Miruko is leaps and bounds ahead of other heroes. She works almost alone, and she does more than her higher-ranked colleagues can do with fully-staffed agencies. They have sidekicks and interns and dozens upon dozens of police liasons, and all Miruko has are three coworkers who can't join her in the field and impersonal HPSC backing. The Commission gives her everything she asks for- without double-checking her work, without telling her to take a break, without coddling her- which is to say, the Commission asks her to jump, and she makes them work for every inch off the ground.
The Commission asks Hawks to jump, and he doesn't bother asking how high. Hawks soars.
(Miruko asks for a new force sensor, after the last one exploded from a roundhouse kick. It's waiting by her door that same evening.)
Miruko isn't better than Hawks, because "better" implies that they're used for the same things. "Better" is a wedge between them that neither of them can afford. Miruko, the Rabbit Hero, works alone and doesn't need a real agency because she knows she's the best. Officially, she doesn't have time for friends. Unofficially, she makes time for Hawks when the Commission allows him to take two seconds for himself and the two of them shouldn't be friends, not when all he does is put up fronts and all she does is disdain them, but blood's thicker than water and God only knows how much blood they've spilled for one another. Hawks has an intern he adores and sidekicks who adore him and multiple on-staff, trained medical officers and countless support technicians and countless more fans. Miruko has a support tech/medic, a personal assistant, and an accountant. She has a lot of people asking for feet pics on Twitter. She has a chokehold on her image because she doesn't have a PR manager and refuses to get one. The Commission's stopped hinting.
(Rumi kicked the training dummy so hard it bent around her heel. She was newly-recruited to an exclusive kind of hero training, engineered specifically for her, after she was picked out of dozens of hero school washouts. She was too aggressive for hero work, all the exams said. She had too many fights on her personal record because teachers never noted down who started them, only who ended them. Rumi had a tail to pull on and ears to tug and a brown belt her mum still had to knot for her. She wasn't supposed to be Rumi, when she was at the HPSC. She was Miruko, the Rabbit Hero in training. She was Rumi anyway, because the HPSC had another kid in the program with her, and he was smaller than he should've been and he knew how to sweep rooms for bugs by detatching all his feathers from his wings. He would be Hawks, the Winged Hero. Rumi locked their pinkies together and promised she'd never stop thinking of him as Kei.
They laughed about it, later. Hawks had officially debuted with his own agency, immediate, and she'd clinked their shitty plastic glasses together and said way to go, Kei, and he'd blinked at her, utterly confused. Rumi and Kei, except ten years down the line and memories to match the head trauma. Miruko raised an eyebrow and asked if he knew her name at all, and Hawks laughed and scratched the back of his neck, boyish charm the same as it always was when he pulled it out for a lie, and she dropped the subject. He remembered. He just hadn't really meant it.
He was the perfect outcome of their project, dropped into it at eight years old and entrapped until his death, whenever they needed that to be. Hawks hadn't had anyone in his corner except himself and another teenage girl on the inside of the problem. Rumi's mum went to bat for her. Snarled over every penny the HPSC tried to pinch, hounded down any extra hours heaped onto her plate, threatened to pull Rumi out of their special program and transfer her to a regular high school. The last one was all bark, no bite, since Rumi'd nearly gotten kicked out six different times in middle school alone, but it got her what she needed. The HPSC got her what she needed, too, all the annoying smoothies and vegetable-only jerkies to wear down her teeth so they wouldn't overgrow her mouth. They'd look less threatening if she wore them down correctly, but Rumi wanted threatening teeth. A bunny girl wasn't the kind of hero to strike fear into the hearts of villains, would never force the world to play fair for fear of her retribution. A hare, though, tall and wrong and sharp-toothed and focused unstoppably on anything in its path? Rumi could do something with that. Miruko could be that.
The Commission told her jump, bunny, show us your soft underbelly. Miruko staggered upright onto her back legs, looked them in the eye, said I'm all lean muscle, motherfuckers. You want a jump? Try and make me.)
