Nyoro Leaves

Aiko Aimi, better known to most as one of the Top 10 professional Heroes in Japan under the alias Rosethorn, had been in more surprising situations. She had fought villains so twisted by trauma and mutation that they were more monster than man. She had ducked an entire sedan hurtling through the air. She had taken over the negotiations for more hostage situations, potential suicides, and terrorist threats than she cared to count. But as far as her teaching career had gone, this was as surprising as it had got.

After all, when Hissori Nyoro had burst into the room and announced he was withdrawing his daughter from her school, he hadn't even had the courtesy to look at anyone. Even now, he might as well have been addressing the furniture as much as Rosethorn, or even his child Hoge herself.

The short silence between his pronouncement and her response stretched on impossibly. She considered the best way to defuse the situation. However, her thoughts were dulled by watching his strange behavior. He didn't bother to look around the room to find where Hoge sat, the way any visiting parent could be expected to do. Rosethorn could tell with a career full of expertise that his body language said he was impatient to leave, the way an office worker is impatient to be released from the meeting room after the agenda had been resolved.

"Nyoro-sama, while I understand your concerns, this is not the appro-"

"Is it in this room?" He cut her off with rapid, confident speech.

"Could you clarify what you mean by 'it'?" Rosethorn glanced at Hoge's seat, and was unsurprised to find the girl was shrinking away into an ashamed haze. And she had been doing so well lately in mostly staying visible.

"Hoge, if you're here," Hissori said generally to the room, the way one addresses a ghost in a seance, "get your things together. We're leaving immediately."

Hoge's head lifted and pointed towards Rosethorn. Rosethorn could see so clearly in her mind's eye the pleading look that her vision could not perceive. She cleared her throat.

"Excuse me, but this is a classroom and you are interfering in my lessons." Rosethorn then addressed Hoge directly. "Perhaps you and your parents could talk in the hall...?"

Hissori's wife and Hoge's mother, Karāiro Nyoro, followed the eyeline to where Hoge sat. Karāiro adjusted her glasses and gently touched the back of Hissori's shoulder. He grandly glanced in her direction, noticed where she was looking, and finally spotted the gradually blurring figure hunching her shoulders and making herself look small at her desk.

"Ah, there you are, Hoge. Come along, busy day planned. We have to clear out your little room at Miss So-and-So's boarding house, after all." When she didn't respond, and only turned to look at the other students immediately around her, Hissori revealed more of his impatience.

"Now really, time to be practical. You did well and we're all very proud, but I'll outlive no child of mine. So we'll get you set up in a real school and put all of this behind us. I gave you a bit of rope to find your way and now it seems you've found people to tie it into nooses. It's done."

Hoge hung her head. She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but then shut it again. Karāiro, as generic looking a Japanese housewife as one could imagine, spoke with a plain and pleasant voice to Hoge's desk. "Let's stop interrupting the class, dear. Be good and get your things."

Hoge twitched. She was fully aware of how nearly every pair of eyes in the room was pointed at her. Her skin itched with the shame of it and her heart was beating in her throat. She stood up, and the chair silently skidded beneath her. Hoge, who had done more than she could ever tell her parents, couldn't meet her father's eyes. She bobbed her head in acknowledgement and he turned away to address Rosethorn properly for the first time.

"Is there a form we sign now, or will it be mailed to us?"

"This is extremely irregular," Rosethorn began sternly.

Hissori swatted the words away like they were a fly near his ear. He stopped acknowledging that she was there at all. Rosethorn couldn't help it. She scoffed.

Emanating sadness from every visually desaturated centimeter of her, Hoge shuffled towards the back where the students' bags were neatly put away. She was numb. Her head was starting to hurt, down to her sinuses. What was this? Ah. It was the effort not to cry. Well, she could at least do that much, and leave with a little bit of dignity. It had been so fun. So hopeful. But every morning you wake up from a dream. This was no different. Hoge picked up her bag and by pure chance her fingers grazed the cluster of charms dangling from it.

She looked at them more closely. A new plastic whale, unmarred by time, with its cute round smile. An eyeball with a lazy look to it, gained at a gachapon at the arcade. A cheerful costumed cat with its own dull sword. Others, too, from the bonds she made in other classes, even in other programs because of her wandering between clubs.

