Misaki leaned her head back against the edge of the large, oval soaker tub in her bathroom and let out a contented sigh. Her legs were just short enough that she was able to completely stretch them out while she leaned back against the side of the tall porcelain surface. She'd added some ylang-ylang oil to the bath water to help her relax and stimulate her cognitive functions. She often did that when she was working through a particularly tough problem at work, as had pretty much been the case ever since she'd taken on the role of Commissioner of Analytics.
At the moment, her mind was focused on a different kind of problem; the impromptu run in she'd had with Hawks at the Commission headquarters earlier that evening. It was the first time they'd met face to face since the ranking's presentation at the end of November. When she'd almost run into him walking out of the President's office, she'd thought her heart was going to come to a complete stop. At least she'd had some time to prepare for a possible confrontation at the ranking's event, but almost colliding with him so suddenly at the office had been quite a shock to her system, especially after all of the subtle ways he'd been brought up in her mind over the past two weeks. So much for fate or karma minding their own business.
She had thought that she'd managed to get away from the situation without making a complete fool of herself after he'd helped her with the files she'd dropped, until he'd popped back up at her side while she'd been walking back to her office a second later. He had acted like he didn't even know her. That had been a dead giveaway that something was up, and she should probably play along with the awkward narrative, which probably wouldn't have been so awkward if he hadn't been staring at her so suggestively while attempting to flirt with her. He knew she wasn't the type to appreciate such advances. She'd assumed that was why he'd acted that way—to make it more obvious to her that it was all an act.
Misaki opened her eyes and stared up at the bathroom ceiling, running back through their brief interaction in her mind for the twentieth time since she'd walked away from him in the vending area. The whole conversation had been laced with several innuendoes that were specific mentions to certain moments in their history. One particular phrase stood out to her more clearly than the rest:
"Seems like most of my work these days consists of helping old ladies cross the street and saving cats from trees."
Aside from the phrase itself being significant for both of them, the way his intonation had subtly changed when he'd said it had told her that it was meant as more than a cursory reference. She dove back into her memory to the times when she'd both said and heard those words before:
"Don't you have some old lady to help across the street, or a cat to rescue from a tree somewhere..."
"I'd take helping old ladies cross the street and saving cats from trees over an armed robbery any day of the week..."
The first time she'd said those words to him had been the day after they'd met, while he'd been in his persistent stalking phase. She'd been trying to throw him off his insistent and uncomfortable inquiry into her personal life when she'd tossed that condescending question at him. He'd told her then that only having jobs like those to do every day was like a dream to him. He'd said much the same when referencing that line a few months later, that those kinds of calls represented a sense of peace to him, which was the complete opposite of what was going on in society at the moment.
Her mind wandered back to the time when they had actually rescued an old lady's cat from a tree. It was the only call Hawks had taken her along with him on for their ultimately disastrous hero for a day date. He'd left her to cajole the frightened feline while he had attended to its elderly owner. As he'd dropped her off onto the tree branch next to the cat, he'd mentioned something that had seemed insignificant then, but stood out to her now:
"I'll let you grab the brainless fur ball..."
"Brainless fur ball... Brainless..." She trailed off, focusing on the familiar word that she'd been seeing over and over for the past few weeks. "Nomu... Was he trying to tell me something about the Nomu?"
It was a bit of a stretch, but his obviously roundabout way of speaking during their conversation made it seem more plausible. If he hadn't been able to come right out and say the word "Nomu", hinting at a time when he'd mentioned something similar to her would have been the next best thing. But what about the Nomu? Had he figured something out about them since he'd been working with the League? Maybe where they were or who was making them?
"Kinda reminds me of that old doc from UA!"
The phrase he had mentioned in reference to the old lady who had owned the cat she'd rescued from the tree flashed through her mind all of a sudden. "Old doc..."
Was it possible that the person behind the creation of the Nomu was actually a doctor? It would make sense. A doctor would have been able to access quirk records and dead bodies without raising any obvious red flags.
