried exclamations and mother henning draw the attention of most, if not every, parent in the vicinity.

They’re all rightfully worried and it takes a while before everyone’s calmed down enough for him to give some story about a swollen throat and how it’s already being taken care of.

He’s lying about it, Izumi knows, but he’s uncomfortable and concerningly red from embarrassment.

She lets him get away with it this once.

The parents give him wet wipes and napkins and well wishes that he gets better soon to his utter surprise. Like he hadn’t expected to be given kindness so freely.

Izumi smiles as she waves them all away, thanking them for helping and thinking, not for the first time, how much she loves her town.

***

She goes home smelling like human blood that day.

It takes almost half an hour for Izumi to calm everybody down enough to explain what happened without worrying them more. And even after that, all her cousins (all at least a decade older than her and all starkly human thanks to the curse everyone will only mention in passing) crowd around her and fuss for hours.

She manages it with only resigned exasperation because they did the same thing when she killed the kelpies causing havoc in the lake last month. (She isn’t sure what the big deal was then and she’s less sure now. Killing supernatural threats is basically her— the skulk’s— job.)

***

She spends six hours that night researching diagnoses where patients coughing up blood is a symptom, and as a result, completely ignores her homework.

She doesn’t like a single word she reads.

(Kacchan yells at her the next day about it but they're both weeks ahead of the rest of their class. He’s really only upset because he can’t compare their answers for the physics homework.)

***

It’s a badly kept secret in the skulk that Izumi will be the next Matriarch.

It doesn’t matter that she’s the youngest or that she’s hardly fox-like at all. Because that’s not how skulks work. They’re not human royalty and it is not about lineage.

Foxes are selfish creatures.

They aren’t quite known for their loyalty, not when there are wolves of legend who will beat themselves bloody for their packmates. That doesn’t mean foxes aren’t loyal, it just means they’re craftier about it. Sneakier and cleverer than their brutish cousins.

(Secrets are more easily kept when fewer people know of them. Loved ones are safer if no one knows to go after them.)

Skulks are just as close and beloved as packs, and the one who reigns at the head of a skulk is not there on power alone, not like the wolves’ alphas.

A skulk’s head is chosen, not fought for. And Izumi has been marked thrice over, by Magic and Fate and her own choices as she grows from girl to woman. Izumi has the will of a leader, the heart of a mother and the ability to inspire all she meets.

Midoriya Izumi will one day rule the skulk, the forests, the whole of Japan.

There is no one else it could be.

***

Days turn to weeks and Izumi keeps tracking Yagi-san down whenever she can. Sometimes they sit and just people watch and other times she demands he play games with her, something that makes him sit down and relax because while she doesn’t know specifics, it’s obvious he’s badly hurt.

All those books she’d scoured say the same thing: that he should be taking it easy. Something he is not doing himself so she does it for him.

He’s also been getting thinner since she met him. Cheeks growing gaunt and limbs becoming bony, like he’s losing muscle mass. Izumi, once she notices, starts bringing him snacks whenever she can. Random things at first that he turns down half the time to her disappointment and frustration.

It must show on her face one too many times because after a while, he sits her down on their bench and explains in fits and starts about his condition. 

Yagi-san was badly injured and lost his stomach. He can’t eat like he used to and isn’t really hungry anymore. His lungs are damaged, which is why he coughs up blood and can’t breathe right.

He tells her a laundry list of trauma and Izumi listens but can’t quite help the horrified look on her face; she’s still too young to have learned to school her expressions.

“That’s… that’s awful,” she whispers, eyes trained on the part of his abdomen he kept gesturing to, the place of such horrific pain.

“It’s okay,” he reassures her and her eyes flick up to meet his. He’s smiling, something warm and wide and so familiar but can’t quite place. “I’m a tough one, my girl. I’ll be alright.” 

Izumi presses her lips together and lets him change the subject. But while he speaks, her mind is a whirl of plans and ideas and things she needs to do.

***

Her mom ‘accidentally’ runs into Yagi-san at the market one day.

(Things like that are never accidental for a fox, nevermind that her mom’s as human as Kacchan. She was born in a skulk and that makes her other in a way normal humans aren’t).

Yagi-san sees her first and his face lights up, “Little Izumi!” he greets.

She waves at him, head tilted back almost all the way as she grins up at him. “Hi Yagi-san!” she yells because he’s so tall. It must be hard to hear her, especially with his human ears. Those miss everything interesting.

His eyes turn onto her mom and he gets very red suddenly. Embarrassed and shy, like he was when she first met him. “Ah, apologies,” his hand rubs the back of his head, “You must be her mother.”

Mom smiles, but her eyes are studying him, flicking over his form, quick and analytical.

“I am, people call me Midoriya Inko,” her mom offers her hand. He shakes it. “You must be Yagi-san. It’s nice to finally meet the man behind the legend. Izumi talks about you a lot.”

Yagi-san looks delighted at that. “Does she?”

“Oh, yes. It feels like I already know you with how much she goes on,” she tells him then turns to Izumi. “And you’re right, sweetheart. He really is too thin.”

“Right!” Izumi exclaims, causing Yagi-san to startle. “That’s why I needed all those bentos! He doesn’t like to eat on his own, so I have to make him.”

After he’d told her about his injuries, she’d very carefully read and researched what one should do after a gastrectomy like his and came away with a thousand and one rules for eating he most definitely was  not following.

It made her more than a bit upset that he’s not taking care of himself like he should be. That he acts so cavalier with his health.

Her mom nods gravely, very serious. “Of course. It’s important to stay healthy.”

“See!” Izumi spins on Yagi-san who looks frozen in mortification, “Even Mom agrees and she’s always right.”

His eyes flick between them both for a long moment before his shoulders slump and he grins, small and wry at them both. “Well if two Midoriya women are telling me that, how can I hope to argue?”

Izumi grins with all her teeth because she’s won and you can’t spend excessive time around Kacchan without picking up some habits.

Mom and Yagi-san talk for a while longer, mostly probing questions from her mom disguised as boring grown-up stuff and small talk. Yagi-san answers them all correctly as far as Izumi can tell. He doesn’t lie once which is good because even if Mom can’t hear his heartbeat she knows how to tell when someone lies.

They leave that day with Mom’s stamp of approval and a skip in Izumi’s step.

***

Mom must have given some sort of signal because now Yagi-san can barely walk out of his house without being accosted by her skulk.

It must be really confusing on his end, all these random people coming up to him suddenly. Not all of them even look like Midoriyas because the townspeople still think there’s only half as many of them as there really are and they want to keep it that way.

They all come away liking him though, some enough to continue interacting with him regularly. Which is good, because he needs more friends. Though, Aunties Emi and Isami tease him so much she’s not sure he’ll ever stop being flustered.

(The best part though, in Izumi’s opinion, is that they all help her keep an eye on him. And, more often than not, they’ll place some sort of fruit or snack in his hands before running off and leaving him in confusion. Izumi laughs whenever she’s there for it to his utter confusion.)

***

Aoi plops down next to her on the couch one day, arm thrown over her shoulders and bright pink pixie cut hair tickling her cheek as she bumps her head into Izumi’s temple and hums lowly because it’s the closest her human vocal cords can get to purring.

Izumi’s classifying plant life for biology, something she normally doesn’t stop doing until it’s finished, but she looks away from them now because Aoi’s her favourite cousin. She’s never said so out loud because she'd rather die than hurt anyone's feelings, but the entire skulk knows anyway.

“He’s weird like you,” Aoi says with no lead-up or explanation.

Izumi grins as Aoi ruffles her hair because she understands immediately and takes that for the compliment it is.

***

Yagi-san touches her casually now. Ruffling her hair, guiding her with a hand on the shoulder, tugging lightly on her wild curls. It’s like he was waiting for permission or something.

It’s nothing she’s not familiar with. Her skulk does it all the time, both to scent mark and provide comfort, and Izumi spends most of her time invading Kacchan’s personal bubble for those same reasons.

Yagi doesn’t know about scent marking like she does because he’s human, wholy and cleanly even if Izumi can sometimes feel a nuclear reactor humming with all the energy hidden away in his chest. (And isn’t that just another reason he’s so strange? Izumi wonders what his quirk is sometimes, but never asks. She doesn't think she’d get the real answer if she did.)

He doesn’t know, and doesn’t seem like an overly touchy person but he touches her and it feels like when her mom pushes her bangs back and presses a kiss to her forehead. Affectionate and soft and Izumi can’t help leaning into every gesture like she’s starved for it.

***

The next day, Izumi greets him with a hug and he smiles that oh, so familiar smile and Izumi feels like she swallowed the sun.

***

The townspeople whisper, carefully outside of Izumi’s range of hearing for once, about the man she follows like a duckling and the growing bond everyone can see.

They were wary at first. They knew so little about this odd stranger.

But with Izumi running around him like a tiny, babbling dervish, unintentionally dragging him into every conversation she starts, it doesn’t take long for them to get a read on the man. It’s almost amusing how he had tried so hard to keep to himself only to fail the moment she crashed into his life.

