20"It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake."
-Frederick Douglass
Chapter One
A typical day in the life of Denki Kaminari began right at the crack of… whenever the sound of his kids fighting in the other room had grown loud enough that he could no longer ignore it.
He groaned, even though he'd become used to this by now, pushing himself up out of the cocoon of blankets and pillows he'd been using to shield his face from the morning sunlight, wiping the sleep from his eye, and staring at the alarm clock in a soporific stupor.
8:36… How sweet. They let him sleep in today.
Deciding to put his morning shower off till later, he forced himself to get out of bed, socked feet padding clumsily across the cold wooden floors, and pulled open his bedroom door, letting the sound of his bickering children and the mere existence of the outside world finally pull him fully into awakeness.
He regretted it instantly.
"Dad!" his four-year-old son Raidin shouted from the living room the moment he spotted his father wandering sleepily into the kitchen. "Aika's cheating! Make her stop!"
"Am not!" his seven-year-old daughter shot back, though from the maniacal grin on her face, she was clearly lying. "Just because you're losing doesn't make me a cheater! Grow up!"
"I can see your ear! You plugged it into the system-!"
"So? That doesn't prove anything! You can't prove that I'm-!"
"You are! You're making it so you get all the good power-ups and I don't get any!"
"It's too early for this," Denki muttered, scratching at his itchy scalp through his static-charged hair, sticking up in every direction just as it always did. "Aika, get your jack out of the console and stop picking on your brother. Rai, you don't need to cry, bud, it's just a game."
"Fiiine," Aika groaned, retracting her extendable earlobe and pulling the jack out of their video game console's USB port. Raidin looked slightly mollified, though he still had tears in his eyes and his pudgy cheeks were red with anger and distress.
Time for a distraction before they blew up again.
"What do you kids want for breakfast?" he asked, pulling open the fridge.
"Pancakes!"
"Pan- ...Bacon!" Raidin amended hastily, glowering at his sister. Apparently, he had decided he was against agreeing with her today.
"Just bacon?" Aika sneered.
"Hey, I could go for 'just bacon'." Denki cut in before his daughter's teasing could set her brother off again. "Too bad we don't have any."
"Ha! Pancakes it is, then!"
"Yeah, we don't have stuff for that, either," he supplied, shuffling the contents of their refrigerator and frowning at the sheer lack of anything even remotely edible. Looks like there was a grocery run in their future today. "How did your mom poison both of you into eating all these heavy American foods? Can't we be a traditional Japanese family and eat, like, miso soup for breakfast?"
"You can make miso soup?" his daughter asked.
Well, she had him there.
"Ok. So our options are… toast," both kids let out obnoxious groans as if he'd just informed them they'd be eating gruel, "...or cereal."
"Cereal."
"I want cereal!"
"Cereal it is, by popular vote." He snagged the half-empty bottle of milk out of the fridge and eyed it suspiciously. "But we'll need to be conservative."
And thus, another ordinary day began.
On his better days, Denki couldn't help but admit that he had things pretty good. He had a beautiful wife who he'd been in love with since they were high schoolers, two adorable (though sometimes irritating) kids who he loved more than he ever knew possible, and a gaggle of unbelievably great friends who he got to see fairly regularly. To many people, his life would seem ideal - almost perfect, even.
But then there are some moments, like when he flipped the TV over to the news while his kids got soggy marshmallows all over his clean countertops only to see highlights of a battle last night between a gaggle of villains and the Pro Hero Red Riot that he sometimes found it difficult to keep a smile on his face.
Once, there had been a time where he'd dreamed of being a Hero, too.
There had also been a time where he'd dreamed of tearing this entire society down and rebuilding it from scratch as something 'better'.
And this was the result. Neither a Hero nor a revolutionary. Just a stay-at-home dad with a cliched troubled past, a couple of goofy kids, and zero job prospects.
He was happy. He was. If he were being honest, he knew he didn't deserve what he had.
But that didn't stop him from sometimes wishing for more.
A couple of hours and a quick shower later saw the family exiting their comfy four-bedroom apartment in one of the nicer parts of the city and heading off toward the nearest grocery store.
It took them some time to get ready, as Aika kept insisting that Rai had lost her backpack (which she needed for some reason) and Rai needed five separate attempts to get his shoes tied properly. For his part, Denki had donned a tattered old baseball cap and a pair of tacky sunglasses to spice up his faded dad jeans and nondescript yellow T-shirt; not because he had terrible fashion sense (no matter what Mina said), but because it made him a little harder to recognize.