Misaki shot up out of the bathtub and scrambled for her towel. She quickly dried herself off and threw on a robe as she hurried out of the bathroom. Rushing out into the living room, she grabbed her tablet, along with her pen and a notebook, before walking back into the bedroom and throwing herself down onto the bed. Sitting cross-legged in the middle of the expansive surface, she wrote down the words "cat" and "old lady" with the words "Nomu" and "doctor" underneath them. Thinking back through their conversation again, she racked her brain for anything that had seemed even remotely significant, and several more words began to fill up the page: free time, tree, pancakes, hometown, Sky Lounge.
She paused after writing down the location Hawks had taken her to for her birthday and her eyes shot over to the necklace hanging around the bust on her vanity table. The gleaming fire opal stared back at her from its comfortable seat amidst the two gold feathers wrapped around it. She couldn't help but feel a bit of irrational jealousy toward the object as she remembered what it felt like to be wrapped up in Hawks's own feathers. Sighing softly, Misaki shook herself out of that train of thought and focused back on her current task.
"Sky Lounge..." She trailed off thoughtfully. "Sky Lounge is a place, so... It would make sense for that to be a clue about a location, right? Did we talk about any places?"
She thought back to the night of her birthday dinner while trying to focus on remembering anything that could've been in reference to a place. She was reminded suddenly about their conversation after dinner when Hawks had volunteered to take her anywhere she'd wanted to go for the evening. She shook her head again and berated herself, "Get your mind out of the gutter, Misaki!"
There was no way that place had anything to do with the location of the Nomu doctor.
She took a deep breath and ran back through what she could remember of that night from the beginning again. "A place, a place..." Glancing back down at her notes, her eyes were suddenly drawn to the pancakes, and she wondered aloud, "Where was the food from again?"
"The chef has them all imported from Kyoto."
She distinctly remembered him telling her that several of the dishes that night had contained vegetables that were unique to the Kyoto area. She'd suspected that the pancakes were a lead in to the Sky Lounge clue, but he must've mentioned them as a way to signal her to focus on the food. She wrote down the word "Kyoto" next to Sky Lounge in her notebook before picking up her tablet and typing a quick query into ROAM, looking for doctors in and around Kyoto. The search came up with over eighteen hundred results.
"Of course..." She sighed dejectedly and hung her head.
It would take her way longer than four months to clear eighteen hundred doctors. She glanced back down at the list of key words she'd picked out of their conversation again. Nothing about any of the remaining words sparked any kind of significance to her like the ones before it had.
Misaki collapsed backward onto the mattress. "Ugh... Maybe I should take a break."
Her stomach suddenly let out a loud growl to remind her that she hadn't eaten dinner yet. She groaned dejectedly and sat up before swinging her legs over the side of the bed. Grabbing up her tablet and notebook in one hand and her pen in the other, she stopped by the dresser to pull on some clothes and clasp her necklace around her neck before making her way into the living area. She set everything down on the dining room table before heading into the kitchen to make herself something for dinner. Having pancakes on the brain, she pulled out a pan and her stash of ingredients, and absentmindedly began to work through the familiar process of making the batter while running back through her conversation with Hawks again in her mind.
She headed back into the dining room twenty minutes later with a plate full of fluffy, round pancakes, piled high with fresh cut fruit and syrup on top. Taking a seat at the table, she cut off a corner of the stack and deposited it into her mouth as she stared down at the list of significant words, chewing thoughtfully while absentmindedly twirling her pen in her left hand. The fire opal handle of the writing utensil caught the light from the overhead lamp and flashed a hint of red across her line of sight, drawing her attention over to it momentarily. As she stared at the pen, sparkling as it spun and projecting hints of color around the table, she suddenly remembered back to the last Christmas they had spent together. The colored light reminded her of the time she had walked in on Hawks decorating his freshly cut tree.
"Tree..." She trailed off as her eyes glanced down at her list of code words.
All of his clues so far had been indirect references, and nothing really significant stood out in her memory about the word tree. She hadn't really been very gracious about his idea of bringing a real tree into the living room of her apartment for Christmas. He had eventually cleaned up after it, but the whole place had smelled of evergreen for months afterward, the bitter scent not one she'd ever been particularly fond of. That, and she'd still been finding pine needles and small chunks of bark scattered around for weeks from where it had shed while it was rotting away in her living room.