A month and a half after he showed up, the townspeople can confidently say that Yagi Toshinori is good people. Earnest and kind in all the same ways Izumi is and uniquely awkward and well-meaning in others.

The townspeople whisper, and laugh, and can’t help but think how good it is that little Izumi’s found herself such a lovely father figure.

***

He asks her, one day, why she spends so much time with him when she has so many friends her own age.

The look she gives him makes him feel like he’s asked a stupid question. The words that come out of her mouth immediately after make him breathless.

“Because I like you,” she says as if it’s just that simple. As if Toshinori hadn’t spent decades interacting with people who only liked him because he’s All Might. As if this little girl, hidden away in this idyllic town, saying she likes him as Toshinori, isn’t the most important thing he’s heard in years.

“Ah,” is all he says to that and Izumi goes back to eating her popsicle, only now she’s unashamedly leaning into his uninjured side.

Something warm in his chest blossoms and Toshinori can’t help wondering what exactly he’s gotten himself into now.

***

She brings Kacchan to meet Yagi-san not long after that. She’d been waiting for her skulk to stop harassing him so much, so it had taken longer than she wanted.

Kacchan was starting to think she’s purposefully keeping things from him—which she is, but not this. And the things she is keeping are mostly not her secrets to tell anyway (not that it makes her feel any less bad for having them).

The two know of each other, of course. It’d be impossible for them not to know with how much she babbles at them both about the other.

Kacchan is… unimpressed at first. Loud and disrespectful and really just himself in a bad mood because he’s bad at meeting new people.

Yagi-san takes it all in stride even as her best friend swears enough to make a sailor blush. She can see he’s wondering why Izumi picked him, of course, because everyone does after meeting Katsuki.

She watches from where she’s lying along the top of the monkey bars as they circle around each other, curious and trying not to show it. That is, until Kacchan grows bored with that and starts challenging Izumi to ridiculous contests.

She sighs but accepts every one because, while Kacchan is indeed the self-destructively competitive one, he doesn't hold a monopoly on that trait within their friendship.

Yagi-san gets roped into playing referee and rewards the winner with head ruffles and blinding smiles. Well, he at least tries to. Izumi accepts the affection just fine but when he reaches for Katsuki, her best friend snaps his teeth at him the moment contact is made.

Yagi-san pulls back immediately, eyes wide, but Kacchan hadn’t screamed at the top of his lungs or exploded something so Izumi knows it’s all mostly for show.

She'll have to explain that to Yagi-san later.

***

There’s a saying, in Izumi’s family. A saying that falls from the lips of every fox in the world. A silent oath one whispers from the day they’re born with magic in their veins.

Shual Nephesh, serve thou for thyself.

There’s a duty every leader picks up when they are placed in power, but it is only foxes who truly carry its weight with them. A shimmering gem tied tightly around their throat, both great honour and deadly noose combined.

Matriarch, be thou for the skulk.

There’s no oath for a Hero to take. Nothing regulated or standardized besides the flimsy laws riddled with loopholes and flaws that Izumi could dance around with her eyes closed. So, she makes her own.

Hero, be thou for the people.

***

There is no new weight to her wrist, no new gemstone to tell of her Promise.

The shackle she wears like a badge of honor has been there for years already after all.

***

Two months come and go and Toshinori… stays.

Torino and David both called the day before he was planning to go back to Tokyo, to go back to being All Might, and they begged him to stay just a bit longer. Well, David begged. Torino yelled at him for ten minutes until Toshinori could get a word in edgewise.

After a long pause, Toshinori agrees, to all their surprise.

He wasn’t going to leave, even before they called to beg and he knows what the reason why is, even if he won’t admit it.

He’ll have to leave eventually. Sooner then he might like because he can’t just stop being All Might… but he can stay a little longer.

The world hasn’t fallen apart without him yet.

***

He does call into his agency, of course, and requests as much paperwork as possible be faxed to him.

He’s still restless and antsy and even if he’s not in the field there is plenty of administrative work that needs to be done as All Might. He’s been ignoring it for too long.

Rika, his manager of all things relating to All Might’s image, is no doubt having a fit about his abrupt and continued absence, but he can trust her. She’s no doubt handling the media circus with an iron fist and cunning mind like always. 

She doesn’t let him touch his social media accounts or anything really relating to PR, but she does send him a list of charities to choose from. He’s always like picking which ones to send donations to and make scheduled appearances at.

She also sends him a veritable mountain of things that need his signature, half of which are for merchandising and things like that.

He signs them all without looking.

He’s also faxed the backlog of Assistant Heroes—not ‘Sidekicks’, there were few words he disliked more than that old relic—applications that have piled up in his absence to sort through. Even with the rigorous standards themselves and what few Heroes All Might does have at his agency sorting through the applications before they ever arrive in front of him, there are still dozens that have piled up.

People who work with him have to uphold certain standards. That's something both him and Rika agree on. They can’t have some Hero with a lousy attitude associated with All Might. The press would have a field day with that kind of scandal and Toshinori can’t stand those types of people anyway.

The employees at his agency are held to a higher standard than others. It’s why it’s so prestigious in the first place. His Heroes have to be brave and kind and put the people first above all else.

They may not ever be pillars like him, but Toshinori will be damned if they aren’t beacons of good.

Toshinori is, was, and always will be, firm on this stance. 

He, of course, has to hide all that paperwork from Izumi—because that’s a thing she does now. Knock on his door and spends time at the cottage he’s renting. She does her homework at the kitchen counter while he keeps himself busy doing the less flashy sort of Hero work.

The problem is, she's a curious sort of child, and interested in most everything her eyes land on. She’s made a habit of poking her head over his shoulder while he’s sorting through sensitive documents, keen eyes dancing over the page, and scaring the shit out of Toshinori.

She stares at him with those all too knowing eyes as he scrambles to hide it from her. After the third time it happens she thankfully stops but there’s a contemplative look in her eyes that’s sure to give him stress headaches.

***

“What do you think he’s doing?”

Kacchan doesn’t look up from the math homework he’s checking for her. He also doesn’t ask who she’s talking about because there’s really only one person it could be. “Kicking ass, probably.”

“Kacchan,” she pouts from her place sprawled across his living room floor (they never hang out at her house, for all the obvious reasons). “Be serious.”

“I seriously think he’s kicking ass.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

Kacchan looks up to glare at her. “Why the fuck would I be? Izu, it’s All Might. He never loses. He’s fine, you goddamn bleeding heart.”

Izumi guesses he’s right. All Might’s never lost a fight. It’s what makes him so amazing. It’s just. There’s something at the base of her stomach that won’t let her let go of her worry. It’s been three months  without a single sighting.

That’s… unheard of.

“Stop moping!” he yells, the sugar-burnt crackle and pop of his quirk jolting her from her melancholy.

“Careful, Kacchan!” she shrieks. “You’re going to burn the paper.”

Kacchan snaps his teeth at her but there’s no real heat in it. It’s playful, or as close to it as he gets. “I am not! And stop slacking and check my fucking history worksheet, you freeloader.”

She sighs and flips back onto her stomach. “Yes, Kacchan. Of course, Kacchan. Anything for you, Kacchan,” she gripes fondly.

“And don’t you fucking forget it.”

***

“Young Midoriya?”

“Huh?” Izumi startles from her thoughts for the third time this game. Realizing what she’s done, she blushes and hides behind her hand of cards. “Oh! Sorry, Yagi-san. I can’t seem to focus at all today.”

He smiles, warm and bright. “Not a problem, my dear.” He sets down his hand, choosing instead to give her his full attention. “Something on your mind?”

“Yeah. Just… I’m worried, I suppose.”

He hums encouragingly. “About?”

She blows out a heavy breath. “It’s been three months since anybody has seen All Might.” Yagi-san’s shoulders stiffen. Talking about All Might always makes him uncomfortable but she needs to get this off her chest and he’ll listen. “He’s never disappeared like this before.”

Yagi-san coughs into his fist. “Ah, well. Perhaps he is doing undercover work?”

Izumi gives him a look like she thinks he’s being particularly thick. “He almost never does undercover work. He’s not suited for it and there’s plenty of underground Heroes who can do a better job. He normally respects that.” She pauses, thinks that over. “And even the few times he was recorded to be associated with undercover jobs, there had been plenty of credible sources saying he’d been seen doing small acts of heroics. Community service, charity work, helping people cross the street, things like that. But, right now, it’s practically radio silence. All Might’s never just,” she waves her hands helplessly, “cut himself off from the public before.”

Yagi-san blinks at her and, when there doesn’t seem to be an answer to that forthcoming, Izumi keeps going.

“I just- I can’t stop thinking maybe he’s hurt? Or that something has happened to him? Kacchan says I‘m worrying over nothing but sometimes I just get these feelings, right? Like there’s someone out there who needs my help and… and this is one of those times.” She huffs a humourless laugh. “But again, Kacchan says I’m being dumb because why would All Might need my help? I’m ten! What can I do?