Memories flooded her. Not just of people, but of places in the campus. Quiet corners with great view angles. Beautiful vistas full of plants and sharp concrete angles. Labs and facilities. The awful reek of sweaty training rooms, the basketball court, the track field. Even simulated ruins that had once terrified her came to her now as nostalgia.

Her hand closed around the charms. It was still a bit hazy. But only a bit.

"I'm not going," Hoge said, without turning around.

"Ha," her father said humorlessly. "Do your best paying rent, then. Groceries and tuition fees and clothing and allowances and all the rest of it." He was building up a full head of steam. "And when this childish career shatters every bone in your body or some gangster lowlife cuts you down, or if you just get passed over by flashier and meaner colleagues and end up not making enough to keep you under a roof, or when it stops being playground games and starts being life or death, I hope you still have enough strength to crawl back and apologize properly! No, none of that. You'll be coming home, you'll be changing schools, and you'll go to college and get a normal job and a good husband with prospects and just be normal, Hoge. You'll be normal."

"What if she d-" Orochi began, starting to get defensive over her desk-mate.

"Quiet. You have no right to interfere with a family's business."

The air began to fill with whispered conversations and muttered comments. Gossip and condemnation flitted from student to student. A couple of the legacy students may have quietly said to a neighbor that they were glad they couldn't relate.

Karāiro spoke up again in the same even, placid tones. "You can pick the new school, as long as it's a safer program. It won't be that bad. Be mature and don't make a fuss in public. We can talk about it at home."

Hoge found her voice wavering, no matter how she tried to force her conviction into it. Maybe it was her conviction that was wavering and not her throat. Her face was burning hot. She turned to speak over her own shoulder, her back to her parents. "I've worked so hard. As hard as anyone."

"And this is as far as it got you."
"You've always been good at that, Hoge. You can work hard at something else."
"It's over. It's done. Stop embarrassing us, child."

Rosethorn activated her quirk and hid it in an official tone of voice. "Okay, this is clearly going too far. As a state-mandated guardian of these children," she began, before once again being trampeded by a Nyoro.

Hoge bit down, but still the words burst out of her. She turned like a duelist, and anger lanced out her words as the point of a sword. "No, I'll-!"

"Enough!" Hissori sliced his hand away from his chest. It was the last sound heard in the room. In that place, even the sounds of the air conditioning system or the singing birds were snuffed out. No more did the restrained noise of the students fill the air. No more did the chairs scrape across the ground, though half the class was hurrying into a defensive stance in their shock. No more could Rosethorn be heard, both her authority as a teacher and her quirk having been silenced in one stroke. Her expression opened as if she had been slapped across the cheek.

Hissori somehow loomed larger in the silence. Though he hadn't moved, hadn't even raised his chin, his projection of absolute stillness had briefly made him a giant in the minds of everyone else in the room. This smothering presence was the same that had made him rise quickly in the corporate world. It was the yoke that he held dozens of professionals in every day. It was the mantle of his authority. And it broke Hoge. When Hissori stepped forward and gripped his child by the shoulder, Hoge did nothing to resist it in any way. She stared ahead, dead-eyed, and walked with him zombie-like. Her passion, her intelligence, even her strangeness, had all flown away somewhere better, and had left this body behind as an emptied shell.

Most of the students stood around awkwardly while exchanging looks. Yui was growing red while berating the man in a muted rant, personally insulted by his temerity. Hifumi furrowed his brow in a way that made him actually look his young age for once. His deference to family matters was at war with his frustration at the injustice of it. Faith was rapidly typing away on her smartphone while her friends looked at the screen over her shoulders. Hoge's mother Karāiro opened the classroom door.

And a youthful hand slammed it closed.

Inigo stubbornly forced his way in front of the door, pushing Karāiro back with an advancing shoulder. His face was set in a hard frown. Fire was in his eyes. When he braced himself against the door and turned that gaze upon Hissori, the office manager flinched, then froze in place. It was like seeing the glint of a predator's eyes at midnight. No. It was like catching the notice of a dragon. Inigo reached out a hand and Gigan alighted upon it, then curled into a ribbon of green light that swiftly enshrouded Inigo in the guise of Ryu-kishi, who closed the outstretched hand into a fist.