He knew a few Pros who tried to disguise themselves when they went out (like his wife or Deku), a few Pros for whom it did not matter (Shouji and Tokoyami couldn't hide themselves if they tried), one Hero who didn't care and who everyone was too scared to approach and whose name definitely wasn't Kacchan, and one Pro who would always blandly claim to the people who flocked around her for autographs that they were simply mistaken and that she only just happened to bear an unusual resemblance to the Hero they were all confusing her for.
To be fair, whenever Hagakure made that claim, it was endlessly hilarious to watch her fans try to find some way to refute it.
Kaminari wasn't trying to disguise himself because he was popular, however. If anything, the opposite was true.
Eventually, however, they were set, taking the elevator down from the sixth floor and waving goodbye to the security guard, Tanjiro, who looked like a bipedal reindeer and could play a mean tenor sax. Kyouka had invited him to more than one jam session, and the man could 'sleigh'. He hadn't appreciated Denki's attempt at a pun, but then, most people didn't.
The apartment complex Denki lived in with his family was a little special, as its occupants were almost entirely made up of professional Heroes and their families.
Finding a place to live as a Pro Hero could be a challenge. The majority of Pros earned a decent wage for risking their lives every day (and a more-than-decent wage from advertising deals and merchandising), but that didn't mean that they could all afford to buy up several kilometers of land in the middle of a buzzing metropolitan city like the Todorokis. With constant pressure from the paparazzi and raving fans, and the omnipresent risk of retaliation from spiteful villains, Heroes really only had two options: try to hide in plain sight or pay through the nose for security.
Hence Tanjiro the security guard. He and his coworkers were well-trained experts at keeping the crazies out, and villains thought twice about attacking a building that could be full of multiple Pro Heroes at any given moment of the day. There was still some risk, of course, but that was true no matter where you were living - especially for Heroes who consistently ranked in the top forty, like Kyouka.
Their trip to the nearby grocery store was about as uneventful as it always was. Rai insisted on carrying the basket at first in spite of the fact that it smacked his knees with every step. His static-charged hair, a grey so dark it was almost black (the coloring clearly from his mom's side of the family), stuck up in every direction as he waddled along, his wide eyes, the color of storm clouds, bouncing frenetically from shelf to shelf as though the next item his dad would ask him to grab was in hiding and would pop out and shout 'surprise!' when he least expected it. Somehow, his shoes had come untied again.
Aika kept behind them, her golden eyes fixated on Denki's phone. Her eyes were the only physical trait she'd seemed to have inherited from him, save for the propensity to generate static that sometimes made strands of her hair stand on end. Everything else made her look like a little Kyouka, from the apathetic shape of her eyes, her default frown, her dark, straight hair that hung to her shoulders, and, most of all, her ears.
She had her mother and maternal grandmother's earlobes, the kind that ended in jacks and could extend like tentacles. However, Denki's genes had apparently altered the quirk in such a way that, rather than send or receive sound waves, Aika could plug her jacks into any electrical device and communicate with it, like she was a computer herself. Though she didn't have her fingers on the screen, she was still scrolling through his phone and controlling the game she was playing with nothing but the earphone jack she had plugged into it.
"Hey, Aika?" he called, stopping to help Rai to his feet when his untied shoelaces finally proved to be his downfall. "What do you want for dinner tonight?"
"I don't know," she mumbled, not paying attention.
"Cool, sure. That's helpful."
He eyed the colorful assortment of fruits and vegetables set up for display, noting how a nearby grandmotherly woman was carefully picking out what he could only assume were the best and most ripe of the bunch. Eight years of being a dad and cooking for his wife and kids, and he still had no idea what he was doing. He didn't even know what half of these vegetables were.
What could he make… Curry? That wasn't that hard, right? Kids made that in school. He'd made it before a few times himself, but for the life of him, could never seem to remember the recipe. He could always find one online… if he ever got his phone back.
"Hey, dad?" Rai asked, reluctantly handing the basket over to Denki to carry. "Is mom gonna be home for dinner tonight?"
Denki tried to hide his wince behind a smile.
"Well, I don't know, bud. Maybe."
"Mom's never home for dinner," Aika butted in, still staring at the phone. "I don't know why you always ask when you already know the answer."
"Hey now, that's not fair," Denki admonished, not-unkindly. "You know she'd be home if she could. Her job is really important, and the villains don't seem to care about dinner time."
"I know that," she replied, tone bland. "I didn't say it was her fault. I was just stating a fact."