“But I just keep thinking how Sir Nighteye is still in Tokyo and hasn’t said anything official about his whereabouts and David Shield is still in America and there’s just nobody else that All Might has to lean on, at least not to public knowledge, and if those two people aren’t there for him then who is?”

By the end, Izumi has to take a deep breath because she hadn’t breathed once while she word-vomited all her worries at him.

When she looks up, Yagi-san is staring at her with an expression she can’t really read.

Quieter, she says—because she’s never been able to leave well enough alone and if Yagi-san doesn’t understand then who will?— “He saves everyone, but who’s there to save him?”

Yagi-san laughs.

Not a mean one, not like he’s laughing at her, but more like he was so surprised by her that he can’t contain the sound. Uncle Kazuki did that sometimes. Probably because Uncle Hikaru is more than a handful and he made the mistake of marrying him, or so they say.

“You truly are one of a kind, my girl. I’ve never, in all my years, met someone with a heart as big as yours.”

Izumi blushes to the tips of her hidden ears at such a high compliment and picks up her cards just to hide behind them. “I think we should finish our game.”

He gives a quiet chuckle but picks up his cards. “Okay, okay. But, for the record, my dear?” Izumi looks up at him and finds him smiling at her, small and soft. “I think there’s a lot you could do to help him.”

***

He watches Izumi and Young Bakugou run around each other, playing some strange amalgamation of tag and marco-polo where Izumi’s blind folded and only allowed to use her hearing and sense of smell to sniff out her friend.

It’s quirk training made into a game, something ingenious only she could come up with.

Izumi is doing well at locating Bakugou, head swiveling in whatever direction he’s in despite the blind fold, but she keeps tripping over and running into things, paying too much attention to her friend and not enough to her surroundings.

She does eventually catch him, pouncing on his back and sending both of them to the ground. Toshinori smiles despite himself as it immediately transitions into a wrestling match.

Not for the first time since coming to this fantasy of a town, does Toshinori think wistfully of a world where things were different. If he didn’t need to hold up the world, if people were kinder, if the world was safer. If, if, if.

Toshinori wanted a family once, before he picked up all these mountains he should’ve climbed. He still wants a family—doesn’t think he’ll ever stop—but he’s practical enough to know it’s too late. To see it’ll never work out.

(He ignores the part of him that says it’s closer than he thinks. Ignores the way any thoughts of his future—the ones where he forgets he’s going to die in eight years at least—all have a child in them. A little girl with wild green hair and freckles and a heart big enough to cradle the world.

His mind ignores them, but his heart is soft and weak and tucks it all in his chest, safe and sound for those rainy days.)

***

Time skips along, as it’s wont to do.

Izumi dances into eleven years old with all the joy and brightness of a girl on top of the world.

Her magic grows more with each day and after the fourth time she comes home dragging some sort of creature behind her, the skulk starts whispering about having her begin training before the traditional fourteen years old.

She joins aikido at the suggestion of Yagi-san while Kacchan gleefully dives into kick-boxing after hounding his parents for three months. Izumi keeps up with gymnastics but Kacchan drops out to join the wrestling team.

It’s all vaguely concerning from an outsider’s point of view but it’s nice that he has an outlet.

For all that she’s growing up, Izumi is still much of the same. Still sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong and dedicating most of her time to helping other people, no matter how important the task, and staying at the top of her classes with Katsuki right next to her.

What little free time she allows herself is divided between all the people she loves. She’s busy, but she’s always been busy. Always right at the thick of things when they happen which is just how she likes it.

It’s the best three months of her life, a bright summer she enjoyed to the fullest. Her magic has been practically singing in her veins because, until she becomes a Hero, until she takes her rightful place at the top, as a Protector, this is as close to perfect as she’ll get.

That, of course, means it can’t last.

Because perfect things never do.

***

Yagi-san leaves, because he has too.

She’d known that for a while now. His job is important, even if she’s not quite sure what it is he does.

He always dances around the question when she asks. Saying he works in relation to an important agency that helps keep people safe. He’s always adamant of how much he loves it and she can see the wistfulness in his eyes sometimes. Like there’s places he wants to be other than here.

And so, Izumi resigns herself to watching him leave her. Braces herself to lose this growing, fragile thing in her chest she can’t put a name to.

He leaves the week after her birthday and she’s there at his house to say goodbye. She expects this to be the last time she sees him, she expects him to leave and not come back just like the father she never met and doesn’t want to.

What she doesn’t expect is for him to press a phone into her hand, a single number already programmed into it, and tell her he’ll keep in touch. She doesn’t expect him to get on his knees so she can look him in the eye as he Promises to visit, to come back, whenever he can.

She tries hard not to cry, because her lonely man gets so flustered when she does, but she can’t help it. She sobs and throws her arms around his shoulders, clinging to him because even with the Promise she knows it will be too long before she sees him again.

She has so many things she wants to tell him. So many things to say and do and none of the time.

His lips press against her forehead. “I’ll miss you, my dear girl.”

But, perhaps she’ll still get the chance. Just… later.

“I’ll miss you, too.”

***

Kacchan, Aoi, and her mom all gang up on her the following days, trying their hardest to cheer her up and get her mind off things.

Her mom makes her favorite foods and Aoi teaches her magic tricks she’s not supposed to learn until Nona officially begins her training and Kacchan only grumbles a little when she takes to clinging to him like a heartsick koala.

It’s the last one more than anything that makes her realize how worried they must be. How badly she must be moping for them to be so worried.

Kacchan may not actually care about how much she’s in his bubble, but he does like to complain about it, loudly and vocally. He’s really very mean and if Izumi couldn’t always tell when he’s lying she’s sure she’d never made it to being his best friend because she’d be crying too much.

But she’s worrying everyone and it’s not like she can’t text or call Yagi-san. He gave her the phone for a reason (though a whole new phone seems a bit much).

Izumi tries not to be so sad.

It only works a little.

***

Two days after Yagi-san leaves town, All Might saves thirty people from a hostage situation, rescues two potential kidnap victims and stops three robberies all before two in the afternoon.

Izumi sees the news articles almost immediately because even if she’s sad and breaks into tears every couple hours, she’s been keeping her ear to the ground about any sign of All Might for weeks now. There’s pictures and videos and stories of his escapades everywhere and all anyone is talking about is where he’s been.

Izumi finds a video of him, barely thirty seconds long, of him apologizing for his absence. Some official story that’s nothing but lies falling from his tongue because it had taken Izumi all of five seconds of hearing his voice before everything clicked.

Izumi is smart and clever and sees things no one else does and she can’t believe she’d been so blind.

All Might’s face smiles at her through the screen but Izumi can’t hear what he’s saying because all she can see are bright blue eyes. Bright, familiar eyes and a familiar smile and familiar laugh and and and-

And her lonely man is the number one Hero.

She closes her laptop and screams.

[tonystarktogo]

Tiny Tony Overlord Part 8

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI | Part VII | Read on AO3

Betaed by the amazing @folklejend. All remaining mistakes are my own.

Summary: In which Clint is frustrated, Natasha is frustrated, Steve is very frustrated, and the three of them handle it as well as you’d expect them to, Jarvis is sarcastic, and Tony wants to take things slow for the first time in his life.

Please enjoy :)

Chapter 8: Restlessness

.Avengers Tower, New York.

Cap’s training. Again. If you can call systematically destroying their private gym “training,” that is. Clint winces as he watches yet another reinforced punching bag sail through the air and hit the wall with a loud snap. At this rate, they’ll be running out of bags for Steve to demolish before the week is over.

Suffice to say, Steve hadn’t taken the disappearance of one of his team mates well. Clint has a suspicion that the whole situation hits a little too close to home. It hasn’t been long since Cap’s lost his entire team—to old age and a certain train none of them talk about—or at least, it hasn’t been long for him. Not that Clint is stupid enough to say something, but he knows Natasha suspects the same.

It’s why neither of them has breathed a word to Steve about it. That, and the fact that even Clint, who likes to think of himself as fairly level, is about ready to join the guy.

To say that their search has been fruitless would be an understatement. And there’s nothing more frustrating than hitting a wall in the middle of a mission. Especially when a man’s—Tony’s—life may well depend on it. Clint knows the statistics as well as any field agent. It’s true that the first twenty-four hours of a kidnapping are the most important; they set the tone for the investigation—and finding the victim after becomes increasingly unlikely.

Of course, they aren’t talking about just anyone. They’re talking about Tony Stark, who blew his way out of a freaking cave in the desert. It’s the main reason none of them are willing to give up. That, and in their line of business, you don’t assume someone’s death. No one is dead unless you’ve gotten hard proof—and sometimes not even then.

But none of that changes the fact that they don’t have a clue about Tony’s whereabouts. And when Clint says “not a clue,” he means not a clue. As in nada. As in not a single one.

[continues under the cut]

Staring at the walls and screens covering the common living room area, at all the data they’ve amassed that still isn’t telling them a freaking thing, Clint rubs a tired hand over his eyes. He’s been going over the same security footage for the fifth time and has no results to show for.