Hawks backs her, some cases. He could fight like she does, but that's bad for the image that the Commission has set out, so he runs rescue while she runs down the rabble-rousers. Miruko pins an escaped villain with anti-quirk cuffs as Hawks swoops back, empty handed for the first time since the mess started, and he sweeps around in a circle like a joyous tornado before dropping to a dive that she meets halfway, her torso threatening to twist even as she hurls the incapacitated Skinsplit (AKA Yahagu Etsuo) to her old friend's grip. He catches them, cradles them, offers a sloppy salute and disappears over the horizon. She hits the ground again and forces her grin sharper.
Miruko works alone.
Miruko does damage, and she does what the Commission needs her to do, and she's as close to free as a contracted hero could ever manage. Hawks is a pawn; Miruko's a queen. They're both still on the board.
Miruko sits up late with tracking data scrolling over and over on her screens and she looks at all the raging injustices of the world and she thinks, I'm going to make it better.
Coleope is the one to hand her the thick envelope dictating she does exactly that. It's odd. Usually, Miruko gets her cases via email or CBChat or, if it's a bad week for villainy, picks them out herself. Usually, Coleope stays on Hawks' ass, and Miruko says as much when the Commission's pet news-breaker strolls into her agency like Miruko ever added her biometrics to the system. Coleope smiles, thin and professional, and explains that the mission had originally been conceived for Hawks before a secondary review of metrics had suggested he stay visible while Miruko… doesn't.
Miruko knows that her smiles look predatory. She does it on purpose, and nobody ever suspects that she's trying not to laugh at an internal joke about vanishing into a hat. "So I'm just, what?" Miruko asks, skimming over the files on Shigaraki Tomura, Twice (AKA Bubaigawara Jin), Ujiko Daruma. Possible new recruits: Hero Killer Stain (AKA Agakuro Chizome), Toga Himiko, Dabi- identity unknown. "Taking over the number three's work since he can't sully his boyscout image?"
"You'll be proving that you can think big-picture," Coleope corrects, "since this is a much longer term arrangement than any you've done before. It should give you some leeway in negotiating your contract renewal, when you've arrested the League of Villains." Miruko snorts. Of course, then, they give this to her. She's doing what she needs to, even if she's half-pinned by the Commission's thumb, so why the hell would a contract renegotiation matter to her? It'd be everything to Hawks. It'd be a chance, for Hawks. And then Coleope gets this light in her eyes, this subtle quirk to her eyebrows that Miruko can't quite read but doesn't like, and she adds, "It would prove that heroes can achieve incredible things even without direct supervision. The Commission would likely expand on your program- and Hawks' agency is so much to keep that close an eye on." The light in her eyes and the edge of her teeth showing through that thin-lipped, smug, stupid condescending smile say, jump, bunny. We know you have a heart.
("Rumi," Kei says, watching her launch herself into the air with reckless abandon and rowdy laughter, "Rumi, you're flying!")
Miruko slams the folder shut and leans her forearms on it. "These names all you got for me, or should I just bring in everybody who darkens their door?" Come catch me, then. Come and take it out yourself.
<Ihai interlude>
Dabi's her favorite lead.
Miruko's got data points by the dozens, and she's all but dropped from the public eye in favor of running night patrols, shaking down minor mooks, analyzing the information she can gather. There's been an uptick in victims found with bite marks around their knife wounds, faint as if accidentally left there, but at least Toga's sticking to mainly the same spots. She used to be a lot harder to track, but that's more than likely due to how much Agakuro moved. Either he was moving her with him, or she was following him around like a puppy, but either way, his stint in Tartarus means the kid's on her own. It should be easier for her to move around now. She's more stationary than ever, despite all signs pointing to the League employing her alongside the well-documented warp quirk villain that evaded capture at the USJ. Some of the analysts have been looking frantically between recordings of Kurogiri and recordings of Noumu attacks, trying to draw an explicit tie between the physiologies. Point is: Miruko has leads. Dabi's just her favorite. He's an asshole and he carries around the scent of gasoline and old blood, but they started from Miruko pinned him against an alley wall when he tried to grab some dude's wallet and now they're sitting on a dock at two in the morning, watching boats. "So, big man," Miruko starts, one leg folded under her and the other hanging over the edge as the moon sits heavy on the horizon. Dabi flicks his eyes over, already tired of her. Miruko hates to disappoint, so she doesn't, just turns to him with a mean, lazy grin. "Heard you attacked a buncha toddlers."