"Yeah, yeah," he sighed, taking off his hat and running a free hand through his hair, watching the way his son's eyes darted back and forth between his sister and his dad with concern. "...How about spaghetti for dinner tonight? Since you seem to like western food so much."
At the register, as he was getting ready to pay, the cashier took a moment to squint up curiously at his face as though trying to peer past Denki's perfectly executed disguise of baseball cap and sunglasses.
"I'm sorry if this seems rude," she asked, and from her tone, he could tell that she was one of those insufferably nosey types, "but do I… know you from somewhere?"
Denki did his best to keep his trademark thousand-watt smile on his face.
"Uh, well, I do come here often, so…"
"Right, right, of course… That must be it."
But the look of curiosity didn't leave her face once until he left the store, and his feeling of discomfort stuck with him even when she was out of sight.
Honestly, he had no one to blame but himself. Ten years ago, every news outlet in Japan had been eager to plaster his face to the front of every news story. Kaminari Denki, the infamous UA Traitor, the boy who had betrayed all of his friends and peers, who had slipped vital information to the villains that had resulted in so much pain and violence on both sides.
It had been years since then, and though many, many other villains had risen up to bury his face and name under the seemingly endless tide of evil, and even though he'd eventually turned against the League to save his friends and had been… mostly pardoned due to his unique circumstances and the lengths he'd gone to to help the Heroes in the end, nearly dying in the process, there were still those with sharp memories of those days who could place his face or his name and remember what it was he had done.
And it didn't help that the rest of his classmates at UA had gone on to be so prolific. Of his nineteen former classmates, every one of them consistently placed within the top fifty in the Hero Rankings, with five of them consistently holding secure positions in the top ten. Their success as a group was unprecedented, their popularity (especially given their involvement working against the League back in the day) was undeniable, and as a result, the sheer number of interviews and documentaries that aired on weeknight television about them, either as a group or as individuals, or of UA as an institution, was astonishing.
And not one of them could get away with telling the story of their heroic past without bringing up Denki Kaminari, their class's one-and-only dark spot.
Things might not be so bad if his friends and classmates hadn't been so popular. Sure, he'd still be dealing with the guilt from his past, and yes, he'd still have the title of ex-criminal hanging around his neck, making it hard to find steady work, but at least sometimes, he'd be able to forget. Or at least pretend to.
That was harder to do when everyone you cared about was out fulfilling their dreams, the same ones your poor choices stole away from you forever.
He was brought out of his dark reverie by the tugging hand of his son, who was pointing excitedly up into the air as the people on the street around him began to gasp and cheer.
Overhead, the Pro Hero Cellophane swung by, his tape bursting free from his elbows in a powerful stream, latching on to the side of a building and pulling him along through the air like an acrobat.
The people around him were shouting and waving their hands, Aika and Rai among them, but Denki remained still. Sero was one of his closest friends, even after everything Denki had done, and he was always glad to see him. Still, he'd rather not attract his attention while in public if he could get away with it. Even if he was sure his kids would be disappointed.
He wound up not having to worry; Cellophane appeared to not even notice the crowd, quickly swinging away with single-minded determination. He was probably on the way to an incident. He'd ask Kyouka about it later.
"C'mon, guys," he said, nudging Aika with the bag in his hand. "Let's send Sero a text later and tell him we saw him, ok?"
The rest of the afternoon proved to be just as normal as everything else.
They got home (and said hello to Tanjiro again), put away their groceries, ate a lunch of rice balls that Denki had prepared the day before for Kyouka to take to work, played a bit of Mario Kart with his kids, and tried to get some work done in his at-home office - though it was really more of a storage space for Kyouka's music paraphernalia.
The kids bickered a bit more, as per usual, but nothing out of the ordinary. When it was time for dinner, they volunteered to help, and he soon found himself kneading herbs into the raw hamburger meat while Aika chopped mushrooms and Rai assiduously stirred the pot of water that was meant to cook the noodles once it reached a boil. Not because it was needed, but because it kept him occupied and was (probably) harmless.
"Man," he said, washing his hands beside his daughter at the sink while the tantalizing scent of the cooking meat filled the kitchen air, "did I ever tell you guys that I once took your mom out on a date to this nice Italian place? Their pasta was so good, and they had this crazy garlic bread that-!"
"What's garlic bread?"
He stopped washing his hands, staring at his daughter like she'd grown an extra head.
"Um, excuse me? Have we never given you garlic bread before?"