“JARVIS?” he questions without much hope. The AI has been quiet since its creator’s disappearance, but Clint is pretty confident that it would speak up the moment it caught anything regarding Tony that they’ve missed. If there’s one thing Clint has learned after months of jumping off buildings and having Iron Man catch him without fail, it’s to trust in Tony’s creations. They’ve yet to let him down.

“I apologise, sir, no new information has come to light since you last asked two minutes and forty-seven seconds ago,” the AI responds with a sarcastic drawl that sounds disturbingly real. Clint loves it.

“I know, J-man, I know, sorry,” he mumbles. Clint isn’t sure exactly where the “artificial” part of the intelligence ends—knowing Tony, probably not where it should—and he doesn’t need to be a tech-whisperer to know that JARVIS is doing everything in his power to find Tony. Pressuring the guy, system, whatever, isn’t going to help anyone.

At the tip-tap sound of Nat’s high-heeled boots against the floor, Clint jerks around hopefully. Unlike himself, Natasha tends to get her best results when she’s pissed. It makes her more vicious, causes her to use sources agents with more scruples wouldn’t, makes her dig deeper until she hits a bone.

Her hair and makeup is impeccable as always, but they don’t quite cover the dark circles below her eyes, nor the tension around the corners of her lips. No success then, at least not yet.

“Alright, this is disturbing.”

“What do you mean?” The question comes from across the room, where Cap walks in, still wearing his training shorts and covered in sweat. Clint would whistle and make a crack about those abs, were he in a better mood. Right now though, all he can muster up his a shrug.

“All of this.” Clint gestures at the maps. “I mean, there is nothing here. It’s not that we don’t know how to interpret the data, it’s that there is no data to begin with. How do you kidnap anyone, let alone Tony Stark, in the middle of New York City without leaving a trace?” he exclaims. “I get Afghanistan, okay, but this is New York. Even with the electrical shortcut, there should still be something, anything, outside that radius. People don’t just disappear. We’ve got SHIELD, we’ve got the three of us, and we’ve got the best AI we know, and still we got nothing ? Nobody is that good!”

“Correction,” Natasha interrupts with a displeased frown, “nobody was that good. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible. So I suppose the question becomes, who do we know who might be capable of such a feat?”

A heavy pause—no, hesitation. Clint grimaces. When Natasha hesitates, it never means anything good.

“Or what. ” she finishes grimly.

* * * * *

.Somewhere on a tiny blot of land in between lots of small islands.

It’s surreal, Tony decides. The last two days have been nothing but surreal.

When he had thought about how his trip to the past would go, he had never imagined it would be like this. Granted, he hadn’t thought about it much at all. At the time, thinking about it had inevitably lead to excitement, to doubt, to heartbreak. Because the thought that this insane idea might actually work—it had always been a little too good to be true. Tasted a little too much of hope.

Still. Sometimes, when his mind had begun to wander, Tony remembers imagining it. No retelling of the story as it should have gone, no rewritten scenes, nothing concrete. Just… flashes. Of a general idea that had been all the more powerful for it. The thought of seeing Pepper again, her face unblemished by the attack that had cost them Happy. The faint sensory memory of being pulled into a hug by Rhodey. The warmth, the security, in fighting side by side with the deadliest people he knew—

Tony frowns. This, how it all actually went down, it’s not how he’s ever pictured it. It’s not how he would have wanted things to go. But his wants haven’t mattered in forever, and as much as Tony would like to gripe and whine, the truth is, he’s fine with it. He’s fine with running around like a headless chicken, without resources or a plan, moving further and further away from the people for whom he’s sacrificed everything. Because they’re alive. He gets to fall asleep at night, knowing they’re here, in this world, drawing breath, and that’s more than he’s had in a long a time.

“That’s all nice and well, darling, but it’s not gonna get shit done,” a sarcastic voice drawls in the back of Tony’s head. It sounds disturbingly like Vic. Damn, but he misses that woman. “How much more time are you gonna waste lounging on a bloody beach watching waves crash before you finally get your arse moving?”

And, well, imaginary voice or not, she’s got a point.

Despite his unnerving encounter with that strange old lady, the past two and a half days have been peaceful, of all things. It’s a foreign sounding description, the kind that itches because there has to be something wrong with it, you just can’t put your finger on it. It’s strange enough to freak Tony out, if he allows himself to ponder these thoughts for too long. So he doesn’t.

Really, he can’t afford to. Being on the move is all well and good—and Tony is well aware that he’s on a clock—but a race is hard to win when you don’t even know where the finishing line is. That’s never stopped Tony before, of course, but he can still be smart about it. It’s kind of his thing, being a genius and all.

“Yeah, well, all those smarts didn’t make a damn difference in the end, did they? You know, Stark, if you really were as clever as you think you are, you’d have found a way to stop this. You’d have found a way to end this.”

“I did end it!”

“Did you really? Or was there just nobody left to die in your stead?”

Tony flinches. The pain these words bring is distant, a wound that’s already scabbed over. He rubs a small hand over his forehead, a useless attempt to soothe the echo of an old hurt.

Footsteps to his right have Tony angle his body reflexively towards Dead-Eyes—an instinct he doesn’t completely understand but is slowly getting used to. Dead-Eyes is just there. A silent presence by his side that only leaves when Tony tells him to.

Should be wrong, probably. Messed up, certainly. Yet, at the same time, it’s not. It feels normal, natural even, and the more Tony gets used to all these memories, the more he understands why. Dead-Eyes is safe because Dead-Eyes is one of—perhaps even the only thing—that hasn’t changed.

“Who’s your watchdog, anyways?”

Stark blinks, follows the woman’s gaze towards the corner of the ruined farmhouse-turned-bar, where Barnes lurks. He’d call the man out on his dramatic act, except Stark is pretty sure the man doesn’t know how to do anything but lurk. It’s his natural state.

“Old friend,” he answers with a shrug.

That piques the woman’s interest, like he knew it would. “There is no such thing as friends,” she states, her eyebrows raised in disbelief.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Stark smirks, dares her to speak against him. “First time I met him, I tried to kill him. What better way to start a relationship?”

“You must have lots of old friends then,” the woman mutters drily. Shakes her head. Then, “What changed?”

Stark lifts his eyes from where he’s been watching Barnes glare a couple of wannabe Cleaners into submission. “Hm?”

“What happened, I don’t know, the second time you met? How did you become friends?” There’s a curiosity in the woman’s voice that’s hard to find these days. Something that goes beyond the steely determination to survive. It makes Stark hope she’ll live through this, even as his gut tells him she won’t.

“Oh, the second time?” he answers despite himself, all charm and nonchalance. “The second time I met him, he was already dead.”

Tony blinks the fake smile and honeyed sweetness away, but the scene is… sticky, like gum stubbornly clinging to your hair, and it takes him a long moment before the sight of dirty tables and war-hardened people fades into the bright hues of endless blue that surround them.

Dead-Eyes is watching him, expressionless as always. He’s wearing long, sand-coloured pants and a washed-out shirt, and despite the soft clothes and metal arm hidden under a thick bandage that Tony had spent the better part of the morning covering it with, he still looks—well. Like you’d want him on your side in a knife fight.

There’s no hiding the jagged edges when that’s all that’s left of a person, Tony thinks. Remembers thinking. Whatever.

This is exactly why he’s still here. Why he’s spent the past two days clinging to Dead-Eyes’ flesh hand, pickpocketing tourists and generally doing his best to get lost in the crowd. Why he watches little kids splashing in the water with shrieks of delight instead of breaking into the best lab he can get his hands on.

Sure, the knowledge isn’t trying to tear his head open from the inside out, and, yeah, Tony has a fairly good idea of what happened in that messed up future of his. None of that changes the fact that he got a good decade worth of memories downloaded into his brain within a couple of hours. That kind of transfer—he’d speculated about the consequences, they all had. As it turns out, Strange was right. The human mind can’t handle that kind of data input. Honestly, Tony is sort of glad the sorcerer isn’t here right now. He’d be unbearable if he knew, the bastard.

Thankfully, he was also wrong; Tony has yet to go insane from the overload. At least, he assumes he hasn’t. He’d have noticed that, right? Right.

Anyways, the closest Tony has come to describe the weird sensation of knowing-but-not is to compare it to a software update on a computer. The data is all there, but it takes the system time to sort through it and store the relevant information in the right places. And the system—it’s not dumb, it learns from its mistakes, but it still makes them. It misfiles certain data bits, can’t properly transfer some, has to change pieces, even loses some of the information. It learns, but it’s an ongoing process.

As a programmer himself, the inaccuracies rankle him a little, but computers aren’t meant to be human; the comparison is bound to fall short. That doesn’t make it useless.

So, yes, Tony remembers. He knows who he is, he knows why he is where he is, and even though he currently can’t recall what his exact mission is, he gets the general idea. Save the cheerleader, save the world, the usual.

