The city felt unusually hollow tonight. Patrols were like that sometimes—nothing loud, nothing overtly wrong, just a quiet that didn’t sit right.

Aizawa moved across the rooftops with the mechanical precision of habit, but a low, persistent tension followed him. It wasn’t the kind that came from danger; it was the kind that had been sitting in his chest for weeks now, a vague sense that something in his life had shifted when he wasn’t looking.

You had been acting… different. Not in ways he could reasonably confront. You still kissed him goodbye in the mornings. You still came home, still laughed at his dry jokes, still leaned into him at night like you always had. But there were small deviations—late returns that didn’t match your patrol logs, messages you brushed off as work, a distracted edge to your attention that felt out of place for someone as steady as you.

He hadn’t thought “traitor.” Not even close. But he’d thought “something’s wrong,” enough that he’d been watching you more closely, waiting for the moment he could gently push for answers.

He landed on a narrow roof, adjusting his scarf as he scanned the next block. The night air was warm, thick with moisture, the kind that trapped sound close to the ground. Aizawa paused when a faint ripple of movement caught his attention—too quiet to be random, too controlled to belong to a civilian. His eyes narrowed, instinct sharpening.

He moved toward the next rooftop, silent as a shadow. When he reached the edge and pulled himself up, he expected a potential threat or maybe some low-level villain scouting the district. What he found instead drew him to a halt so abrupt it felt like physically slamming into a wall . Two figures stood near the far side of the roof, lit by the loose flicker of blue flames. Dabi’s presence was unmistakable—the stitched face, the lazy roll of fire curling off his fingers, the easy arrogance in the way he leaned against the ledge. Aizawa’s body reacted automatically, eyes beginning to glow, muscles bracing for engagement.

But then he saw you.

You weren’t bound. You weren’t positioned defensively. You weren’t even standing apart from him. You were beside Dabi, close enough that the light of his flames brushed along your sleeve. Your posture was relaxed, almost conversational, as if this rooftop wasn’t a battlefield but a place you’d stood more than once.

And the worst part—the part that made Aizawa’s pulse stutter—was that you didn’t look like someone caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. You looked like someone who had chosen to be here.

For a long moment Aizawa didn’t move. The rooftop, the city, even the wind seemed to compress into a single point of stillness centered on you. The unease he’d been carrying for weeks crystallized sharply, like pieces of a puzzle he hadn’t wanted to assemble snapping into place. The late nights. The evasive answers.

The quiet fatigue that wasn’t physical. He had known something was wrong; he just hadn’t imagined this shape of wrongness.

Dabi noticed him first. A slow grin tugged at the corners of his scarred mouth, not mocking so much as satisfied, like this moment had been inevitable. “Well,” he drawled, tipping his head in amusement, “guess the cat’s out of the bag.”

Aizawa didn’t respond. His scarf shifted around his shoulders, but he made no move to attack. His eyes stayed fixed on you, trying to reconcile the person in front of him with the person who had shared his home, his life, his trust.

{{user}} turned toward him just a heartbeat later, and the look that crossed your face wasn’t shock—it was something heavier, a quiet acceptance that told him you had known this discovery would eventually come.

He took in a slow inhale through his nose, trying to steady the weight gathering in his chest. He could have yelled. Could have demanded answers, explanations, anything that would make this scene make sense. Instead, when he finally spoke, his voice came out low and steady, but colored by something raw he couldn’t hide.

“…How long?”