She frowned, shaking her head.
"What is it?"
"What-? Well, it's… it's bread. Bread with… garlic on it…"
Her frown had only increased in intensity. Clearly, he wasn't doing his explanation any justice.
"I don't think I like garlic bread," Rai piped up from his lone vigil over the still-not-boiling pot.
"But you've never even had it."
"Yeah, but still."
Dinner was a normal affair. Aika, for whatever reason, felt the need to meticulously cut her noodles into tiny pieces before eating. She didn't do that with soba or ramen, he pointed out, but her only response was "This is different" before carrying on her merry way. Rai, in contrast, slurped his noodles down with gusto, getting red sauce all over his shirt and face.
After dinner came some much-needed baths, particularly for Rai, followed by the trio sitting down on the couch to watch some TV until bedtime.
When eight o'clock finally rolled around, however, they were reluctant to go.
"But mom still isn't home yet," Rai whined, clutching a pillow to his chest and pushing Denki away with his feet, his shoulders braced against the armrest. "We haven't seen her in forever!"
"Three days," Aika chimed in from Denki's other side. He shot her a look and she buried her face back in his phone.
"Daddy, please? Let us stay up just a little bit longer?"
He sighed. It was true, Kyouka had been incredibly busy for the last couple of days. She had said she'd hoped to be home by six tonight, but that clearly hadn't happened. It was completely normal for her to be late, of course, considering the nature of her job, but…
Well, he knew she'd want to see the kids too, if she could.
Staying up just a little bit later wasn't going to cause any problems. They were on summer break, after all. Not that that mattered for Rai, who wasn't old enough to go to school anyway.
Rai cheered when Denki told him he could stay up an extra half an hour, though he had his doubts that it would make a difference. Sure enough, before even twenty minutes had passed, Rai had collapsed against Denki's arm, snoring loudly.
"Poor little guy," he muttered, lightly ruffling his hair. Kyouka would be heartbroken when she learned how much he'd wanted to see her.
Aika snorted, declaring that she knew he wasn't going to be able to stay awake, and when Denki announced that it was bedtime after all, she went along without a fuss.
And the rest of the evening proceeded as normal.
He tucked Rai into bed, kissed his daughter good night, cleaned up the kitchen, made sure he had enough leftovers for Kyouka in case she was hungry when she got home, and set himself up in the living room with his laptop, trying to get some extra work done while he waited.
It was about a quarter after one before he heard the front door unlock and his exhausted wife finally stumble her way inside.
This too, unfortunately, was normal.
He waited a moment, not wanting to jump on her as soon as she walked in the door, and in the few seconds' pause after he heard the door lock behind her came the unmistakable sound of her leaning back against the heavy mahogany wood and letting out a weary sigh.
He frowned, making sure his translation was at a good spot before saving his work and quietly closing his laptop. She still hadn't moved from her spot by the door. He couldn't see it from his position on the couch, which meant she couldn't see him either, but he had a feeling he could picture her face perfectly. The sound of her sigh gave her away. It always did.
Most people knew that being a Hero was hard. Most people also couldn't even begin to fathom what that actually meant. It was more than risking your life every day. More than working yourself to exhaustion and being expected to keep going. More than having to put on a brave face or be polite or engage with endless waves of fans or bear harsh, often unfair scrutiny or outright attacks from pretentious reporters looking to profit off of your shortcomings, all with perfect decorum.
It was never being there for a festival at school because there was a robbery in progress. It was missing your anniversary because you were unconscious in the hospital. It was having to break your kid's heart for the umpteenth time because you'd swore up and down that this year would be different, this year, you'd be able to spend time with them on their birthday, or on a holiday, or just any day, only to have to cancel because some psychopath was trying to blow up a school.
It was coming home after a solid day of being everyone else's source of strength and finally being able to break down because today hadn't gone so good. Today, you weren't able to save everyone. Today, you failed.
And getting up again tomorrow after too-little rest and with unhealed injuries so you can try all over again.
Kyouka always did her best to put on a brave face while she was home. She didn't get to spend enough time with the kids as it was, and she didn't want what little time she did have to be weighed down with baggage from her job.
Finally, she pushed herself away from the door and walked up the short hallway, rounding the corner into the living room.
"I've told you time and time again that you don't need to wait up for me," she said by way of greeting, though there was a rote nature to her words that indicated that she didn't really mean what she was saying.
"Yeah, well. Work a job where I don't have to worry about 'if' you'll come home, and we'll talk."