But until the flashbacks—and that’s not quite the right word for it, but Tony can’t think of a better term—stop overwhelming him every time a new memory is triggered, he needs to remain on standby. Despite the restlessness twisting and snarling under his skin, like a second layer that wants to break through. Tony can rush many things, but he can’t rush this. He can’t rush his own mind, not when he needs all the information he has before he can make a plan.

He only has one shot at this. He’ll have to get it right on the first try.

So he’ll wait. With gritted teeth and nervously drumming fingers, but he’ll wait.

It’s a decision that goes against everything Tony believes in, but so far it has payed off. They’ve spent the past two and a half days slowly traveling from one island to the next. Always on small tour boats, mingling with other tourists. With their borrowed clothes and the meticulously placed bandages on Dead-Eyes’ arm, they don’t do too bad of a job at blending in. Tony has settled on a house fire to explain the “injuries,” as well as his “mother’s tragic death.”

Movements like these, where everything is paid in cash and two American tourists get lost in the crowd, are as good as untraceable. It’s enough to appease the restlessness, for now. And well, it’s helping. The clear sky, the see-through water, the gentle breeze. The heat and the sand under his feet that has finally stopped sending cold chills down his spine.

With every passing hour, every deep breath Tony takes, the events of the past—future—years become clearer. He recalls, with a clarity only life-changing moments hold, the desperation that fuelled him, controlled him, ever since he made it back out of that damn wormhole. The deep-seated certainty that they were on the brink of another war, one humanity was woefully unprepared to handle. The frustration and clawing fear when no one listened.

Tony had been right, but that revelation hadn’t brought him any satisfaction. Had come much too late to save the family he had already lost. They had been unprepared for Thanos’ attack, broken and scattered and divided. Of course, that hadn’t stopped them. Enemies and friends and strangers alike, they had risen to Thanos’ challenge and they had answered it the only way they knew how to: they fought.

And maybe they hadn’t won—it had never felt like a victory; too many good people had been lost to them, too many innocents had died—but they had survived. That should have been the end of it. It should have been enough.

Six months later, whilst Tony was still practicing a genuine smile in the mirror, Namibia had been razed to the ground. An entire country was wiped off the map of Earth from one moment to the next, and nobody knew how.

The timeline after that gets a bit spotty, mostly because Tony himself doesn’t know exactly how things went. Too much happened too quickly, and there weren’t enough people around studying the phenomena and collecting data for them to tell how things proceeded. But, from what he remembers, there had been health hazard warnings going out from places like Monaco, Singapore, and Macao before people had time to panic—and then they did panic.

Sand grains rub against Tony’s palms as he curls his fingers into tight fists. From the way he thinks about it, it could have been a sickness of some kind, maybe even a plague. All these words swirling around in his mind, about a cure, about infections, health and aggressive viruses—it fits.

Doesn’t mean it makes sense though. An illness that kills, a new one, maybe even biological warfare, alright. Tony can easily imagine the devastation it caused. But more than people dying, he remembers fighting, remembers living with guns and knives strapped to his every body part, remembers being covered in blood more often than not.

There is more to it than a mere virus, and yet, for some reason, the answers refuse to come. Are silenced by an impenetrable bubble that keeps parts of his newfound knowledge huddled away, beyond his reach. Tony, being Tony, prods and pushes and shoves, but so far the bubble hasn’t given an inch.

Half the time Tony thinks he should be glad for that small mercy. Maybe he doesn’t want to know how bad things had really gotten. Maybe he doesn’t want to remember all those terrible acts that tore him apart, turned him into a man capable of—

His delicate sensibilities don’t matter though. He can’t allow them to matter, can’t spare himself from whatever minefield lies hidden in his own mind. Peace and innocence are luxuries Tony can’t afford right now. Not when knowledge is the only advantage he has.

Tony reaches out and isn’t surprised in the least when Dead-Eyes meets him halfway, having already gotten used to being led around on Tony’s hand. It’s part of the cover, but Tony isn’t entirely sure Dead-Eyes realises this. Realises that hand-holding would be frowned upon if they weren’t playing a family. Actually, Tony has no clue exactly how much of the world Dead-Eyes even processes.

Dead-Eyes isn’t stupid, of that Tony has no doubt. There’s a calculating intelligence in those blue eyes, an awareness that serves as much as a weapon as everything else Dead-Eyes wields. But social norms? Human interaction? Hell, even prejudices of some sort? Tony hasn’t seen any of it, and that’s just not normal. Of course, Dead-Eyes always was the exception, wasn’t he?

“You found him,” Natasha states, an air of disbelief around her. “After all this, you finally caught up with Bucky Barnes.”

Tony turns back towards their prisoner. Stares at the man’s blank face, an eerily familiar emptiness in his eyes. Tony has seen it many times before, too often not to recognise it on first sight. And really, there is only one answer he can give her.

“No. I didn’t.”

Natasha purses her lips. “No,” she agrees. “You didn’t.” Then. “We’ll have to test him.”

Tony doesn’t even flinch. “I know.” No exceptions. It’s a rule for a reason—this they learned the hard way.

“Are you prepared to do what is needed if he fails?”

It’s a question Tony wishes Natasha hadn’t asked, though he understands why she needs to know. Guilt is a powerful motivator, and they don’t have any room for errors.

He looks her straight in the eyes when he replies. “Yes.” It’s not the first time they’re lying to each other. Or themselves, for that matter.

Tony swallows the sudden urge to throw up. An ill sensation that makes no sense, doubly so because this is hardly the worst memory he’s received. Certainly not the bloodiest.

He clings to Dead-Eyes’ flesh hand uselessly, as Vic’s voice rings mercilessly in his head. “Go on, take your time figuring out that sick, co-dependant mess you call a relationship. I’m just gonna lie here and quietly bleed out in the mud while you get your bloody act together!”

Tony can’t remember the exact fight where it happened, there were too many to tell, but he remembers Vic’s acidic words clearly because even riding the high of a battle won and covered in entrails he didn’t care to identify, they had made him snort with laughter. Vic had never done anything quietly in her life. She had also had a knack of getting her point through Tony’s thick head.

The situation is a different one now, and the truth is, there is no telling what Vic would say if she were here now, because she isn’t. Vic, wherever she is, doesn’t even know Tony. Will never have to know him, if he has anything to say about it. Will never have to kill her own mother, will never carry that wounded, shattered look in her eyes.

If he can keep that from happening, then it will be worth it. That Tony is sure of. But he’s going to be smart about this, not gonna take any unnecessary risks. No half-assed preparations and improvisation.

“Two more days,” he says out loud, even though he’s really addressing the voice inside his head that sounds so much like Vic. It’s a plea and a promise in one. “Two more days, and then I’ll start.”

He should have known that Fate would take that as a challenge.

* * * * *

Tony drags Dead-Eyes onto a small tour boat—because a whole island inhabited by iguanas sounds intriguing, and because he feels too restless to stay in the same place any longer. The boatsman is a small man with a booming voice who keeps ruffling Tony’s hair, much to his annoyance.

He would have sworn Dead-Eyes was amused by the treatment, except when he catches Dead-Eyes staring, it isn’t with the familiar smirk he half expects to see. Instead, Dead-Eyes wears a puzzled expression, a furrow between his eyebrows that says he’s struggling to work something out.

Tony decides he really doesn’t want to know. Thankfully there’s an uncomfortable sensation distracting him, like a small weight pressing gently down on the back of his neck. It’s a feeling Tony recognises from dozens of missions, that prickling knowledge dancing on his nerve endings, telling him he is being watched .

It should be ridiculous. There are only twelve other passengers on their tiny boat, none of whom carry a concealed weapon larger than a switchblade. A group of college students, half of whom are currently posing for Instagram pictures. Two pairs who look sickeningly romantic—seriously, all these forehead kisses and soft smiles are going to give Tony hives. And three older men who haven’t stopped arguing about some foreign policy since they’ve stepped onto the deck. None of them look like an assassin waiting to strike. Of course, the whole point of being an assassin is that you never look like one, so that’s a cold comfort.

Tony leans over the railing of the boat for a moment, pretending to take in the beautiful sight of an endless horizon, only occasionally disrupted by a tiny blot of land. When he turns to look at Dead-Eyes over his shoulder, he uses the position to observe everyone else. The boatsman is explaining something to one of the college students, all wild gestures and deep-throated laugh. The younger pair is making out full-time, and—there.

One of the students is standing slightly separated from her friends, gaze fixated on them. Or, well, not them, Tony realises after a moment of carefully suppressing the urge to tell Dead-Eyes to shoot now, ask questions never. She’s watching Dead-Eyes, not him.

Some of the tension in his back uncoils at the realisation. Alright, maybe he’s a little paranoid. Not that anyone can blame him—it’s not paranoia when you’ve got an entire secret spy organisation on your ass—but killing some kid for eyeing up his unfairly attractive shadow might be a slight overreaction. Even by his standards.

Despite the stress and general uneasiness though, the trip is absolutely worth it. Tony hadn’t given iguanas much thought before, but they’re so freaking cool. And loud. Who knew reptiles could make so much noise? Two of the college girls make a show of shuddering in disgust, which Tony doesn’t get at all. Iguanas aren’t slimy or glittery—they look like miniature dragons.

