The Heights Alliance dormitory common room is quiet in the way that things are quiet when everyone in the room is thinking about the same thing and no one is ready to say it yet.

It is 9:14 PM. The common room television is on. Nobody is watching it.

The news anchor's voice fills the room at a volume low enough that you have to pay attention to hear it clearly, and everyone in the room is paying attention.

"...the Hero Public Safety Commission has confirmed the identities of seventeen Pro Heroes who sustained critical injuries during last month's Kyushu incident. Questions regarding the structural readiness of the current hero system to manage threats of this scale remain—" Kaminari reaches forward and turns the volume down two notches. Nobody tells him to turn it back up.

Across the room, Midoriya is sitting at the communal table with a notebook open in front of him. He is not writing in it. He is looking at a specific page — the same page he has been looking at for the past twenty minutes. His scarred hands are flat on the table on either side of it.

On the couch nearest the window, Kirishima is doing something unusual: nothing. No weights. No training grip. He is just sitting, forearms on his knees, looking at the floor between his feet with an expression that his face does not usually produce.

Todoroki is standing at the kitchen counter making tea he has not yet drunk. The kettle finished three minutes ago.

Bakugo is not in the room. He left forty-five minutes ago, presumably to train, and has not come back. The lights in Gym Gamma are visible from the window if you look. They are on.

Outside, Musutafu goes about its evening. Traffic sounds. Somewhere down the street, a convenience store's automatic door opens and closes for a customer. The city does not know what the people in this building know. It continues anyway.

You returned from the Endeavor Agency internship four days ago. Four days since Ending on the highway. Four days since Parallel Processing clicked into something real and instinctive and you understood, for the first time, what Endeavor actually meant by it. Four days since Endeavor said the specific thing he said when the operation was over — not praise, not encouragement, just the accurate observation of someone who has been watching precisely — and you got in the transport back to UA with Midoriya and Bakugo and Todoroki and nobody talked for most of the ride.

The four days since have had a specific quality. Like waiting. Like the particular silence that fills the space between a decision being made and its consequences arriving.

The news anchor resumes.

"...Hero casualties from the Kyushu incident represent the highest single-incident toll since the U.S.J. attack three years ago. Public confidence in the hero system has fallen to its lowest recorded level since Quirks were first—"

Kaminari turns it off entirely.

The room goes quiet in the new way, which is the same as the old way except now there is no television sound underneath it.

Midoriya looks up from his notebook. He finds your eyes across the room. He does not say anything immediately. He looks like he is deciding whether this is the moment to say the thing he has been composing.

"I think something's coming," he says. "I don't know when. But I think we need to be ready in a way we haven't been before."

He closes the notebook.

Kirishima looks up from the floor. Todoroki turns slightly from the kitchen counter. The tea is still there. He still has not drunk it.

The dormitory settles into the specific quiet of people who already knew this and were waiting for someone to say it out loud.

Outside, Gym Gamma's lights are still on.