Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A draft slithered across the Shie Hassaikai compound’s roof and rattled the loose flashing with a metallic hiss. The day was quiet in that way cities sometimes are, breath held, sirens waiting in the lungs of sleeping streets. It smelled like dust and concrete and antiseptic and… something sweet?

Kirby’s nose, or rather face because he doesn't have a nose twitched.

“Fooood?” he whispered, delight and inquiry squished into the same small sound. He was three feet of pink sphere, red shoes planted on tarpaper, stubby arms clasped over a round tummy that growled like a distant drumroll.

All around him, the raid churned like a storm inside the building. Distant booms rumbled up the ventilation shafts. Voices barked orders. But the little puffball wasn’t here for voices or storms. He was here because he’d smelled a hint of apple candy, of mochi, of warm broth threaded through the ductwork like a promise.

...And a star shaped wormhole he jumped through that's the main reason he's here

He flattened himself, (plip!) and slid into a vent grate with a soft metallic ping. The screws didn’t turn; they simply decided to be someplace else. Kirby wiggled, belly first, squeaking down into the dark.

Below, the yakuza maze shifted and writhed as Mimic’s Quirk squeezed corridors and buckled floors. To Kirby, the labyrinth felt like a living mouth. He hummed to himself, unbothered, pinging along on red feet that somehow made no sound. When walls squeezed, he turned sideways like a skipping stone and slipped through cracks that weren’t there a blink ago. The air thrummed with the energy of Heroes and Villains colliding, the taste of quarried stone and old metal and the bitter tang of medical cleaner clung to his tongue.

Food smell got stronger.

Kirby’s eyes shone. “Haaiii~,” he sang to no one, and bumped his cheek to the duct, listening. A shudder, a pain-cry like a swallowed gasp, came from below, a battle cry smashed flat by a blast of falling rock. He scooted, popped a vent, and plopped silently onto a steel beam strung across a service hallway, ten feet above scuffed concrete.

Something small ran.

Something bandaged, with a horn like a pearl splinter, wrapped in a torn red cape.

Eri.

She stumbled. She collided with the beam’s support, caromed, and, bonk, bounced into a round, soft, pink.

“Sorry!” she squeaked. Her eyes were watery terrariums of terror. Even though Kirby was smaller than her,just by a little, she flinched as if she’d struck a grenade pin.

“Haaaiiiii~!” Kirby chirped, smiling so wide his cheeks squished his eyes into crescents. Then he tilted his head, the picture of puzzled kindness. Why was the little one quivering? Why were her hands cold? Why did the cape smell like fear and soap?

He held out his hand.

Well, nub.

Eri stared at it, working her breath in tiny sips. The torn cape fell around her like a wilted sunflower. Somewhere down the hall, a man groaned, the sound of a mountain choosing to move one more inch because someone needed it.

Eri put her tiny hand in Kirby’s soft palm.

He nodded as if they’d just agreed on thunder. “Come,” he said softly, the word toddling on his tongue. “Kirby walk. Friend walk.”

He gave Eri a brotherly head pat

They started. Kirby took small, bouncing steps, his hand light on Eri’s, as if he were tugging a kite string through a storm. They passed a shape slumped in the hallway, a boy really, in a ragged cape’s absence, strong body crumpled like paper that had done its job. Lemillion. Mirio’s eyes were half-lidded, his breath scraping. He stared through Kirby, through Eri, through everything. It wasn’t that he refused to see, his body just… couldn’t, right then.

Kirby tugged a little harder. “Go,” he said to Eri. “Safe safe.”

She looked back over her shoulder at Mirio with a tiny whimper. Then she squeezed Kirby’s nub, as if trusting a balloon not to pop.

From around the corner: impact. Stone cracked like thunderclaps. A cold voice filled the basement like bleach poured over a wound.

“-when I disassemble, the recoil is… unfortunate,” Overhaul said, standing in a world he had made sharp. Chunks of floor hovered, then fused into jagged pylons that screamed upward. “But a human who refuses to give up… is not to be made light of.” He flexed blood off his glove with a flick, as if the droplet itself were a disease. Hives mottled his neck where dust had settled; the mask’s filters whistled.

Midoriya, arm trembling, a shard of stone bitten into his flesh like a fang, staggered upright. He was shaking and smiling and about to fall over all at once. His breath was a furnace trying to light in a windstorm. Behind him, Sir Nighteye lay impaled against the far wall on a spear of reconstituted floor, eyes a haze of pain and stubborn calculation that wouldn’t dim.

Midoriya’s mind spun: (I smashed the floor and reduced his firepower good, good, hold on, hold on!)

Overhaul’s right hand opened; another mouth churned into existence across the palm. Lips peeled back over enamel born of flesh and Quirk, and when it spoke it was Nemoto’s voice hitchhiking through a nightmare: “Eri. Did you want… any of this?”

The basement seemed to hold its breath.

In the hallway, Eri’s feet stopped moving. Her hand in Kirby’s went rigid. Memory crawled up her spine like cold hands, fingers that had come apart and put her together, wrong and again and wronger. That mouth, those hands, the gentle voice that said it was all necessary and the air that became knives.

She turned and ran back, cape flaring in a tattered arc. Kirby trotted behind her, little feet making tiny shh shh shh sounds. His mouth was still a smile, but his eyes had gone very round.

Midoriya whipped around. “Eri- ! You need to stay with-!”

“I don’t want any of this!” Eri said, on the verge of tears

“Do you think he can do this alone?” Overhaul asked. Shin’s truth slid out through the palm-mouth like a scalpel.

Eri stopped at the edge of the battlefield, Mirio’s warmth gone from the torn cape. She looked at Midoriya, at the boy who had reached once and let go, and she did not lie. “No.”

Overhaul’s eyes thinned to needles. “Then what must you do to resolve this?”

“I have to go back,” Eri whispered, toes at the line where the floor became Overhaul’s idea of a floor. “And you have to fix everything back to normal.”

“Of course,” Overhaul said, voice soft as a clean blade. “It will be easier on everyone if only you are hurt.”

“Eri!” Midoriya’s voice broke. “No- !”

Overhaul’s gaze slid to him, to Mirio slumped in the hall, to Sir Nighteye pinned and bleeding, to the nervous system of Heroes above like a whole body trying to make a finger move. “Your faith in Lemillion was misplaced. Your insistence on rescue? Cruel, to her. This is the mess of your hope.” His dermal hives flushed angrier at the dust in the air, at the thought of it inside his mask. “Unwanted.”

Something in the hallway sighed as if the air itself had gotten fed up.

The pink blur came with no warning, no footfall, no intake of breath. One second, Overhaul’s coat lay flat; the next, the fabric cratered inward where a tiny fist, impossibly dense and impossibly kind, buried itself in his gut.

The room hiccuped.

Overhaul folded in half, eyes wide, a sound like a broken accordion punching out through his mask. He stumbled and vomited, bile, blood, breakfast, and fury spattering his immaculate shoes. The hives exploded. He reached for the antiseptic in his mind and found only pain.

To everyone else, the impression was of cotton candy turning into a railgun. Something pink, small, spherical, just existed where Overhaul’s abdomen used to be comfortable. Then it wasn’t there again, except the afterimage quivered on retinas like a smear of sunrise.

“Is it, an adult? A… short… adult?” Midoriya muttered,

Sir Nighteye blinked. “…a child?” he managed.

The pink thing blinked twice. “Poyo?”

Oh, it’s a kid.

HOW DID A KID GET HERE???

“W-what!? What are you!?” Overhaul wheezed, horror and rage tug-o’-warring in his voice. His hand twitched open toward the floor out of habit, to make spikes, to make order.

Kirby tilted his head again, the same gentle confusion. Then the mask stink, metal and plague and cruelty, hit him, and something prim and small inside Kirby sat up very straight.

Overhaul’s fingers brushed the floor

And Kirby jumped. It wasn’t a leap; it was a decision to be elsewhere. Overhaul snatched at air and found a shirtfront in his hand, warm and soft and impossible. Equally impossible was the way the soft thing grabbed his jacket, no fingers, no grip, and yet the fabric belonged to Kirby now.

“Oh,” Kirby said very quietly, nubbins set. “No.”

He threw Overhaul one-handed.

The yakuza boss went through a wall with the offended shriek of limestone. Dust geysered. The mouth in his palm keened. He stood, bones crackling under skin that tried to be his, hives singsonging along his throat.

“I-I’LL KILL YOU!” he spat, and the basement answered with spikes, columns, the floor reconfiguring like teeth. He didn’t care about touching filth anymore. He didn’t care about the blood drying sticky on his gloves. He cared about the tiny thing that had put him on the ground and the way the girl’s eyes had shifted when it had smiled at her.

Kirby’s face did something Eri had not seen yet. It stayed cute, but the edges went firm. The blueish fade in his oval eyes became cold stars.

He moved.

Fists like hail. Jabs like sewing needles going wrong. A drumroll of impact that made the human ear decide to give up. Overhaul’s arms broke at the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder; each time he tried to reassemble, Kirby’s hands were already there too, disassembling with pure physics. Cartilage snapped. Clavicles sang. Somewhere in the flurry, the mask split, plastic and flesh popped like a seed hull, and the last punch was an upward cut that took the lower half of his jaw, mask, skin, pride, and sent it cartwheeling into the dust.

Overhaul collapsed in a shape that didn’t know where its edges were. He clawed at the rock, hand-mouth sobbing, tried to pull himself into himself and found that the blueprint was smeared. Fix it. Fix it. Fix it. Fix-

He lunged again

Kirby flattened like a pancake before kicking him in the jaw

Overhaul could of sworn he felt his adam's apple explode which he did.

"This...This isn't right! You can't be this strong! Nothing about this makes sense!" Overhaul said, Fixing his body

Then The ceiling exploded.

Broken concrete rained in slabs and dust. A dragon’s shadow unfolded across the void, Ryukyu in full, wings mantling, eyes blazing. Behind her dropped Uraraka and Tsuyu, boots skidding, faces white with shock.

“Deku?!” Uraraka blurted, seeing him below, and remembering another Midoriya above.

“Froppy, brace!” Ryukyu roared, catching a beam and hurling it aside. “Why are there two Deku's-?”

Because above, Himiko Toga smiled with someone else’s freckles as the goop fell off. Twice laughed and doubled himself and doubled himself again, shoveling dupes down like an avalanche. Mr. Compress, copied, leapt through the hole, coat flaring, eyes on Eri like a magician fixating on a coin. “Snatch,” Twice ordered merrily. “Snatch snatch snatch.”

Compress landed lightly, hand spiraling toward the girl.

Kirby appeared in front of him and punched. Not hard. Not very hard. Just… enough.

A bright pinprick streaked out of the basement, up, up, up through cement and rebar and winter clouds, dwindled to a star. If you asked a telescope what happened, it would describe math and grief and something that looked like an atomized top hat spreading across a Jovian sky.

“…Okay,” Uraraka said faintly, through her fingers. “Okay... WHAT!?"

Midoriya’s eyes snapped back to Eri. “Uraraka- ! Sir Nighteye, he-!” His voice broke on the impaling. “Please!”

“I’ve got him!” she yelled, racing with Tsuyu toward the wounded mentor. Tsuyu’s tongue flicked, guided, stabilized Nighteye’s weight a millimeter at a time as Ochaco reached gently to brace the stone. “Ribbit, stay still, Sir!”

Midoriya launched toward Eri.

The floor erupted. A rock pillar whipped up between them, Overhaul, ruined face knitting clumsily, riding it like a glaring, desperate, hateful god. He snatched Eri as the column surged. Dust burned Kirby’s nose. Rage burned Overhaul’s veins and scrubbed his phobias clean; he would fix the mess. He would fix everything. He would fix everything if he had to rip this entire building apart and eat the dust.

He started growing the pillar longer, longer the escape tunnel he couldn’t destroy in his head because it was the only clean thought left.

Midoriya refused to stop. He planted a boot on a rising shard, sprang, fingers grazing the stone. “Eri!” he yelled, the name a lifeline thrown up a well.

Mirio’s cape, what was left, fluttered.

It snagged on a bit of rebar, a little red caught on grey. Overhaul sneered at it, at the memory of a boy who’d lost everything and still had the gall to smile. “Disgusting,” he hissed, reconfiguring the pillar, lifting them toward the hole.

Eri’s hand moved on its own.

She grabbed the cape. The torn cloth rasped under her fingers. She remembered Mirio’s words, the way his laugh had wrapped her without hurting, the way the pink creature’s nub had felt like a hand. Something that had been punishing her bones for existing flinched.

A light soft and cruel as time bloomed under her skin.

Overhaul gasped, stumbled; his body twitched as if someone had yanked the plug on a screaming machine. Fused muscle unfused. Shapes peeled apart like wet paper. Shin Nemoto sloughed out of Overhaul’s back with a moan, black fabric slipping from bone, mouth-palm wailing as it became only a man’s mouth again. Overhaul’s monstrous bird-limbs shrank and curled away.

Today, this day was the first time Eri had ever reached back instead of away.

“Don’t-!” Overhaul choked, grasping for her arm as his own body backtracked through his sins.

Kirby didn’t wait to see how far she would go alone.

He inhaled.

It was not a breath. It was a decision. The air bulged toward him; the floor grit skated; Eri squeaked as gravity chose Kirby instead. She sailed off the pillar and into Kirby’s mouth (fwoop!) vanished without a swallow.

Silence.

A beat where the entire basement tried to understand what it had seen.

“HEY! SPIT HER OUT YOU DISEASED FREAK!” Overhaul howled, losing what composure he had left, fingers clawing the air between him and Kirby as if he could sanitize it by force. The idea of that child inside the pink thing, of anything unclean inside anything, everything, hives ate his neck.

Kirby’s eyes slid to him, twinkled. He raised one nub. Carefully. Mischievously. Then, because sometimes petty was a flavor that went with everything, he swallowed.

Gulp.

Overhaul’s heart suffered six small panics in a row. The heroes in the room had two each.

"AHHHHHHH!!!!" Midoriya screamed

Kirby’s shape didn’t change. And then it did. Hair long, white, snowsilk, spooled down the back of his head like laughable wig on a celestial dumpling. A little horn grew, spiraled, gleaming. Power hummed around him, the sound of clocks forgetting how to count, of rivers deciding to go back to the mountain.

Kirby toddled across the floor to Sir Nighteye, who was trembling but still trying to take notes with the eye that worked.

Kirby pulled sir nighteye off the spike

"WHAT ARE THEY DOING!??" Uraraka yelled

“Poyo!,” Kirby said, laying his nub against Nighteye’s side.

The wound stopped being a present problem and decided it had been yesterday’s mistake. Stone unwrote itself gently out of tissue. Blood flowed backward into vessels, clean and warm. Cells remembered their instructions from the last time everything was fine and obeyed them.

Sir Nighteye blinked, gasped, and focused on Kirby as if the puffball were a prediction he’d refused to believe he’d ever see.

"What is this..."

Around Kirby, the air popped like a bubble. Eri appeared beside him in a soft puff of stars, then stumbled forward. She was whole and panting and crying.

“Friends good,” Kirby chirped to her, and patted her hand. The long white hair and horn looked very silly on him, which somehow made it feel okay that he’d been terrible and wonderful a second ago.

He exhaled, the hair became a glittering yellow star that hopped from his head like a soap bubble and tangled in the air. The Quirk he’d borrowed flittered away with the star, toddling into nowhere.

Overhaul, below the hole, watched the power leave with a gaze that tried to hold on through will alone. His fingers, bone-knitted and wrong, twitched. Rage and obsession balled up in his throat. He needed her. He needed her to fix everything he’d broken to fix everything he wanted to fix. He needed-

Kirby, for reasons known only to the theology of small joys, pulled a little flip phone from nowhere.

He flipped it open with exaggerated gravitas. To everyone watching, it looked like a child playing make-believe.

He pressed a single button.

Somewhere beyond the ceiling, a star responded.

The Warp Star descended through the ragged hole like a golden bee, humming a note that made the dust glitter. It hovered at Kirby’s shoulder, tilting, as if it were a loyal dog pretending to be a comet.

The heroes stared. “It’s… a focus?,” someone breathed, because that was the shelf in their mental library where miracles fit.

Kirby put the flip phone away like a businessman who’d just set a lunch meeting. He hopped onto the Warp Star, turned, and held his nub out to Eri again.

She hesitated only long enough to look at Midoriya.

He nodded, tears bright and determined. “Go,” he said, and his smile had all of Lemillion’s sunlight bent through his own grit. “We’ll be right behind.”

(Nope! My friend now!) Kirby thought to himself, proud of himself

Eri took Kirby’s hand. She climbed onto the star.

The Warp Star rose, dust feathering off its wake, and zipped toward the hole like a song finding its chorus. It didn’t rip through the air so much as charm it aside. Eri’s hair flagged in the wind. For the first time in a long time, the inside of her ribs unclenched.

Overhaul tore his remaining glove off with his teeth. He slapped his hands to Rikiya Katsukame’s broad back where Ryukyu’s team had pinned him earlier, and the world around his fingers exploded into pieces and ordered itself again into his idea of monstrous. He fused. He grew. His lower body became a jagged juggernaut of stone and clawed hands and need, his upper half nestling in a cavernous maw.

“All of you are sick!” he screamed up the shaft where the gold had gone. “Hero syndrome! Villain syndrome! A plague! And I was going to cure you-!”

Up in the shower of drifting concrete petals, Ryukyu’s eyes narrowed. She planted her talons in the collapsing ceiling, wings lashing. “Froppy,” she snapped, “protect the others! Uravity, assist!”

Tsuyu tightened the makeshift tourniquet she’d fashioned on Nighteye with a gentle, sure ribbit. “You’re okay now,” she said, confidence a warm knit scarf. Ochaco’s hand hovered over fractured stone, making it light enough to slide without tearing more flesh.

“I’ve seen many Quirks,” Sir Nighteye repeated softly, still looking up where the pink and the white and the gold had gone. The pain had fled; the calculus remained. “But that one, it might be the strongest in history.”

No one corrected him. No one knew to. In a world where everything extraordinary wore the word Quirk like a hat, the idea that something could be otherwise didn’t occur to them.

Overhaul’s new form heaved forward with an avalanche’s promise. “I’m not done,” he snarled, every syllable an itch he couldn’t scratch. Blood ticked out of the rents Kirby’s hands had made. Hives burned anew beneath the mask-shreds on his face, a whole body screaming that the air around him was unsanitary and wrong and he would make it right if he had to tear all the air out and start again.

Midoriya set his feet.

“Deku!” Uraraka called, eyes flicking between him and the newly stabilized Sir Nighteye. “We’ve got him! Go!”

Midoriya nodded once, teeth bared to a grin that understood terror and kept walking. Above, a golden streak turned a corner of sky and vanished into the day with a laughing hum. On it, a little girl clutched a tattered cape and a pink hand, and for the first time, the future felt like something that didn’t want to hurt her.

Down below, surrounded by broken stone and broken certainty, a room full of heroes steadied themselves against a man who would rather break everything than be touched.

The yakuza’s monster took its first step.

The Warp Star burst through the last veil of dust like a golden swallow. The air kissed Eri’s face, the taste of concrete replaced by exhaust and far-off fried batter. She clung to Kirby’s head with both hands, wobbly on her knees, eyes wide at the sprawl of the city, the rooftops like boxes stacked by a fussy giant, the streets drawn in dark ribbons, the sky a pale bowl.

“P-poyo,” Kirby chirped, reassuring, as if the whole world were just a very big kitchen and he knew where the cookies were.

They cleared the shattered roofline. A dragon silhouette Ryukyu, banked below, her roar scattering pigeons. Nejire Hado hovered like a dragonfly at the level of broken neon, hair streaming, eyes round. “What are, who are, so cuuuute, wait, the mission!” she squeaked to herself, orbiting the crater.

From deep under the compound came the sound of a giant grinding its teeth.

The rooftop bulged. Tiles went skittering. Rebar screamed. Then the compound’s entire center erupted like a volcano having a tantrum. Overhaul burst into the sunlight in his fused form, lower body welded to a thundering, clawed mass of stone and meat and malice. He was a cathedral of jagged hands and grasping intent, and in the middle of that terrible mouth, Kai Chisaki’s fox-sharp eyes glared like knives behind broken mask straps.

He saw the gold streak. He saw the white horn peeking over pink. His skin crawled with hives at the thought of wind that wasn’t filtered touching his face. “You won’t get away.”

The sentence cracked the cold air.

He raised a forest of arms. The Warp Star sang louder, climbing, and then one slashing limb, precise, surgical, met it mid-arc. The star didn’t shatter so much as decide to be many stars instead; it burst into a flock of sparks that whirled away like fireflies. Eri squealed as gravity remembered her.

Kirby flipped midair like a skipping stone finding its last perfect bounce. “Poyo!” he giggled, catching Eri against his cheek as if that were always the plan. They landed in a skid of glitter over the compound’s collapsed courtyard, Kirby’s red feet squeaking, Eri’s small fingers fisted in his skin.

Overhaul was already moving, the fused mass roaring across broken ground, throwing pillars like spears, lashing with craggy tendrils. Kirby sidestepped, hopped, bounced. He didn’t look hurried. He looked like someone playing hopscotch in a very rude neighborhood.

“You stupid puffball!” Overhaul’s voice rasped through torn filters, all politeness burned away. His hives flared, his breathing became a spit of steam. “You don’t understand a thing! Why won’t anyone see the bigger picture!”

“Big pik-shur?” Kirby echoed, tilting his head, then executed an unnecessary but joyful cartwheel over a slab the size of a car. Eri yelped and clutched tighter. “Kirby see li’l pik-shur. Friend safe.”

Nejire hovered higher, hands fanning energy, indecisive. “Is that- a kid? It’s got to be a kid, right? Ah! Eri!” Her face folded into determination. “I’ll keep the air clear!”