Dabi tches, looks back to the harbor. "The Yuuei brats? That's old news, bunny." Part of the reason Miruko likes this aspect of the job- this infiltration attempt, grifting with the same lead one-on-one- is that she isn't putting up the whole front. They both wrap it up under business transactions, careful information exchanges coated thick with sarcasm, but there's something similar at the core of them. A disdain for the way heroes work. A bad example of how to fix the problems. So much anger it'll kill them. Dabi sees her as an annoyance, but an ally, and better to keep on his side because he knows that she could snap him over her knee like a fucking twig. What can she say? Miruko likes that in a man.
"New to me! Somebody never said anything about it, and I had to find out from their teachers getting extra paranoid about kidnapping protocols." Present Mic was the worst, despite Eraserhead getting the brunt of the League's meddling. (Blatant, dangerous attacks still count as meddling until there's a bodycount.) Cool air rumbles in over the waterfront, and Miruko readjusts her hoodie, pulling the strings tighter and taking a moment to readjust to the pressure on her ears. They're tucked securely up under a woolen beanie with buttons sewn onto the sides to allow for face masks. Dabi, lucky bastard, can just stretch them on right over his ears as long as he's careful about not picking out any staples. They've both foregone the masks for the conversation- turned out to the harbor as they are, at this time of night, too much concealment of identity is more suspicious than not enough.
It's enough for Dabi to just wear clothes without staples in them and be abruptly unrecognisable. He doesn't even need a hood. Just a thick plaid scarf piled on top of his shoulders, obscuring the lower half of his face and all the burns stretching out from under the collar of his shirt. "They're kids," he grouses, "you would've had a problem with it."
Miruko would have. She wouldn't have fixed the issue, obviously, just told Eraserhead to stay on lookout. He was almost paranoid enough for all the League's plans to collapse in on themselves anyway, so who would've suspected that she had a hand in it? Nobody even died. It's kind of a fucking miracle. "Eh. Getting them out of the Commission's line of sight is probably better for 'em, long term," Miruko says with a dismissive wave of her hand. "Might've talked Shiggy into letting me come with, make sure you didn't kill any of 'em, but…" Dabi snorts. (He talks about Toga the way Miruko used to talk about Hawks. Toga calls their leader Shiggy and it pisses the big bad off so bad that Dabi's gone out of his way to introduce Miruko to the nickname. She's had to correct her official notes more than once.)
Dabi snorts, "You think he'd listen to anything you said, hero?"
Miruko cracks her knuckles. "I'm persuasive." Her informant barks a laugh, and Miruko wonders what it says about her that she wishes she and Dabi could be real friends. Probably that she's just as mean as everybody's always said.
"Yeah," Dabi says, "right. I'd pay good money to see you two in a room together."
"Gimme a good heads up on where to focus patrols, and I'll do it without breaking your broke ass more."
