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The rooftop was empty at lunch because nobody came up here anymore.
That was Ren's doing. Not entirely on purpose either, never told anyone to stay away or even claimed the space for himself. But people just stopped coming, the same way Mrs. Takashi watered her roses at a different time now, the same way Bakugo took the west corridor when Ren was in the east, the same way the seats immediately next to him in the classroom had started going unclaimed, empty, even when every other desk was taken.
People moved away from him without deciding to. Their bodies did it for them.
Ren sat against the chain-link fence with his bento in his lap and the September sky flat and grey above him. Summer break was over. Final term of junior high. The UA entrance exam was five months away.
Template: 9.98%.
Four months since I made that binding vow. Four months of total brutal honesty, saying what I meant, meaning what I said, feeling every truth land without any sort of cushioning. Decree operated at a level that would have taken years without this vow, but still.
Every judgment I make is backed by genuine conviction now. No CE wasted fighting my own subconscious. It runs clean, like a blade with no friction.
The cost was everything else.
He ate his bento. His mom had packed it this morning. Rice, grilled salmon, pickled vegetables, a small thermos of miso that was still warm because her hands had held it. She'd been packing his lunches with more care lately. More variety. More of the things he liked.
She never said why.
He finished eating. Closed the box. Sat there.
The stairwell door opened.
He didn't turn around. You could identify Midoriya Izuku by sound alone. The hesitant footsteps, the slight shuffle, the breathing pattern of someone who'd rehearsed a conversation in their head forty times and was now terrified of having it.
Midoriya stopped about three metres away. Too close for a stranger. Too far for a friend. The exact distance of someone who wanted to be heard but was ready to run.
"Asano-kun."
Ren looked up.
Midoriya was standing there with his hands clasped in front of him and his school bag over one shoulder and that expression he always had, the one where his whole face was trying to be brave while the rest of his body was begging him to leave.
His ears were already red.
He looked different.
Five months of cleaning a beach at dawn had filled him out. His shoulders were wider. His forearms had definition that hadn't been there in April. The baby fat was gone from his jawline. His hands had calluses on them now, the rough kind you got from gripping things heavier than you were.
Ren knew what it was. Bullet point one in the notebook.
"What do you want, Midoriya."
"I... um." He swallowed. His hands tightened against each other. "Are you okay?"
The question sat between them.
Ren looked at him. Flat. The expression that wasn't an expression.
"I'm fine."
The vow didn't push back, because physically, nothing was wrong with him. His body was the strongest it had ever been. His quirk was healing faster than ever. His CE reserves were deeper. His Decree was the sharpest it had ever been. His domain could hold for over two hours now. By every measurable standard, he was fine.
But somewhere underneath the word there was a pressure. Not the vow rejecting it. Something else. Something he could feel but couldn't name because the vocabulary for it had been shrinking for months.
He wasn't sad. He wasn't angry. He wasn't scared. He was something that didn't have a word, or maybe it had a word and he'd lost the ability to reach for it because reaching would mean admitting something the vow would force him to examine fully and he wasn't ready for that.
It was easier to say fine.
"You don't look fine," Midoriya said.
That was braver than Ren expected. His voice shook on the last word but he held the eye contact. His hands were trembling against each other. Everything about him said he wanted to be anywhere else.
But he stayed.
"I look the way I look."
"I know. That's... that's what I'm saying." Midoriya took a breath. The kind you take before jumping. "You look like someone carrying something really heavy and I don't know what it is and it's none of my business and I know you told me to mind my own business before but I can't just... I can't watch someone who might not be okay and walk past it. I can't do that. A hero should meddle in other people's lives. That's what I believe. So I'm meddling."
He said it fast, the words running together the way they did when he was nervous, that muttering thing where his mouth outpaced his brain. His eyes were wet but he wasn't crying. Not yet. He was holding it in.
And then something happened that Ren didn't intend.
It came from somewhere underneath his conscious thought. Not a judgment he chose to make. A reflex, the way you flinch from a loud noise before you know what caused it. His cursed energy moved on its own, flowing outward in a direction his technique understood even when he didn't.