Overhaul tore up a chunk of street and hurled it like disgust. Kirby ducked and it sailed on to demolish a parking sign. He hurled a streetlight; Kirby twirled under the pole with a squeaky “wheee,” Eri squeaking in echo, terrified but blinking at the strange fun of it. He hurled a van; Kirby flattened and let it skim him like a stone on a pond, then popped back up with an apologetic “poyo” to the van as it clattered away.

“This is not a game!” Overhaul’s voice shredded. He dragged more mass, more rebar, all of Rikiya’s borrowed bulk, forcing it into shape. “People are infected with syndromes. Heroism, villainy, disease! I am the cure!”

Kirby stopped, blinked up at the mountain of wrong, and patted Eri’s hand. “Man mean. We go vroom now, okay?”

“V-vroom?” Eri managed, baffled and still ready to be snatched.

Something big and chrome caught the day light, a big rig, red and white, its cabin skewed against a ruptured loading dock. The side decal depicted a smiling cartoon eggplant for reasons only marketing could explain. Its tank hissed softly where the impact had cracked a valve.

Overhaul snarled and wrenched a whole swath of pavement free, muscles in his jaw jumping under skin that wanted to hive forever. He hurled the big rig as if he could throw the entire messy city back into order with it.

The truck tumbled, end over end, a metal comet.

Kirby looked up, eyes glossy with the reflection of headlights. Then he inhaled.

Eri had time to gasp.

Kirby did not swallow the truck. He couldn’t, not even him (at least not without hypernova) . Instead his mouth stretched. And stretched. Pink skin went glossy, pliant; his whole round body ballooned forward until he popped over the truck like a rosy tarp. For a ridiculous heartbeat he was a pink hood ornament eating the world.

Then he settled, mouth sealed around chassis, kirby was becoming becoming the truck’s shape with his little red feet peeking from behind the cargo.

Eri found herself on a rounded pink roof of the vehicle that was also, somehow, a person.

Kirby’s eyes blinked from the fromt like happy stickers.

“Poyo~!” he trilled, delighted at his own new shape. “Mouf-ful!”

He revved.

It sounded like a cheerful thunderclap.

Overhaul froze for a beat, mouth open, hatred blue-screening into bafflement. “What-"

Kirby popped the clutch.

The big rig, Kirby, shot forward, tires grabbing crumbled asphalt. Eri squealed again, then clung, horn cutting wind, cape flap-flapping. Kirby steered with his whole body, the wheelless not-wheel in his mind turning because he wanted it to. He hit a fallen slab at an angle, turned it into a ramp, launched, and came down biting a hunk of Overhaul’s improvised wall to powder.

Overhaul responded with mass. He dragged everything, EVERYTHING, he’d fused from Rikiya into a tidal wave of flesh-stone that reared, casting greasy shadow. It came down to crush.

Kirby honked politely.

The horn was adorable.

Then Kirby slammed the accelerator.

He met the wave head-on.

The impact sounded like a quarry coughing. The pink truck tore a tunnel straight through meat-rock like a happy drill. Chunks exploded in glittery dust because the world couldn’t decide what else to make of them. Kirby burst out the other side with a squeal of tires and a cheery “poyo!” that said excuse me like an angel in a crosswalk.

Overhaul staggered. That mass had been his shield. He tried to pull it back together and found a truck smile in the middle of it.

“Stop! Stop! Stop! STOP!” he shouted, grabbing at leftover material with the fervor of a germaphobe trying to sop up an oil spill. He knit it into a shape with desperation, making it simpler, stronger, bigger. A hand. A giant hand with fingers like pillars and nails like jagged plates. He poured everything into it, Rikiya’s bulk, his fury, his need. He left his own upper body nestled in the maw, too exposed, but he didn’t care. The hand hoisted, flexed, shadowed the city.

“I’LL TEAR THIS WORLD APART STRAIGHT FROM ITS FOUNDATIONS!” Overhaul screamed, voice echoing between buildings. He launched the hand.

On the street, green lightning skated.

Midoriya tore around the far corner, boots tearing divots, lungs flaring frost. He had followed the wake of destruction like breadcrumbs. His eyes found Eri first, white hair stark against pink, and then the truck. His brain tried to fit those pieces together and invented a Quirk to explain it before it could think to be confused.

“Deku!” Nejire called from above, swooping. “Whatever that thing is He’s got a truck? He’s a truck? It’s fine, we’ll go with that! Eri's safe-ish! Keep him busy!”

Midoriya planted his foot on a gnarled slab; it crumbled. He launched anyway, knees pistoning, percentages of One For All humming up bone. “Hang on, Eri!” he shouted. “We’re coming!”

Kirby angled the rig toward Overhaul like a knight lowering a lance. Eri flattened to the pink hood, teeth clenched, eyes wet. She was ready to be grabbed at any second, ready to be dragged back below ground, ready to be un-made again.

Kirby beeped.

It was a small, silly sound. It vibrated through his makeshift hood into her hands.

She swallowed, nodded to no one, and held tighter.

The hand descended with the weight of ideology, the surety of a man who believed the cleanest world was the one that did not challenge him.

Kirby didn’t blink.

Because he this little puffball from dreamland had faced, Aliens, robots, bugs, nightmares, wish granters, Gods, Eldritch Horrors beyond human comprehension, Ultimate lifeforms, all to the death.

And emerged victorious before taking a nap.

The hand and the big rig met with a bang that made pigeons forget why they were birds.

For an instant, the world was pressure. The fingers clenched. The grill grinned. Overhaul screamed something that was supposed to be a sentence but came out as static.

“I WON’T LOSE TO A PINK MARSHMALLOW! NOT AFTER ALL MY WORK!!! I HAVE TO DO THIS FOR THE BOSS!!!! I HAVE TO PAY HIM BACK FOR EVERYTHING HE’S DONE FOR ME!!”

The hand buckled.

Not dramatically. Not in a poetic slow-motion crumble.

It just… stopped being a problem.

The giant fingers snapped like cheap cutlery under a good steak knife. The palm split. The wrist sheared with a noise like a snapped promise. The energy Overhaul had packed into it fizzled against Kirby’s ridiculous determination. And the big rig didn’t slow.

Kirby roared. or as close to roaring as a pink truck could, which sounded like an adorable blender tackling gravel. “Poyooooo!” Battle-cry bubbled out of the grill as he slammed into Overhaul’s core.

Overhaul tried to hold the truck back. He jammed improvised limbs into the asphalt, sprouting braces, levers, wedges. He screamed. He foamed. He hurled bile and words and justifications.

“This… THIS CANNOT BE! NO! NOOOOO!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

His voice glitched as his body tried to reconcile outcomes it had never permitted itself to imagine. The tidy story he’d told himself was an ice sheet cracking under sudden spring.

Kirby did not hear philosophy. He heard a monster between him and lunch.

He kept driving.

Chrome and pink and stubborn joy plowed into Overhaul’s chest. The rig pushed him across the courtyard, through what remained of the facade, up the little steps the architects had once meant for feet. The last inch was the worst. It always is. Then the last inch was over.

Something in Overhaul, call it resolve, call it anything you like. We here call it the Kirby Effect (TM). His body collapsed in on itself as if embarrassed. The fused stone-flesh imploded. Not into gore. Into light. Into tiny, twinkling stars that popped into being where stress had been. They hung for a breath like fireflies that had forgotten their names, then spiraled upward, indifferent.

Where Overhaul had been was now a scatter of glimmer and a pair of broken gloves.

Midoriya stumbled to a halt on the steps, winded, wind-whipped, eyes dinner-plate wide. He stared at the glimmer raining up and gasped like he’d just watched physics shrug. Nejire descended a few feet, mouth open, then closed, then open again.

“…Did the villain just... turn into…stars?” she asked the general atmosphere, because it felt like the sort of question you had to get out of your mouth or it would live in your head forever.

Kirby idled. He bounced on his shocks. He turned his blinky head-lights toward Midoriya as if awaiting a grade. Eri, still trembling, risked a peek over the curve of his hood.

Midoriya took a step, hand outstretched, words forming, thank you, who are you, Eri are you hurt, where did you even-?

Kirby revved once in a goodbye.

Then he spun the rig in a cheerful half-donut and peeled out.

“W-wait!” Midoriya yelped, lurching. His boot caught on a chunk of former ideology. He windmilled. Nejire zipped to a hover beside him with a flurry of sparkles.

“He’s… leaving?” she said, baffled and delighted and a little annoyed. “With the truck? And Eri? Ohh, Mirio will absolutely have an aneurysm.”

Down the street, citizen phones came up like daisies. People gaped, pointed. “Is that a, pink, semi?” someone wondered aloud. “Is this an upcoming event thing?” asked another. “I think it’s a Quirk,” said a third

Kirby threaded the big rig through the initial tangle of police cordons and civilian curiosity with the uncanny luck of soap bubbles. A barricade would be there; then a gust would flick a tarp; someone would duck; and he would slip by with a jaunty beep. Eri looked back once, twice, at Midoriya shrinking behind them, at Nejire’s ribbon-hands, at the hole in the world where a terrible man had been.

Her hands were still shaking. The city was too big. The sky was too open. The clean fear of captivity had become the messy fear of freedom and she didn’t know what to do with that, didn’t trust it. Any second a hand would grab her ankle and yank her back.

Kirby patted the hood with a reassuring shimmy. “Safe safe,” he said, simple as bread. “Kirby drive. Friend happy soon.”

She swallowed. “O-okay.”

They hit an avenue. Traffic had stopped of its own accord to watch. Kirby used a chunk of fallen sign as a ramp to zip over a stalled taxi. Eri squeaked and then made a sound she didn’t recognize: a tiny laugh that had to sneak past all the tired.

They cut three blocks, ducked under an elevated train just as it passed with a squeal and a wash of wind. They took a left where a ramen shop vented steam and secrets. They slid between an armored police van and a delivery truck whose driver was filming with his mouth open. They left the heroes behind, Midoriya shouting into his comm, Uraraka’s “ehhh?!” carrying faintly up from below, Tsuyu’s “ribbit” an exasperated metronome, Nighteye’s data brain scrambling to file this under something.

They reached a neighborhood that wasn’t watching the raid anymore because it had laundry and homework and the smell of curry in stairwells. Kirby slowed. He eased the big rig into the shade of a multi-story parking garage with a mural of a smiling tanuki on the outer wall. The concrete was cool. The fluorescent lights hummed like flies in summertime.

He parked the rig in a slot that read RESERVED in faded paint.

Eri blinked around, heart still drumfast. “W-where are we?”

“Hide-and seek,” Kirby said solemnly. He looked very funny being solemn with his windshield eyes and pink bumper mouth.

She swallowed another nervous breath. “Okay.”

Kirby wiggled, then puckered. The big rig slid forward out of his mouth with a rubbery pop and an aggrieved hiss, like a whale politely returning a boat. It clanked to a halt. Kirby shrank back to Kirby, round and soft and exactly as absurd as five minutes ago, cheeks rosy.

He hopped. Once. Twice.

Music that wasn’t music, joy pretending to be a melody, bubbled out of nowhere. Kirby raised his little arms and began to dance.

It started with a shimmy, a waggle, a turn. He kicked one red foot out, tapped it twice as if challenging the concrete to a duel, spun, and clapped his nubs with the confidence of a rock star who had never seen a rock or a star. His eyes squinted, his mouth became a confident line, his whole being saying I did a thing and I am proud and also I might like a snack.

Eri watched, rigid for a heartbeat. She looked toward the street through the garage’s shadow, no hands, no masks. She looked back at the pink creature who had swallowed her and then given her back. The sound he was making wasn’t quite a song and wasn’t quite nonsense. It was… happy.

Her shoulders loosened a fraction.

Kirby pivoted and gestured to her with both nubs like a tiny maître d’ of celebration. “Come! Dance,” he invited, vowels smooshed.

Eri’s mouth tried a shape. The shape was a smile’s little cousin. She tucked her bandaged arms in toward her ribs and swayed, a tiny wobble, a test. No one grabbed her. No one told her she was wrong. No one said she had to earn permission to move.

Kirby cheered (“Poyo!”) and added a hop that nearly toppled him. He windmilled stubby arms to balance. Eri squeaked in alarm and reached instinctively to steady him; her hand pressed into his cheek, and it was warm.

He leaned into it for a heartbeat. Then he spun under her hand like a dancer ducking a partner’s arm and did a little heel-toe that he absolutely stole from a video game victory animation.

Eri giggled for real, bright and fast and scared of itself. She tried the heel-toe. She messed it up magnificently and nearly fell on her face. Kirby boinged to catch her, and their clumsy orbit became a pattern, her cautious sway, his joyful hop, the shared little clap, the big finish with arms thrown high because what else do you do after you make a whole bad thing go away.

They ended panting, Eri’s cheeks flushed, Kirby’s mouth wide. The parking garage hummed approval.

Silence rushed back in, but it didn’t feel like the bad kind.

Eri’s eyes slid to the truck. “Is… is he gone?” she asked, voice small. She meant Overhaul. She meant the basement. She meant the hands. She meant forever, and they both knew forever was a big ask.

“Gone now,” Kirby said. He didn’t try for bigger truths. He patted his belly. “Kirby hungry.”

A hiccup of a laugh. “Me too.”

Kirby turned in a slow circle, as if sniffing out a bakery by sheer force of optimism. Then he pointed both nubs at a stairwell door, determined. “Food that way.”

“How do you know?” Eri asked, curiosity elbowing fear for a seat at the table.

“Kirby know,” he said with the absolute conviction of someone who had never been wrong about snacks. Then, softer: “We go slow. Hide if bad.” He mimed ducking behind a pillar and made a silly “shh!” sound that shouldn’t have been funny and was.

She nodded, serious again, but steadier now, like her feet had remembered they were allowed to stand anywhere the floor existed. She took his nub.

They padded across the cool concrete toward the stairwell, little steps and squeaky shoes, leaving behind a very confused big rig, a cloud of stars that had already forgotten the shape of a man, and a skyline that would be arguing over what, exactly, had just driven through Overhaul for the rest of the week.

Far behind them, in the wrecked compound, voices crackled, orders were shouted, medical teams fanned. Midoriya looked up at the empty sky and down at the broken mask at his feet and, against all sense, smiled. He had wanted to be the one to save her. He hadn’t been. He would make his peace with that, because she was out there laughing at something small and ridiculous, and that sounded like rescuing too.

Nejire loop-de-looped, hair fizzing, and tried to explain on the radio that a pink Quirk truck had solved their Overhaul problem while adopting the mission objective. On the other end of the channel, Sir Nighteye pinched the bridge of his nose and said, very evenly, “Understood,” as if that word could tame any of this.

Up in the garage, Kirby paused at the stairwell door, then glanced back at Eri.

“Good dance,” he said solemnly.

She ducked her head, embarrassed and pleased. “Y-you too.”

He beamed, pushed the door open with a proud little grunt, and led the way down toward steam and clatter and the promise of broth. Eri followed, the echo of the dance still warm in her bones, the memory of hands that hurt receding one step at a time behind the reality of a different kind of hand, round, soft, and very determined to find dumplings.

Chapter Text

The sun was already high and a little too bright for everyone’s pupils. Dust hung over the Shie Hassaikai compound like glitter someone immediately regretted. Sirens harmonized with the buzz of drones, and the low thud of Ryukyu’s wings punctuated the morning like a metronome for chaos.

Stretchers. Bandages. Barked orders. Aizawa’s scarf snapping as he stalked from patient to patient. Ochaco and Tsuyu kneeling beside Sir Nighteye, whose suit was soaked at the waist but whose eyes were once again terrifyingly lucid. Fat Gum sat on a curb with a blanket around shoulders that looked much smaller without all that protective fat, while Kirishima and Tamaki, swaddled in IV lines and stubbornness, were loaded into an ambulance.

Midoriya paced in wide jagged loops, hair wind-mussed, eyes blown wide. His mouth tried to decide between words and air and failed at both for five whole seconds.

Then he spun on his heel, flung an arm toward the horizon, and exploded:

“Okay we need to talk… WHERE DID THEY GO AND THAT KID? I THINK THAT WAS A KID. MURDERED CHISAKI!”

Aizawa blinked once, deadpan to the point of art. Rock Lock straightened so fast his back popped. Fat Gum looked up from the blanket with a slow “huh?”

“Who and WHAT!?” they said together, because some things were simply too much to process alone.

“You didn’t, underground, you didn’t see-" Midoriya scrubbed both hands through his hair and left it worse. “There was this- this pink puffball? It looked like a child very small three feet maybe and it he?-"

“Gender uncertain,” Nejire chimed in from above, hovering like a worried kite and peppered with dust sparkles. “Age uncertain. Biology uncertain. Definitely adorable. He referred to himself in the third person as Kirby.”

Sir Nighteye’s head snapped toward her as if jerked by a wire. “WRITE THAT DOWN WRITE THAT DOWN!”

Bubble Girl, already scribbling, nearly poked herself in the eye. “Kir-by,” she said aloud as she wrote, so the word felt real.

“Okay we have a name,” Centipeder said, calm as a spreadsheet. “START SEARCHING DATABASES.”

“Already on it,” Bubble Girl replied, phone in one hand, tablet in the other. “Civilian registries… hero candidate databases… Quirk registry… school rosters… missing persons…” Her brow wrinkled. “Uh filters, filters this is going to take a lot of filters.”

“And that’s if it’s catalogued at all,” Sir Nighteye said, jaw tightening. “There is a non-trivial chance we’re dealing with a brand-new manifestation. Or an out-of-country entry. Or-" He didn’t finish. The rest of the sentence stood behind his glasses like a very neat ghost: or something that doesn’t fit our categories.

Rock Lock planted his fists on his hips. “Back up. You said ‘murdered Chisaki.’”

“Murdered, uh-well-” Midoriya’s hands pinwheeled. “He- Kirby... he slammed a big rig into Chisaki and then Chisaki...imploded? Into stars? I have no idea what that means scientifically or-or morally, there were no pieces, just...light.”

Aizawa’s scarred eyes slid from Midoriya to the ragged crater. “We’re not putting ‘imploded into stars’ in a report.”

“Not verbatim,” Sir Nighteye agreed, closed-mouthed. His gaze ticked to the broken beak of Chisaki’s mask, to the glitter that still drifted from the hole. “We’ll put ‘unavailable for apprehension.’”

Nejire bobbed. “From my angle, on the surface, he punched a Mr. Compress clone so hard it went… somewhere. Spaceward.” She wiggled a finger at the sky. “Which, like whoa. So: super strength.”

“Super strength,” Midoriya echoed, nodding so hard it hurt. “From our side, underground he gut-punched Overhaul and Overhaul vomited from the impact. Then he broke...everything. Bones. All of them.”

“Super speed too,” Sir Nighteye added. “He wasn’t there and then he was. Counterpunch at near-teleportation latency. Midoriya?”

“I... yes. He basically teleported to Overhaul for that gut punch.” Midoriya swallowed, a little pale. “I’ve trained with Gran Torino and.All Might and it was… new.”

“Okay,” Rock Lock said. “So he’s strong and fast. Welcome to hero society.”

“And… no bones?” Midoriya added weakly.

Aizawa slowly dragged a hand down his face. “Explain.”

Midoriya swallowed again. “He turned himself flatter than a pancake before- um kicking Overhaul in the jaw so hard his Adam’s apple-uh...exploded. And also he stretched over a whole truck.”

“Right!” Nejire lifted a hand as if answering in class. “He stretched his mouth over a whole big rig on the surface! He drove it! Eri was on top! It was somehow the cutest traffic violation I’ve ever seen.”

Fat Gum squinted into the distance, as if expecting the truck to loop back for another pass. “A truck?”

“A truck,” several people said, already resigned to whatever their day had become.

“Star power?” Midoriya ventured, almost apologetic. “He summoned a star. With a telephone. A, flip phone. He’s either got a support item or, something else.” He looked to Nejire.

“I saw something starry,” she said, thoughtful. “I didn’t see a phone. But he didn’t seem concerned when it got destroyed. Like he could make another? Also: strong lungs.”

“Strong… lungs,” Centipeder repeated, which was not the strangest thing he had had to log, but contenders were stacking up.

“He sucked down Eri from the top of a pillar,” Midoriya said, guilt and awe and residual horror threading his voice. “One inhale. Then on the surface he inhaled a truck.” He glanced reflexively to Uraraka, Tsuyu, and Ryukyu, who all nodded as if they needed to notarize that sentence for their own sanity.

Rock Lock’s brows climbed his forehead. “He...ate the girl?”

Silence hiccuped.

“WHAT!?” came in a chorused wave from everyone who had not been in that exact hallway: Fat Gum, Aizawa, Kirishima’s medic, Tamaki’s medic, half the local police, the man with the drone.

Nejire’s mouth fell open, then closed, then opened. “He ate Eri?”

Uraraka lifted both hands in helpless emphasis. “And then spit her back out totally fine!”

Tsuyu, steady as ever, nodded. “Ribbit. He gained her hair and horn and… healed Sir Nighteye’s wound. Then, pop it went away in a little star.” She looked down at Sir Nighteye, whose bandaged waist was now a tidy, almost regrettably normal part of a terrifying day. “He saved you, sir.”

“That he did,” Nighteye said softly. “He also stabilized the entire situation in ways that confound our models.”

Mirio, on a gurney near the ambulance doors, had been quiet, eyes fixed on a point that wasn’t here. At the word “ate,” his head whipped around so fast it made the medic swear.

“HE DID WHAT?!”

“GET BACK IN THE AMBULANCE, LEMILLION!” the medic barked, slapping a hand, gently but with the authority of someone who’d seen too much on his shoulder.

“But- Eri-” Mirio’s hands flexed helplessly.

“No, you’re not searching for her yet,” the medic snapped. “None of us are. Kirishima and Tamaki are unconscious, you’re quirkless and still bleeding, and your heart rate just spiked into ‘stupid’.”

Mirio clenched his jaw. Then he lay back, eyes hot, hating the ceiling for being a ceiling.

Aizawa folded his arms, scarf stirring. “We need to move from the emotional to the actionable. What do we know now that we didn’t know an hour ago?”