Their deal is nothing more than quid pro quo; she gives him the days that the top ten aren't patrolling, and he gives her the vague outlines of what the League is planning next. She shifts the city around to make blindspots for petty crimes, and he shifts their serious crimes around to turn them pettier. Toga's been killing less people, even if the injuries are worse. Bubaigawara's break-ins have been without anybody home at the wrong times, even if insurance rates have been rising. Nobody's dying. Miruko's saving people's lives. Civilians living through shit is what they do, and it's better to have a hard time living than to die for no reason. They're partners in crime, literally, and it's damage reduction in a way that Miruko usually turns her nose up at. Working with somebody to stop things from getting worse feels different than it does when she's shuffled off to the sidelines and told to do pre-emptive clean up while less skilled, more liked heroes take down the active problems. Dabi looks her over, face flat so his staples won't tear him back open, and then he says, "We're dealing with something else, right now. Laying low, defending our turf from some of the other gangs in the area." He shrugs, one-shouldered and faux-casual, dull blue eyes still piercing her. "Might be nice to have a hand with that, 'less you're too busy getting kittens out of trees or something."
Miruko doesn't know how much he suspects. Hawks is the one who manipulates his own image, who charms in real time with on-the-fly adjustments to his personality, who couldn't do this job because nobody would ever believe the golden boy could be dirty unless he shared what the Commission did to him. That's not data the Commission wants anybody sharing. That's why Miruko's here, playing chicken with an arsonist, going all in. Maybe he knows she's bluffing. Maybe he's going to fold. "I've got an image to keep, but my schedule's not exactly full-up anymore. 'Help' like I arrest the gangs before they make a move, or are 'help' like I make sure they don't move again?"
Dabi smiles, just a slash of a grin that strains the silver at its edges. "Text me your coordinates when I ask, and we'll see what you can stomach, hero." Hawks gets nightmares about every villain he bruises too bad before they make their way to their cell. Miruko washes blood from her fur before she goes over to his sterile apartment. Commission says jump: Hawks skims atmosphere. Commission says stomp: Miruko cracks concrete.
"I already put up with your crispy ass," she points out, wrinkling her nose in disgust that's only mostly fabrication. Dabi's eyes brighten with the threat of flame until she looks pointedly at the water a few feet below them - he's not weak, exactly, but he's not strong enough to hold his ground if Miruko decides to properly introduce him to Batū harbor - and then they shoot the shit for a while longer. Can you believe Shigaraki dusted another fucking couch (yes), why the hell would Endeavor boil my iced coffee (because he's a fucking bastard, don't talk about him), when are you going to tell me the real shit that goes on (when you've proven I can trust you, which probably means never), keep directing pros away from Sisubo, keep a fucking leash on the arsonist tendencies. Dabi makes her leave first so she won't trail him back to the shitty, rundown bar that the trackers indicate Atsuhiro sleeps in and that sits at the center of Toga's attack radius. He might genuinely think she doesn't know about it.
The weeks pass slow. All For One is locked up and the League is scrabbling to stay together, dealing with new losses, testing out the loyalty of their "inside man." Miruko runs patrols, gets closer to a full roster of the League, and re-readjusts her budget for canned coffee. (Oba- her assistant- looks at it, looks at Miruko, and visibly decides not to interfere. She does circle Asano's paycheck and note the usual starting rate for medics beneath it, but that's something Miruko's been meaning to get around to updating anyway. She ignores that it's a dig at her health. She's always been like this, and it hasn't killed her yet.) Toga claims another almost-victim, rushed to the hospital just in time before back-alley exsanguination.
Miruko knows she should feel guilty. She's always been too focused on the ends, though, for the means to make her stomach turn. She's always been like this.
It's saved more people than it's killed.
<Ihai interlude>
Two days before her next scheduled meeting with Dabi, Hawks slams through her balcony doors missing half of his feathers and about a fifth of his blood. "Heyyyyy, Miruko," he says, dripping red onto her floor, "uh, I know you're not technically on duty-" there's a roar from below them, probably not the first if the fight's been going on long enough to have injured him this badly, and he winces. Miruko had her penthouse soundproofed for a reason. The reason is that she likes sleep.
