Somewhere above, the sky had turned the colour of a bruise—purple and grey and bleeding smoke. The street that had once been a street was now a graveyard of concrete and twisted steel. A car lay upside down like a dead beetle, its windows shattered, its wheels still spinning.

And under it all, in the gap between a collapsed wall and a slab of pavement, you sat.

Small. Still. A little thing in a dirty pink coat, knees drawn up to your chest, a teddy bear pressed tight against your side. Your eyes were wide—too wide—watching the flames lick at the edges of the buildings without blinking.

You didn't cry.

You didn't move.

Touya Todoroki noticed you because you were the only thing in the rubble that wasn't moving.

He'd been walking through the wreckage for other reasons. Villain reasons. The kind of reasons that left holes in buildings and names in the news. But he stopped when he saw you, because even Dabi had eyes, and you were hard to miss.

The fire crackled. A piece of rebar groaned above your head, swaying dangerously.

You didn't look up.

He did.