“Overhaul’s notes,” said a detective jogging up, a clear evidence bag in hand. His hair was grey in the way thoughtful city hair gets grey. “We found the lab. The term is right here in three separate entries. The Quirk Eri has is called ‘Rewind.’ It rewinds organic beings to a previous stage.”

“That tracks with what we saw,” Uraraka murmured. “She unfused that one guy from Overhaul without… you know. Mess.”

“And Kirby” Sir Nighteye pronounced the syllables carefully, as if filing a crucial document “appears to have replicated it, at least temporarily, after inhaling her.” His eyes hardened a millimeter. “He also demonstrated advanced healing capabilities. He rewound my injuries.”

“We can’t let that power get into villain hands,” Rock Lock said flatly. “Eri’s alone is bad enough, especially with her trauma. But this… Kirby?” He shook his head. “He’s on a whole other level.”

“Level of what?” Fat Gum asked, trying to put warmth into the air and only managing worry. “Kid’s not a villain. He saved us. He saved her.”

“And drove off with her,” Aizawa said, each word like a stapled page.

“He’s a monster in physical combat,” Midoriya admitted quietly. “A pink demon. But he… smiled at Eri. He offered her his hand first.” He remembered the head tilt, the soft “poyo,” how the little thing had seemed confused by fear itself. “He’s kind. And terrifying.”

Sir Nighteye pinched the bridge of his nose. “What is this thing,” he said, because questions sometimes had to be said aloud to make room for answers. “One Quirk? Multiple? Experiment? New Nomu type without exposed brain? One very lucky child?”

“Child,” Nejire said softly, and the word gathered heat out of her mouth. “He felt like a kid.” She hugged her own arms, hovering lower. “I know that sounds silly. But he did.”

Centipeder cleared his throat. “With respect, sir, do we inform the Commission?”

Sir Nighteye was silent for a beat too long. Uraraka looked up sharply. Tsuyu did not move but everything about her became attention.

“We do not,” Nighteye said finally. “Not yet.”

Rock Lock exhaled half a laugh. “Because if this is a kid, we lost the objective of our mission to a kid and we will never hear the end of it.”

“Because Eri is our responsibility,” Nighteye corrected, calm and cold. “And our mission isn’t complete. The Commission will be informed if and when it aids that mission. For now, their involvement would add pressure without providing leads.” His gaze flicked over the courtyard: the medics racing, the cops stringing tape, the heroes sagging on their feet. “We’re injured. We’re exhausted. We have no starting point. If we call, we will be ordered to do more than we can.”

“And if things get out of hand?” Aizawa asked, voice like a sharp edge under cloth.

“Then we call,” Nighteye said. It sounded like a promise and a threat to himself.

Fat Gum rubbed his neck. “So… next?”

“Rest,” Aizawa said. “Stabilize. Debrief. Then we search. Quietly.”

“What are we even searching for?” Rock Lock said, waving a hand at the sky Kirby had driven into. “Pink. Round. No bones. Answers?”

“Anything,” Centipeder said. “We have a name. It’s a thread.” He gestured and a sidekick thrust a tablet at him. He typed with frightening speed. “If it’s in any registry, I’ll filter it.” A beat. “If it’s not… we widen.”

Midoriya pushed his hair back again and, through sheer force of will, stopped pacing. “For what it’s worth… I don’t think he’ll hurt her.” He looked at the road, then at his hands. “He’s, already done the hard part I couldn’t. He’s… keeping her away from bad hands.

“Ribbit,” Tsuyu agreed, simple and firm.

Silence settled, not peace but a truce with exhaustion.

“Very well,” Sir Nighteye said. “We proceed on two tracks. Medical and maintenance for our people. Quiet data sweep for-” he was careful “Kirby. We do not discuss this with the Commission. We keep our radios clean. And we prepare for… the realities of a world where a pink puffball with super strength, copying ability, and, apparently, star power exists.”

“Surely it will be manageable,” Centipeder said, because someone had to be the adult.

“Right?” Fat Gum added, because someone had to joke or scream.

Nejire, hovering, gazed up where the glints of star-dust still hung like dandelion wishes caught in a draft. “They’ll be okay,” she said, as much to herself as to anyone. “Eri and Kirby.”

Aizawa glanced at her. “You don’t know that.”

“Nope,” she said, bright. “But I’m going to act like I do until it’s true.”

Sir Nighteye allowed himself one breath that counted as almost a smile. Then he looked down at his notebook and wrote, very neatly, Kirby. Underlined. Twice.

They did not notice, three neighborhoods away, a pink ball and a white-horned girl peering over a counter at a menu they couldn’t read because the clerk had hand-drawn the specials in cursive.

The shop smelled like broth and scallions and safety.

Kirby mashed his face to the glass display with a soft blmp, fogging it immediately. “Mmmmmm,” he hummed, the sound traveling through his whole round body like a purr. “Noodle. Dumpling. Sweet bun.”

Eri stood on tiptoe, fingers white on the counter, trying to make herself small and failing because her existence was unabashedly real. She had watched Kirby sniff his way here like a truffle pig for carbohydrates. Her heartbeat was still too loud for the size of her chest. The world out the window was too big and too bright. Every person who laughed made her flinch; every siren thread in the distance made her ribcage want to fold shut.

She tugged at Kirby’s stubby arm. “You said you’re… Kirby?” she asked, careful, as if it might be a password.

Kirby turned around and beamed so hard the clerk, a man with a gentle mustache and a tattoo of a koi half-hidden by his sleeves, made an involuntary squeak.

“Kirby!” he said, pat-patting his chest with a nub. “Kirby, yup!”

“Okay,” Eri said, and the word put a plank across a little gap in her brain.

The clerk cleared his throat. “You two, uh, ordering?”

“Food,” Kirby declared, gravely. “Lots. For friend. For Kirby. For… tummy.” He patted his middle. It made a cheerful donk.

Eri tensed. Money. She had none. She had never… paid, even in the back-of-the-mind way kind people sometimes pay without saying it. Panic slid cold into her throat. “We- I don’t-"

Kirby looked at her with the serene confidence of a creature that literally had a pocket dimension where his digestive tract should be. “Kirby got,” he announced.

He exhaled .

The clerk took a stumbling step back as Kirby leaned over and delicately puckered at the empty space to his left. Reality obligingly presented… a treasure chest.

It thumped onto the counter. It looked like the sort of chest cartoons use for lessons about greed. Gold bands. Cherrywood sheen. A lock that practically winked.

Eri’s eyes doubled. (How much does he have in there? ) she thought, remembering the glimpse she’d gotten when the world had been all lungs and stars, frying pans, umbrellas, a whole picnic set, so many things just floating, as if his stomach were a separate little sky.

Kirby popped the chest with a clap of his nubs. Inside: coins. Bills. A small ruby that caught the fluorescent light and threw it around the shop like confetti.

The clerk closed his eyes for a long second, opened them, and decided to be very chill about this. “Okay,” he said, throat dry. “Uh. Two bowls? Three? Five?”

“Five,” Kirby said without hesitation sensing 5 to be the largest number. “And bun. And-” he squinted at a picture of something glazed “meat on stick.”

“Yakitori,” the clerk said faintly. “Sure.”

They took a corner booth, Eri tucking herself against the wall where she could see both the door and the kitchen, a habit she hadn’t learned so much as absorbed like a bruise. Kirby sat across from her and then, after two seconds, popped around to her side and pressed his soft hip to her like he had remembered that proximity sometimes out-argues loneliness.

Bowls arrived. Steam like arms.

Kirby inhaled the first bowl in one ambitious slurp that probably violated at least two physics laws and one etiquette. Eri flinched, then startled, then… giggled. She cupped her own bowl as if it might break and lifted a noodle like a string from a harp.

“Good?” Kirby asked, cheeks full, eyes enormous.

She nodded, because her mouth was busy discovering salt and warmth and a feeling that might be now. “Mm.”

Kirby inhaled bowl two. Bowl three. He slowed on four and actually chewed on five, which felt like watching a storm decide to become a breeze out of courtesy. He chased it with three sweet buns and a stick of yakitori, which he did not inhale because the glaze stuck cheerfully to his mouth and he liked to lick it off.

Eri ate slower, but she ate. Halfway through, her shoulders came down a notch. The world outside kept being outside without trying to climb in. No one told her to hurry. No one made her answer questions that became knives in her throat.

She wiped a bit of broth from her lip with the back of her hand, then startled at her own reflex and looked to Kirby to see if he would flinch at the unclean. He stole the napkin holder instead and put three in her lap with grave ceremony.

“Kirby...are you not not taking me back?” she asked suddenly, as if the thought had been waiting behind the soup for its turn.

Kirby’s head tilted. He swallowed his bite with a little “mm.” “Nope.”

“But… they were heroes.” The word felt like a fragile soft toy someone had stomped on and given back. “They, they tried. But then he, he made me say things that weren’t true. That made me sad. And everyone listened because he was loud. And I…” Her fingers tightened on the napkin until it wrinkled. “And you are here.”

“Kirby here,” he echoed softly. “Kirby hear.” He tapped his "Ear" (side of his head) . “Bad man make sad words. Make lie in heart. No more.” He tapped her chest. “No bad hands. No sad words. Friend safe.”

She pressed her lips together. Tears threatened the edges of everything. She didn’t want to be a faucet anymore. She wanted to be a girl in a corner booth with broth on her chin and a friend who said small sentences that fit where big ones didn’t.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Okay,” he agreed, and went back to licking yakitori glaze with monstrously content focus.

They ate until the world felt less like a floor dropping away and more like a table that didn’t wobble. The clerk brought over candy unasked“for the brave,” he said, not looking directly at Eri so the kindness could slide in sideways and politely pretended to be unfazed by the way the little pink creature devoured an entire skewer in a single, unbroken happy noise.

When it came time to pay, Kirby produced a second treasure chest just because the first one had been fun. The clerk raised both hands. “No, no, that’s, please. Keep your… pirate loot. It’s on the house.”

“House?” Kirby echoed, alarmed at the idea of eating architecture.

“Free,” the clerk translated quickly, smiling. “Take the treasure somewhere it won’t make my accountant faint.”

Kirby considered, then solemnly picked out three coins and placed them on the counter anyway. “Tip,” he said with mysterious adult knowledge, and patted the clerk’s sleeve with serious gratitude.

Back outside, the city felt wider and less hungry. Eri’s hand found Kirby’s without being asked to. They walked nowhere in particular, which was the nicest destination she had ever been given.

On a side street, a rack of capsule toy machines blinked in the sun. Kirby stopped as if gravity had affixed his feet.

“Oooooh,” he said, reverent.

Eri followed his gaze. “Do you like those?” she asked.

“Shiny,” he said simply. “Round. Like Kirby. Kirby likes figures! Kirby likes keychains!"

He fished around in nothing and produced of course a coin the exact size the machine required. He fed it with the solemnity of communion and cranked, tongue peeking in concentration. A capsule clunked loose, rolled against the glass.

He opened it and beamed: a tiny plastic star on a keychain.

He held it up to Eri as if presenting her with the moon.

“For… me?” she asked, terrified that wanting was rude.

“Friend,” he said. “Star for friend.”

She took it. It was silly and cheap and perfect. She looped it around her wrist, the plastic star resting against the bandages she refused to look at too long. It caught the light like the flock of little stars had when Overhaul had stopped being a problem. For the first time, her breath didn’t hitch at the memory.

“What, do we do now?” she asked, voice smaller, because this was new her

Kirby looked up at the sky as if it were a menu. “Nap,” he declared, with the authority of a general ordering a strategic retreat. Then, with a little frown: “Plan later. Find soft. Find… roof? Or tree? Or-" his eyes brightened "Kirby saw place.”

He led her down an alley painted with cats, around a corner where a dog snored in a sunbeam, up an exterior staircase that creaked the way nice stairs do. At the top, a rooftop garden stretched planter boxes, a faded bench, a tarp someone had tied as shade. Laundry lines flapped gentle flags. No one was there. The door had been left open with a brick and trust.

They tucked themselves under the tarp, on the bench, Eri’s head a cautious weight on Kirby’s round shoulder. From here, the city sounded like a heart complicated, but beating.

Down in the crushed compound, the heroes did their paperwork and their wounds and their best. Up here, Eri twirled a tiny plastic star around her finger and felt, for the length of the twirl, unclaimed by anyone but herself and a puffball who didn’t think in paperwork at all.

“Kirby?” she asked, drowsy.

“Mm?”

“Thank you.”

“Welcome,” he said, and his voice went soft in that way it did when the powers hid and the pink was just… pink. He added, almost shy, “Kirby… like friend.”

Eri smiled with her eyes closed. “I like you too.”

They slept.

Somewhere far away, a dozen databases returned no results, a sidekick swore at a blank field, and Sir Nighteye underlined the word Kirby a third time without noticing. Somewhere closer, a clerk told a story about a treasure chest that nobody believed until he showed them the tip: three oddly minted coins that shouldn’t exist.

A few hours later

The rooftop garden was all hum and flutter and warm noon light. Somewhere below, a neighbor’s radio murmured talk-show laughter; laundry lines flicked thin flags; a cat, convinced it owned the building, made its patrol along the parapet and didn’t even blink at the pink sphere and the horned girl under the tarp.

Eri woke first. She had fallen asleep with her cheek on Kirby’s side, which turned out to be exactly the right softness for a nap and also smelled faintly like sugar buns. For a lovely, terrifying second she didn’t know where she was. Then the memory unspooled, truck, stars, noodles, a tiny plastic keychain, and the fear didn’t pounce. It only looked at her from across the rooftop and, finding no purchase, shrugged.

Kirby was already awake, eyes half-lidded with the long blink of the very content. He was watching a sparrow bathe in the shallow water on the tarp, head cocked, as if memorizing the splash for later. When Eri shifted, he looked over and beamed, which is a thing you can do with your whole self if you are built like a bright moon.

“Morning,” she said, then corrected herself because it was definitely past morning. “Um. Day.”

“Day!” he agreed, patting the bench like he’d been personally involved in inventing it.

She rubbed her eyes. The question had been knocking politely at the back of her tongue since noodles. It came out, small and curious. “Kirby… do you have friends?”

“Poyo!” he chirped, as if she’d asked if he liked air. Then he reached into nowhere and came up with his flip phone.

Eri stared. “You… carry that in your… tummy?”

“Stummy,” he said confidently. “Kirby pocket.” He flipped the phone open with a flourish that would have made a magician jealous and pressed a single button with his nub.

The line trilled. Somewhere very far away and somehow very close, the world changed stations.

On Planet Popstar, inside a throne room that had seen everything from formal ceremonies to pie fights, a ringtone blared at a volume carefully tuned so only the people sharing air with the owner had the honor.

“Dedede that’s the name you should know! Dedede he’s the king of the show! You’ll holler and hoot, he’ll give-"

“Aw right, aw right, I hear ya!” boomed the King himself, scooping up a phone that looked very small in his very large, very gloved hand. The accent rolled out like warm syrup; you could pour pancakes with it. “Hello, you little pink menace. You’re more ‘bout textin’ than callin’, so somethin’ must be up.”

“Dedede!” Kirby sang, delighted, and without ceremony shoved the open phone toward Eri like a treasure he wanted to share.

Eri’s fingers hovered, then took the edge, the way you take a hand when you’re not sure if you’re allowed. “H-Hi,” she said into the tiny hole, as if it might bite.

On the other end: a pause. “Kirby,” drawled Dedede, “who is that?”

“Friend!” Kirby declared, pressing his cheek to Eri’s shoulder as if to annotate the word.

Eri’s mouth bobbed. Then she managed, “Kirby saved me. My name is Eri. Kirby is very soft.”

There was a sigh you could have lain on. “Mm-hmm. He is that,” Dedede conceded, fondness tucked under the grumble like honey under a biscuit crust. “Kirby, where are you?”

Kirby looked around at the skyline, which could have been any skyline if you were from a place where trees were stars and stars were trees. “Dunno,” he said cheerfully.

“Of course you don’t.” Dedede did not even pretend to be surprised. “Bandanna Dee! Put it on the board!”

“Yes, Great King!” chirped a voice just out of frame. A Bandanna Waddle Dee hustled into view, dutiful eyes bright beneath his blue bandanna. He trotted over to a wall-sized whiteboard where, in very tidy handwriting, someone had titled a chart: How Many Dimensions Can Kirby See In A Month. Bandanna Dee uncapped a marker and, with the solemnity of astronomers adding a star, wrote another tally mark. Then he wandered back, stood on tiptoe, and shouted happily into the phone, “Hi, Kirby! How are you doing?”

“Bandee!” Kirby squealed, as if the name itself were a hug. “Kirby good. Food. Friend. City.”

“Good, good,” Bandanna Dee beamed. “Are you safe? Do you uh need spears? Snacks? Directions?”

Before Kirby could decide whether “directions” were edible, a low, smooth voice slid into the conversation, accent curling around the words like ribbon. “Mi amor,” said Meta Knight, and Eri could hear the smile even though the voice wore a mask by habit, “I feel like we should focus on getting Kirby home.”

“Meta kini!” Kirby squeaked, bouncing. He made the syllables into a little song and Eri instinctively swayed.

Dedede made a small noise that, if you could translate it, would have spelled flustered in big, embarrassed letters. “Now don’t you ‘mi amor’ me in front’a the kid ‘less you’re gonna bring me a coffee too,” he grumbled, and there was the sound of a cape, and then the sound of a kiss pressed into the grumble anyway, quick and unapologetic.

Eri’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. Kirby giggled.

Dedede cleared his throat with royal authority. “Mety, who could take Kirby down?”

Meta Knight’s chuckle was warm steel. “Fair enough. No one I can think of. Call us if you do need help, Kirby.”

“Poyo!” Kirby agreed as if that settled the orbit of moons. He leaned into the speaker. “Love you. Bye!”

There was a chorus Bandanna Dee’s “Bye! Stay safe!”, Dedede’s “Don’t eat nothin’ that screams!”, Meta’s soft “Hasta pronto, estrella” and then the line clicked. The ringtone’s echo vanished back into the walls of a throne room where, for a beat after, a king and a knight looked at each other like two people who’d crossed more than one impossible bridge together, and a Waddle Dee put the cap back on the marker with a happy little pop.

Back on the rooftop, Eri handed the phone back like it was a warm stone she wanted to keep in her pocket.

“They seem close,” she said, thinking of the kiss you could hear and the “mi amor” that curled like ribbon. “Are they… friends?”

Kirby shook his head, hard enough that his cheeks wobbled. “Nope.”

She tried again. “They love each other?”

Kirby nodded so vigorously he nearly toppled off the bench. “Love!” he said, patting his chest, then drawing an invisible circle around his own head with both nubs. “Big love. Long. Home.”

Eri’s brain, which had been trained to assume the world came in one narrow flavor, stopped and tasted air. “But they’re both boys,” she said, not as an objection so much as a line she had seen painted and never been allowed to smudge. “Can they do that?”

Kirby nodded again, slower this time, serious. He held up two nubs side by side. “Two boys,” he said. He pressed his nubs together like interlocking rings. “Ring.” He mimed a little party arms up, a wobbly shimmy, the universal sign for cake. “Marry. Yay. Cake.”

Eri stared at the air while her insides rearranged themselves to make room for something that had been missing. It felt like untying a knot you didn’t know your shoelaces had. “They can marry,” she repeated, voice careful. “Boys can marry boys.”

“Mm!” Kirby said. “Girls with girls. Boy with girl. People with people. Good if kind.” He scratched his cheek with a nub, then added with an earnest authority that could have legislated joy: “And dance.”

Eri laughed, a little shocked by her own sound. The rooftop didn’t punish her for it. A breeze went by and did not carry scolding on its back. Somewhere, a kettle boiled and someone shouted that the water was ready, and it didn’t have anything to do with her. “I didn’t know,” she admitted. “I thought… I don’t know what I thought. No one told me things like that.”

“Now know,” Kirby said, as if he had just put a sticker in a book that said Achievement Unlocked. He reached up and patted her horn very gently, like a cat greeting another cat.

For a while they just sat, Eri fingering the little plastic star on her wrist, letting the idea of boys can love boys settle in beside no one is dragging me anywhere right now. It felt strange and good and, most surprising of all, obvious, the way a door looks obvious once someone finally points at it.

Then the other curious thing shouldered its way to the front of her mind, something she’d seen because she had been inside it.

“Kirby?” she said, blushing a little. “Um. Your… stomach.”

“Stummy,” he corrected with pride.

“It’s… a whole other place,” Eri said, words tumbling over each other as if relieved to be out. “When you- when you-” she faltered; he patted her knee in a way that said I know and I won’t do that again without asking. “When I was in there. It was like… floating in space? There was stuff everywhere. Umbrellas. Pans. A picnic? It was… pretty.” She hesitated. “And scary.”

Kirby nodded, unoffended. He tapped his middle with a hollow donk. “Star place,” he said. “Inside-sky. Kirby keep things. Safe. Soft.” He thought, searching for a word he didn’t exactly have. “Pocket… world,” he tried, and looked very pleased with himself.

Eri’s eyes went round. “Pocket world,” she echoed. “Can you… show me? Not-” her breath quickened, then steadied; she pushed the panic down like hair out of her eyes “-not inside. Just… like before. With the Treasure chest?”

“Mm!” Kirby agreed. “No eat friend,” he promised solemnly, holding up one nub as if swearing an oath.

He exhaled very gently. The air tickled. He puckered at nothing and coaxed something out of it like pulling candy from behind someone’s ear. A parasol bobbed into existence, pink polka dots on white, and drifted down. He handed it to Eri. She took it as if it might decide to fly off again.

Another inhale: a scarf, silk and sky-blue, fluttered into his hand. He wrapped it around her shoulders with comic seriousness, tongue peeking out the side of his mouth as he got the ends even. He was very bad at symmetry; she didn’t fix it.