She's only managed half an hour of it, but she stands up anyway, groaning as she grabs aerolised deodorant off her coffee table. Nothing to be done about her hair, or the rock still lodged in the toe of her boot, but she can at least smell less like death warmed over. Hawks is lucky she crashed still in her costume, and she makes sure to tell him so. Repeatedly. He keeps up his grin and a constant stream of puns at the expense of the oversized plant monster that keeps shooting vines and pus-smelling flower globules at them both. It's a rough morning. They're both drenched in chlorophyll by the time the police show up to cart away the incapacitated ecoterrorists, and Hawks turns to her, hopeful before he even opens his mouth. "It's not that far back to Fukuoka," she says, knowing full well it would be for anyone else. "Use your own damn shower."
"Yours is right upstairs," Hawks whines.
Miruko turns on a heel (and finds that her hair is stuck too awkwardly to her neck, shoulders, and itself for a dismissive hair flip) and starts back to her agency and, by extension, penthouse. "Upstairs and back a couple blocks. You couldn't catch them with that Mach-Speed Corkscrew before we had to block traffic across extra intersections?"
Recalling the rest of his feathers, Hawks bounces after her, his boots hitting the ground too hard for it to be truly comfortable for him. "I can fly us back!" There's a shoot of bamboo clenched in his left fist, and he's doing a decent show of conducting an imaginary orchestra or waggling it for emphasis while he talks. Stress gripping isn't good for the cameras. Mutations at large are only good for the cameras in small doses from those with pretty, human faces. They're lucky the press were only allowed aerial shots and that nobody's managed to clear the roadblocks or rubble and press microphones into either of their faces just yet.
Miruko groans, but slings an arm around Hawks' neck and jumps just enough for him to get his other arm up under her knees. "We're using the communal set in the main building," she threatens, "you don't get to track this shit into my apartment." It's barely a compromise since there's never been a snowball's chance in hell that either of them want to deal with cleaning the apartment, but Hawks gives her a dopy grin all the same. It's the same routine when she's closer to his home turf: he whines and cajoles her into staying, and she refuses to use the shower in his empty fucking housing unit, so they use his agency's showers and utilize the perpetually re-invented relationship scandals to get away with it. Hawks is the actor, the tabloids are his adoring audience, and all Miruko has to do is fuck around without getting found out. Not like either of them have enough time or vulnerability for a longterm partner, anyway. (Not like either of them could stomach the thought of being together, anyway. Hawks kissed her, once. It was right before they finalised their contracts and it held off his debut for an extra week while he recovered from the obvious bite mark, healing quirks applied judiciously to make sure it wouldn't scar. Miruko would feel bad if his reaction hadn't been abject relief, and she'd encourage him to experiment with people he does like if she could trust him to identify who those are. He says he doesn't have time to hang around at bars. Miruko doesn't argue.)
The water turns on and his feathers come off, wriggling over the tiles. They've been lucky so far, but the one time they don't check will be the one time that the Commission has figured out how to waterproof and noise-gate their bugs enough to be worth planting in their experiments' only private spaces. "What the fuck happened to your ear?" Miruko asks when he lingers a second too long outside the spray. It's not quite code, but it's not blatantly asking if there are finally eavesdroppers, either, just in case there are.
Hawks shakes himself, which is a little funny to watch when he's missing his wings and most of his clothes. "Nothing, we're clear," he answers, his blinding grin finally dropping for a tired, toothless half-smile.
Miruko grimaces back. She's sleepy and hungry and missing her friend, but she's also hiding half of her job from the man who's supposed to be her only confidant, so where the fuck does she get off being upset he's not telling her whatever's bothering him? "I'm gonna drown you for wasting my time. C'mere, jackass, you can't wash your hair like that." He disassembles his boots and goes where she tells him, and she combs cheap, overscented shampoo through his hair when the hot water has finally carried most of the plant goop down the drain. Hawks leans into it like the touch-starved bastard he is, hand slowly unclenching while shampoo suds slowly rinse away until Miruko can grab the splinter of bamboo and chuck it onto the pile of their costumes. "You can get the rest," she dismisses, waving a vague hand at his body and the equally overscented bars of soap behind him, but Hawks just presses his forearms together in an X and makes a buzzer sound with his mouth, reaching over her to pump too much conditioner into one hand before spinning the other in a clear turn around gesture.