*You are insignificant.*
Decree activated.
The effect hit Midoriya mid-sentence. His words died. His knees buckled, not all the way but visibly, like someone had dropped a bag of sand across his shoulders. His breathing changed, shallow and tight, his chest rising in short pulls like the air had gotten thicker. The colour left his face in about two seconds.
He reached out and grabbed the chain-link fence to stop himself from going down.
It wasn't just physical.
Midoriya's eyes went wide. The light behind them dimmed. Every thought he'd ever had about his own worth, every time someone had told him he couldn't be a hero, every day Bakugo had reminded him he was nothing, all of it landing on him at once. Not as memory. As fact. The feeling of being small and worthless confirmed by something deeper than words, something pressing on his bones, his chest, the inside of his skull. Reality itself agreeing with every insecurity he'd ever had.
His legs gave. One knee hit the concrete. His hand stayed on the fence, knuckles white.
His mouth opened. Nothing came out.
Ren felt it.
The CE drain, was minor at best. The technique running, enforcing a judgment he hadn't made on purpose. He looked at Midoriya on one knee gripping the fence with white knuckles and tears running down a face that was grey with something worse than pain and something in his chest lurched sideways.
He turned it off.
The pressure vanished. Midoriya gasped. The colour came back to his face in uneven patches like blood returning to a limb that had been squeezed. He stayed on one knee for a few seconds, breathing hard, then pulled himself up using the fence. His legs were shaking. His face was wet.
"What..." Midoriya looked at him. The tears were still falling but his expression wasn't pain anymore. It was confusion. "What was that?"
Ren stared at him.
The vow wouldn't let him say "nothing." It wouldn't let him say "I don't know." He knew what it was. He'd felt his CE move. He'd felt Decree activate.
"Something I did by accident," he said. "It won't happen again."
Both sentences were true. The vow let them pass.
"Are you hurt?" Ren asked.
The question surprised both of them. It came out before he could decide whether to say it. Midoriya blinked. Wiped his face with his sleeve. Sniffed.
"I... yeah. I'm okay. I think." He flexed his hands. Opened and closed them like he was checking they still worked. "That felt like... everything I've ever been afraid of being true. Being true. All at once."
Ren said nothing.
Midoriya straightened up. Wiped his eyes again. Looked at Ren with an expression that had no business being on the face of someone who'd just been psychologically crushed three seconds ago.
Concern. Still. After all of that.
"If you ever want to talk to someone," Midoriya said. His voice was hoarse. "You don't have to. But if you ever want to. I'm around."
Then he left. Through the stairwell door. Gone.
Ren sat against the fence and looked at his hands.
His technique had decided Midoriya was insignificant. Involuntarily. Without input. Which meant somewhere inside him, in the part of himself that Decree drew its judgments from, he genuinely believed that Midoriya Izuku did not matter.
The kid who ran quirkless into a sludge villain. Who was training every morning before dawn to earn something nobody thought he deserved. Who had just been flattened by a technique that told him he was worthless and then got back up and asked Ren if he needed someone to talk to.
That kid didn't matter?
Ren closed his eyes.
---
He went home after school.
His mom was at the clinic. A note on the kitchen table, folded once, his name on the outside in her handwriting. He didn't open it. He put his bag down. Went upstairs. Sat at his desk.
His laptop was there. His notebook was next to it. The pen was where he'd left it this morning. Everything in place. All he had to do was open the laptop and study. Three hours of law. The same routine he'd done every evening for six months.
He didn't open the laptop.
He sat there.
The room was quiet. The water stain on the ceiling was still shaped like a boot. The Crimson Riot poster was still on the wall. His desk was clean because he cleaned it every morning, part of the routine, the structure Isaac had helped him build and the binding vow wouldn't let him abandon because abandoning it would mean admitting he didn't care and he did care, the vow confirmed it every time he checked.
He cared about the training. He cared about the studying. He cared about the entrance exam. He cared about his template percentage and his CE reserves and his mother's cooking and his father's silence and Isaac's clipboard.