One more: a tiny snow globe, the kind you shake and the flakes tumble. Inside, a castle that looked suspiciously like Dedede’s, except someone had put a hat on it. He shook it; the flakes swirled; Eri gasped and clapped and then hid the clap in the scarf because old habits are sticky.

“How much do you have in there?” she blurted, then clapped a hand over her mouth because greed was rude and she had not earned anything except maybe noodles.

“Lots,” Kirby said blithely. “Kirby ‘splore. Keep.” He tapped his belly. “Stummy is big. Like… sky.” He frowned theatrically. “Sometimes lose spoon.”

She giggled. “You lost a spoon in your… sky?”

“Found,” he assured her at once, affronted at the thought that a spoon could escape him. “Later. In hat.”

She set the snow globe in her lap and watched the last flakes settle. Then, in a very small voice that didn’t want to wake old ghosts, she asked, “When you… took me. Did it hurt you? To copy?”

Kirby shook his head. “Nope. Borrow.” He pointed at his head. “Power visit. Wear hair. Horn. Fix friend.” He mimed spitting out a star. “Then, bye-bye.” He wiggled his fingers as if waving at a departing train. “No keep. No steal.”

Eri nodded. She didn’t have the words for relief; she had the feeling. It was heavy and soft, like a blanket that decided it liked you.

They spent the afternoon that way: learning each other in small bites. Eri learned that “Bandee” was short for Bandanna Waddle Dee and that he had the neatest handwriting of anyone on Popstar. She learned that “Meta kini!” was how Kirby said Meta Knight’s name when he was too excited for syllables. She learned that Dedede called him “menace” but sounded proud about it.

Kirby learned that Eri liked dumplings more than buns, that she didn’t like big doors or small rooms or hands that came at her too fast, and that she found the sound of pigeons comforting in a way she couldn’t explain. He learned that when she laughed unexpectedly she immediately looked around to see who she needed to apologize to, and he made a point of laughing louder so the air would learn to leave her alone.

At one point he pulled out the flip phone again, pressed another button, and swiped with exaggerated care through a gallery of pictures. Eri leaned in.

There were so many friends. A girl with long pink hair and a ribbon, hand in hand with an artist holding a paintbrush twice her size (Kirby tapped: “Ribbon And Adeleine.”). A scientist with pink hair and a fancy suit (tap: “Susie.”). A magician with cat ears and no arms or legs just floating hands (tap: “Magolor.”). Animals stacked like a totem, all looking like they were about to have a very good picnic (tap, tap, tap: “Rick. Coo. Kine.”). A blue blob with googley eyes (tap: "Gooey) The king and the knight in the middle of a festival, fireworks making crowns of their helm and hat, Dedede’s arm around Meta Knight’s shoulders with the casual rightness of someone who’d done that a thousand times.

“They look happy,” Eri said softly.

“Happy,” Kirby agreed. Then he looked at her, tipped his head, and added with great seriousness, “You happy?”

She considered. It didn’t feel like betraying anyone to say “yes.” It felt like giving someone a flower you found on the sidewalk.

“Yes,” she said, and smiled like a sunrise that had been hiding under her tongue.

“Good,” Kirby said, and his relief was so big it made his whole outline brighter for a second.

The sun slid. Shadows lengthened, the tarp’s shade went from bright to cool, and someone downstairs practiced a saxophone with more zeal than aim. A cloud did a very good impression of a fish. Eri yawned, surprised at herself. Kirby’s tummy answered with a tiny mrrrp as if agreeing.

“Hungry?” she asked, teasing now, because she had learned he always was and it was safe to tease that.

“Always,” he said, delighted to be so knowable.

They ate something simple from a stand downstairs onigiri wrapped in crackly seaweed because Kirby had decided the treasure chests should rest and the clerk, upon seeing Eri’s scarf and the way her shoulders were set, refused to take a coin anyway. Back on the roof, Eri told Kirby about the best bite and the worst day and the way Mirio had laughed like he was making the air work better. Kirby listened with his eyes and his little soft “mm”s and no interruptions.

When the first evening lights began to pierce the city, Eri tugged on the scarf. “Kirby?”

“Mm?”

“Do you think… the heroes are mad?”

He thought about this, lips puckered, gaze on a pigeon deciding which antenna to insult next. “Dunno,” he said. “If mad. we make… not mad. Want help. Kirby help later.” He was not flippant; he simply trusted tomorrow like a tool he kept in his pocket world. “But no go back ‘til friend want. No make friend say sad.”

Eri nodded. She still didn’t want to go back. She wanted to be ready before she had to be brave again. Maybe that was what brave really meant, choosing when to go, not just being pushed.

She hooked the little plastic star with one finger and spun it. “When we see your friends,” she said, trying the idea on like a hat, “can we bring them cake?”

“Cake,” Kirby said, as if she’d just discovered a law of physics. “Yes. Two,” he added magnanimously.

“Two cakes,” Eri repeated, and looked properly amazed at the thought of a world where that was a plan you could make.

They watched the city turn its lights on. Somewhere out there were heroes in bandages and friends in ambulances and a very frustrated government committee and a stack of empty folders labeled KIRBY. Up here were a bench, a scarf, a keychain star, and a small, loud certainty: the shape of love wasn’t the problem. The shape of kindness was obvious.

Eri leaned her head against Kirby’s side again. “I’m glad your friends love each other,” she murmured, half-asleep and wholly honest. “It makes the world make more sense.”

“World good,” Kirby agreed, and tucked the parasol a little more over her with the fussy care of a very proud umbrella. “People love. Eat cake. Dance.”

“Dance,” she echoed, and the word was a lullaby.

They dozed like that while the cat finally deigned to acknowledge them with a tail flick, and the saxophone downstairs found something that might be a melody if you tilted your head. On Popstar, a king and a knight stood by a window and watched their own evening collect itself, hands overlapping, talking quietly about portals and pudding and whether Kirby would remember to brush his teeth. In a different city, phones buzzed with questions. On this roof, one answer was enough.

“Kirby?” Eri mumbled, already slipping.

“Mm?”

“Thank you for telling me. About boys.” A yawn. “About cake.”

“Welcome,” he said, voice small and full and sure. “Friend.” He paused, then added, with all the gravity a pink puffball can summon, “We eat cake.”

She smiled in her sleep.

Kirby looked at the sky, decided it looked like frosting, and was very pleased with the universe’s consistency.

Chapter Text

By late afternoon the city felt like it had decided to forgive itself for the morning. The market streets sang: wind chimes like laughter, vendors calling out specials, a busker coaxing a tune from a shamisen that sounded like the sun stretching its spine.

Kirby and Eri walked through it like a matched set of sweets. She had the sky-blue scarf crooked over her shoulders and a plastic star bouncing at her wrist; he had a parasol tucked under one nub like a gentleman cartoon and crumbs at the corner of his mouth because of course he did. When a breeze pushed, he leaned into it; when the crowd swelled, he shortened his steps so Eri didn’t have to hurry.

“Careful,” he’d say, a hand-nub out at curbs. “Step-stairs.”

“Okay,” she’d reply, and take the world one shallow stair at a time.

If anyone stared, at the horn, at the pink, Kirby stared back with the wide, guileless curiosity of a toddler. People broke first and smiled. A few waved. Somebody’s grandma pressed a hard candy into Eri’s hand and then pretended she hadn’t.

They peered into windows. Kirby pressed his face to the glass of a pet shop and fogged it instantly. A retriever puppy pressed its face to the other side. They both thumped their tails (Kirby did not have a tail; he made do). Eri snorted in a way she didn’t know how to apologize for yet and Kirby’s answering “poyo” turned it into a proper laugh.

“Kirby?” she asked, somewhere between a matcha stand and a stall selling keychains shaped like wyverns. “Are you… like a brother? I never had…” She didn’t finish.

“Brudder,” he declared at once, puffing his chest like a marshmallow trying to be a mountain. “Kirby brudder. Soft brudder.” He flexed. It looked like a dumpling trying to intimidate soup.

She nodded, biting a smile. “Okay. Brother.”

They rounded the corner to a bakery that had worked out how to make its smell reach around obstacles. Cakes watched from the cases with naked longing. There was a strawberry shortcake crowned with berries so shiny Kirby could see his own round reflection.

He pressed his nose to the glass. “Cake."

“Cake,” Eri echoed, reverent.

The clerk, who had the supernatural sense for children looking at sugar, appeared with a smile. “Two slices?” she suggested cheerfully. “Or one big one to share?”

“Big,” Kirby said, voice solemn as a prayer. “Share.” He fished a polite handful of coins out of pocket-sky and placed them on the counter with the grave precision of a man paying for his future happiness.

The clerk boxed the cake like it was a tiny, delicious crown jewel and handed it over. Eri took the box because Kirby’s hands had a way of becoming other things and she wanted the cake to feel safe.

They stepped out into the street. The parasol put them in their own little shade. The plastic star at Eri’s wrist pinged the box with hopeful taps. Kirby hummed a low, contented tune, the kind you hum when a nap and a snack are shaking hands at the back of your brain.

The man didn’t mean to.

He was running, hood up, a backpack stuffed wrong and slapping his spine with each step. The water bottles in the shop behind him were still rocking; the owner was still mid-shout. The thief jinked to avoid a delivery guy and caromed into Kirby and Eri’s orbit with the aimless cruelty of accidents.

His arm hit Eri’s hand.

The box flew.

Time hiccuped, the way it does for tragedies of a certain scale.

The cake described an arc that had been designed by a sadist. It turned. It opened. It landed with a soft, wet splutch. The strawberries rolled like little red planets seeking lonely orbits.

Eri froze. Kirby didn’t.

His face didn’t change. Not at first. He stepped between Eri and the running man without looking like he’d moved. His eyes, those simple, oval skies, went very round and very calm.

Somewhere in a memory, a dark star laughed wrong and Kirby had punched it into next week because he thought it had taken his his strawberry shortcake. (It didn't yet it still died)

The running man skidded to a stop because even thieves know when they have stepped on a ritual circle. He looked back, saw the cake carnage, and swore. “My bad, kid, I-"

Kirby’s smile was kind. Very kind. It made the hairs on the back of the thief’s neck wonder if they were on the right head.

“Sorry,” the man tried again, hands up. “Look, I can-"

Eri tugged Kirby’s arm. “It’s okay,” she whispered, because that’s what you learn to say when messes happen around you. “We can-"

The thief’s hand flicked. Water from a fire hydrant down the block bulged, wobbled, and then whipped toward them in a coiling lash. The man’s Quirk kicked on with panic’s gracelessness, more reflex than malice, as he tried to wash the scene, the witnesses, the guilt, away.

Kirby inhaled.

The water didn’t hit them.

It angled midair, developed morals, and sprinted into Kirby’s mouth with an audible decision. The thief yelped and tried to pull it back. The hydrant seemed to shrug and offered him, out of pity, a futile trickle.

Kirby swallowed without swallowing, his form ballooning, smoothing, taking on a gloss. A circlet blinked into being around his brow: gold, with a drop-shaped ornament at the center and two tiny waves curling on either side. A crown fit for a fountain. In his hands, if you can call them that, a column of water spun to happy life, a tame tornado, a tidy ocean pretending to be well-behaved.

Water Kirby blinked.

Eri squeaked. “You’re cute,” she blurted, which was true, and also unwise to say about a creature about to declare war.

The thief took a step back, palms out. “Hey, hey, kid- He threw his hands toward a puddle and it surged into a wall. Water Kirby tilted his head as if admiring technique, then made a small circle with his wrists. The vortex caught the wall by the scruff and turned it into a spiral that wrapped the thief like a very enthusiastic snake.

“Wai-gk-!” he managed before the vortex corkscrewed him off his feet. Up, down, up, down, ducts rattling, crows scolding, the kind of flume that makes carnival lawyers nervous.

Kirby’s eyes narrowed, not mean, exactly, but set. He raised one hand. The vortex tightened. Not much. Enough.

The water-quirk thief knew, intimately and all at once, that drowning is a quiet kind of violence. He forgot how to use a Quirk and remembered he had lungs. He clawed at the spiral and came up with handfuls of river.

“Kirby,” Eri said, voice small and urgent. “Stop. Please.”

The vortex loosened like a fist remembering it was a hand. The thief fell out of it with the graceless splat of wet laundry, coughing, spitting, staring at the crown that was not supposed to be real. Kirby stepped up to him, lifted the water by its throat with a twist, and deposited it back into the hydrant like a librarian putting a book exactly where it belongs.

He bent, picked up a strawberry that had survived the catastrophe by wedging itself under a shoe, considered it, and then very deliberately set it atop the sad ruin of cake on the pavement. He patted it into place with two gentle taps.

“You don’t mess with Kirby’s food,” Eri told the thief solemnly, because she had discovered this is a rule like gravity.

Kirby nodded once, the crown glinting. “No mess,” he agreed, and then added helpfully, “Or die.”

(He did it once and he'd do it again)

“Yes. Or- please don’t,” Eri amended quickly, grabbing his arm and giving it a squeeze that meant please don’t kill anyone today.

Kirby blinked, then tipped his head in a small sorry. He reached into pocket-sky and produced a fresh cake box. The clerk across the street, who had watched the entire sequence with tears in her eyes and a phone in her hand that she had not used because what number do you dial for water crown justice, covered her mouth as Kirby placed the new box on her counter, bowed, and pushed it gently back to Eri.

“Paid already,” he said, which was true in the metaphysics of Kirby’s economy.

Sirens were a part of the city the way pigeons were. They grew louder. The thief looked at the pink thing that had just borrowed his element and almost borrowed his life and decided to become a puddle in his soul. He put his hands on his head and lay down and waited for the heroes who could say you’re under arrest with paperwork instead of with the ocean.

“Are you okay?” asked a hero with a clipboard and a tired smile.

Eri nodded. Kirby pointed at the ruined cake, the crown still gleaming, and made a very sad face.

The hero looked at the replacement box, then back at the sad face . “On behalf of the city,” he said gravely (because sad Kirby makes your soul hurt), “we apologize for the cake.”

Kirby considered this absolution, then brightened and patted the hero’s pen as if it were a very good sword.

They found a bench under a tree. Kirby popped the new box, presented Eri with the first forkful like a knight presenting a boon to a lady, and only after she took a bite the size of courage did he tuck in with honest fervor.

“Kirby?” she said around a strawberry, as the water crown blinked out, leaving hair a little damp and cheeks extra rosy. “Did you… almost drown him?”

“Mm.” He wobbled a hand. “Little drown. Not big. Scare. No die.” He squinted, trying to weigh justice against cake on an invisible scale. “He learn.”

She thought about that, then nodded. “He did knock over our cake.”

Kirby pointed the fork like a moral. “Don’t mess with Kirby’s food.”

“Right,” she agreed gravely. “Rule.”

They ate cake and let the city stitch itself around them. The thief, handcuffed, watched them go by with disbelief that had given up trying to make sense and decided to nap. The clerk slid a small bag with two extra buns across the counter “by accident” to be found later, a gentle conspiracy. Kirby left a coin on the windowsill anyway.

Miles away, in a warehouse that had seen more failed plans than successful ones and smelled like old dust and newer smoke, the League gathered like cats at a broken window.

Twice paced. Then he sat. Then he paced again. Then he paced with a second him, who kept stepping on the first him’s heels. “He went boom!” one of him announced. “He went boom,” the other agreed. They high-fived and then glared at each other for stealing each other’s line.

Toga lay stomach-down on a crate, kicking her feet idly, chin in hands, eyes bright enough to start fires. “It was so cute,” she said, which made Dabi twitch like a man allergic to adjectives. “Pink and round and it turned into a truck and then it ate him and spit her out and then it-" She made a tiny imploding gesture with both hands. “Stars.”

Mr. Compress, sleeve pinned neatly where an arm used to be, inclined his head, the single eye visible above his half-mask narrowed thoughtfully. “I resent the implication that anything was cuter than my performance,” he said, deadpan. “But yes, I noticed my clone didn't show up when you came back.”

"Yeah it punched your copy super far! And the. he killed overhaul." Toga said

Spinner leaned on his sword like it was a soapbox and he was a lizard preaching. “So that’s why we couldn’t find the truck,” he said. “We were all crouched by the overpass like idiots waiting for a show that got canceled.”

Shigaraki sat in his chair like it owed him money, fingers drumming a slow tap-tap-tap that made the crate under Toga suddenly very interesting to look at. Kurogiri’s absence hung in the room like a missing tooth. “Report,” he said, and the air listened.

Toga wiggled her toes and complied. “We got down in the maze,” she said, sing-song syrup hiding a mean slice of steel. “We made the yakuza boy mad, he was so easy to make mad, and then the heroes broke things and went places and we went other places and then-” she grinned, fangs catching the light “this little pink thing appeared. I did not stab it. I could not stab it. It was a truck.”

“Truck,” Twice echoed, then pointed accusingly at the ceiling. “Then not truck. Then truck again. Pick a shape, coward.”

“It punched my copy,” Compress said, dignified even in outrage, “to parts unknown. I am still receiving postcards.”

“Cute,” Dabi said flatly. “Deadly. Adorable murder. Great. My favorite brand.”

“Overhaul,” Shigaraki said, as if tasting a fruit and finding it more bruise than bite.

Twice clapped. Twice slapped his own hands down. “Dead!” “Debated!” Both shrugged, in harmony, which is worse than in dissonance. “He went poof into sparkles like a cheap festival trick.”

“So there wasn’t a transport,” Spinner summarized, flipping his sword over to look at the reflection of his own grimacing. “No truck for evidence, no truck for arms, no truck for bullets.” He looked up at Shigaraki, eyes hot with old anger. “No chance to return the favor.”

Shigaraki’s fingers paused in their tap. He scratched his neck instead, slow, until skin pinked under his nails. “Kurogiri got himself arrested,” he said, voice sandpaper. “Looking for something. So we don’t have our door. We don’t have our driver. We don’t have our get out of jail free card.”

“So we have a puffball,” Dabi said. “And a problem.”

“Okay we need to be strategic,” Shigaraki said, and the word sat oddly in his mouth, but not like a lie. “If you go in guns blazing that thing will kill you.” He looked at Dabi, then at Spinner, then at Compress, then at Toga and Twice, who were inheriting expressions like a coin flipped between them. “Gather intel.”

“On what?” Spinner demanded. “On ‘round, pink, turns into vehicles, possibly an alien."

Toga clapped her hands. “I can shadow the heroes,” she offered, like a girl offering to bring lemonade that might also be blood. “They’re swooning. They’re tired. They’re sloppy. They’ll talk about it. They’ll say the cutest little details. He said ‘Kirby,’ by the way.” She rolled the name on her tongue like candy. “Kirby. It fits.”

“Kirby,” Twice repeated. One of him sighed. The other nodded. “Yeah,” they chorused.

“Don’t touch him,” Shigaraki said, and the warning carried a memory of hands turning to dust, of five fingers and regret. “Don’t touch the girl. Watch. Listen. If he’s a kid” the word made a face in his voice “then he’ll do kid things. Eat. Nap. Show off. We can use that.”

“Can we recruit him?” Spinner asked, pure chaos in the question and not a little admiration. “Kid like that? Pink demon? He’d look great on a poster.”

“Or can we not die,” Dabi said, dry. “Step one: not die.”

Mr. Compress tapped his mask, thinking in the measured iamb of magicians. “Perhaps we borrow the heroes’ eyes,” he mused. “They will start their own search. We ghost behind it. We let their filters filter for us.”

“Fine,” Shigaraki said. He stood up and the chair looked relieved. “Toga. Twice. You saw it. You go. Stay out of the heroes's shadow. Dabi, Spinner, stay. Watch the network. If the Commission breathes, I want to know what it smells like. Compress ” He paused. “Keep the An eye.”

Compress bowed, elegant. “With pleasure.”

“And if you see a pink truck” Shigaraki added, deadpan, “don’t do anything stupid.”

“Define stupid,” Dabi murmured, but even he sounded like he planned to live to turn the question into a smirk later.

The meeting broke with the clatter of small plans pretending to be big ones. Toga stuck her tongue out at the ceiling on her way out because it had been a while since she’d stuck her tongue out at anything and ceilings have it coming. Twice argued the whole way down the stairs about whether he wanted noodles or to avoid noodles because of trauma and settled on both.

Shigaraki was left alone with the open space where Kurogiri should have been. He scratched at the idea of a pink thing eating their schedule, and somewhere deep in his chest something that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a cough shook its head.

“Okay,” he said to the air. “Okay.”

On a different bench under a different tree, Kirby and Eri split the last strawberry with the sacred fairness reserved for siblings and saints. Eri pushed her half toward him at the last second, and Kirby pushed his back, and they both ended up eating the other’s in a messy truce that tasted like trust.

“Do you… want to dance after cake?” Eri asked, emboldened by sugar and rules that didn’t hurt.

“Dance!" Kirby said, because you can put always beside cake and be right.

He hopped down, wiped his hands on his sides because napkins were a concept he respected but did not internalize, and held out both nubs. Eri slid off the bench, set the empty box on the seat like a trophy, and placed her small hands in his.

They wobbled left. They wobbled right. They did a little step they had invented together that looked like two people trying to become a heart and deciding it was easier to be two circles instead. A passerby slowed, smiled, and kept going. The city, for once, minded its business.

When they finished, Kirby struck a pose and Eri clapped, and a sparrow in a nearby tree decided this was a good moment to take a bath in a gutter with sincere, enthusiastic splashing.

Kirby watched, head tilted, and Eri saw his eyes track the water with pure, silly interest. He glanced at her, then back at the sparrow, then back at her, as if asking permission to be amused by small things.

“Go ahead,” she said, mouth tilted. “Watch the bird.”

He did. He giggled when the sparrow sneezed water on its own foot. “Water hat,” he whispered, touching the place the crown had been. “Good hat.”

Eri bumped his side with her shoulder. “You’re a good brother,” she said.

He bumped back. “You good friend,” he said, because some words are truer when you keep them small.

They walked on, cutie patooties with cake breath, leaving behind a rule written in frosting and water: Some things cannot be forgiven. And you don’t mess with Kirby’s cake.