“I want one,” Tony breathes in reverence.

He’s watching a couple of them rhythmically wiping their heads, and he can almost hear “Highway to Hell” playing in the back of his head.

“Understood,” Dead-Eyes replies with a small incline of his head.

It’s pure luck that Tony pays enough attention to him to reach out and grab Dead-Eyes’ arm before he can jump overboard, probably to catch Tony an iguana. Awesome as that would be, it would probably get them into trouble with the local authorities.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the thought, but really, don’t,” Tony mumbles just loud enough for Dead-Eyes to hear. “It would draw attention and we really don’t need that.”

And if Tony is still humming AC/DC under his breath? Well, nobody save Dead-Eyes is gonna know—and it’s not like the guy will talk.

Tony is still humming the song half a minute later, when he suddenly realises that the rhythmic dum-dum-dum he’s been hearing in his head actually sounds more like a rumpa-rumpa-tap. And it’s not as much a part of his imagination as he would have liked.

Taking a deep breath and forcing himself to realise it with a soft swish between his teeth, Tony closes his eyes and says to no one in particular, “Please tell me I’m not hearing a chopper.”

“I’m not hearing a chopper,” Dead-Eyes repeats obediently.

“Me neither,” the blonde who’d been eying Dead-Eyes up calls out from where she’s standing near the tail of the boat. “I count three.”

I hope you like this slightly longer chapter! If you have any thoughts, questions or ideas, please leave me a comment or a message, I’d love to hear them! And merry Christmas, everybody!

[huffleporg]

The Catfather :: Chapter Three - East of the Sun :: [G] :: 3/? :: 14k so far

Thomas O'Malley couldn't say he had the perfect life, but after adopting Swan the cat and her two kittens, Thomas finally had a sense of normalcy restored. That was until the day his dead wife's long lost son Henry Mills showed up on his doorstep, claiming that not only is his wife alive, but her name is really Emma, he's really Captain Hook, and that it's his job as her True Love to find her and save her so she can save everyone else.

Quite a lot to swallow before breakfast.

From the Beginning  (Ao3)

Thank you to bewitching. over at TDA for making me this awesome graphic.

This fic is NOT season seven compliant. It was planned out completely independently and fully developed long before season seven spoilers started getting out, so you will not find *anything* from season seven here.

I am sorry that it took so long to update, but between medical school, hurricanes, and just learning how to adapt, I took a lot longer than I would have liked. But here it is finally. Chapter three.

The arching spikes of the letters written on the flyer stared back at Thomas. “‘He can help,’” he read out loud, as if saying it would some how clarify the whole matter. “Who is ‘he?’”

Despite all of his previous long-winded explanations, for a moment all Henry could do was shake his head. Finally, the Author managed, “I don’t know.” He looked up at Thomas. “I don’t even recognize this handwriting. But, you know what this means, right?”

Thomas was still staring at the yellow paper. “Someone was watching us.”

“Someone remembers,” Henry said. “And they want us to see the Kings of the Highway preform tonight.”

Stepping between the two adults, Lucy said, “We’ll have to go and see ‘him’ then!” She walked towards the back of the car. “Come on,” she said, her hand on the car door.

“Not so fast, kid,” Henry said grimly. “We don’t know if this is a friend or if it’s a trap… What if whoever cast the spell has been watching us and left us this message?”

As Henry spoke, Thomas nodded, though he hadn’t thought of all that himself. It still made sense to Thomas, given everything that he had learned since this morning. Someone wanted them at The Blue Village tonight, but didn’t want them to know who he or she was. It was as suspicious as the message was cryptic.

Lucy’s hand fell to her side, but the determined frown still remained on her face. “And what if it’s someone who wants to help us, but can’t reveal that they remember? What if they have to lie low? What if they’re scared of whoever cast the Curse?”

Henry folded the paper back up. “We can’t count on that. I want to believe it. I want to think that it’s not a trap, but Lucy, we have to be careful. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, or who might be on our side,” he said. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t go. We should. But, we need to be smart about it. Come up with a plan… just in case things go wrong.” He glanced over at Thomas. “Killian, can you look up this band… Kings of the Highway?”

Thomas pulled out his phone from his jeans pocket. “Sure.” He tapped the screen, quickly typing in the name. “There’s a web page.” He scrolled through it frowning at the brief description of the band’s history and style. The blurbs from reviews that had been written about their performances. None of it seemed particularly useful. “I don’t think it’ll be much help. There aren’t any pictures of them.” He handed the phone to Henry to see for himself.

“Of course there aren’t,” sighed Henry. “That would be too easy.” He used his index finger to scroll. “At least it confirms what the ad says. They’re playing tonight at The Blue Village at eight. Don’t know who’s running the page, so can’t entirely trust it, but that’s promising.” He handed Thomas back his mobile. “Do you know who owns The Blue Village?”

“No,” said Thomas. “Like I said, I’ve never been there. I don’t like jazz. And I haven’t really gone out in years. Not since…” He stopped. “I guess I’ve never actually been out.” If Anna’s death was entirely the result of memories given to him by a curse along with all his past, then he had never been out in Fairyland.

“Oh, you’ve been out,” said Henry. “Killian Jones went out… a lot. You liked taverns.”

“Liked,” emphasized Thomas. “I stopped going to bars in my mid twenties. Don’t think I’ve had more than a couple beers since… well… however long this curse has been.”

“Knowing you, you probably drank the night before the curse came,” said Henry with a grin. “We’re wasting time,” interrupted Lucy with an exasperated sigh. She folded her arms across her chest. “Our family is in danger and you are just standing there looking at....” She paused, clearly struggling to find a way to explain a smart phone, “... those rectangular things.”

“Lucy, don’t be rude. And they’re called phones,” said Henry. He started towards the car. Catching Thomas’s look of confusion, he offered, “She has a point, and we need to figure out what we’re going to do.” Henry swung open the car door and slid inside, Thomas quickly joining him.

“So we’ll go to the club tonight,” said Lucy. “But we have to be smart about it.” She leaned forward from the back seat so she was in between the driver’s and the passenger seat.

Henry turned back in his seat to look at his daughter. “I think that we have to do a stakeout, before the show,” he said. “See who shows up to open the place up. See who works there. And try not to be seen in the process.” The way the younger man spoke, Thomas had no doubts that this wasn’t the first time Henry had ever planned a stakeout. Years of experience seemed to form his words. “What time does The Blue Village open?”

A quick google search later and Thomas said, “Six.”

“That means the earliest people that work there will start arriving will probably be five. Maybe four-thirty,” mused Henry. He checked his watch. “That leaves us with a few hours.” He stroked his chin. “Does Fairyland have a clock tower?”

Thomas raised an eyebrow. “Clock tower? I don’t think so.” It was a little bit too quaint for this place, even if it was named Fairyland.

“Worth a shot,” he murmured. He glanced out through the dashboard out into the vague distance of buildings and roads. His forehead crinkled deeply as he left Thomas and Lucy to wonder in silence just what the author was planning.

Thomas glanced in the rearview mirror to see what Lucy was up to, only to find her dark bistre eyes looking straight at him. He opened his mouth, trying to think of something to say to the girl, but Henry spared him the effort.

“Is there anything in Fairland,” began Henry suddenly, “that is… broken? Or vacant? Or not open?”

Thomas turned in his seat to look better at Henry, his forehead wrinkling.

“Just ‘cause, in Storybrooke, there was a clock tower, but it was stuck, frozen in time during the curse. It was on top of the library, which was closed until Belle woke up and became the librarian, and below that was a dragon protecting--”

“A dragon?” laughed Thomas. “A real dragon? Now that is something.”

Henry smiled and said, “Yeah. You met her, actually. Her daughter and my mom had a complicated past, and she’s a dragon too. They’re both probably here somewhere.” His eyes scanned the scene before him, as if by some miracle the women he was talking about would walk right by. “But I was thinking, there might be something like that here.”

“Fairyland is a city,” said Thomas. “Something is always closed or out of order.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I can’t say that I’ve noticed anything particularly… well…” For a moment he wracked his mind, trying to recall anything that could perhaps be of use to Henry. “I really can’t think of anything that might be of use.”

With a tone that betrayed a hint of frustration. “The Curse probably doesn’t want you to notice stuff like that,” said Henry. “When I was trying to convince everyone that there was a Curse on Storybrooke, no one seemed particularly bothered by any oddities or noticed stuff like that.”

“Maybe if we just drive into town, we might see something like the clocktower or library,” suggested Thomas.

“Might be the best,” Henry said. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “Okay, Lucy, buckle up,” as he pulled his own seat belt across his lap. “Let’s go.”

As the car started, Thomas turned his gaze to the suburban scene out of the window. Over the next few minutes of restless silence, Thomas watched the yards grow smaller and smaller, until finally, they practically vanished as the car entered the city again. Pedestrians began to appear on the sidewalks, strolling past shops and other business of Fairyland. The car began to slow, allowing for closer inspection of the passersby.