Her mind abruptly flashed back to a conversation she'd had with Hawks on the morning of his birthday, after she'd gotten ready to leave for work...
"You still have this thing?" Hawks's contemplative voice commented as she walked out of her bedroom and into the living room. She looked over to see him standing in front of the Christmas tree he'd brought into her apartment and decorated all by himself for the holiday. He turned his head toward her, smiling sheepishly as he said, "To be honest, I thought you'd throw it out as soon as I left."
She sighed dejectedly. "I probably would have if I thought I could get it down the stairs on my own."
He blanched slightly at her confession, grimacing and scratching the back of his head as he glanced away and murmured, "You must really hate it, huh..."
Walking over to stand next to him by the tree, she stared up at it reminiscently before telling him, "My parents and I always decorated our tree together on Christmas eve. We'd eat a special Christmas cake and watch the holiday programs on the television as we hung up all the garland and the ornaments. Then we'd all camp out in the living room and wait for Santa to come and bring us our presents."
"Sorry."
Hawks's dejected sounding voice drew her out of her musings, and she turned her wide-eyed stare toward him, asking, "Why?"
Still grimacing, he staunchly avoided her gaze as he replied, "I just went and brought a tree without asking if it was okay first. I even decorated it all by myself too..."
She lifted her closed fist as high as she could and bonked him on the top of his bowed head.
"What was that for?" He groused, reaching up to rub the back of his suddenly sore head.
Pinning him with a dry glare, she told him flatly, "I didn't tell you all of that to make you feel bad. I said it so that you'd remember for next year. And don't get another one that's just gonna turn into some dead husk that sheds all over my living room." Crossing her arms across her chest, she drew her expression into a harsh frown as she groused, "It's not practical."
He stared back at her with wide eyes for a long moment before he let out a soft chuckle. Grinning down at her incredulously, he pointed his thumb at the tree and asked, "Can't you just use your quirk on it to Restore it?"
Sighing to herself, she smiled in a placating fashion as she reached up to wrap her arms loosely around his neck before telling him, "My quirk doesn't work on things that are already dead. Get rid of it before you leave today, please."
He smirked at her and lifted his own arms to wrap around her waist, leaning in to place a quick kiss on her lips before assuring her, "I'll take care of it."
She smiled back at him and returned his quick peck with one of her own before replying, "Thank you."
Shaking her head to clear the sudden sense of nostalgia that gripped her at the fluffy ending to that memory, she focused in on a few of the significant words she'd picked out of the conversation instead. "Dead tree husk... Shigaraki."
She wrote "Shigaraki" next to the word "tree" in her notebook. Circling all of the words she had managed to decode from their brief encounter, she was finally able to see the entirety of the message Hawks had spelled out for her during his impromptu, coded flirting.
Shigaraki was with the Nomu doctor in Kyoto.
A feeling of dread washed over her, and she raised a hand to her mouth in horror. "Oh no..."
As if things could possibly get any worse.
~*~
Misaki stalked purposefully into the President's office the next morning, interrupting her in a meeting with a few lower-level Commission employees. Before her promotion, she would have turned on her heel and quickly left the room after apologizing profusely for disrupting them. Now, however, she confidently met the President's stare and held her gaze in a clear message that she had something important to talk to her about in private and it couldn't wait.
The woman turned her attention to the others and inclined her head to them as she said, "Excuse us."
They all nodded before filing past Misaki in a rush to leave the room. As soon as the door shut behind them, she walked up to the desk and informed the President, "I have a possible lead on our League backer."
The woman's eyes widened as she stared back at her and she asked, "How did you find him?"
"Hawks. He passed me a message while he was hitting on me yesterday," Misaki answered a bit tentatively.
"Excuse me?" The President asked with a disapproving tone.
Misaki shifted uncomfortably before hesitantly replying, "We kind of ran into each other outside your office."
The woman raised an incredulous eyebrow at her.