Chapter Text

Hospitals always smell like someone boiled time and added bleach.

Mirio Togata lay in a room that the morning had turned to afternoon turned to evening without asking his permission. He was propped at an angle that made the world look like a slope; a blanket was tucked just-so because a nurse with a power complex about corners had adopted him. Electrodes made a polite forest across his chest. His smile, habit, armor, promise, kept trying to climb onto his face and then sliding off, not because he didn’t mean it but because it weighed too much.

Midoriya sat in the visitor’s chair as if it had asked him to take its confession. His notebook lay open on his knee, but the page was blank and the pen was trembling. The better part of Full Cowl hummed faintly along his veins like a distant train you’re sure you can outrun if the timing breaks your way.

“She must be so scared,” Mirio said softly. His voice was hoarse with use and swallowed screams. “She hates small rooms and bright lights. And those gowns-"

Midoriya blinked. The picture reassembled in his head with painful ease: a little girl with a horn in a tattered hospital gown, bare feet slapping on a filthy corridor, blood tacky on her ankles. He swallowed. “No shoes,” he murmured. “She didn’t have shoes.”

Mirio squeezed the blanket. “The floor’s cold,” he said distantly, as if he’d left part of himself lying on it. “And the tiles aren’t… kind.” His eyes clenched shut, then opened and found the ceiling like a point on a map. “I should be out there.”

“You should be in bed,” said Aizawa from the doorway, voice like sand over steel. His hair hung limp; his eyes were red-rimmed and too awake. He stepped in with the gravity of a man who refused to topple because there were students in the room who would topple if he did. “Both of you should be, one in bed, one at least pretending to sit.”

Midoriya shot up straighter. “Eri-"

“Is not in this building,” Aizawa said, which sounded cruel and was in fact kindness wrapped in a lesson. “We’re searching.” He did not add quietly, because the word had couches and broom closets filled with reasons they weren’t sharing. “Sir Nighteye’s team is running filters. Centipeder has the registries. Uraraka and Asui are resting for the first time in twenty hours. Fat Gum is feeding half the hallway. And you-" He leveled a look at Mirio that was not a scold and not permission and therefore something like respect. “- will be useful when you can stand without clenching your teeth.”

Mirio grinned automatically. “I’m not clenching.”

“You are,” Aizawa said, and then, softer: “And she’s afraid, yes. But she is also… with someone.” He let the absurdity hover and harden into something that could balance on a bedside table. “Midoriya?”

Midoriya looked up, pen knuckled white. “Yes, Sensei?”

“You saw the pink thing up close.” He said it as neutrally as a man could say the pink thing and have it still be truth. “You believe he, Kirby wants to help?”

Midoriya remembered a nub held out to a shaking child. A head tilt that took fear as a puzzle to be solved with softness, not a problem to be smashed. A water crown and a truck and the look on Eri’s face when the star had tucked her onto safety. “I do,” he said, and his certainty surprised him enough to take the sting out of the guilt for a heartbeat. “He… he felt like a kid.” His throat worked. “A very strong, very scary kid.”

Mirio’s eyes warmed. “Then maybe she’s not as scared as we think,” he said, trying the thought on like a shirt he wanted to fit. “Maybe she’s… eating cake.”

A nurse swept in with a clipboard and the authority of a goddess in crocs. “It’s rest time in twenty minutes,” she said briskly. “And if either of you tries to ninja your way out of my ward I will personally call Recovery Girl and have her scold you until your hair turns gray.”

Midoriya blinked. "We're teens-

“Don't care it will be grey,” she said without blinking, and disappeared.

Aizawa let out what, in a different life, might be called a chuckle. “Sleep,” he ordered. Then, when Midoriya opened his mouth: “Midoriya. That was an order.”

Midoriya closed his mouth. Mirio eased back. The monitors ticked. Somewhere down the hall, a machine made a beeping sound that suggested it was thinking rude things about the heart it was attached to.

“She’s scared,” Mirio said again, softer, because some sentences don’t change no matter how many times you fold them.

“And someone’s carrying her,” Aizawa replied. “Let yourself picture that for five minutes.” His voice went even lower, like a hand on a fevered forehead. “Then sleep.”

Midoriya nodded. He closed his eyes and, because his teacher had asked him to, pictured a small, round, ridiculous hero carrying a little girl down a street. The image refused to be anything but tender. It put socks on her in his head so the pavement wouldn’t bite.

He didn’t know that, a few districts away, that picture was deciding to become true.

You can live inside a moment for a long time without noticing the edges until they scratch you.

Kirby noticed the edges when he looked down and his eyes didn’t find red shoes. Eri had been walking beside him across a patchwork of sun and shade up a block of silky asphalt, down a slice of old cobbles and the rhythm of her steps had a flinch in it, tiny and brave. He’d been talking, if you could call poyo and “look bird” and “bun smell!” talking, and she’d been answering with smiles and the kind of nods you give to a baby brother who’s actually ancient.

Now he frowned at her feet.

They were small. All feet are small to a puffball, but these were small in the way things are when they’ve been asked to grow around pain. The bandages he’d wrapped earlier had gray bruises where city had leaked into the weave. Her toes, hugged the ground like it might bring them closer to safety.

He stopped so suddenly that a pigeon, mid-waddle behind them, almost bumped him.

Eri stopped too, because she had learned that when Kirby ceased being momentum and became statue, something was About To Happen.

He pointed at her feet. “Cold?” he asked, because you begin with the simplest true thing.

She blinked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Then, instinctively, she tried the smile that meant I promise I’m fine, please don’t make a fuss. It bent in the middle. “It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t want to… bother you.”

Kirby’s mouth became a tiny o of astonished offense on behalf of the universe.

“Bother?” he repeated, as if he had never considered the word could be attached to you deserve not to bleed when you walk. “No. No bother. Friend feet hurt. Kirby fix.”

Before she could argue, because she would, because children who have learned to be small always do, he scooped her up.

It wasn’t dramatic. He didn’t do a superhero dip or a bridal sweep. He simply put both nubs under her knees and behind her back and lifted, as if she weighed what she weighed (which was not much) and the air was cooperative (which it often was for him). She yelped, then steadied, arms going around his round shoulders on reflex. He was warm. He was very good at being portable furniture.

“Kirby carry,” he announced, more to the street than to her, as if warning it to behave.

“B-but-” she tried, because not being a bother is a religion with a hard catechism. “I can-"

“Kirby fast,” he said, and set off.

He didn’t sprint, he didn’t need to. He moved at that Kirby-pace that looks like a bounce and covers ground like a rumor. He took alleys not because they were shorter but because they had less grit. He hopped curbs with the care of a waiter carrying soup. He angled his body so her horn wouldn’t bump street signs. He glared at a pebble as if it personally had something to answer for.

The first store with shoes and clothes was not a boutique with curated playlists and three shirts that cost rent. It was the kind of place where the bell over the door had been there longer than the paint on the frame, where the owner knew five kinds of parents and three kinds of children and stocked for all of them. Mannequins in the window wore the current idea of cool; a handwritten sign promised Socks 3-for-500; somewhere, behind a row of hoodies, a radio cheerfully lied about traffic.

Kirby shouldered the door with the polite intention of a gentleman and a battering ram all at once. The bell went ding with alarm.

The clerk looked up, expression moving from Hello! to …what? to Oh jeez, protect the child in a single clean arc. She was about thirty, hair up in a hurry, the kind of face you trust with picking your haircut when you can’t form words. Her eyes flicked to Eri’s bare, bandaged feet, to the hospital gown swallowed by a scarf and a too-big sense of self-effacement, back to Kirby’s set mouth and round determination.

“Hi,” she said, switching gears without missing a beat. “Welcome. I’m Hana. Looks like we’re having A Day. Let’s get you two sorted.”

Eri, still in Kirby’s arms, tried to apologize with her posture. Kirby said, “Shoes,” like a king ordering the tide to go away.

Hana’s smile softened into something like a blanket. “We can do shoes,” she said. “What size?”

“Small,” Kirby said at once. Then, remembering his research method for bun sizes earlier, he added, “Soft. No hurt.” He paused, then, exquisitely serious: “strawberry.”

Hana’s mouth twitched. “Soft and no hurt and strawberry,” she repeated, grabbing a little long tray, a measuring sticker, and the sense of humor that keeps retail from eating your soul. “We might have something. You know what? We’re doing this right. Do you want to carry her, or should I-?”

Eri stiffened. Kirby’s arms tightened very slightly. “Kirby carry,” he said gently.

“Got it,” Hana said, reading the room like a pro. “We can measure while you hold. Toes to heel.” She knelt on the shop rug without hesitation, the better to be eye-level with a child who had only met kindness at height.

Eri’s breath fluttered. Kirby leaned his forehead against hers. “Safe,” he murmured, and set her carefully on a stool he dragged over with a foot. He knelt, tiny, round, and pulled a towel out of nowhere.

Hana blinked. “Did that...come out of your-"

“Stummy,” Kirby said, busy. He set a shallow basin beside the stool, also out of nowhere. He poured water from a silver teapot that had no business being there and tested it with a nub. “Warm,” he announced.

Eri stared between basin and towel and Kirby’s face as if trying to locate the trick. “Where-"

“Pocket,” Kirby said causally, “For… stuff.” He looked at her feet, then at her face. “Okay?”

She looked at Hana. Hana nodded once, the kind of nod that says I’m on your team even if I don’t know the rules. Eri nodded back. “Okay,” she whispered.

Kirby handled her feet like they were made of the same stuff as his best parasol. He eased the bandages free with the patience of a person who has time for this because nothing is more important than this. The skin beneath was not as bad as it could have been and worse than it should have been, red where friction had insisted, raw in two small places where tile had tried to keep her. Eri watched his face for flinches. He didn’t give her any.

He washed her feet with the warm rag in slow circles, humming nonsense under his breath. He made a game of the worst bits; he blew on a sore spot and made a little boo! noise like a spell. Hana handed him a tiny packet of sample foot balm without comment. He dabbed it on with solemn concentration. He conjured clean, soft bandages and wrapped them lightly, tucking the ends in with a flourish. He did not kiss her toes because some boundaries are holy; he settled for tapping the tips with his nub. “All done,” he said proudly. “Soft.”

Eri was crying. She was trying not to; she was holding the tears in her nose and eyebrows like a person trying to carry too many groceries up the stairs. Hana pretended to adjust a box of belts on the shelf so the kid could have the privacy of a stranger at the right distance.

“Thank you,” Eri managed, the two words doing the work of at least twenty.

“Welcome,” Kirby said, as if he hadn’t just rewritten three chapters of her internal book titled The World.

Hana clapped her hands gently, bringing the universe back into its right shape. “Okay! Socks.” She pulled a package from a display, small, cotton, ankle, with tiny stars stitched at the cuff. She held them out like a secret. “Try these.”

Eri touched the fabric like it might purr. “They’re… pretty.”

“And practical,” Hana said briskly, as if prettiness needed a lawyer. “And if anyone tells you you can’t have both, you refer them to me.”

Kirby took the socks, dramatically shook one out (it poofed), and slid it over Eri’s clean, warm foot. The little star kissed her ankle. Eri giggled, hiccuped, and then made the brave decision to let a stranger put her foot into a sock for her. People came in pairs. Safe and choice. She could have both.

Shoes came next. Hana did the measure, sticker, pen, the ritual lengthening of a child’s toes as if by magic and disappeared into the aisles like a hunter into a forest. She reemerged with three boxes: a plain pair of link sneakers, a strawberry themed pair with supportive cushioning and a little cloud embroidered on the side, and a pair with tiny LED lights in the heel that blinked when you stomped.

Eri’s eyes went to the lights like moths do. Then, because children who aren’t used to wanting ask permission from the air, she glanced at Kirby.

He wobbled in place from the effort of not immediately yelling YES. “If friend want,” he said, straight-faced and adult, then blew it by whispering: “Blinky.”

Hana hid a laugh that would have come out as a squeal. “Let’s try the clouds first,” she suggested. “Make sure we’ve got the right fit. Then you can test the blinkies like science.”

The clouds fit like apologies that actually change behavior. Eri stood. The sole cushioned the memory of tile away. She took a step. Another. Her face did that thing faces do when something good happens to feet, surprise at how close joy is to the ground. “They’re… soft,” she said, wonder cluttering the corners of her mouth.

“Walk,” Kirby encouraged, backward-stepping, arms out like spotter panels.

She walked. She didn’t flinch.

“Blinkies,” Hana said, because rewards shouldn’t be delayed past the point of poetry.

They blinked. Of course they blinked. Eri stomped carefully, then stomped not carefully at all, and when the heels lit up she let out a laugh that Kirby had only heard twice today and every time it felt like winning.

“We can… get two pairs?” she asked, with the caution of a person who has learned that abundance has a test at the end.

Kirby nodded so hard his crown (which had vanished) nearly reappeared from sheer enthusiasm. “Two,” he agreed. “Cloud for long. Blinky for fun.”

“Deal,” Hana said, because sometimes the adult’s job is to agree to sanity.

Clothes were less like shopping and more like excavating a new person. Eri gravitated to a soft hoodie the color of morning sky with a little stitched star near the hem, to leggings that didn’t rub, to a cotton dress with pockets (Kirby shook her hand when she said “pockets” because he respected priorities). Hana found a bundle deal on underwear because the universe can be decent in small ways. Kirby pointed solemnly at a beanie with a pom-pom. Eri tried it on, and then her hand went to her horn, halfway between pride and hiding.

Hana hesitated in the polite, professional way of people who have been trained not to assume. “Do you want hats that… make room?” she asked, quiet.

Eri’s throat did the thing where it closes around three different answers. Then she looked at Kirby, who was watching her as if the choice were a star and he was its friend. “No,” she said, and her voice didn’t tremble. “I want it out.” She lifted the beanie off, smoothed her hair back with both hands, and chose a headband instead—a simple blue one that made her look like what she was: a little girl allowed to be pretty on purpose.

“Excellent,” Hana said, and meant it so hard that both of them relaxed.

Toiletries were a pile of small dignities: a toothbrush that wasn’t grey from too many mouths, a little bottle of shampoo that promised peaches, a hairbrush with gentle bristles. Kirby held the hairbrush like a weapon and then tucked it away with reverence.

He paid with a treasure chest because of course he did. Hana did not count the coins because she knew a plot device when it walked into her shop; she rang up a number that would not make her boss yell and then closed the register with a conspiratorial wink. Kirby, in turn, placed a shiny coin she’d never seen on top of the counter by the stapler and patted it like a tip. “For kindness,” he said simply.

Hana swallowed around the knot that retail puts in your throat when someone remembers you’re a person. “Come back if the shoes rub,” she said. “Or for… anything.” She glanced at Eri’s scarf, at her eyes. “Anything.”

Eri nodded. Her eyes shone. “Thank you,” she whispered again.

“Any time,” Hana replied, and meant it in the way of women who have declared small sovereign nations inside fluorescent buildings.

Outside, the sidewalk felt like a new country. Eri’s socks hugged her ankles and the clouds hugged her arches and the blinkies hugged her inner six-year-old, who had thought perhaps she might not be allowed to live here. She stomped once, for science. The lights flashed. She stomped again, for joy. The lights obliged. Kirby stomped in solidarity even though his shoes did not blink and he was deeply offended by this oversight.

“Good?” he asked, unable to contain the smile that made his whole body become punctuation.

“Good,” she said, and then, because good was not big enough, “Better.”

He fussed the hoodie onto her shoulders (she could do it herself; he made a show of letting the sleeves “mysteriously” find her hands). He adjusted the headband with the clumsy care of a brother trimming bangs. He stepped back and tilted his head as if appraising a painting he’d had the honor of hanging.

“Pretty friend,” he said solemnly.

She blushed so bright the blinkies tried to keep up. “You too,” she said, with the goofy bravery that comes with new socks.

They walked with the lope of People With Errands, a category Eri realized felt weirdly luxurious. Kirby bought a backpack that looked like a star had decided to hug a zipper and packed it with the small life they’d just conjured into being. He insisted on carrying it because he liked the weight. Eri insisted on carrying the toothbrush because it was hers, and the having of it kept unspooling in her chest like a ribbon.

They found a public restroom where the mirror didn’t lie and the sink water ran warm when persuaded. Kirby guarded the door like a bouncer at a very exclusive club that only admitted one small girl and her horn. Eri scrubbed her hands and face until the hospital smell fled. She tried the peach shampoo just enough to make her hair smell like summer. When she came out, Kirby did a little clap without thinking and she curtsied in the ridiculous, wonderful way of children who have just discovered that performance is allowed.

“Food?” he asked after a minute, because joy burns calories.

She grinned. “Cake?”

He put a hand over his heart as if she had just.. well offered him cake. “Cake.”

They split a cupcake on the curb, because sometimes thrones are concrete and frosting is communion. Her blinkies flashed when she kicked her heels against the step. He licked frosting from his cheek and pretended to be offended when she dabbed a bit on his nose and he went cross-eyed to see it.

“Kirby?” she said around a crumb, because there was always another question now. “Can we… get pajamas?”

“P’jamas,” he repeated with reverence. “Soft ones. With stars.” He looked at the sky as if waiting for applause. “Sleep good with soft.”

“And a blanket,” she added quickly, then looked immediately guilty. “If that’s, too much-"

“Too little,” he said, scandalized. “Blanket and friend bear,” he declared, as if conjuring stuffed animals were part of his power set.

They did not buy a bear. Kirby produced one from pocket-sky with a flourish that made a toddler in a stroller three feet away drop his pretzel in awe. The bear had a slightly crooked smile and a belly that asked to be poked. Eri hugged it the way you hug the first safe thing that looks like it might be allowed to keep you.

Evening leaned in. The city’s edges softened. The neon signs blinked awake. Somewhere above them, on a rooftop with functional binoculars and a head full of bad ideas and soft spots, Himiko Toga watched them from a shadow.

“They’re adorable,” she whispered, half disgusted, half besotted. “If I stab the puffball the girl will cry. I hate when girls cry unless it’s-" She stopped. She felt Twice bump her shoulder. “Okay, okay,” she sighed. “We’re just watching. Gathering intel. I can do that. I can. …I could totally, like, adopt them, though.”

“Don’t,” Twice said, both of him, and they wrote KIRBY BUYS SHOES in a notebook because intelligence has to start somewhere.

Down on the sidewalk, Eri tugged at her hoodie pocket, eyes suddenly heavy. “Do we have… a place to sleep?” she asked, the question a feather that still managed to fall hard.

Kirby nodded. He pointed at the sky. “Roof,” he said. “Garden roof. Bench. Blanket. Safe.” He tapped his chest. “Kirby watch.”

She nodded. She believed him not because he could turn into a truck or swallow the sea, but because he had put socks on her and washed her feet like it wasn’t a tax on his patience.

They went back to the rooftop with the tarp and the cat (who had grudgingly decided that perhaps someone else could own this building between three and five p.m.). Kirby shook the blanket out stars, of course and made a nest with the efficiency of an animal that had napped on every planet. He tucked Eri in and then made a show of tucking the bear in, too, because equality under blanket law is important.

“Kirby?” she said into the folds, sleep already putting stones in her pockets. “Thank you. Again.” She looked at her shoes lined up neatly beside the bench. “For… making me a person.”

“You are person,” he said, gently offended. “Always. Kirby just… add shoes.”

She laughed, a tiny, tired bell. “Add shoes,” she repeated. “Okay.”

He settled beside her, round and watchful, little red feet sticking out from under the edge of the blanket like punctuation marks. The city breathed. Somewhere, a boy with a notebook finally fell asleep with his face in a page because his teacher told him to. Somewhere else, a boy with a smile like a sun he’d learned to carry even in eclipse dreamed of a little girl eating cake.

Up here, Eri drifted, one hand curled around the headband she’d taken off and tucked under the bear’s paw, the other resting on Kirby’s side, as if to make sure the roundness stayed between her and the world.

“Night,” she mumbled, almost gone.

“Night,” he said, and the word was a ward.

Her blinkies were lined up like tiny lighthouses, heels to the bench, ready for tomorrow.

Kirby watched the skyline a long time, unblinking and very awake, as a kind of promise. And then, when the cat finally decided to sleep on his feet without asking, he allowed himself to close his eyes.

New shoes. New steps. And a road that, unbelievably, was beginning to feel like it led somewhere that didn’t hurt.

Chapter Text

Morning found the rooftop garden rinsed in gold, the tarp snapping softly, the city yawning into birdsong and bicycle bells. Eri woke with her cheek pillowed on Kirby’s side and the bear tucked under her chin like a promise. For one perfect blink she forgot to be careful. Then memory shuffled its cards, cake, shoes, hoodie, dancing, and laid them down in a pattern that did not hurt.

Kirby was already awake, blinking slow and content, tracing a chalk line with his eyes between two drifting clouds. When Eri stretched, the new hoodie made a whisper sound that felt like a hug. She sat up, tucked hair behind her ear, and glanced at the skyline.

“Kirby?” she said, hesitant, because apologies are hungry little things that eat their way out. “I’m… sorry you had to lose your pretty star. When you saved me.”

She meant the Warp Star: that blazing, friendly comet that had shattered into glitter under Overhaul’s swipe. It had been beautiful. It had been gone. People were like that, mostly.

Kirby blinked once as if he had to buffer the idea of loss. Then he shook his whole round body like a dog coming out of a lake. “No prob,” he chirped. “Star back.”

He hopped to the parapet, dug in his pocket-sky, and, without fanfare, without ceremony, lifted one nub and drew a shape in the air. It was as if he were tracing the outline of a song he already knew. Light gathered in his wake, a golden smear that thickened, brightened, condensed, and then, with a chiming ting, became.

The Warp Star hovered, cheerful as ever, throwing warm coin-colored light on the rooftop, on Eri’s small astonished face, on the cat who pretended not to be impressed and failed.

“Oh,” Eri breathed, a child’s prayer to a solvable universe.

Kirby grinned, hopped once, and the star dipped in invitation. He held out both nubs. “Ride?”