Miruko glowers. Hawks repeats the gesture more forcefully, and she rolls her eyes before obliging. To the back of her head as he starts slathering the worst tangles: "After we're done, I was thinking I go charm Oba into letting me see what super secret bounty you're hunting this week-"
"Fat chance."
"-while you catch up on your beauty rest!" Hawks finishes like she didn't interrupt. Gingerly folding her ear forward, he starts working some of the conditioner into the fur there. The sound of water hitting the tiles muffles until it's indistinguishable from blood running through her veins, and Miruko doesn't bother keeping her eyes open as Hawks directs her face under the showerhead. "I didn't mean right now," he adds, and she tells herself that it's a joke unweighted by worry. She tilts her head enough to avoid water going up her nose and fakes a loud, obnoxious snore, and Hawks' laugh is the rusted over trill-gasp that he never lets out in public. Green plant gunk and gray-brown dust shimmers on its way down the drain. He doesn't ask if she's okay. She knows better than to ask if he is.
(They used to shower together all the time when they were teenagers. She's not sure if the Commission had already come to the conclusion that their two rising stars were completely incompatible or if they had made the same mistake as the trash magazines. Miruko doesn't know which option is worse. What she does know is that Hawks' talons make washing hair difficult, that standing flat is only comfortable for an hour or two without his boots, and that she's the only one who he trusts enough to lean into when she touches him. She knows that her fur is scratchier than it should be because she uses rough human shampoo, that wearing her teeth down the way she does only makes chewing harder, and that Hawks won't ever draw attention to the way she makes excuses to draw close to him. It's rare that they spend real time together. It's rarer that she doesn't want to.)
Hawks grabs one of the few meat dishes she keeps in her fridge, sits on her counter and tears into it while she knocks back a protein shake and digs through her bathroom cabinet for a silk scarf. Including the forty-five minute shower, they spend an hour together. It's more than they've had in months. Hawks does end up grabbing an almost-finished case file and wheeling away while she shouts after him about stealing her collars, and he just laughs as he catches a thermal and disappears into cloud cover. Miruko sets her straightening iron out for when she wakes up, the heat protectant bottle set right in front of it so she won't be able to ignore it. It's optics, again, because everything she learned about herself from before the Commission relinquished her as a viable surgical implant for the billboards was about optics. Tight-fitting costumes don't provide relief from being grabbed by villains, talking around what she means isn't better for getting what she wants, and her hair isn't overlong rabbit fur with an inexplicable curl that will mat if left to grow naturally. Her hair is human hair. Her hair curls because her mum's does, because her grandma-on-her-dad's-side's did.
Miruko doesn't have a PR manager to make her wear a form-fitting leotard with thigh-high boots and straightened hair. She does anyway. She loses funding if she dips too far away from the top ten, too far out of the public's good graces, and mutants are only good for the camera if they're mostly human or mutated "sexily".
(It's different from what Hawks lets the Commission do to him for those same optics. It's different when she does it to herself.)
<Ihai interlude>
She's not in costume when Dabi texts her; she's working through a roadblock on Ironclad's dead-end case by stomping down to the gym and doing pull-ups until the bar breaks or she does. She should be Rumi, in a loose-fitting charity event T-shirt and old yoga pants with a hole for her tail that she had to cut herself. Instead, she's thinking about a case she can't crack and working out in a cluttered, Commission-funded, private gym in the same high-rise as her cluttered, Commission-funded agency and cluttered, Commission-funded apartment. She's Miruko, and she gets a text reading, "yr coordinates; b ready" so Miruko should get into costume, but this is abruptly a matter of maintaining cover. If this infiltration is going to work, she has to show she's quick to action, trustworthy in a fight. Even if she didn't need those things for the job, hell if she doesn't need to blow off some steam. Miruko already has her legs wrapped, but she grabs her steel-toed boots and the beanie with a face mask still half-dangling off the buttons before texting back the coordinates of her agency building. The air in front of her splits at a seam she didn't know it had, black mist spiralling into a circle that ripples purple as she leaps through it, careful not to touch the edges just in case.