"The way he spoke to me made it seem as if we'd just met, but there were a few code words mixed in; things he knew only I would pick up on," she rushed to explain in an effort to steer the conversation away from the topic of how he'd told her what he'd told her.
The President narrowed her eyes at the obvious redirect and lowered her voice in clear displeasure. "I'm not sure I approve of the way he's involved you in this."
Misaki grimaced. "I admit, the experience was a bit... Unsettling. But I seriously doubt he would have taken the risk unless he thought it would be worth it."
The woman was silent for a long moment, staring back at her in contemplation before her shoulders relaxed and she acquiescently inquired, "What did he tell you?"
Misaki swallowed heavily before responding grimly, "I'm pretty sure he was trying to tell me that Shigaraki is undergoing a modification procedure with the doctor who created the Nomu in Kyoto."
"What?" The woman asked in blatant shock.
Misaki dropped her head and nodded solemnly. "Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction too. He already turned Deika into a hole in the ground just by awakening his quirk. Imagine the nightmarish abilities he'll obtain at the hands of the Nomu creator. Feel free to throw up. I did."
"Is it possible that you're wrong?" The President asked, her tone and expression markedly grave.
Misaki let out a short, rueful chuckle. "You have no idea how much I wish I was."
The woman sighed heavily and shook her head. "We need to find out more about this doctor."
"I'm having ROAM search through all of the hospitals and private clinics in and around the Kyoto area, looking for anything that looks like it could be related to the Nomu in any way. Death certificates, cadaver transfer orders. Any possible connections to any of the known Nomu DNA contributors we've been able to identify so far," Misaki earnestly explained. "I'm hoping that the Kyoto clue will help unweave a few strands of the web he's created to hide himself over the years."
As soon as she'd figured out the message, and after she'd run to the toilet to upchuck her pancakes, she'd gone right to work on programing a tracking query. As far as she was concerned, finding the Nomu doctor had just become priority number one. Taking into consideration the four-month time frame Hawks had laid out with his first message, it was likely that was in lieu of the completion of Shigaraki's nomufication procedure. They wouldn't be able to have their revolution without their all-powerful grand commander, after all. They had to find this doctor before he could finish his work, or she dreaded what kind of monster Shigaraki would become.
The President nodded and moved around her desk to sit, saying, "Keep me in the loop."
She returned the nod and turned to leave when the President's voice stopped her.
"Misaki." She turned back around halfway to regard the woman who was staring across the room at her severely. "Be very careful about having any further interactions with Hawks. We can't afford for you to end up on the League's radar at this point."
She swallowed heavily before responding. "I will."
~*~
It had been a little over a week since her run in with Hawks. Misaki had just been called into a meeting in the President's office after a call had come in from Detective Tsukauchi and Gran Torino to update them on their progress with Kurogiri's interrogation. The detective had notified her earlier in the week that their investigation had led them to consider that her hunch about Shirakumo Oboro had been correct. The revelation had made her sick to her stomach, but that hadn't been nearly as bad as when they'd told her that they were planning on asking Eraser Head and Present Mic to attempt to make contact with Shirakumo's consciousness inside Kurogiri.
The theory behind the measure was rooted in the behavior Endeavor and Hawks had observed from the Nomu they'd encountered in Kyushu. After looking into its DNA profile, they had found that the body at the Nomu's base belonged to a cage fighter who was well known around the circuit to have an unquenchable thirst for battling strong opponents. Those base personality traits had remained intact within the Nomu they were referring to as Hood. Since Kurogiri also appeared to present a personality, they were hoping that Shirakumo's two best friends would be able to make contact with whatever was left of him inside the Nomu somehow.
The plan had paid off, it seemed, but not quite as well as they were hoping for.
"Hospital? That's all that was said?" The President asked in the direction of her phone which was currently sitting in the middle of the coffee table.
"We were lucky to get even that," Detective Tsukauchi's haggard voice sounded out from the speaker.
Misaki cleared her throat as she sat forward in her seat and said, "I actually have a few hospitals on my list of suspicious locations. But if we're talking about the one that comes to mind first..."