Eri looked at her blinkies lined neatly by the bench, at the bear tucked back into the blanket, at the scarf around her shoulders. Then she nodded. “Ride.”

They mounted like professionals, Kirby scooting to the front with practiced wiggle, Eri settling behind him, hands around his middle, head tucked where the glow warmed her forehead just so. The star hummed like a big cat. The city leaned back to make room.

“Hold,” Kirby reminded, as if she would forget. “Tight.”

“I will,” she promised, and did.

They rose.

The world became soft pieces: the noodle shop steam, the laundry lines, the alley cats scolding breakfast pigeons. Air slid through Eri’s hair and decided to be gentle. She pointed once, twice, there was the park with the tilted swing; there, the mural of the tanuki; there, the river that tried to be a mirror and never quite succeeded. Kirby banked at her finger like a trained thought. He kept low, kept kind, kept out of the sightlines of drones and curiosity and the peculiar gravity of hero work.

They settled in a quiet, empty park tucked between old apartment blocks and a schoolyard deserted for weekend. The grass grew with that stubborn tenderness city grass has; a sandbox waited like a paused story. A fountain, not on, made a circle where wishes could land when it remembered. Eri hopped down, blinkies flashing, hoodie sleeves tugged over her knuckles. Kirby followed, star hovering at his shoulder like a well-trained dog.

He was about to suggest a game (tag, or Kirby’s favorite, which was “touch the cloud with your eyes and feel proud”) when his flip phone sang.

“Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, that’s the name you should know Kirby, Kirby, Kirby, He’s the star of the show! He’s more than you think, He’s got maximum pink-"

It cut off mid-glee because Kirby had already flipped it open. Eri giggled at the jingle one of those songs that burrows into your brain and builds a tiny condo but she didn’t recognize the voice. (Master Hand had recorded it himself, once upon a Smash tournament, upon request after Kirby had heard Luigi's ring tone) Kirby had loved it. Eri, who did not know what a tournament was beyond the's base TV’s confusing noise sometimes, only knew it made her want to clap.)

“Poyo!” Kirby sang into the receiver, standing straighter, as if warmth were coming through the speaker.

“Bonjam, Kirby!” bubbled a voice as clear and cool as the inside of an ice sculpture.

Eri tilted her head. “Bonjam?” she murmured, trying the shape of it.

Another voice burst in, sparking like a firecracker. “Woah! Who is that?! She sounds so Jawaii!”

“Friend!” Kirby declared, popping with pride.

The third voice arrived with command tucked under courtesy. “Compose yourselves, sisters. Kirby, report. Are you whole? Are you-” a tiny, impatient breath “- causing collateral again?”

Eri peered over Kirby’s shoulder, as if she could see through the phone by wanting it enough. Kirby, delighted, pressed the speaker button so the air could listen.

The screen showed three faces arranged in a tidy trio: pale blue hair like a frost waterfall, red spiking like a flame in a breeze, yellow cut in a hime fringe under a beret with a proud sigil. No noses; blue eyes like polished marbles; markings that made their expressions look like they had been drawn beautifully by a very serious child.

They did introductions with a flourish that suggested this had been practiced in mirrors and on battlefields. “Francisca,” intoned the blue-haired one, bowing with a lace of politeness. “Frozen General.”

“Flamberge!” yelped the redhead, nearly toppling her own frame from enthusiasm. “Blazing General, your favorite!” She blew a kiss because kisses are hot.

“Zan Partizanne,” finished the yellow, with the crisp precision of someone who makes lists for fun. The upside-down hearts on her beret gleamed. “Lightning General and the leader of this trio.”

They looked, Eri thought, like a costume book had put its favorites on one page and then animated them. They looked like trouble in the best way.

Eri bobbed a little bow she had learned from watching TV through a partially open door. “Hello,” she said. Then, shyer: “What does… bonjam mean?”

Francisca’s smile softened, the kind of smile that only appears when someone asks for a word and you happen to have one in your pocket. “It is a greeting in our native tongue,” she said, her voice with the cadence of snow falling in a place that knows how to be quiet. “Would you like to learn some Jambastion words?”

Eri’s eyes went round. A new language felt like a secret path down the side of a mountain. She nodded, careful and eager. “Jes,” she said a beat later, trying it on.

Flamberge whooped. “She’s a quick one! So Jawaii,” she sang, elbows on the frame, chin in hands. “Okay, okay, class is in session!”

Zan cleared her throat, because leadership is often just clearing your throat at the right time. “We will keep it simple and practical.” (Which is what people say before they hand you a sword and a poem.) “Repeat after us, Miss…?”

“Eri,” Eri supplied.

“Eri,” Zan repeated with pleasant gravity, as if tucking it into a column under assets. “Very well. First: Bonjam means greetings.”

“Bonjam,” Eri echoed. It felt soft and snug, like a good sock.

Francisca lifted a hand, fingers floating like leaves in a current. “Jamanke means thank you.”

“Jamanke,” Eri tried, and the word sat right in her mouth, firm and polite and proud. She glanced at Kirby, who bobbed with approval, even though he had already decided he would not be learning any new words today if he could help it. He had plenty. He liked the ones he had.

“Vun means very,” Zan continued, pace smooth. “As in, ‘Vun Jawaii’ if you wanted to embarrass Flamberge.”

“HEY,” said Flamberge, who was already grinning. “But yeah. Vun Jawaii! That’s you, kid.”

Eri flushed, and her blinkies would have flashed if she’d been wearing them. “Vun Jawaii,” she repeated, pointing at Kirby.

Kirby struck a pose and nearly fell off the star. “Ha!” Flamberge cackled. “She gets it.”

“Jes means yes,” Francisca added, fingers sketching a check mark in the air. “Janno means no.”

“Jes,” Eri said, half-nod. “Janno,” she said, and felt weirdly taller.

“Majicious means tasty,” Flamberge put in, eyes going half-lidded like a cat thinking about cream. “Use that for cake.”

“Majicious,” Eri said dutifully, then looked at Kirby, who was nodding so hard his whole outline jiggled. “Majicious cake.”

“Goppoko means surprise,” Zan chiseled, with a hint of mischief. “As in, ‘Goppoko! There is a puffball in my kitchen eating my pudding.’”

“Kirby never- ” Kirby began, then remembered times. He put a nub over his mouth. “Maybe.”

“Jonto means soon,” Francisca said. “Jorrow means sad.”

Eri’s eyes lowered, her thumb rubbing the edge of the star keychain. She tried them carefully, looking for splinters. “Jonto,” she said softly. “Not Jorrow.” The sisters, who had also learned to live around sharp words, nodded as if the child had just translated mercy into their dialect.

“Rigga means painful,” Zan continued, and the word cracked sharp like dropped ice. “Japologa means I’m sorry.”

“Rigga,” Eri said, and put it on a high shelf in her mind where it could not fall on her head without permission. “Japologa,” she added, and sent it down a river. She had carried too many apologies that weren’t hers.

Francisca twirled a lock of blue hair, choosing with care. “Ji means me,” she said. “Mafo means lie. Jif means if.”

Eri tried them in the smallest possible sentence. “Ji Eri,” she said. It felt like signing a flower. “Mafo is bad,” she added, making a face. “Jif… we get cake, I will say majicious.” She looked immensely pleased with herself.

“Jaway means I forgot,” Flamberge offered, unabashed. “I use that one. Juh means huh? for when your friend does something ridiculous, which will happen. Mapop means hope. Bastion means heart.”

“Mapop,” Eri whispered, because that one slipped past the guard she kept on her throat and went right where it belonged. She tapped her chest. “Bastion.”

All three sisters softened visibly. Even Zan’s posture unclenched by a degree. “Good,” Zan said, and did not explain what.

Francisca laced her fingers, glanced at the others, and ventured into a thorny thicket. “Merījamasumāsu means merry Christmas.”

Eri blinked. “What is… Christmas?”

Silence fell in the hilarious way it falls when three very dramatic women discover a gap in a child’s joy. Flamberge clutched at the frame. “Jam, JAM, what do you mean what is-" She flailed for cultural analogies that did not exist here. “It’s food! And sparkles! And presents! And you wear dumb sweaters! And you sing badly on purpose! And- and Francisca cries at lights!”

“I do not cry,” Francisca objected, already misting. “I, glimmer. Zan help.”

Zan, who had once tried to express feeling by lighting a fortress on fire in a very strategic way, frowned at the empty park, at the little girl in the hoodie, at the puffball holding the phone like it could hug them back. “It is a… winter festival,” she said, decisive but gentled. “A time where families or those who choose each other gather. There is food. There are gifts. There is an excuse to tell people you love them and blame it on the calendar.” She paused. “You… have not had this?”

Eri shook her head slowly. “No.”

Kirby made a small noise, halfway between “poyo” and the sound a kettle makes when it is about to sing. He reached up and patted her shoulder twice, then a third time because two didn’t feel like enough.

“Okay,” Flamberge declared, slamming her palm on an invisible table that probably had scorch marks already. “New mission: we schedule a Merījamasumāsu Jonto for you, kiddo. We’ll do it out of season. That makes it punk. We’ll call it Merījamasu-Maybe!”

Francisca, who had already begun mentally decorating with blue ribbons, nodded fervently. “Jes. We will make it Jhappy,” she said, and smiled at her own small joke.

Zan cleared her throat again, but it was less command, more emotion batted into shape. “Continuing. Jamba New Year means happy new year. Jhappy means happy. Jambuhbye means goodbye. Jaitty means good night. Jawaii means cute.”

“Jawaii,” Eri said, pointing at all three sisters in turn with mischief that wasn’t afraid of itself anymore. Flamberge preened; Francisca hid a smile; Zan pretended not to be pleased and failed.

“Konjy means crazy,” Zan added, because vocabulary is incomplete without a word for what Kirby is doing now.

“Konjy,” Eri repeated solemnly, aiming it at Kirby and making him beam.

Francisca clasped her hands. “Jamedetāna means congratulations. Use it on someone who's trying to help.”

“Jamedetāna,” Eri practiced, and then, impulsively, pointed at herself, at her shoes, at the hoodie. “Jamedetāna, Ji Eri.”

“Jes,” Francisca murmured, eyes warm, and then Flamberge, unable to resist the gravitational pull of chaos, leaned in conspiratorially.

“Okay, last one,” she whispered. “This one’s special. Use it wisely. Jamblasted. It means God damn it.”

“Flamberge,” Zan hissed, scandalized. Francisca covered her mouth with her hand pads. “She’s a child.”

Flamberge waggled her brows. “She’s a Jawaii child with a life. She deserves good words.” She winked at Eri. “Say it only when you drop cake frosting on your hoodie, okay? And only when adults aren’t listening. Except me.”

Eri, suddenly conspiratorial too, whispered back, “Jamblasted,” and then clapped both hands over her mouth, eyes huge, as if the air might tattle. Kirby snorted a laugh so big it nearly unseated the star.

Zan sighed the sigh of sisters everywhere, which means: fine. “Majaja means again,” she said, reclaiming the chalk. “As in, ‘Repeat this lesson Majaja when you have slept.’”

Eri drew a breath, heart doing a little dance in her chest. “Jamanke,” she said quietly into the phone. “For teaching me. Ji Eri. Jhappy. Mapop.” She searched the piled marbles of new words and found the one that rolled to her hand. “Bastion.”

Francisca put a palm over her heart. “You’re welcome,” she said, and dabbed very casually at the corner of her eye like someone adjusting an imaginary monocle.

Flamberge pointed a finger at Kirby. “You better feed her something Majicious soon, Pink. Or I will come there and eat your stove.”

“Poyo,” Kirby said, saluting with his nub and somehow conveying both yes ma’am and please do.

Zan inclined her head, the chain between the hearts on her collarette glinting. “Kirby, keep your collateral damage under Konjy levels. Eri-” and here her voice did something soft and careful “-Jambuhbye for now. Jonto we will speak again.”

“Jambuhbye,” Eri echoed, and Kirby punched the speaker off, then flipped the phone closed with a flourish so neat it made the star tinkle.

They stood in the quiet park with a sky that looked like someone had washed it and wrung it out. For a long breath neither of them said anything. Then Eri looked down at her shoes, lifted her gaze, and smiled in a way that showed all the new room in her.

“Kirby?” she said. “Bonjam.”

Kirby threw his arms up, thrilled, as if she had just performed an S-rank combo. “Bonjam!” he squeaked back, mangling the vowel a little and not caring.

She looked at the fountain, at the sandbox, at the star hovering like a tame comet. “Jonto… cake?” she tried, eyes bright, testing the word in a sentence like a sparrow testing air.

Kirby’s entire soul lit up like a heel light. “Yes,” he said, adopting exactly one new word and then pretending it had always been his. “Cake. Delicious .”

They set up a picnic on the grass with the efficiency of friends who had practiced on rooftops. Kirby produced a gingham cloth from pocket-sky because of course he did. He followed it with a small plate that said World’s Best Boss (Dedede’s, liberated by circumstances), two forks, and a cake that should not have fit in the space between molecules. Eri clapped, then put a hand over her mouth, then took the hand down because she was allowed to clap.

“Jamanke,” she told him gravely, and he bowed like a very round waiter.

They ate and practiced, turning the park into a classroom where the lessons were all alive. Eri held up a particularly gorgeous strawberry and said, solemn as a priest, “delicious.” Kirby nodded, mouth full, and echoed

She pointed at a squirrel that stole a crumb and whispered, “Goppoko,” and they watched it dart up a trunk, its tail insulting gravity and manners.

When a cloud swallowed the sun for a second and the breeze stitched a cool seam across the grass, she shivered and pulled the hoodie tighter. “Jorrow?” she said, asking if the sky was sad.

“Tomorrow ,” Kirby assured, tapping the sun’s edge as it returned. “Happy sky. Hide game.”

She practiced apologies that didn’t belong to her and discarded them like wilted leaves. “Japologa,” she said once, and then shook her head, frowned, and corrected herself: “Janno. Not my Japologa.” She peered at Kirby. “Mafo… bad.” He patted her hair gentle, proud, quiet.

She pointed at her chest. “Ji Eri,” she said again, as if she liked the sound. “Bastion.” She touched the little star keychain. “Mapop.”

Kirby, who had never once in his round life been able to sum up everything important in a sentence and had never needed to, nodded hard enough to make the plate wobble. “Me Kirby,” he said. “Friend.”

They played after, because language should end in a game when you can manage it. Kirby chased his own star in lazy loops around the fountain, making Eri shriek with laughter at his pretending-to-almost-fall and actually-falling-on-purpose. They built a castle out of sandbox sand with towers like softened popsicles. Kirby tried to inhale the entire sandbox once and Eri yelped “Janno!” so loudly he swallowed his giggle instead and let the sand be.

They wandered to the swings. Eri sat, new shoes scuffing the dust, hands tight on the chains. Kirby stood behind and pushed with gentle, steady nudges enough to make her stomach flutter, not enough to trigger old alarms. She giggled, hair lifting, hoodie fluttering, shoes blinking faintly in the shadow every time her heels kissed the air.

“Happy?” Kirby asked, breath puffing.

“Jhappy,” she said, and the word fit her mouth like it had been made there.

A train went by somewhere, a long metal sigh. A helicopter flitted the edge of the sky and then meandered away like a bored fly. No one watched them that meant harm; Toga and Twice were blocks away, peering into entirely the wrong deli and arguing over onigiri fillings as if surveillance were a snack, because Kirby did not linger long enough in any one frame to be caught by anything except joy.

When the sun knocked politely at the afternoon and asked to be let in a little lower, they packed up. Kirby brushed the crumbs into his pocket-sky because ants are friends and he didn’t want to throw a party without asking. Eri tucked the plate into the backpack because the words on it made her giggle.

“Jambuhbye?” she said to the park, practicing on the trees and the sandbox and the squirrel, which flicked its tail like a curt bow.

“Soon,” Kirby corrected, pointing at the swings with a promise.

They mounted the Warp Star again. Eri glanced at the sky as if checking if there was a sign she should read. There wasn’t. That was the point. Kirby felt her breathe in and set his own pace to it. The star rose.

As they skimmed rooftops and alleyways, Eri leaned her cheek against Kirby’s back. “Kirby?”

“Mm?”

“When your friends said… Merījamasumāsu.” She sounded out the syllables with care. “Can we do that? Even if it’s not… winter?”

Kirby thought about lights strung where they don’t belong and gifts given for no reason except love and cake that arrived just because calendars are excuses. He thought about Dedede and Meta Knight and Bandee and the Mage Sisters and how they would all absolutely burn a hole in reality to throw a child a party out of season. He thought about Eri’s face learning new words and what it had looked like when she said Bastion.

“Yes,” he said, simple as daybreak. “We do. Big. Very big.”

Eri smiled into his back. “Jamedetāna,” she told them both in advance.

They banked toward the garden roof as the afternoon laid its head in the crook of the world’s elbow. The cat awaited, pretending this was routine. The tarp flapped a hello. The bench remembered their shapes. The city below kept being itself, flawed and loud and important, while above, on a square of sky borrowed by kindness, a little girl and a pink hero set down a star and practiced a language that had words for cake and hope and goodbyes that promised soon.

Chapter Text

The green light came with a stack of caveats and a very long look.

Aizawa leaned one shoulder into the doorframe of the ward where Mirio dozed, the afternoon sun banding the blanket in pale gold. “You get one pass, Midoriya,” he said. “No rooftop heroics. No chasing a comet over traffic. If you spot them, you talk. If they run, you let them run. You hear me?”

Midoriya bobbed his head so hard the chair beneath him creaked. “Yes, Sensei.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I’ll talk,” Midoriya said, steadying the word with both hands. “If they run, I let them run.”

Aizawa’s eyes softened minutely. “Good. Keep your phone on. If anything smells like an ambush, you call.” He turned to go, then added without looking back, “And try a different tack than the Commission would. You’re good at… not being scary.”

That landed like a weirdly warm pat on the head. Midoriya swallowed, nodded even though no one was watching, and tucked his notebook into his hoodie pocket like a talisman he had outgrown and couldn’t quite throw away.

He started with the simplest lead: shoes.

The bell over Hana’s shop door gave a tired ding and Hana herself looked up from pricing a stack of beanies. Her face went through a full conversation hello / are you buying / oh, a hero / oh, that hero, in a heartbeat.

“Welcome-” she began, then caught the way Midoriya’s eyes had already snagged on an emptiness in the corner of the counter, the space where a strange shiny coin had sat for an hour before she tucked it in a drawer and decided it was a good-luck charm. She sighed like someone deciding to be brave in retail. “You’re looking for something.”

Midoriya’s shoulders slumped with relief. “You saw a girl and a puffball Are they were they-?”

“Cute,” Hana said dryly. “And underdressed. Not anymore.” She came around the counter, all brisk competence and a warmth that didn’t feel like charity. “He carried her in, like she was a teacup made of breath and the first thing he did was set up a tiny foot spa he summoned from his… pocket dimension? He called it his stummy. He didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. I’ve worked this strip long enough to roll with it.”

Midoriya tried not to look like his brain had tripped on the words foot spa. “He washed her feet?”

“Like it was his job.” Hana reached for a little measuring sticker and tossed it back into its drawer because there was no child here to measure. “New bandages. Socks. Shoes two pairs. Hoodie, leggings, headband, underwear, the whole dignity kit. Paid in a way that would give my accountant religion.” A smile pried at her mouth. “He called himself Kirby, if that helps. Girl seemed like she thought she was a burden at first."

Midoriya’s chest squeezed. The notebook stayed in his pocket because any pen he tried to use right now would shake. “Did she seem… scared?”

“Like a person who knows what fear is and is trying on other things,” Hana said. “Wanted blinkies. Picked clouds for the walking.” She shrugged. “He did not let go of her hand unless she wanted him to. That matters more than anything I can put on a receipt.”

Midoriya nodded, once, grateful enough to make the air itself ache. “Thank you,” he said, bowing too deep for a shop that sold socks.

“Don’t bow to me. Bring her by later when it’s less… everything. First fittings are on the house.” Hana’s eyes flicked to his sneakers, beat to hell in a way that said runner, fighter, boy. “And eat something.”

He promised (and meant it), thanked her again (and meant it more), and stepped back onto the street with a map that wasn’t a map. He turned it over in his hands anyway.

The city had already begun its late afternoon murmur, buses sighing, a delivery scooter whining past with a stack of boxes like a precarious wedding cake. Midoriya ran his usual loops in unusual ways, keeping his head down, his ears open. He checked parks, rooftops with easy access, the kinds of alleys that look like shortcuts and aren’t. He asked a street vendor with a face like sun-baked leather if a pink ball and a little girl with a horn had come through.

“Bought two taiyaki,” the vendor grunted, flipping fish-shaped molds with sacred economy. “The round one inhaled them like a vacuum. The girl giggled. The round one laughed at her giggle. It was very tiring. Left that way.” He jerked his chin.

Midoriya followed, heart beating the way it beats when a trail is fresh and kindness is a breadcrumb. He perched on a mail drop, scanned the cross streets, dialed Full Cowl up enough to put a green hum in his calves-

-and froze as a light brushed across the corner of his vision, not sunlight, not siren, something warmer. He looked up.

A star slid between buildings like a coin through practiced fingers. Not a metaphor, an actual star, small enough to ride and bright enough to make the air around it look briefly more honest. Two figures sat astride it: a round pink being in front, a slim child in a sky-blue hoodie behind, hands around his middle, hair teasing in the slipstream. Eri’s horn caught the light and drew a quick silver line in the air. Kirby leaned with the easy instinct of someone who had learned balance in another gravity.

Midoriya’s breath left him in a single, ridiculous oh.

He didn’t know what the thing was called. He filed it in his brain as flying star board??? And the fact nejire was right about him being able to make another and told his legs to go.