They're in an alleyway, but it's broad daylight as Miruko flies directly into somebody's back and knocks them flat. She can hear the dull roar of a crowd nearby, meaning she has to snap the face mask's elastic back onto the button before she does anything else. "Nice of you to join us," Dabi sneers from too close for comfort, but Miruko's too busy flicking through the known A-list villains- searching for a match to the prone figure she's still got pinned- to respond. Two spiralling, sickly-yellow horns protrude from the wispy blond hairline, and there's a faint but persistent buzzing of flies in the air around them. Vermind, AKA Arima Kie, quirk name Pestilent Horns, B-rank villain, neither a priority nor affiliated with the League of Villains, acceptable loss. Miruko doesn't have quirk-suppressant cuffs on her person, so she grabs a fistful of lank, greasy hair and slams Vermind's face into the concrete half as hard as she can.
Vermind chokes around a whimper, and Miruko hisses, "Stay down." She gets to her feet without checking if the villain seems intent to obey. "Nice of you to invite me," she calls back to Dabi, his location easy to pinpoint from the rising heat around him. Spinner (AKA Iguchi Shuichi, quirk name Gecko, C-rank villain) is about two feet from her and locked in a blisteringly fast brawl with someone Miruko hasn't read a file on, so she figures they're expendable. Spinner leaps backward and the other villain unfolds his left leg almost faster than Miruko can react, stirring up dust as he bounds forward in pursuit. Almost. Miruko meets the jumping villain mid-air, feet-first, and knocks him into a brick wall with enough force that she feels something crunch under her soles. There's a rush of air, and then there's a throwing knife sticking out of her opponent's skull. Courtesy of Spinner, no doubt.
It's an acceptable loss.
"Coward," snarls someone else, and Miruko ducks the brass-knuckled punch aimed her way without even thinking about it, uppercutting her attacker in the stomach and dodging the resulting spray of vomit. "Did you think you could steal from us and not face consequences?" The same voice, from somewhere closer to the edge of the fight, is demanding and raspy, like he's been breathing in too much of Dabi's hot air. Miruko spares a glance as she hops over the wooden crates (half-opened by force, probably narcotics of some kind judging by how close they are to Flaunt's base of operations) to rebound off the wall and pin one of the underlings to the ground, and she's not overly surprised to see Shigaraki lunging after Pearlescent. There are multiple reports of Pearlescent (AKA Hamaguri Sennen, quirk unregistered, A-rank villain) seizing territory previously belonging to the League of Villains, so it stands to reason she knows how to fight against their Vanguard. Primarily, it's staying out of reach of Shigaraki, who could disintegrate her refractive skin and presumably deal with anything her quirk could be used for. "Come here!"
Staying out of Shigaraki's range is easy, Miruko notes as she and Spinner's backs hit and they whirl around each other in a flurry of blades and boots aimed at their attackers, since the villain's charges are telegraphed and poorly-considered. He's chasing her around like a kid playing tag. Honestly, Miruko remembers playing tag with Hawks, and she's pretty sure this is more like a toddler trying to play tag with an Olympian. It's pathetic. Dabi shouts, "Down!" Miruko drops, pulling Spinner with her, and a line of blue fire streaks over them in a cacophany of screams and crackling flesh.
Spinner wriggles free of the grip on his shoulder and pops back to his feet, sneering at his teammate. "Quit kill-stealing! We had it!"
"I was hoping to hit you, too," Dabi sneers back.