“Who is that?” asked Lucy, pointing at a balding man jogging half-heartedly on the sidewalk.

Henry took his eyes off the road for a moment, and said, “I never actually learned his name, but I know he’s a Viking. Or used to be.”

“A Viking?” repeated Thomas, staring at the man. It was hard to imagine the man in a tank and sweatpants holding a brightly painted round shield and a sword like the Vikings he had seen in movies and drawings. It was also hard to reconcile how a historic group of people could be here in Washington, but he supposed that with all the stories and legends that had been told about them over the years, not to mention their own myths and folklore, it was possible that they belonged here, just like Snow White and The Evil Queen.

“And what about her?” Lucy pointed at a slender woman with a long black braid walking a speckled mutt.

“Oh, that’s Guinevere,” said Henry, his voice rising slightly with what Thomas could only interpret as surprise.

“What? Were you not expecting to see her here?” asked Thomas. He watched the legendary queen bend down, pulling out from her pocket a purple plastic bag, to perform a task he doubted that she had ever had to do in her former life. Or is ‘real life’ a more accurate term?wondered Thomas, almost missing Henry’s answer.

“Last I heard, she was in Camelot,” said Henry. “So either she came back to Storybrooke or the Curse affected more than just Storybrooke. But I don’t even know if that’s possible.” He paused. “It shouldn’t be. But… I don’t know that guy,” he gestured at a man in a green windbreaker talking on a cellphone, “and I’ve never seen that woman before…” He nodded at a woman in her mid-thirties pushing a stroller with a rather chubby toddler strapped in. “They’re not from Storybrooke. And if Fairyland is a city, but Storybrooke a small town…” His eyes met Thomas’s for a moment.

“The people had to come from somewhere,” supplied Thomas.

“Exactly,” Henry said, giving a small nod.

The car continued to roll on, at least five miles below the speed limit. Thomas marvelled at the fact that no one had honked at them or driven around them out of frustration.

Abruptly, the car lurched forward to a quick stop. Inertia sent Thomas forward before his seatbelt caught him, reigning him back.

“What?” asked Lucy and Thomas in almost unison.

Henry’s hazel eyes had gone wide, as he stared at a tall woman crossing the street. Her thick red hair, streaked with white, fell down her back. Gaze directed straight ahead as she jaywalked past the silver Toyota, oblivious to the three people following her.

“That’s… that’s my aunt. That’s Zelena.”

“The Wicked Witch?” asked Thomas, remembering the illustrations that Lucy had showed him. There was certainly a resemblance, even if the woman seemed around a decade older than she had been in the drawings in the book.

“We’ve got to follow her!” declared Lucy, her voice trailing upwards.

“First I’ve got to find a place to park,” muttered Henry.

Thomas pointed to a vacant space on the next block. “There’s a spot up there.”

On the sidewalk now, Zelena turned to proceed in the opposite direction of the car. Lucy unbuckled her seatbelt and got up on her knees, leaning against the back seat to watch out the rear window. “She’s going that way!” she said, pointing behind them.

“Damn it,” Henry swore under his breath. “Lucy,” he said in his normal tone as his eyes quickly flitted around the scene, “if I ever teach you how to drive, you never, ever should do this.” He quickly spun the wheel around, causing the car veer into a U-turn.

Thomas barely had time to grip the handle above the door to brace himself against the turn. He could hear Lucy laughing in the back seat. He scanned the sidewalk for the redheaded woman. “Up there!” he said, pointing at the former Wicked Witch.

“Charge!” shouted Lucy, with a laugh.

Henry pressed on the gas and the car lurched ahead just in time to see the woman turn down a one way street.

As Henry put on the turn signal, Thomas said, “Don’t you think you’ve broken enough laws today, mate?”

“Since when did you care about the law?” the younger man asked.

“Since the curse I guess.” Pirates weren’t exactly known for following the rules of society, but Thomas had his limits. Even when he had been driving often rather than relying on the buses, he hadn’t ever gotten a speeding ticket. Seeing Henry, a man who was supposed to be his step-son, about to break another law, he felt obligated to speak up.

“We’re going to lose her,” protested Lucy, craning her neck to try to follow the woman with her eyes. “Dad…”

Henry sighed and quickly pulled up to the curb right in front of a fire hydrant. Before Thomas could open his mouth, Henry was already saying, “Not a word. I’ll take the ticket.”

Thomas sighed, but said nothing, instead opening the door and pulling himself up out of the car. He heard the sound of Henry’s car lock beeping as the three of them crossed the street to hurry to the side street. Lucy started running, something that Henry quickly began to do as well. Thomas quickened his pace, realizing why the father and daughter had started running as he started down the street properly. The woman was no where to be seen.

“She’s not here,” said Lucy after stopping in front of another side road. She hurried down the block, much faster than Thomas could keep up with. “She’s not here either!” Even from the distance of a block, Thomas could hear the desperation in her voice.

“Stay there!” shouted Henry, as he tried to catch up with his daughter. Henry reached her within a few seconds, with Thomas coming up last, panting. “She wasn’t running,” began Henry. “So she has to be around here somewhere.” He turned around and scanned the linear park that ran parallel to the street. Neither the group of preteen girls walking by a small patch of wild flowers, nor the old couple feeding birds seemed to spark anything in Henry, nor was his aunt anywhere in sight.

“Maybe she went into one of the shops,” suggested Thomas, nodding at the shops that lined the street. It was the best explanation he could think of as to how they could have lost the woman so quickly.

Turning to face the nearest storefront, a shoe store, Henry said, “Possibly.”

Lucy cupped her hands around her eyes and pressed her face up against the window to peer into the shop.

“Is she in there?” asked Henry, leaning forward to try to see better into the shop.

Instead of answering, Lucy straightened up, shaking her head, and walked down to the next shop, Henry and Thomas trailing behind her. A quick pop into the second hand shop was enough for the three to ascertain that Zelena was not there. The next shop over, a cramped ice cream parlor likewise was proving unsuccessful for their witch hunt. Finally, “Is that her?” asked Thomas, pointing at the barista in the coffee shop. Her back was turned as she went about preparing something for a customer who stood in line, boredly scrolling through a phone. Even through the dark tinted windows, there was no mistaking the firy red of the woman’s hair.Henry nodded and opened the door, Lucy following suit.

Thomas barely had time to register the logo on the door - a crescent moon overlapping the edge of a sun, with touching faces that looked almost like they were kissing. “I’ve been here before,” said Thomas. “West of the Moon.” He joined Henry and Lucy standing close enough to the counter so that they could read the menu displayed up on a chalkboard hanging about the bar. “They’ve got a great croissant.”

Henry didn’t seem to be listening, instead his eyes were trained on the back of the woman’s head, eyes almost boring into her. At last, the barista turned to hand the customer his drink, and Thomas heard Henry sigh. The woman standing behind the counter was most definitely not the same woman that they had seen crossing the street.

“Merida,” murmured Henry.

“Are you trying to swear?” laughed Thomas.

“No,” said Henry. “That’s Merida. Only she’s straightened out her hair. When I saw her it was… wild.”

“Oh well,” sighed Thomas. He turned around to exit the coffee shop, but he stopped when he felt Henry grab onto his right arm. “What?” he asked, looking back and Henry only to see that his stare was now focused somewhere else other than the redheaded barista. Thomas followed his gaze and saw in the corner of a shop, a petite woman with hair swept up into an elegant bun, except for a lock of silvery hair that had escaped, separate from the rest of her auburn hair, falling in front of her face, as she poured over a book, the rest of the four-person table occupied by several other books and legal pads with notes scrawled on it.

Not missing out, Lucy asked, “Who is she?”

As if he was suddenly interested in the display of scones on the counter, Henry looked away from the older woman. “Belle,” he said softly. “That’s my step-grandmother.”

Thomas couldn’t stop himself from giving the woman another look. “Where’s her beast?” The man who his prior self supposedly had spent centuries hating and plotting to kill. This woman and him had supposedly been friends before, back in Storybrooke. As he watched her gesticulate in conversation, he willed himself to feel something, some sort of spark of recognition, like the ones he felt before. Nothing came, and he quickly joined Henry in examining the scones. “How about you two go and get the table next to her,” whispered Thomas, “and I’ll get us something so we look like we belong.” They couldn’t be kicked out if they had bought something.

Henry nodded at the plan and motioned Lucy to follow him. While the two took a table several tables over from Belle’s - a better idea now that he thought about it - Thomas went to counter, glad that he wouldn’t have to wait in line. He smiled at the woman behind the cash register, trying to see the similarities between her and the cartoon that he remembered being advertized years ago. “Hello… Sally,” he said, reading the name tag pinned to her pink babydoll tee-shirt.

“Good afternoon,” she said, returning the smile. “Welcome to West of the Moon. What can I get for you today?”