Full Cowl flared; the world sharpened. He bounded off a mailbox, up a wall to a balcony rail, across to a narrow ledge that hadn’t asked to be a highway and was being one anyway. He leapt a gap that would have made his mother faint. The star drifted right and he did too; it dipped and he collected the drop in his knees and bled the force into brick like a practiced apology. He was not going to catch them. He knew that halfway through the second leap, his body doing math his brain didn’t have time for. But if he kept them in sight, if he could at least-

“Excuse me!” yelled a woman watering plants as he passed, and he apologized to her petunias without stopping.

The star eased higher, played along the seam where rooftops make a secret road. Midoriya followed until the calves of his soul burned and the little voice in his head that sounded like Aizawa sighed: He told you not to chase a comet over traffic.

He slowed. He watched the star slip into a wash of light and be lost among the reflections like a fish disappearing under sun-blind water.

He stood there panting on a second-story ledge with a laundry line flapping a pink towel in his face that had three cartoon ducks on it. He let his head bump the wall once in frustration, then twice because once had felt petty and twice felt like ritual. He took out his phone, thumb hovering, then didn’t call because what was he going to say? Saw a star. It was fast. He breathed. He climbed down like a sane person instead of jumping, because he could be taught.

He found them hours later, by chance and because some chances are the kind that look like a kindness taking the scenic route.

A pocket park tucked between a public library and a corner curry shop that always smelled better than any menu promised. A bench, a half-dead hedge, a swing set that squeaked like it enjoyed complaining. Kirby sat on the low wall around the hedge, legs dangling, thumping his heels lightly against stone. Eri stood in front of him, her hood down, headband neat, blinkies blinking softly as the shade shifted. She had a small notebook open, the kind you get from gacha machines with holographic cats on the cover, and she was writing very carefully, tongue peeking out.

Kirby watched her with the contentment of a moon. He said something that was half purr and half nonsense. She giggled, then looked up and saw the boy in the green hoodie whose eyes always looked like they were already apologizing for everything.

Her face went through surprise, calculation, then decided on kindness.

“Bonjam, Mr. Deku,” she said, bright.

Midoriya blinked. “H-Hi,” he managed. “Eri.”

Kirby tilted his head. “Green boy,” he announced, pleased, as if he had solved for X.

Midoriya tried not to be delighted at being called green boy. He lifted his hands palm-out, the universal sign for I am not here to net you. “Can I… talk with you? Just for a minute?”

Eri glanced at Kirby. Kirby shrugged, which looked like a marshmallow trying to get out of a scarf, and patted the low wall beside him. Midoriya approached like a deer learning to be brave and sat with what he hoped was a non-threatening amount of butt.

“First,” he said, because it was the only place to start, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

Eri bobbed. “Ji Eri jhappy,” she said, beaming. Then, seeing his confusion prickle like a breeze, she added, more normal, “I’m happy. With Kirby.”

“Poyo,” Kirby confirmed, patting his own chest like a stamp. “Friend.”

Midoriya’s shoulders eased a fraction. He let out a breath so careful it wouldn’t disturb a dandelion. “We’ve been worried. Mir-uh-Lemillion. Sir Nighteye. Everyone. We… want to keep you safe.”

“Safe,” Eri echoed, rolling the syllable like candy. “Safe is…” She searched for the word, eyes flicking to the little notebook, where she had underlined a set from earlier. “Bastion,” she decided, tapping her chest. “Heart. My heart.” She touched Kirby’s side. “Kirby.”

Something in Midoriya’s throat did a weird hiccup that might have been a sob’s smaller cousin. “I-yeah. That makes sense.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “There’s… a place we can take you. People who can help. A school called UA-"

"No." Kirby said

“Janno,” Eri said so after, the word clear as a bell.

Midoriya blinked. “It’s not, uh, tests all day,” he added quickly, tripping over his own attempt at reassurance. “And you wouldn’t have to go to classes until you’re ready. We have, friends there. Teachers who-"

“School boring,” Kirby declared, making a face like he had licked chalk. “No. Nap better. Cake better.”

Midoriya’s mouth did a very small, very helpless smile because if anyone had earned the right to veto the concept of standardized education, it was the pink ball who’d beaten statistics into confetti and eaten the leftovers.

Eri frowned a little, not at him, at the idea. “UA?” she tried, sounding out the letters with the careful suspicion you give to pills. “Is it… rigga?” She made a face and corrected herself. “Painful.”

Midoriya shook his head so fast his curls bounced. “No. No! It’s- it’s safe. It’s-we’ll make it safe.”

She peered up at him. Her voice went soft. “Jif… my bastion is with Kirby. Then… Jonto, Mr. Deku.” She spread her hands around the bench, as if to say, Soon, but not now. Here.

He heard soon. He heard not now. His brain tripped on the first word she’d dropped in that wasn’t his. “Jif,” he repeated blankly, not wanting to interrupt to ask, not wanting to pretend he understood and lie to whatever she had rebuilt in her mouth. He filed the syllable under kid language with an apologetic asterisk and moved on.

“Could we-” he tried again, steady and careful, “-meet somewhere? Later? I could bring-" He stopped. He had no idea what to offer. A stuffed animal? She had a bear. Books? She had a language that had shown up like a carnival and she’d learned it in a day. A carrot on a stick? He didn’t know that Kirby would pull the stick apart, eat the carrot, and then ask if the stick came in strawberry.

“I can bring Sir Nighteye,” he said instead, and then winced because that was the wrong tack; she’d last seen Nighteye bleeding. He pivoted. “Or just me. Or-Lemillion. He… he wants to apologize for-” He swallowed. “For not being there sooner.”

Eri’s face softened. “Jamedetāna,” she said sympathetically, like congratulations for trying. Then, seeing his blankness again, she huffed a laugh. “You're trying.”

“Sorry,” Midoriya admitted, ducking his head, thoroughly undone by a child telling him gently that he was, in fact, a grown-up. “I’m a little, uh. slow.”

Kirby leaned forward and patted his knee. “It okay,” he said with immense magnanimity. “Green boy learn. Slow okay. Kirby slow at words. Fast at punch.” He demonstrated a tiny flurry of jabs in the air and then remembered he was being serious and folded his nubs primly.

Midoriya laughed, and the sound came out not like a crack in something but like sun through an old newspaper. “I noticed,” he said. He sobered, looked between them. “Eri-… will you tell me what you need?”

She thought about that, because being asked and being allowed to answer were different sports and she was new at both. “Ji Eri needed… shoes,” she said solemnly, and lifted one heel to blink at him. “Got them. Need… safe. Got it.” She touched Kirby’s arm. “Need… time. Jonto. With Kirby. Then, maybe, UA. When not… jorrow.” She made a face and groped for the Japanese. “When not sad in the belly.”

Midoriya nodded like he was signing a treaty. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He pulled his phone out, thumb dithering. “Can I- this is weird- can I give you a number? If you ever want to call. Or text-"

"No." Kirby said, knowing damn well Marx would clown Midoriya's ass into oblivion if Kirby invited him to talk in the group chat

Midoriya let out a sigh

"Okay...okay." Midoriya said a bit disappointed

“Mr. Deku,” Eri said, very formal, as if entering the number had also entered him into some polite society. “Jambuhbye Jonto. We will go.” She glanced at the sky, then at the hands of nothing in particular. “Kirby?”

“Poyo,” he said, already sensing the wind of the moment shift. He slid off the wall, flipped the phone shut with a snap that sounded like a small door closing kindly, and hopped up to call the star because sometimes you invent your exit and sometimes your exit is a golden friend that comes when you think please hard enough.

“Wait,” he blurted, because wanting things doesn’t make you entitled to them and he knew that and he asked anyway because hope is an idiot on purpose. “Could I walk you to the corner? Or stay here until-"

Eri shook her head, kind and small. “Janno,” she said, gentle as a hand on a fevered forehead. “Mr. Deku… you are kind. You are-" She searched, found it. “Mapop. Hope. But, school-" Her face scrunched. “Boring.”

Kirby, helpful, chimed in: “No UA. Nap. Cake.” He leaned over and stage-whispered, “School have test?” He made a face like someone had said the word beet.

Midoriya choked on a laugh. “Sometimes,” he admitted.

“Jamblasted,” Eri muttered under her breath

"Huh?" Midoriya said, blissfully unaware Eri just swore

(He would have a heart attack if he found out)

He stood back. He didn’t step between them and the star. He didn’t reach. He didn’t lecture. He put his hands in his pockets so they wouldn’t betray him and watched a little girl step onto a miracle like it was a bus she had finally learned was allowed to be hers.

“Eri,” he said, and his voice felt like something he had cleaned before using. “When you’re ready… I’ll be there. Not to drag. To walk.”

She blinked fast. “Jes,” she said, one word he (assumed) he knew, and then, because she liked him and he was trying so hard to understand a language without learning it, she added in normal, “Yes.”

"Jambuhbye." Eri said

Kirby tipped an invisible hat. “Bye-bye, green boy,” he said. “Be safe. Eat. Sleep. No cry.”

“I’ll try,” Midoriya promised, and meant it the way you mean it when you are half twenty and half a child and entirely a hero.

The star rose. Midoriya jogged a few steps because his body hadn’t gotten the memo that it was time to be still, then stopped and lifted a hand. Eri lifted hers back, small fingers spread, and he realized vaguely that he had no idea what her favorite color was, whether she liked dogs, whether she knew what it was to be bored in a good way. He would find out.

They slid up into the bright, the star making the air around it look briefly like a nicer version of this world. Midoriya stood in the pocket park between a curry shop and a library and let them go.

He didn’t call Aizawa right away. He sat on the low wall and wrote Jonto and Bastion and Mapop in his notebook with the care of someone cataloguing rare birds. He underlined cake? three times and didn’t know why.

A pigeon landed on the bench, addressed him as the person most likely to have crumbed, decided his pockets were not a bakery, and left.

He stood finally, stretched, rolled his shoulders until something popped, and headed back the long way on purpose. As he walked, he practiced saying, very quietly to himself, “Jambuhbye,” and then, “Jonto,” because he wanted to attempto to understand them more.

Up above, on the kind of road only people who are willing to be surprised ever find, a little girl leaned into a puffball’s back and said, “Mr. Deku is… mapop.”

“Mm,” Kirby said, pleased, and banked the star toward the part of the city where cake was most likely.

Chapter Text

The conference room at Nighteye Agency was held together by coffee and pencils. Morning laid itself flat across the long table where maps and reports had begun to breed. Sir Nighteye stood at the head, alive, pale, crisp, his hands resting on a folder as if it might try to run. Aizawa leaned in the doorway like a cat that had agreed to be furniture. Ryukyu and Nejire took the left side; Uraraka and Tsuyu the right; Bubble Girl and Centipeder hovered with the professional anonymity of very competent wallpaper. A seat was left open for Mirio and then immediately filled by a tablet on a stand, camera pointed at his hospital grin.

Midoriya arrived with the same breathless energy he’d had since forever and also since yesterday, when he had watched a star carry away a child he promised himself not to fail again. He set his battered notebook down like a sacred text.

“Report,” Nighteye said, and the room’s hum trimmed itself into listening.

Midoriya swallowed. “I found them.”

Uraraka sat forward. Tsuyu’s fingers laced. Nejire practically vibrated.

“They’re okay,” Midoriya said quickly, because that’s the bandage you put on the first cut. “Eri’s wearing proper clothes, Hana, the clerk at the shop, helped them get shoes and a dress.” He couldn’t help the smile that climbed into the words. “Her sneakers… light up. Strawberries on the sides.”

Nejire clasped her own face: “I love her already.”

“More,” Midoriya added, flipping to a page where he’d drawn a star that took up half the paper. “Nejirewas right about the star. Kirby made another one. It’s… he called it with his phone? And it just… appeared. He and Eri ride it. It moves like, like it’s listening.”

Nejire flicked a fingergun and winked at no one in particular. “Knew it.”

“Did you engage?” Aizawa asked, a teacher’s calm pinned over a parent’s worry.

“I spoke to them,” Midoriya said. “We walked a block together. I didn’t push. I told her Mirio is okay and that we’re… not trying to take her. I asked if she’d consider a room at U.A. for rest. She said no.”

There it was. The word the room had been avoiding sat down on the table, crossed its legs, and asked for tea. Silence percolated.

“Reason?” Ryukyu asked gently.

Midoriya scratched the back of his neck. “She wants to stay with Kirby,” he said simply. “She called him her… ‘bastion.’ I think it means heart. She trusts him. And Kirby… ah… has strong feelings about school.” A tiny, apologetic smile. “He said it was boring.”

Nejire snorted. “Relatable.” Aizawa gave her a deadpan that would have felled a lesser senpai. Nejire recovered with a chirp: “I meant… kids think that! Kids! Not me! I’m a scholar.”

Mirio’s voice, tinny but bright, pushed through the tablet. “He’s protecting her,” he said, more to himself than the room. “Good.”

Nighteye’s thumb tapped twice on the folder. “Any indication of coercion?”

Midoriya shook his head so hard the curls at his nape tried to play. “No. She’s… giggling. She’s… learning.” He hesitated, flipped to another page. “This is going to sound odd, but Eri’s using… new words. A lot. Like a… code. Or a game. She kept saying things like ‘bonjam’ and ‘jhappy’ and ‘mapop.’ I asked what they meant and she translated a couple, hello, happy, hope.” He lifted his palms. “I think, she and Kirby… made up a language? As a kind of… play?”

Nejire squealed softly. “A secret language! That’s so cute!”

Tsuyu tilted her head. “Kero. Or it might be a way to put distance between the old meanings and new safety. Kids sometimes rename big feelings so they can carry them without dropping them.”

“Whatever it is,” Midoriya said carefully, “I didn’t understand half of it. And Kirby didn’t use it. He speaks… simply.”

Aizawa rubbed two fingers over his mouth as if trying to erase a worry line. “So. Eri’s speaking in a code. She refuses U.A. They’re airborne sometimes. And the pink puffball who murdered the most dangerous sociopath in Japan thinks classes are boring.” He exhaled through his nose. “Well. Shit.”

Rock Lock, bruised and bandaged and leaning on a crutch in the corner like stubborn punctuation, barked a humorless laugh. “Finally somebody says it.”

Nighteye’s gaze drifted to the whiteboard where “KIRBY?” had already accrued a constellation of unanswered questions. He recapped, measured: “Capabilities confirmed, super strength, speed approaching instant relocation, matter manipulation via inhalation, energy projection via ‘star,’ possible power replication via ingestion, regenerative output, healed me with Eri’s Quirk.” He let out a breath. “Limitations unknown.”

“Motives?” Ryukyu asked.

Midoriya didn’t hesitate. “Exploring,” he said, then immediately corrected himself with a sheepish glance. “And keeping Eri safe. In that order?" eyebrows tried to find his hairline. “

Bubble Girl, pen poised, scribbled, reading aloud as she wrote: “Highly curious. Highly responsive to Eri."

“Good,” Mirio said weakly. “She’s… smiling?”

Midoriya nodded. “She told me to tell you ‘jhappy.’ For ‘ji. For her.”

Mirio’s mouth wobbled. Ryukyu reached over and, without looking like she was doing it, tilted the tablet screen so he wouldn’t have to watch himself try not to cry.

“Next moves,” Nighteye said briskly, because love can be logistics. “We watch. We don't want to spook them. Understand?"

Everyone nodded

“Good,” Nighteye said. “Bubble Girl, draw up a friendly network list. Florists. Bakers. Shoe stores. Pharmacies. Parks staff. Anyone who might cross their path without a cape.”

“On it,” Bubble Girl said, already halfway through a phone tree.

“Define rules of engagement,” Aizawa continued, practical. “No chasing. No cornering. If you see them, talk. Do not touch without explicit invitation. Avoid words like ‘custody’ and ‘safehouse.’” He eyed Midoriya. “You did well.”

Midoriya tried not to glow and failed.

Tsuyu raised a hand, finger up. “They like parks,” she said. “Kero. And rooftops. And laundry lines. We can… perch nearby. Not too close. If they look up, we wave. If they look away, we vanish.”

Nejire bounced. “And rooftops! I can float just high enough to look cute and not terrifying.”

“Let’s teach ourselves how to be scenery,” Ryukyu said with a thin smile.

“Mirio,” Nighteye said softly to the tablet, “I know you want to sprint out the window.”

Mirio, who had indeed been eyeing the window in the background like a lab rat contemplating a maze, grimaced. “You know me too well, Sir.”

“You will stay in bed,” Nighteye said, gentle as a judge. “Recover. There will be a time to stand in front of her and say hello. It is not when you can’t run ten steps without someone yelling about your stitches.”

“Bonjam,” Mirio said to himself, mostly so he could practice the word he didn’t understand and still liked the taste of. “Okay.”

Uraraka lifted a finger. “What about… gifts? Not bribery. Just… offerings.” She blushed at her own earnestness. “We could… leave things where they might find them. A plush toy. Bandages. A bento.”

Fat Gum, who had slotted himself into the room in that way big people can when they’re quiet enough to be polite, brightened. “I make a mean tonkatsu bento. We can tape a note to the lid. ‘For Kirby and Eri. No strings.’”

“Do not write ‘no strings,’” Aizawa said immediately.

“Right, because that makes it sound suspicious,” Fat Gum agreed. “Just a heart?”

“That’s also suspicious,” Rock Lock said. “But… do it.” He rubbed his temple. “We’re… babysitting the strongest unknown in Tokyo with snacks.”

Nighteye’s mouth twitched. “History suggests snacks are effective with certain demographics.”

“Are we comfortable with not… using Foresight?” Ryukyu asked Nighteye gently. “On Eri. Or… the other one.”

Nighteye stood very still for a heartbeat. “I am,” he said. “I have misused assurances before.” He looked down at his hands, then up. “And there are ethics. Seeing a child’s future without consent is… an intimacy we have not earned. With Kirby, I suspect it would be like staring at fireworks through a keyhole. Possibly dangerous. Certainly rude.”

“Agreed,” Aizawa said, surprising no one.

Centipeder tapped a list with an efficient digit. “Logistics: If they are airborne, we cannot follow at speed. If they are on foot, they move quickly but with stops. Preferred locations: small parks, rooftops within two kilometers of the noodle shop mentioned in prior reports. Time windows: morning to mid-afternoon most active. Night: indoors.”

“Kirby’s phone,” Nejire added, snapping her fingers. “He called that star with a ‘boop.’ If we can get a bead on the signal-"

“No hacking,” Nighteye said instantly. “We will not turn their lifeline into a leash.”

“Okay,” she said, chastened and then immediately grinning again. “Then we’ll just… watch for sparkles.”

“Names,” Tsuyu said softly. “Kero. Did you tell Eri yours, Midoriya?”

“She calls me ‘Mr. Deku,’” he said, blushing like it was a secret crush and not an honor. “She doesn’t know… Izuku yet. Or U.A. She knows ‘Mr. Deku’ and ‘Kirby’ and… ‘friend.’”

Mirio smiled like he’d been given medicine that actually works. “That’s… enough.”

“Plan, then,” Nighteye summarized, crisp: “Soft surveillance. Civilian network. Friendly offerings. No pressure. If contact occurs, talk, don’t take. If danger occurs, intervene without escalation. We repeat until trust becomes routine.”

“Majaja,” Midoriya murmured, without thinking.

Nejire cocked her head. “What was that?”

“Uh, Eri said it,” he blurted. “It means ‘again.’ I think.”

Rock Lock made a face like he’d just seen a dog wear shoes. “So the kid’s speaking in tongues and Deku’s picking up the accent. Great.”

“It’s not tongues,” Uraraka said, half in defense, half in wonder. “It’s… healing with glitter.”

Aizawa’s mouth might have quirked. Hard to tell.

“Dismissed,” Nighteye said, and the room breathed back into motion.

Midoriya hung back. When the others had drifted away in currents of tasks, Nighteye beckoned him into his office. The blinds were half-open, splitting the light into overly organized lines.

“You did well,” Nighteye said, and Midoriya felt the words land in his chest with the weight of a medal and the gentleness of a hand on your head.

“I didn’t… bring her,” Midoriya said bluntly.

“That wasn’t the task,” Nighteye replied. “You built a bridge. Bridges don’t get medals. They get used.”

Midoriya swallowed. “She told me to tell Lemillion she’s… happy. For her. That she said ‘hope.’ I didn’t know where to put that in the report.”

“Here,” Nighteye said, touching the desk. “Between the stapler and the part where you save the world incrementally.”

Midoriya laughed softly. “Yes, Sir.”

“And Midoriya,” Nighteye added, eyes sharp. “Do not try to speak her new words at her. Not yet.”

Midoriya blinked. “Because-?”

“Because she built a room,” Nighteye said. “It has her furniture in it. We are guests. We knock. We wait to be invited in. We do not show up speaking the house language as if we own the place.”

Midoriya felt a sudden, fierce gratitude for adults who had learned from their mistakes. “Okay.”

“Now go home,” Nighteye said, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Shower. Eat. Sleep. Practice being boring so you can be interesting longer.”

Midoriya tried to salute and succeeded in making a small, awkward gesture that meant I’m trying my best.

Hospital rooms are where hope practices walking with an IV pole. Mirio propped the tablet up on his knees and watched the ceiling with the patience of a man trying to convince his body to be a good listener.

A nurse came in with a scowl that was actually concern. “Don’t you dare get up.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Mirio said, then immediately lied with his eyes toward the window.

She sighed. “You’ll see her,” she said, so simply even his heart had to believe it a little. “Let Mr. Deku buy you the time.”

Mirio picked at the sheet. “He said she said ‘jhappy,’” he murmured, too pleased with the soft ridiculous word to care that it sounded silly. “I’m going to make an idiot out of myself learning all her little words, aren’t I?”

“That’s the job,” the nurse said. “Adults learn kid.”

Mirio grinned. “Yes, Ma’am.”

He slept, because he had been told to, and because somewhere a girl had shoes.

Soft surveillance looks like kindness wearing sunglasses.

Bubble Girl walked her beat with a tote that said BUY LOCAL and a list of shopkeepers who now knew to text if they saw a small, horned girl with a round guardian. She didn’t pretend to be invisible; she pretended to be ordinary extraordinarily well.

