{Around half an hour ago}
Yagi was staring at the boy on the other side of the one-way window, turning something over in his mind that he hadn't yet found the right words for.
He had read the file twice.
After a moment he turned toward Nezu, who was sitting beside him quietly finishing the last of his tea before heading in to talk the young man into joining there side.
"Nezu. I don't think this is a good idea."
Nezu set his cup down and looked up.
"You don't think he is fit to be a hero?"
Yagi was quiet for a moment. When he answered, his voice had the careful weight of a man choosing each word deliberately.
"Young Midoriya has the spirit for it. Reading that file, I can tell he knows how to play a losing hand and turn it into something workable. A quirkless kid hunting down criminals across an entire city, no support network, living on a part-time worker's salary." He shook his head slowly. "That is not nothing. That is remarkable, actually."
He paused again. The boy on the other side of the glass hadn't moved.
"But?" Nezu said, gently nudging the silence open.
"But he needs help. Not a job." Yagi's voice dropped slightly. "Look at him, Nezu. He is barely seventeen and already covered in scars. A kid that age does not throw himself into vigilantism without a reason that goes deeper than wanting to do good." He was quiet for a beat. "His mother was killed in front of him. He was still a child."
Yagi turned and looked at Nezu directly, seriously, the way he rarely did anymore.
"You know as well as I do that he is in this for vengeance. Not justice. There is a difference, and it matters. We cannot hand a hero licence to a boy who is still fighting a fight that ended ten years ago. It will destroy him."
Nezu listened without interrupting. When Yagi finished, the small director stood, clasped his paws behind his back, and looked at the window rather than at Yagi.
"Some say the shackles of tragedy give your fists weight," he said quietly.
"And his fists have far too much weight behind them already," Yagi cut in. "It is not going to be good for him. He needs help long before we consider putting him back on the streets with our name attached to him."
A brief stillness crossed Nezu's face. Not quite offended.but annoyed.
"We doesn't have time for that, Yagi." His voice was calm but carried an edge of urgency underneath. "We have three months till stage 2 of the plan, we can't delay it any longer.we have Three months to groom him, hone him, and point him in the right direction." He finally turned to look at Yagi fully. "Take some of that weight out of his fists. Give the boy a little hope and show him what he could actually become."
Nezu walked to the door. Guard beside it straightened as he approached.
He stopped at the threshold and looked back at Yagi one last time.
"We can save this kid, Yagi." A pause. "I know we can"
————
Izuku was staring out of his window, thinking.
Today might as well have been the most monumental day of the past five years. So much happened. He finally took down those Fushikai bastards, got kidnapped, received a job offer, and met Mr. Yagi, all before midnight on a festival day.
Unlike Director Nezu, Mr. Yagi seemed straightforward. Simple in the best way. No angles behind his words, no quiet tests running underneath the conversation. He had just walked in, greeted him kindly, and meant it. No more, no less.
I think we are going to get along just fine.
He shifted against the windowsill.
I can't sleep like this. There was too much ahead, too much still turning over in his head. The headquarters. Monday. A real workspace, real resources, gear he didn't have to forge from beach scrap in the middle of the night.
This was first time in a long time izuku was looking forward to something.
———
The U.A. headquarters looked different in the morning.
Izuku had passed this building before, on patrol routes, on late nights cutting through the district. He had always clocked it the way he clocked everything, exits, entry points, sight lines, blind spots. A building was a building. A wall was a wall.
But standing at the front gate on a Monday morning with a visitor pass and an actual reason to be here, it felt different. The two glass towers caught the early sky and threw it back doubled, blue on blue, clouds moving across the facade like something alive. The compound was enormous up close. Larger than it looked from the street. The kind of place that had been built to look permanent on purpose, to tell the city that something stable still existed inside it.
He made sure his face said none of that.
He found Yagi in the east corridor on the third floor, standing by a window with a paper cup of coffee and the particular expression of a man who had been awake since before the building opened. Up close in the daylight, without the strange gravity of the interrogation room, Yagi looked even thinner than Izuku remembered. The cane was hooked over the windowsill beside him. His shirt was slightly too large at the shoulders.
"Midoriya-kun." He straightened when he saw him and smiled, the kind of smile that didn't seem to require any effort. "Good morning midoria-kun."
"Good morning yagi-san," Izuku said.
Yagi handed him a ID, a proper one, lanyard and all, with his name on it. Izuku looked at it for a moment longer than he intended to.
"Come on," Yagi said, picking up his cane. "We have somewhere to be."
Izuku had spent the entire elevator ride, the subsequent walk to the vehicle bay and car ride quietly constructing a list in his head. It was a good list. It was list of things he want to learn from the 'professionals', he wanted learn about how to digitally track someone properly, how to investigate crime scene, how to make actual hero gear, he had long long list.
He was still mentally ranking them by priority when the car stopped and he looked up and recognized exactly where they were.
Takoba Beach.
Or what used to be Takoba Beach. The shoreline had been quietly drowning under illegally dumped waste for years, layers of it, appliances and scrap metal and broken furniture and things that defied easy categorization, all of it rusting into the sand in long uneven drifts. Izuku knew this beach the way he knew his own apartment. He had spent two and half years picking through it, pulling pieces for the workshop, learning which sections were worth revisiting and which had been picked clean.
He stepped out of the car and looked at Yagi.
Yagi was already looking at the beach with an expression that was calm and unhurried and slightly immovable, the way a man looks at something he has already made his peace with.
"I know this place," Izuku said carefully.
"I know you do." Yagi turned to face him. "That is why we are here."
He was quiet for a moment, as if giving the beach itself a chance to make the point before he had to.
"You are exceptional at what you do, Midoriya-kun.The way you work, the way you think, the way you take a bad situation and find the angle that works in your favour. You spent years on a beach that everyone else wrote off as useless and you built yourself a hero gears out of it." He paused. "That is a hunter's instinct. Find the advantage. Use what is available. Survive."
He looked back at the shoreline.
"But a hero does not just survive a bad situation. A hero does not just find the angle and exploit it. A hero walks into the bad situation directly and resolves it. Not works around it. Resolves it." He turned back to Izuku. "This beach has been like this for years. People stopped coming here. The city stopped caring about it. Everyone found a way to route around it."
He reached into the car and produced two pairs of work gloves. He held one pair out to Izuku.
"We are going to clean it."
Izuku stared at the gloves. Then at the beach. Then at the sheer, almost incomprehensible volume of waste covering every inch of sand from the waterline to the road.
"This is going to take months," he said.
"Yes," Yagi agreed simply. He was already pulling his gloves on.
"You are serious."
"Your first mission as a U.A. operative is to clean a beach, Midoriya-kun. I suggest we start at the waterline and work back."
Izuku stood there for another moment. The waves came in and went out. Somewhere behind all that rusted metal and broken appliances there was sand, and somewhere under the sand there was the version of this place that people used to come to before they gave up on it.
He pulled the gloves on.
"Fine," he said. "But I know where the heavy pieces are. We start at the north end, there is a cleared path through the first row."
Yagi looked at him with that same effortless smile.
"Lead the way."