Nighteye turns thirty. The world turns upside down.
All Might undertook to make this a nice night, presiding very amiably over the birthday dinner, joking with their friends and with the waitstaff, retelling his best old stories. He toasted Nighteye as the finest sidekick in Japan, a companion in the struggle, a comfort in adversity, a comrade in victory. Gran Torino gave Mirai a sidelong glance: “Get a load of those hard c’s, kid.” But if the old hero was impervious to All Might’s charms, Nighteye found that he himself was still taken by them. There was something about All Might—this All Might, bluff and jovial, as though all the evils of the world were paper tigers—that made him want to sit closer and warm himself, the way one would nestle under a heated kotatsu table. Even knowing that his easy cheer was a pose, a pretense, he felt it, and he tried to let the comfort of it seep into his blood along with the expensive wine.
At their dinner table, the spirit of the holiday season still reigned. Torino and Tsukauchi both got a little drunk and started a cutthroat game of jyan-ken-pon; All Might cheered Tsukauchi on with outsized enthusiasm. Nezu ought to have been inebriated as well, given the amount of wine he was consuming with his imported cheese, though you never could tell with him. He and Centipeder had not met before, but they took to each other immediately, as Nighteye had expected they would. “Don’t human faces look outrageous when they sneeze?” Nezu asked, and Centipeder thrummed with laughter: “It is so humiliating for them, poor things! Thank heaven my physiology makes it impossible.”
Before long, Nezu had Juzo talking about his ambition to divest from the cooperative of young heroes where he worked now and start his own agency. “I know it’s a pretty big feat,” his friend joked, “but I hope all my small ones will add up.”
Nezu chortled, then squeaked as though he had thought of something tremendously clever, “Perhaps you should join him, Sir Nighteye, now that you’re getting on in years! You can’t be a sidekick forever, you know!”
It was a natural enough thing to say, in theory. Sidekick status befitted young heroes, virtually all of whom had ambitions of rising independently through the rankings. Few were over thirty, and fewer of those had any reputation to speak of. Moving beyond the title didn’t necessarily entail a separation from one’s mentor, personally or even professionally. Often enough, people who got along, who had grown to depend on each other—and sometimes more, as everyone knew—would formally announce a shift to an equal partnership. It had happened with Team Kazan, and the Water Hose heroes, and plenty of others besides.
But for himself and All Might, such a thing was obviously nonsense. For Japan’s top hero, the Symbol of Peace, unrivaled in combat and adored in the public eye, suddenly to become half of a set, the other of whom had no physical prowess to speak of and no taste for exposure? It didn’t even bear discussion.
“All Might, I’m gonna be straight with you.” Midnight leaned even closer, and he could see the muscles of her face were strained. “Night always kept his work with you at the core of his professional profile. What people really know for sure is that you mattered to him. They know he loved you.” Toshinori stared at her. “This is your chance to even things up, set the record straight. Your last chance, unless you wanna write a big-ass brick of a memoir or something, which honestly sounds like something you would do. But my point is that you owe him this.” He could feel anguish in his throat, and anger twisting his face, and he could tell he was a moment away from the petty retort that she had no business saying what he owed to Nighteye. But she was still not done. “And someone else will step up and do it if you won’t, maybe Centipeder or maybe even me, though I really don’t want to do a fourth one of these, not now and not for him—”
She stopped haranguing him, and Toshinori realized that it was because she had started crying. For several seconds, he sat paralyzed beside her, watching her shoulders shudder as she wept very quietly into her hands. Finally, not knowing what else to do, he draped one arm loosely around her shoulder, patting it in an irregular rhythm. When Midnight shocked him again by leaning into the touch, his other arm volunteered itself too, pulling her infamous curves lightly against his skin and bones in the weirdest hug of his too-long life.
The tragedy of All Might and Nighteye's doomed partnership, remembering the happiness too.
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