She looked awful. Still better than most people (hey, his wife was a looker and he wasn't too proud to gloat), but still. Her face was pale, her eyes drawn and weary, her shoulders slumped. He couldn't see any obvious injuries and her costume didn't look all that dirty or torn. No battles, then. At least, none that would account for her exhaustion.
It was funny how little her outfit had changed since high school. But then, much like his own had been, her costume wasn't exactly too complicated. Comfortable pants, a practical jacket, a t-shirt of some band she liked (though nowadays, it was her own band, for promotional purposes). Her boots had been custom fit with high-powered speakers, and she had extra ones on her wrists that could detach and be moved about by her ears, but other than her eye paint and headphones, she looked mostly normal. The only major difference between school-Kyouka and adult-Kyouka was that she was a little older.
She was chewing her lip, though, and had stayed by the hall rather than joining him on the couch. Judging from the way her jacks were writhing, twisting around in circles like snakes, she was anxious.
Getting Kyouka to open up was a delicate process. She basically had two modes; angry venting or dark brooding. If it was the first, it was just a matter of letting her know you were willing to be her sounding board. For the latter, you had to play a waiting game. Denki wasn't very good at the waiting game.
Hoping today was a 'venting' day, he offered up a simple "Bad day?" in the hopes that she would reciprocate.
He was in luck. She stopped chewing her lip.
"...I take it you haven't seen the news?"
Well, that couldn't be good. Though she still didn't look like she'd been in a fight. What could have happened to her that would have been newsworthy?
"No, sorry. I've been trying to catch up on work-"
But Kyouka started shaking her head halfway through his sentence.
"No, no, it's fine. When you still hadn't messaged me by the time I was allowed to leave, I figured you hadn't seen. Did no one else try to contact you? I thought about calling, but…"
Denki padded his pockets, looking confused.
"Ah- Aika. She must still have my phone. I forgot to take it back from her before she went to sleep. Sorry, I know we have a rule about that, but-"
"It's fine," Kyouka butted in, sounding somewhat frazzled. "Don't worry about that now. Denki… You… You may want to sit down for this…"
He glanced down at his lap from his already-seated position on the couch, a spot he had not moved from for hours, then looked back up at his wife.
"...Alright, I think I got that covered."
He'd hoped he'd at least get a smirk out of that, but Kyouka barely even seemed to notice that he'd already been sitting down, let alone his response.
"It's about… your father."
Something in his navel twisted unpleasantly. He swallowed.
"I hope you're going to tell me that he's dead," he said, the humor for once completely gone from his voice. Even without superhuman hearing, he was certain she could hear the lie, no matter how much he wished he meant it.
She shook her head.
"There was an… attack… at the prison he was kept in. He's escaped."
Denki could only stare, absolutely dumbstruck.
"...and the police think he's probably going to try to come for you."
So, hey there.
This is my first-ever foray into this fandom. As well as my first-ever foray into writing a fanfic for an anime/manga. I'm not really familiar with the community in general, but I like the series and was struck with inspiration, so... here we are. That, and this daggum epidemic has given me a lot of free time.
Just wanted to leave my readers with a heads-up about the update schedule for this story: I'll be posting new chapters every weekend. I'll shoot for Friday evenings starting with Chapter 2, but they may occasionally be delayed till Saturday or Sunday if I'm otherwise occupied. I have the first six chapters done already, and there shouldn't be more than 15 or so for the story as a whole, so now you know what to expect moving forward.
The only other thing to say is that, with recent manga revelations, much of what I planned for this story is... obviously not cannon. I know that bothers some people, so this is a heads up. I don't plan on altering any of my plans for this story based on recent or potential future revelations in the manga, so let's just agree that this is canon-divergent as of... I guess where the anime has stopped, for all that I started planning it about two months ago. Anime-only's shouldn't have any issues with spoilers here, I don't think. But if that's a deal-breaker, really the only canon I'm diverging from is what specifically relates to Kaminari being the Traitor in this story. Everything else is, presumably, the same.
Also, there will be OCs in this story. You've met two of them. There will be a few more. I know this is a deal-breaker for some people, and I myself have been turned off by OCs in the past, but I purposefully wrote this story so as to create OCs so that I can practice making original characters. Y'know, in case dreams come true and I become a real author someday. Most of my stories tend to have hidden agendas like this, so... yeah.
Aight, that's it. Thanks for reading. Leave me a comment if you liked it, cause... I'm really out of my depth with this community and am not really sure how this will be received.
Keep it Zesty.
ZC