He cared about all of it.
He picked up the pen. Put it down. Picked it up again. Put it down. Looked at the wall. Looked at the ceiling. Looked at the desk.
His phone buzzed.
**Isaac:** *you coming tmrw? want to test a new periodization block on you. also your left trap was tight again which means you're sleeping on your right side AGAIN switch sides tonight*
He looked at the message.
**Ren:** *yeah*
He put the phone down.
He sat at his desk until the light in the room changed. Afternoon to evening. The shadows moved across the floor and he watched them move.
His mom came home at five. He heard the door, the shoes, the grocery bags. She called his name from the bottom of the stairs.
"Ren! I'm home!"
"Okay."
A pause. He could feel her standing down there, reading the single word the way she read everything about him now.
"Dinner in an hour?"
"Sure."
Her footsteps moved to the kitchen. Pots. Running water. The stove clicking. The sounds of her doing the one thing she could always do for him.
At dinner they sat at the table with the wobbly leg. She'd made curry. He ate. She watched him eat. The silence had weight.
"How was school?"
"Fine."
"Anything happen?"
Ren looked at her. She was holding her tea with both hands. Her eyes were soft and careful and searching for something in his face that she used to be able to find.
"A classmate asked if I was okay," he said.
She blinked. "That's nice. What did you tell them?"
"That I was fine."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at her tea.
"Were you?"
The vow pressed. Not hard. Just enough to make him aware of it.
"Physically, yes."
His mom set her tea down. She didn't say anything for a while. The fridge hummed. The table wobbled slightly when she shifted her weight.
"And the other kind?"
Ren looked at his plate. There was still rice on it. He picked up his chopsticks and ate the rest. She watched him.
"I don't know," he said. "I'm trying to figure that out."
That was true. The vow let it pass clean.
His mom nodded. She didn't push. She picked up her tea and drank it and they sat together at the table in the kitchen that smelled like curry and neither of them said anything else for a long time.
He washed the dishes. She went to the living room. He heard the TV turn on, low volume. He went upstairs. Sat at his desk. Opened the laptop. Stared at the screen for forty-five minutes without reading a single word. Closed it. Went to bed.
His dad came home around nine. The door. The jacket on the hook. The low sound of his parents talking in the kitchen.
Sleep didn't come.
Midnight passed. One. Two. Three.
At 3:48 he got up. Put on a jacket. Went downstairs. The house was dark. He put his shoes on and went outside.
---
It was raining.
Not hard. The thin, constant kind that didn't fall so much as exist in the air. Everything was damp. The streets were empty. Musutafu at 3 AM was a different city. The same buildings and the same roads but stripped of everything that made them feel inhabited.
Ren walked with his hands in his pockets and his hood up. The cursed energy hummed under his skin, thin and constant. The air around him had weight. He could feel it pressing outward, the distortion his father had been measuring for months.
He turned down a side street. Residential. Closed shops, dark windows, a konbini on the corner with its lights on and nobody inside except the cashier.
The alley was between a laundromat and a building with no sign. Narrow. Unlit.
He heard it before he saw it.
A sound. Muffled. Wet. The kind of sound a person makes when they're trying to scream and something is covering their mouth.
He stopped.
The rain fell.
He looked into the alley.
Three men. One woman. She was on the ground. One had his hand over her mouth. Another was pinning her arms above her head. The third was standing over her, pulling at the hem of her skirt.
Her eyes found Ren's across the dark.
Wide. White. The look of a person who had already left their body because staying inside it was not survivable.
The men hadn't seen him yet.
Ren stood at the mouth of the alley. The rain ran down his face. His hood had fallen back and he hadn't noticed.
He thought about justice. About the teacher who died for a girl with bruises on her wrists. About the systems and proper channels you were supposed to use and how every one of them required time that this woman did not have.
He thought about Midoriya on one knee, tears on his face, looking at the person who had just crushed him and asking if that person was okay.
And for the first time in months, something behind his eyes turned on.
"Domain Expansion."
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Leave a comment. I read every single one yk.