Some League. She's seen more cohesive teamwork from- shit, she's done more cohesive teamwork. Miruko surveys the damage around them and reckons that a more bleeding-heart type would wince. If any of these mooks survive, they'll need serious treatment for the next several months, minimum. Skin grafts, intensive care for most of them, the works. Spinner isn't burned, and neither is she, meaning that this was Dabi holding back. Meaning that despite his words and general demeanor, he cares enough about staying with the League to actively avoid friendly fire. Interesting. "Anybody gonna help Shiggy out?" Miruko asks the alleyway at large.
"I don't need-!"
Pearlescent giggles like a woman half her age, still evading the League's fearless, manbaby leader. "Shiggy? Aw, that's adorable! It suits you, kiddo!" She makes a horrible, wet noise, and then rapid-fire spits a series of tiny projectiles at all of them like she's blowing boba out of a packed straw. Miruko launches herself into the air, bounding off of the walls toward her with one fist already drawn back. Pearlescent isn't as fast as Miruko, or as gymnastic, meaning Miruko catches her just fine where Shigaraki's flat-footed attempts failed. And Miruko could take her out, is the thing. Pearlescent is dangerous and deranged and dealing drugs that are over half impurities, driving up prices and danger in previously stable, if not safe, parts of town. Nobody would question it if Miruko grabbed her, bagged her, reported her in.
"Hey, boss!" Miruko calls, and she flings the woman down at Shigaraki's feet. "Special delivery!"
Pearlescent has enough time to gasp when she hits the ground, though whether from pain or fear, nobody will ever know. She's dust in a matter of seconds.
Shigaraki straightens, flicking dust off of his fingers as he looks up at Miruko. "So you're Dabi's recruit," he drawls. Not the, but Dabi's, meaning Shigaraki's not the driving force of bringing her here. Why would he be? When he was stumbling after Pearlescent, Shigaraki didn't suggest he and Spinner- clearly more suited to pursuit and capture of highly mobile opponents- trade places the way a good commander would. (The way Miruko wouldn't have, either, but there's a reason that she works alone and Shigaraki doesn't, and the reason is that she is good enough to tackle problems without outside assistance.) Shigaraki wouldn't have asked to bring in help. He isn't angry, either, implying he at least knew about her, which is- more than Miruko had expected. Miruko had expected Dabi to manipulate the League into meeting the bare minimum of her demands without any mention of her, without any intent to bring her into the fold. "Do you think you have what it takes to join us?"
Shigaraki Tomura has an ego the size of Endeavor's and twice the destructive power. Shigaraki Tomura is the lynchpin in Miruko's undercover operation. Shigaraki Tomura will not take well to being bested by a woman he has never met before, especially if he knows that she's currently a hero, and biting her tongue is the hardest thing Miruko's ever fucking done. All she says is, "What, you don't?" It ought to earn her money. Shigaraki leers and Miruko leers back through the mask, between the slit of the metal rod pinched over her nose and the brim of her hat, and she wonders what the new leader of the League sees in her. She looks at him through the hand pressed perfect and tight to taut and flaking skin, and peering out peek-a-boo at her, between the gaps of dead fingers, is a child. She knows from reports and best-guesses and gestalted information that he's barely younger than her, but there is something about the dullness in his eyes that she recognizes because she learned how to hide it when other kids were in high school.
The dullness of the crowd down the alley sharpens, and Miruko's ears twitch against the underside of the beanie. "Can we take some of this back with us?" Spinner asks, gesturing to a crate that's exsanguinating white powder.
"Pearlescent's been cutting her shipments with bottom-shelf crap," Miruko drawls. "Surely the League has better connections to the drug trade than stealing poisoned coke out of an alleyway in broad daylight." It's not the most subtle probe, but none of them seem to be overly suspicious. Spinner mostly seems sheepish, uncomfortably folding away his sword.
"You'd think," Dabi grumbles, slouching against a wall over an unmoving body, one hand in his pocket and the other texting on a black flip phone. Miruko cannot picture this man voluntarily taking stimulants. He snaps it shut and Miruko feels the world dissolve behind her, filling up anew with cool darkness. "We'll call if we need you, Bunny."
<Ihai interlude>