No words needed to be spoken. It was clear what it meant. 'You're leaving only if you go through me.'

Outrage blew away Hissori's instinctive fear. His eyes opened in a bulging glare, his mouth grimacing downward. Something of the samurai stirred within him, and he looked over to sneer at Rosethorn for losing control of her classroom. His nostrils flared in anger when he saw that she was staring him down as well, one hand resting gently - but meaningfully - on the auxillary exit into the hallway. Hissori felt something brush his suit jacket and he looked down to see Hifumi dashing by. The boy stopped beside the costumed Inigo and rested a supportive hand on his shoulder, then smirked at Hissori.

After a few seconds, Hissori saw Bobby walking up the other aisle between desks. With a bit of shame, or maybe discomfort, he scratched the nape of his neck, but then casually rested his shoulder against the doorway beside Inigo and crossed his arms. The half-lidded expression he shot the older man showed that he knew Hissori wouldn't try anything.

Soon enough it was more than just The Boys. Chris stood up and crossed the room, too. Chihiro, though she faltered in her first step with indecision, approached with her head held high. Yui and Noah rushed to join, the latter pulling Sally behind him by the hand. The gun nun refused to look at Hoge, but acquiesced on the grounds of Christian charity. Hailey and her closest friends filmed everything from multiple angles as they joined the growing crowd. Kaylee went to stand by Rosethorn to loom in Hissori's peripheral vision. Shinkan, clearly irritated at being silenced, billowed out steam and shoulder-checked Hissori as he passed. At the same time, Orochi placed herself so even her hydra-headed tails could glare at the middle-aged office worker.

Whether it was to support their friends who had already clustered together, or simply to refuse to be pushed around by a stranger, no one sat out. More kids came up, and more still, filling the gaps and pressing together. Hissori couldn't even see his wife anymore, as she had been swallowed up by the crowd of hero-students, but he did see movement out in the halls as the aura of silence that had leaked into other classrooms was now being investigated. His mind began to race, the way a boulder crashes downhill: advancing inevitably towards a single conclusion. His shoulders slumped. He felt Hoge step away from him, and he twitched in her direction. Surprise was clear on his face.

Hoge stumbled forward with her face tipped down. She was shivering. At first she walked stiff-legged, then with faster, shorter, looser steps. The crowd parted in front of her, then fell in around her, concerned looks and comforting hands swallowing her up. And still, at the edges of the assembled class, there was plenty of venom being glared at Hissori. He couldn't see any of it anymore. All he saw his daughter throw her arms around Inigo's neck and Inigo embrace her back as she wept. Bands of light curled over her the way the sun trails on a lake.

Hissori forced the tightness in his chest out of his mind.

All at once, sound returned. In moments, room tone became chatter among the kids, then chatter became all the noises of excitement. They cheered, and clapped, and hooted and laughed. Some jeered at Hissori with triumphant, toothy smiles. Sound was a victory that the kids reveled in. Karāiro pushed her way out of the crowd with her arms held tight against her chest, looking flustered and embarrassed, and several of Hoge's peers realized in an instant where most of her gestures had come from.

Hissori tried to recover his pride as he went to Rosethorn, but for all his stiff-backed posture, it played falsely on his face. Even more so because of how he kept part of his attention on Kaylee, who was making sure the way she crossed her arms behind Rosethorn caused as many muscles as possible to bulge.

"You will have to come to the main office where this will be discussed," Rosethorn said in a way that brooked no argument.

"I understand," Hissori replied. And they left, with Karāiro tottering along at her husband's back. It wasn't a solution. But it was enough for today.

Even once everyone had calmed down some and began to treat the time as a free period until a teacher returned, Hoge didn't say a word against it. When Skycarver looked in and a visiting patroller wanted to know what happened, someone else handled it. Hoge abdicated her self-appointed duties. It wasn't any of her concern. She was already busy. The sunlight coming through the long classroom window was warm on Hoge's skin and it filled her mind with flowers.