She opened her internet browser on her tablet and typed in the name of the hospital she was thinking of before casting the feed to the television screen.
"Jaku General Hospital," the President read aloud when the webpage loaded.
"The name of this hospital appears on the cadaver transfer orders of several confirmed Nomu DNA contributors. But more specifically," Misaki tapped on the staff link and navigated to the description page of the doctor at the top of the list.
"Who is he?" The President asked as the picture of the bald man wearing a pair of wide rimmed goggles over a large, bushy mustache popped up on the screen.
"Doctor Garaki Kyudai. He's the Director of Jaku General Hospital. He's also responsible for setting up several orphanages, private clinics, and charity work centers around the country," Misaki explained as she swiftly pulled up the links to several of the doctor's charitable organizations.
"He seems like quite the upstanding citizen," Shadou commented dryly.
Misaki turned her head toward him and succinctly said, "It's a front."
It had taken quite a bit of digging and cross checking for her to finally pin him down. The doctor had been careful to the point of paranoia while covering his tracks over the years. He'd used several different pseudonyms and filtered all of his work through his many so called "charitable" projects, never putting his name on anything directly. However, almost all of his endeavors, both in and out of the spotlight, had been quirk related in one way or another, which was what ultimately led her to investigate him in the first place.
She tapped another icon on her tablet and a multi-tiered table filled with the pictures and names of everyone she'd been researching over the past month. "This list details the confirmed DNA results of those used in the bioengineering of all of the recovered Nomu."
"There are so many..." The President trailed off in a whisper, staring at all of the results with wide, shocked eyes.
"Quite a few of them, in one way or another, tie back to Garaki Kyudai," Misaki said as she zoomed in on one of the pictures of a boy with large, bat-like red wings protruding from his back.
"Tsubasa Maruta, who's DNA was found in the winged Nomu recovered from the Hosu incident. His grandfather was a former colleague of Garaki's."
She zoomed out on the kid and pulled up a mugshot of a man with vacant eyes and large lips. "The small-time thug who made up part of the Nomu that attacked the students at UA. He grew up in one of Garaki's orphanages."
She closed that picture and pulled up another, this time of a man with wild eyes and curly black hair. "The cage fighter who was the base for the high-end Nomu, Hood, was treated several times for injuries consistent with cage fighting at one of his private clinics."
The President's expression had been growing more serious with every mention Misaki made to a connection between the Nomu and the doctor. She called out to the man on the other end of the line with a severe tone, "Detective?"
"I'll send one of my officers in undercover to do some surveillance," he immediately replied, the exhaustion in his voice now replaced with firm conviction. "By the looks of things, he's been experimenting with these Nomu for longer than we ever thought. Hopefully, he's overconfident enough to slip up and give us some concrete evidence."
"I'll forward the hospital tip on to our informant," the President said as she reached out to pick up the phone and end the call.
"I'll get our guys working on running down any potential contacts and aliases for this doctor," Shadou said as he stood, nodding to both of them before turning and heading for the door.
"Good work, Misaki. Take the rest of the week off," the President said as she stood.
"What?" Misaki asked, blinking back at the woman with wide, shocked eyes.
"You've done enough for now. Take a few days to recuperate before you burn yourself out," she told her as she turned and also made her way toward the door.
"But—" Misaki stuttered as she cut the feed from her tablet to the television and stumbled a bit to follow after the woman.
She didn't even turn around to acknowledge her as she called out over her shoulder, "I'll see you next week."
Misaki stopped, standing frozen in shock and suddenly all alone in the middle of the President's office. She looked down at the date and time on her tablet. It was only Thursday. What was she supposed to do with herself for the next three and a half days?
~*~
AN:
OMG I can't tell you how much work went into this chapter! My brain was on overload for weeks coming up with a scenario where Hawks could tell Misaki about the Kyoto clue. Just in case the "tree" reference was a little hard to understand, the kanji that is used to spell Shigaraki contains the characters for "death" and "tree". Also, the kanji for "Nomu" means brainless. Can you tell how long I've been planning for this scene?! Yes it's been that long! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it!
Thank you so much for reading! ❤️
LOLSAT