Centipeder negotiated with park staff to approve a “donation” of new first-aid kits and clean blankets that were then “forgotten” near certain benches. A bento appeared under a gazebo, a neat box with tonkatsu and a little container of strawberries and no note and absolutely no strings.

Ryukyu took to walking in her human form, sunglasses tucked into her hair, buying taiyaki she did not eat and leaving one near a set of swings when no one was looking. She did not look surprised later when both were gone.

Tsuyu perched on a railing across from the noodle shop that had been reported as a maybe. She watched the light move across the door, the chalkboard, the small universe of the window. If anyone asked, she practiced being a frog in the sun.

Uraraja left a plush star at the end of a slide in the quiet park Midoriya had described, then walked away without turning around, which is a skill not everyone has. She did not see who took it. She did not need to.

Aizawa slept. For an hour. Then he woke, fed his cat, and walked the rooftops with the sort of slouch that does not spook birds or children.

Midoriya didn’t chase the sky. He put “Bonjam” and “Jhappy” and “Mapop” in the margin of his notes and drew a box around them labeled words to not say yet with a skull and crossbones doodled for comedic effect. He ate a decent lunch because he’d promised. He texted Mirio a photo of a strawberry he’d bought from a vendor and then thought better of it and brought the strawberry to the nurse’s station instead.

Eri and Kirby did not know any of this, which was the point. They sat under a tree and shared the taiyaki with the meticulous diplomacy of small siblings: one bite apiece, no nibbling on the corner you’re holding hostage. Eri held up the little star plush with both hands and declared it “Jawaii,” and Kirby nodded solemnly because everyone knows acknowledging a star plush’s cuteness is legally binding.

They spoke, occasionally, in words that were not the ones the city had given them. Eri tried out “Jast” (vow), on a promise to Kirby that she would practice double-knotting even when no one watched. Kirby said “poyo” to everything because it was a language that kept treating him well.

Aizawa watched them from a rooftop and, because no one was looking, let his mouth soften half a centimeter. He scribbled a note to himself about buying spare shoelaces. He did not write “well shit,” but it hung in the margin anyway, next to a doodle of a very round star.

Back at the Agency, Nighteye moved pins on a map three inches to the left because his spatial sense told him three inches to the left is where kindness would be on a good day. He turned over his stamp pad and stamped a form and then put the stamp away because not everything needed a stamp today.

“Keeping an eye,” he murmured to the empty office. “Keeping an eye.”

Sometimes, that’s the whole job. Not to catch. Not to corral. To witness. To be the adult who can look at a pink meteor and a girl with a horn and say to the world, we will make room.

Later

Eri had learned a lot of new things lately,how to double-knot laces, how hope feels when it sits down for lunch, how to say hello in a language that tasted like sugar, and when you have learned that many things, the world starts to look like a book with a finger holding your place. There was time for one more page before bed.

“Kirby,” she said, swinging her strawberry-sneakered feet from the bench. “Can we… see more of your friends? Say Bonjam to them?”

She expected the flip phone to appear. She had begun to think of it as a small, dependable doorbell to other worlds. But Kirby, who almost never did the thing you already expected because he was too busy doing the delightful one. tilted his head, went hmm like a thoughtful kettle, and reached into the someplace that wasn’t his pocket and wasn’t the sky either.

He withdrew… a sock.

It was enormous. Not people-enormous; story-enormous. White with a multi coloured line near the top, at the toes , a knit so soft you knew someone had made it by hand while thinking good thoughts.

Eri blinked. “Juh…?”

“Sock!” Kirby announced, holding it up with both nubs like a trophy. His eyes shone. “Magic.”

She looked at it, at him, at the sock again. “Magic?”

“Magic,” he agreed solemnly, then turned the sock so the opening faced them, like a mouth about to sing.

“Do we… call someone with it?” Eri asked, leaning forward, polite to the possibility.

Kirby shook his head, took two bounce-steps back, and, before she could ask how or why or is this what normal feels like now, he vaulted forward and dove into the sock like a salmon into a waterfall.

“Kir-!” she yelped, then reached instinctively to catch him and toppled with perfect slapstick timing. The sock’s mouth was bigger than it had just been, the way doors widen when they like you. Eri tumbled through a sudden softness, a tunnel made of grandma’s sweater and museum carpet, a slide that smelled faintly of clean laundry. The world said whoosh in a good way.

The sock spat them out.

They landed on their backs in a field the color of grass. Eri’s first thought, only barely a thought, really; more a sensation interpreted by a surprised brain, was that the ground felt like pants. Not on-top-of-pants, but pants. Soft twill, stretchy corduroy, stitched in long friendly lines. When she pushed a palm against it, it gave a little and then sprang back. The grass wasn’t grass; it was a perfect, hundreds-of-needles imitation of grass, sewn into the earth with thread you could see if you looked close. Felt, not rocks, dotted the ground. One had a ladybug painted on it, very seriously.

Eri laughed once, not because something was funny but because the part of her that had decided to be a child again had just seen a carousel.

She sat up. Her hand was… yarn. Not a bandage nor a glove nor a trick of light: strands of yarn, neatly arranged into Eri-shape, bound together by some sweet logic that didn’t let things unravel. Her hair was a cascade of soft white string; her horn, a neatly crocheted spiral that looked both adorable and exactly like itself. She wiggled her toes. Her shoes flashed, then stitched little sparkles that settled back into the fabric of the world.

“This is a Goppoko,” she breathed, delighted.

“Poyo!” Kirby popped up next to her, grinning as if he’d known this would tickle her. He, too, was yarn now: a neat outline of pink thread, two big embroidered eyes, his red feet perfect felt ovals. He shook himself like a puppy and made a faint fwip noise, as if he were lighter than air because someone had replaced every atom with a balloon.

“Kirby! You’re here! You didn’t tell me you were coming!” called a voice that bounced like a rubber ball and then landed on Eri’s shoulders like a cape.

Eri turned.

He looked exactly like Kirby after someone had told a story about the sky and then glued that story to felt: round, happy, stitched. Azure instead of pink. Orange feet. Brown eyes with a spark of I’ve thought this through somewhere behind them. A golden felt crown perched on his head, wobbling a little with excitement. His eyebrows were frankly enormous, the kind of eyebrows that have opinions. He waddled toward them with authority and appetite.

“Fluff!” Kirby said, as if saying “water!” at the ocean.

“Who’s your friend?” the blue one asked, curiosity and manners shaking hands. His voice was a little older than Kirby’s and a tiny bit bossier, though he wasn’t trying to be a boss. He was just… a prince.

“My name is Eri,” she said, remembering to stand up and smooth her dress even though it was now, she realized, a dress-shaped arrangement of yarn. It still swished. The swish made her brave. She tucked a strand of string hair behind a string ear that was a suggestion of an ear. “Bonjam.”

“Bonjam?" he tried, then laughed. “So you know jambastion? Well then, a bonjam to you.” He swept a little bow that managed to be both formal and friendly. “As prince of this land, I warmly welcome you to Patch Land!”

The way he said the capital letters made them appear.

Eri looked. Beyond the minty field, a town unfolded like a craft table had imagined urban planning: houses out of patterned fabric, doorways with big cheerful stitches, lamp posts topped with buttons; the castle, Patch Castle, sat like a cake on a cushion, pennants made from ribbon curling in a wind that seemed to know how much to blow so nothing frayed. In the middle, a plaza with a sign that read Patch Plaza in embroidered letters, and a board covered in flyers that were squares of cloth with messages sewn on in tidy script. A daisy’s face turned, and the face was a button.

“Jawaii,” Eri said helplessly, hands clasped. “Cute.”

“Cute indeed,” Prince Fluff agreed, as if very cute were a state one could declare. He turned to Kirby. “You didn’t say you were bringing a guest! I would have had my seamsters lay out a runner!”

Kirby puffed with pride. “Friend! Eri.” He spun once and pointed at a very cozy-looking building on the far side of the plaza. “Kirby pad!”

Eri blinked. “Pad?”

“His apartment,” Prince Fluff supplied with a little smile that said he had long ago made peace with the fact that Kirby owned property in improbable places. “In Quilty Square. He keeps it neat,” he added, which coming from someone with eyebrows like that felt like a compliment. “When he remembers he has it.”

“You…” Eri cocked her head. “You have an apartment?” She’d started to catalog Kirby the way one catalogs stars, mostly by affection and a few simple facts: soft, round, violent about cake. The idea of him having a lease was almost as wild as the sock.

“Mm.” Kirby nodded, very casual. “Kirby house Dream Land. House New World. Pad here.” He counted on his nubs: one-two-three. “Many bed.”

Prince Fluff chuckled. “He’s very popular with furniture.”

Eri laughed, then took a tentative, delighted step, enjoying the way the ground felt like a friendly lap. The idea of a bed in a place like this, stitched and soft and sensible in its kindness, made something in her chest loosen further. Bastion, she thought, and liked that there were now many places the word could mean.

“Do you… live here?” she asked Prince Fluff. His crown bobbed cheerfully.

“I suppose I do,” he said. “When I’m not out in the other pieces.” He gestured with a sweep that seemed to include the sky. “Patch Land is seven lands held together by magic yarn, Quilty Square here, and Grass Land, Hot Land, Treat Land, Water Land, Snow Land, and Space Land.” He ticked them off with prince-ly precision. “They used to be separated, some sorcerer nonsense, but we sewed them back together, thanks to Kirby.”

Kirby kicked the air bashfully. “We help.”

“Jamedetāna,” Eri said softly, trying out congratulations because that was a big grown-up word and no one here made small things of big words. She touched Kirby’s stitched arm. “Good job.”

Prince Fluff grinned. “We also eat a lot. You’ll fit in.”

Eri’s stomach made a tiny, thrilled sound at the concept of an entire land where the ground asked to be petted and the air tasted like sugar. “Majicious,” she told the wind; it approved.

“Come,” Fluff said, and when princes in such lands say come, they don’t mean follow orders; they mean it will be fun. He led them through Patch Plaza, pausing to wave at a Waddle Dee made of felt who waved back with a little string arm, and at a man made of cord who sold bobbins of thread like they were produce. A woman at a stall stitched “Welcome!” onto a square and handed it to Eri as if giving her a sticker; Eri held it like a diploma.

They passed Kirby’s Pad, a cozy apartment with a polka-dot awning and a door-shaped door. Inside: a round bed with a quilt like a sunset; a little round table like a button; a window with a view of an even bigger button. On the shelf, a trophy that might have been a teacup in another life and a model Warp Star made of felt. Eri’s eyes went wide.

“You really have an apartment,” she whispered, as if the furniture might be shy. “You… live.”

“Kirby nap,” he corrected with equal seriousness, then flumped onto the bed, bounced, and rolled off with a fwip and a giggle.

“Fluff,” Eri said, liking the way the single syllable behaved in her mouth. “Do you… have school here?”

“School?” He considered. “Not the kind you mean, I think.” His eyebrows did a synchronized tilt. “We… practice fun. And help each other sew things. And sometimes the Hot Land gets too excited and we all go, ‘No, no, take a breath,’ and put little curtains on the volcanoes.” He shrugged. “If you mean sit in a room and memorize rules, no. If you mean learn the names of clouds and buttons and pastries, then yes, it’s very rigorous.”

Kirby, delighted, jabbed a nub in the air. “School boring,” he declared, then softened and added, because he had learned something new recently: “Eri learn fun.”

“Jes,” said Eri, and Prince Fluff blinked in polite confusion at the Jambastion slip, assuming it was a local dialect of adorable. “I would like to learn the names of pastries. For… homework.”

Fluff beamed. “Treat Land is that way,” he said, pointing toward a distant hill topped with what looked suspiciously like a cookie. “We’ll go later.” His expression softened into something like big-brother-warm. “For now, let’s walk.”

They did. Eri discovered that the ground made a tiny crrk crrok sound if you dragged your shoe, she didn’t, because she had been told be gentle with the world, but it amused her to know it could. Buttons made clicks when you stepped on them; threads hummed underfoot like happy bees. In the plaza, a notice board had quests stitched on it:

•Button Missing! (Yellow. Smells like lemon.) Reward: a hug.

•Need Help: Hot Land Curtain Hemming. Payment: cookies.

•Space Land’s Constellations Coming Loose. Volunteers must enjoy heights.

“Everything is… chores, but nice,” Eri said, astonished.

“Everything is fixable on purpose,” Fluff corrected, with the sturdy wisdom of royalty who has watched people make all manner of messes and learned that patience is a tool. “Sometimes things fall apart. We make falling-apart not a tragedy but an invitation to craft.”

Eri thought about that while they visited Patch Castle (full of tapestries that looked like cousins and a throne that had learned to be sat in by people who didn’t like sitting still) and Patch Plaza’s bakery (a banner: Treats! with a cookie sewn to the T). The baker, an oval of yarn with a mustache, called them “my darlings” and handed them something shaped like a donut but tasted like a cloud with opinions. Kirby ate his in one soft, miraculous gulp and then looked at Eri’s with the solemnity of someone who would never steal from a child but could imagine arranging a trade.

“Majicious,” Eri said, cheeks full, and the baker clapped at the correct use of the word even though he had no idea what it meant.

They wandered to the edge of Quilty Square where a green felt hill spilled into the stitched horizon. Beyond it, the suggestions of Grass Land’s rolling pastures; a crimson flicker that might be Hot Land; a distant glimmer that could be Space Land’s first star. The wind made a tiny sewing-machine sound as it went through ribbon leaves.

“Kirby,” Eri said, quiet and fierce all at once, “thank you.”

He blinked at her, head tipping. “For sock?”

“For… everything.” She touched her chest. “Bastion.”

He went soft in a way that would have been difficult in a world with bones. “Friend,” he said, and bumped her with his round side until she laughed.

Prince Fluff sat on the hill, legs out, crown crooked, watching them with a little smile that said he had seen many versions of this scene and never once gotten bored. He plucked a stray bit of thread from the ground as if tidying even the world could be play.

“So,” he said, half to Eri, half to the sky, all friendliness. “Shall we do a small adventure? The sort that earns you a button and a story but not a bruise?”

“Jes,” Eri said at once, because some words do feel like permission slips.

“Good answer,” he said, and hopped up.

The small adventure arrived right on time, as if Fluff’s “shall we” had been printed in the day’s itinerary. The Button Missing! quest-giver, a little felt duck with a ribbon bowtie. waddled up with distress embroidered on his face. “Oh, Prince Fluff! My lemon button! I was making a hat and it rolled away and, oh dear, now how will anyone know it’s a lemon hat?”

Eri crouched so her eyes were in the duck’s universe. “We’ll help,” she promised with the seriousness of a judge and a kid at recess.

The duck blinked at the unfamiliar word and felt comforted anyway. “Oh, thank you!”

They followed the button trail, literal thread crumbs through the plaza, under a clothesline strung with sun, over a small bridge held up by cheerful stitching. Kirby, in this world, moved differently: he did not inhale the button and declare victory; he extended a little yarn whip from his belly like a lasso and fwipped toward it. The whip curled around a pole, and he swung delighted carrying Eri on his back because why not. She squealed and held on, and the world did not mind squeals in public so early in the day.

They found the lemon button lodged in the hem of a curtain in the tailor’s shop. Prince Fluff frowned. “Ah. A runaway. Happens.” He tugged gently. It wouldn’t give. Kirby fwipped his yarn whip, looped it around the stubborn button, and gave a demonstrative tug. Nothing.

“Rigga?” Eri suggested, pointing to the hem, because her new word for painful was very helpful when applied to stuck thread. “Maybe, oh!” She brightened. “Scissors?” She mimed a little snip. The tailor, a cord man with spectacles so tidy they seemed stitched right to his nose, nodded regally and passed her a pair that felt like a prop in a musical. She snipped one thread. The button popped free into her hand. It was yellow and smelled faintly of lemon, because of course it did.

“Jamedetāna!” Fluff declared. “Congratulations on your first Patch Land rescue.” He looked proud like someone who has taught a child to tie a knot and then watched that knot hold during a parade.

They returned the button to the duck, who did indeed pay them in a hug, light and soft and not too long, and a tiny square of fabric with a stitched lemon on it which, he explained, would look very good on Kirby’s pad if he wanted to hang it. Kirby clutched it like treasure. Eri filed the hug as currency policy under this world is very good at being itself.

They did two more small quests: helped a frog button his vest (Kirby insisted on double-knotting it for safety; Eri told him he was vun good at knots and he glowed), and sat with an old woman made of felt and listened to her tell them about the time Space Land got too big for its britches and someone had to sew it back a little (Eri looked up at the glimmering fabric of the sky and felt big in an unscary way).

By midafternoon, they were back at Kirby’s pad. The round bed yawned. Eri sat on it and swung her feet; the springs went spoing with a sense of humor. Kirby placed the lemon patch on the wall and stepped back, head cocked, appraising. Prince Fluff straightened it with the tiny fussiness of a prince and then pretended he hadn’t.

“Will you stay a while?” he asked, trying and failing to make it sound like casual conversation and not a request.

Eri looked at Kirby to make sure she was reading the map right. He nodded. “Stay,” he said, content. “Play. Eat.” He held up a nub and ticked off their priorities. “Sleep.”

“Jes,” Eri agreed, then caught Fluff’s slightly confused look and translated. “Yes.”

He smiled. “We have extra quilts,” he said, as if this answered all follow-up questions. In Patch Land, it did.

They discovered that eating in Patch Land was like telling stories to your tongue: the soup was a square that you unrolled, the bread toasted itself if you sang at it, the jam told you it was made of strawberries by being very earnest about it. Eri nearly cried laughing the first time a spoon made a clink against a button bowl and then apologized shyly. Kirby patted the bowl and said, “Good bowl,” which seemed to set it at ease.

As evening snuck up. making the fabric of the sky a deeper blue and the stitched-on stars brighter, Eri wandered to the window and pressed her hands (soft yarn palms) to the glass. She could see a corner of the plaza where someone had lit a string of tiny lanterns that looked like fireflies who had learned choreography. A Waddle Dee held hands with a child made of felt hearts. Someone stitched a heart on a patch and someone else stitched a patch on a heart. The castle’s pennant made a soft sound that translated to we’re fine.

“Kirby?” she asked, voice hush-soft.

“Mm?” He was on the floor on his belly, doodling with a stubby crayon in a book made of fabric, drawing a little round Eri with a horn and a parasol and large shoes.

“My… horn,” she said, touching it, a crocheted spiral that felt like someone had decided even the non-soft parts of her deserved to be soft here. “It’s… still here.”

“Eri horn,” he agreed, as if she had pointed out the sky again.

“Do you think…” she hesitated, then tried, because this was a land where trying was applauded. “Do you think it will always be part of me? Even when I am… bigger?”

He rolled to look up at her from the floor, serious in that perfect, simple way of his. “Horn is Eri,” he said. “Good. Pretty. Power.” He pressed his little pink yarn nub to his chest and then to hers, as if performing a very gentle spell. “Bastion safe.”

She breathed out. “Mapop,” she said, and the window fogged a little and then cleared like it had been moved by the idea.

Prince Fluff emerged from the kitchen with three tiny bowls of something that looked like a cross between pudding and a friendly cloud. “Evening snack!” he announced, then paused at the earnest intimacy of the moment and set the bowls down quietly instead. He fussed with the lemon patch again as if covering for their feelings like a good host.

They ate on the round bed, cross-legged, bowls in laps, spoons making polite clinks, and listened to the stitched night. Somewhere, faintly, Space Land’s first star chimed. Somewhere else, a button popped off and someone laughed and someone else threaded a needle. Eri curled her feet under and leaned into Kirby’s round side, which was as warm as a bedtime story.

“Tomorrow,” Prince Fluff said, licking his spoon with princely restraint, “Grass Land? We can turn into cars.” He waggled his eyebrows in a way that suggested this was both an activity and a compliment to their characters.

“Cars?” Eri squeaked, fully ready to accept that she was yarn who could be a car. “Jhappy!”

“Tomorrow,” Kirby echoed, putting his bowl aside meticulously because Patch Land had taught him that dishes deserve dignity. He leaned his head against Eri’s shoulder and yawned a soft stringy yawn. “Sleep now.”

“Jaitty,” Eri murmured, tasting good night on her tongue and letting it sink into the fabric of the bed.

They wriggled under a quilt that had a thousand patterns and not one bad idea. Prince Fluff, who pretended not to be sentimental about tucking people in, adjusted the corner just so, then adjusted his crown the opposite way to prove he wasn’t always adjusting things. He paused at the doorway.

“Welcome to Patch Land, Eri,” he said simply. “We’re glad you’re here.”

“Jamanke,” she replied, and even though he didn’t know the word, he understood it. That’s the other thing languages are for.

The night held them like a promise. Eri closed her eyes and saw knobs of thread and little sequins in the dark, constellations you could rearrange with a finger until they spelled home. Kirby snored once, delicately, the snore of a hero who has battled gods and discovered the truth that quilts are also victories. Prince Fluff’s silhouette stood watch for a minute—because princes in sensible kingdoms do that—and then he padded away with his eyebrows leading the charge.

Back in the noodle shop in a different world, a chalkboard wrote closed to anyone who might have thought to call. In still another place, heroes practiced being patient. In a third, three mage-sisters debated how many cookies belonged in a standard interdimensional care package and argued themselves into generosity.

In Patch Land, the quilt’s stitches held. The quilt of the world did too.

And in the morning, when morning happened here, which was a gentle thing with soft edges, they would wake, and bump noses, and eat something that apologized when it fell off the spoon and forgave itself, and go to Grass Land to become cars and say vroom in at least two languages. They would help sew the day back together wherever it tried to come apart.

For now, Eri slept, yarn-hair haloed on a pillow, horn soft as a lullaby. Kirby slept, round as a period at the end of a chapter that promised there would be another. Prince Fluff slept with one hand on his crown and the other on his heart, as leaders do when they remember they are also friends.

The magic sock waited in a tidy loop on a bench by the door, patient as knitting, humming to itself: Majaja. Again.