Though he had never actually seen the movie, Thomas was fairly sure that the Texan accent hadn’t been a part of it. “Two coffees,” said Thomas. “One with cream and one whatever sweetener you have handy.” He paused trying to remember just how Henry had liked his coffee. “The other with two sugars and a dash of cream.” It wasn’t too different from how Anna had liked her own coffee. She had always preferred her coffee sweet, but had liked a little more dairy in hers. “And a chocolate chip cookie,” he added, thinking of Lucy.

“Coming up.”

As Merida-Sally busied herself getting the order ready, Thomas leaned on the counter to try to casually glance in the direction of Belle. She seemed completely engrossed in the book, unaware of the fact that there were three pairs of eyes staring at her.

“Here ya go!”

Thomas practically jumped out of his skin, only to realize that it was just the barista back with his coffee. “Sorry.” He gave her a small apologetic smile.

“Oh no worries,” she said. She paused. “I put everything on a tray.” She nodded at his prosthetic.

“Thank you.” He pulled out a twenty dollar bill - more than enough to pay for the coffees and cookie. “That woman,” he said, his voice dropping low, even though Belle wasn’t really within earshot, “do you know who she is?”

“Yeah,” said Sally apprehensively. “She comes in here regularly. Professor of Literature up at the university.” Her voice dropped low and she gave a conspiratorial grin. “What? Would you like me to send her a coffee from you? Like from her special secret admirer at a bar. Always wanted to do that.”

Taken aback by the woman’s obvious eagerness to aid in the pursuit of romance, Thomas’s eyebrows went up. “I… I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, Henry and Lucy. Henry mouthed something that Thomas was fairly sure was ‘what.’ “Just her name, I guess.”

The woman’s smile faltered. “That’s Linda Argenteuil. She taught at least two of my brothers a couple years back,” she said.

“Thanks.” He handed the redhead the money and picked up the tray and walked over to the table Henry and Lucy had picked out. The thrill of minor espionage and intelligence gathering made him quicken his pace. He sat down beside Lucy and handed her the cookie. As he handed Henry the coffee he said, “This one’s yours.” He leaned closer to the two of them. “Evidently your step-grandmum teaches English up at the university. Goes by Linda Argenteuil.”

“That’s.... oddly fitting,” said Henry, surprise raising his voice upward. “Usually curses give people lives that don’t entirely…” He frowned and his voice dropped even lower. “She’s even dressed how she dressed in Storybrooke. But her shoes look far less painful. Makes me wonder…”

“Her shoes make you wonder?” asked Thomas glancing over to see the pair of strappy sandals on the professor’s feet.

“No, but her life makes me wonder if… if Mr. Gold cast the curse,” said Henry. He blew on his coffee.

“Isn’t Belle the person he loves most?” asked Thomas.

“His true love,” answered Lucy.

“There are many different kinds of love,” Henry said. “And you can use them to cast a curse.” He took a sip of his coffee, and Thomas followed suit only finding it much too hot still to drink without blowing on it first. Perhaps Henry was too worried to notice, supposed Thomas.

After a minute of silence, “You have to talk to her.”

Thomas stared at Henry. “Why me?”

“You were friends,” said Henry. “There should be some lingering spark or something. There was for people in the first curse. My grandmother became friends with Grumpy.”

It was a sign of just how much his perspective on the whole matter had changed over the course of mere hours that Thomas didn’t burst out laughing at such a ridiculous statement. He merely nodded it, and accepted that there was a chance that what Henry was saying was true, and if that chance allowed for the possibility that Anna or Emma or whatever her name truly was was in fact alive, Thomas was willing to entertain it. “Okay,” he said, getting up again.

“Worst comes to worse,” Henry continued, “you could just flirt with her.”

With a sigh, Thomas shook his head and turned around. As he drew closer to Belle, he could make out the title of the book that she was reading. “‘A Tale of Two Cities,’” he said out loud, standing a few feet from Belle’s table. “Been a few years since I read it, but I remember it was about the best and worst of times.” He grinned a little bit at his joke.

Startled at the sound of someone speaking to her, Belle’s eyes widened and flicked up to meet Thomas’s gaze. “Uh, yes,” she said. She cleared her throat and put a yellow ribbon in the book to mark her place. “More specifically it’s about the French Revolution.” She set the book down on the table. “I’m teaching a course this semester on historical fiction, and I like to prepare by re-reading all the books before the semester starts.” She nodded at the other scattered books on the table. “Or rather, I skim them at this point. I’ve read so many of them so many times, I could practically recite them.” She smiled a little.

“If you’re doing historical fiction and you’re reading ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, then you’ve got to read ‘Les Mis,’” said Thomas.

Belle picked up her backpack and opened it to reveal a well-worn copy of Les Miserables. “Way ahead of you on that one,” she said with a wink. “I do it as a compare and contrast. Always get some interesting papers as a result.”

“I can imagine,” he said. He reached for an unoccupied chair at her table. “Mind if I sit here, Professor…”

“Argenteuil.” She shook her head. “Not at all,” she got to her feet. “I actually should be going. I’ve got to pick my son up from practice. I’m just lucky you came over. I was quite enthralled by Dickens’ prose.” She began to put each book in her bag one by one.

A son. He glanced over at Henry and Lucy, both were leaning forward. He could imagine what they were thinking, as it was most likely the same question he was wondering. “Oh, well,” he said, awkwardly scratching his ear. “I had hoped to be sitting with you, but I suppose that you’ve got to your son… back to your husband.” The words felt so foreign to him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had flirted with anyone. He hadn’t wanted to since Anna had died, and for years before that she had been the only one who he bantered with like that. Even back when he had been trying his hand at pick-up lines and cheeky jokes, he had never been particularly adept. As he spoke now, however, he felt an unprecedented ease that told him what timber to hold his voice at and where to pause for effect.

The professor stared at him for a moment before letting out a laugh. She put her final legal pad away and swung her backpack onto her shoulder. “No. Just me and my son,” she said. Walking around the table, she continued, “and I do appreciate the attention, I’m not really interested.” She tilted her head to the side and gave him a sympathetic smile. “You’re just not really my type.”

All Thomas could think to do was just nod and say, “Okay then.” He took a few steps back. “Have a good day.”

With a small wave the professor said, “You too,” before leaving the coffee shop.

Feeling a little bit defeated, Thomas returned to Henry and Lucy with a sigh. “So, we know she has a son, no husband, but not much else.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Sorry I couldn’t get much more out of her.” He picked up his cup of coffee and took a sip. Finally it was cool enough to swallow directly.

“It’s helpful, though,” Henry said. “What is really strange though, is that Professor Argenteuil was Belle. Without her memories. But she was pretty much Belle.” There was a pause. “And you were you. For a moment there.”

“Was I?” Thomas said. “I suppose that explains-” Before he could continue, he felt a buzzing from his pocket. He pulled out his phone and checked the screen to see a picture of his upstairs neighbor. “It’s Marvin.”

“Blackbeard?” said Lucy with a grin.

“Sure.” He still had trouble seeing it. “Let me get this.” He got to his feet and hurried out of the cafe. Once he was outside, he tapped the answer icon on the screen. “Hey, Marvin?”

“So, you’re not going to believe this,” came Marvin’s voice, “but I’ve got your cat.”

“Which cat?” asked Thomas. Really it didn’t matter. The thought of any one of his cats out of the apartment where they were safe made him feel the push of worry.

“Uh, Swan… She’s the big one, right?”

Even though Marvin couldn’t see him, Thomas nodded. “Yeah. That’s her. What happened?” He started walking back and forth, across the length of the building and back again.

“I’m not exactly sure, but I was gardening, and there I see this white thing across the street, and I look, and I see that it’s your cat! I don’t know how she got out,” Marvin said. “But somehow she did. Gave me quite the workout running after her. I don’t mind. I need it. But seriously, your cat can run.”

Anxiety still gripped him. “But you have her.”

“Yes. She’s here with me now.”

There was an unmistakeable meow that immediately melted away some of the tension inside of him. “Good.” He paused. “What about the kittens?” If Swan could get out, then there was no reason to expect that the kittens couldn’t have followed their mother. And knowing them, the kittens had.

“I haven’t seen them.”

“Can you check for them?” Thomas asked, voice growing tight at the end. “Like, use the key under the rabbit statue out back? See if they’re inside. They should be there. They’re probably in my bedroom. And maybe see how Swan got out…” He kept on trying to remember what he could have possible left unlatched or open that could have allowed her to get loose.

“Sure, no worries,” said Marvin’s voice reassuringly. “I’ll let you know what I find. Going to go find the rabbit.” With a click and a few dull beeps, the call ended.

Thomas tried to swallow, but found his mouth was too dry to do it without getting caught.

Hearing the tinkling of a bell as the door to the cafe opened, Thomas turned around to see Henry and Lucy coming out. “Sorry about that,” he apologized. “Marvin just…” Compared to Operation Wookie, the matter of a cat that had gotten out and been found and too possibly missing kittens really was nothing. “Nevermind.” He forced the corners of his lips to raise up into a feeble smile. “So what do we do for a stake-out?” he asked, hoping that whatever was going on at The Blue Village would be enough of a distraction to get him through however long it took for Marvin to find the kittens.