The car ride had been stuffy, silent, and tense from the start. Ace stared out the window, tapping his foot, flame licking their soles. Inko locked eyes with the demons in her head, eyes unfocused. And poor Izuku could only watch them in silence as the driver made another turn.
"Is everything okay?" Izuku asked, music player in his hands.
"Hey, Izuku, can you... listen to your music for this... event?" Ace asked with a smile devoid of all emotions.
"But what is it for?"
"Izuku, just... listen to Ace," Inko muttered, eyes still unfocused. "Just this once."
Izuku frowned but plugged his earbuds and pressed play.
The drums echoed in a slow, thunderous lurch. Each beat landed like something massive walking through mud. Then came the wail — harmonica stretched like a warning, or a cry from the bottom of a well.
The guitar followed, slow and heavy, dragging each note behind it like a body in the flood.
"If it keeps on rainin', the levee's gonna break..."
The car door opened to a sea of reporters, all lined up to SSSP HQ. Ace and Inko shielded Izuku from view as people snapped pictures and tried to ask questions, SSSP operatives holding people back from getting too close.
"If it keeps on rainin', the levee's gonna break..."
The crowd surged. Cameras flashed like lightning. Voices crashed like waves. Izuku gripped his music player tighter, the wire taut between his hand and his ears.
Ace was saying something to the guards. Inko moved like a storm in heels, shielding her son with a posture too practiced to be spontaneous. But Izuku didn't hear any of it clearly — not over the thump of the kick drum, not over the ghosts now surfacing from his memory.
"If the levee breaks, I'll have no place to stay..."
They now walked inside SSSP HQ, stern looks and rough shoves being the treatment of Ace and his mother. They now sat in front of a board of people, many with angry stares, but just as many carrying guilty faces and unable to look at Ace and Inko.
"Mean old levee, taught me to weep and moan, lord..."
The song kept playing.
The courtroom didn't have pews, but it felt like church — cold, silent, and packed with judgment. The kind of silence where even apologies couldn't echo. Just long stares and the ache of things too broken to fix.
"Mean old levee..."
Izuku's fingers trembled in his lap. He didn't know why he hadn't paused the song. Maybe he couldn't. Maybe the music knew something he didn't. Or maybe it wanted him to remember.
Ace sat still in the chair beside him, jaw clenched, hands bandaged and twitching with heat. The collar of his flight jacket was wrinkled, as if it had been grabbed too many times on the way in.
Inko sat upright like a knife — composed, unmoving, but with the unmistakable tension of someone one breath away from carving reality apart.
They didn't say a word.
Neither did the board.
Not yet.
The man at the center — a Commander Izuku didn't know — flipped through a digital tablet like it was a list of crimes instead of a case. His voice came eventually, slow and deliberate:
"Portgas D. Ace, you were observed violating Article 34, Subsection 7 of the Kaiju Containment Peace Accord: unauthorized Quirk ignition inside metropolitan airspace without emergency protocol clearance. You are also charged with reckless endangerment, unauthorized engagement with a Class-Fire Kaiju, and public destabilization within protected SSSP jurisdiction."
YOU ARE READING
Inheritance of Giants
Science FictionIzuku Midoriya learned early that the world was stranger than most people admitted. The skies were too loud. The shadows moved wrong. And sometimes cities vanished off the news, only to reappear in whispers and scars. Kaiju exist - not as legends, b...
