Chapter 6: The Empty Desk
The day pass came with conditions. Two staff numbers on a laminated card, a return time of six, and a rule about staying within sight of his approved escort, which was written in official language and meant Bakugo. Kirishima signed the form at the front desk and his pen hesitated only once, on the line that said destination.
Heights Alliance. The dorms. The common room.
The train ride took twenty minutes. Bakugo sat with his arm across the back of the seat, not touching, watching the windows like a man counting exits. He had picked Kirishima up at nine with the paper bag, and neither of them had mentioned that Friday had arrived, or what was scheduled after this. The letter to Shinso was in Kirishima's jacket pocket, sealed, addressed in handwriting that had gone careful halfway through. Aizawa had sent the hospital room number on Thursday, four words, no greeting.
"He'll be in class," Bakugo said, as the train slowed. "Nezu does attendance now. Everyone's accounted for, everyone's fine, nobody's going to ambush you."
"You're accounting for me right now."
"That's different. I'm the escort."
The dorm building came up around the corner of the street and Kirishima's legs slowed without asking his permission. It looked the same. That was the bad part. Same brick, same bike rack with Sero's bike leaned crooked against the rail where he always left it, same sag in the screen door that nobody had reported because reporting it felt like claiming the building.
Bakugo took the door and held it.
Inside, the common room had stopped.
It was the first thing Kirishima understood, standing in the entryway with his key still in his fist. Not messy, not quiet the way rooms get quiet in the evening. Stopped, like a clock with the hands pulled off. The couch cushions held their shapes, nobody having sat anywhere but the ends for weeks. The kitchen island was bare except for a single mug, handle turned outward, waiting for a hand that wasn't coming to collect it. Somebody had watered the plant on the windowsill. Somebody had not done anything else.
Across the room, stacked on the low table, was a tower of tapes and disks and two labeled drives. Sero's handwriting on every spine. Denki's dumb playlist, vol. Camp trip, the good parts. Karaoke, do not show Mina. The whole stack sat unwatched under a film of dust, and next to it a sticky note that said only: when someone's ready.
"He hasn't touched them," Kirishama said, and his voice came out lower than he meant. "He brings them out and puts them back."
"He told me. Says it feels like a funeral thing, playing them. Like you'd need everyone sitting down for it."
Movement at the far end of the room. Mina was sitting on the floor against Kaminari's door, knees up, a mug of tea gone cold beside her, and she had clearly been there a while. She'd made a nest of it. A blanket, her phone, the kind of vigilance in her face that softened and then sharpened again when her eyes found Kirishima and she stood too fast.
"You're here." She crossed the room and stopped a step short of him, hands hovering, asking permission with the hovering. "You're actually here. On a pass? They let you out?"
"Supervised." Kirishima nodded toward Bakugo. "Six o'clock return."
Mina's face did several things in a row. Relief, then guilt about the relief, then something tired underneath. "You picked a heavy day to visit."
"Every day's heavy here. I can tell from the couch."
She laughed, a short wet sound, and wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand before anything could fall. "Sorry. Sorry. I'm the one who's supposed to be holding it together, you're the one on a day pass from the facility."
"That's not a competition you're winning by crying first."
"It's absolutely a competition and I'm dominating it." She said it with her voice cracking in the middle, and Bakugo looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man refusing to have feelings about it.
Then the floor by the door caught up with Kirishima. What it meant. Housekeeping's cart was parked at the end of the hall, unused, supplies stacked and forgotten.
"How long have you been sitting there?"
"Since Wednesday." Mina said it simply, like reporting weather. "Facilities keeps trying to service the room. Standard schedule, and the paperwork's backed up, and every time they come I tell them the room's spoken for." She stopped. Her thumb found the strap of the blanket and worried it. "It's been, what, almost four weeks now. And I keep thinking, that's Denki's room, and it smells like him, and the second somebody cleans it, it's a normal room again. Somebody else's room. So I sit here on my free periods like a lunatic and I don't even know what I'm protecting."
"The room," Kirishima said. "Like Shinso said. Keeping the door shut so it keeps."
"You heard about Shinso." Mina looked at him, then at Bakugo, who shook his head slightly, the day's dark arithmetic not his to relay again. "Right. You know."
Footsteps on the stairs. Sero came down two at a time and stopped dead when he saw Kirishima, one hand still on the rail. "Oh," he said. "Oh, hey, man." He came over with his usual fast energy and it kept stalling out on him, half a laugh, half a swallow. "Nobody told me you were coming today. I'd have cleaned up. I'd have, I don't know, put on a shirt with buttons."
"You own shirts with buttons?"
"I own one. It's for court dates and emergencies." He tried the joke and it landed soft and died, and his eyes went to the stack of tapes on the table, and stayed there a beat too long. Kirishima watched the stall happen and understood it from the inside.
The corridor was quiet around them. Somewhere upstairs a door opened and closed. The common room held all of them in its stopped time, the mug with the outward handle, the dust on the tapes, the girl camped against a dead boy's door.
Kirishima turned and looked at the door itself.
It was closed. Of course it was closed. Behind it was everything the class had been stepping around for a month, the smell Aizawa had described in the van, bread kept from the air. He could feel it under the wood the way you feel a radiator's heat before you touch it.
"Has anyone opened it?" he asked. "Since."
Mina's jaw worked. "I go in. Sometimes. When nobody's around, because if they see me come out of it they'll look at me like I'm doing something brave and I'm not doing anything, I'm just standing in his room." Her voice had gone thin. "But nobody else. Jiro won't walk down this hallway. Sero stands at the corner. It's like the door's radioactive."
"You're all circling it," Kirishima said, and there was no accusation in it, only recognition. He'd spent six days staring at a wall. He knew the shape of circling.
He reached for the handle.
Mina's hand came up. "You're going in?"
"Yeah." The handle was cool under his palm. "Somebody has to be the first one. And I've had the most practice at this part, the part where you walk at the thing instead of around it." He looked back at the three of them, the pink, the tape-filled, the glaring. "It's just a room. It's got his stuff in it. That's all it's ever been."
He turned the handle and opened the door and the smell reached him before anything else did. Citrus body spray and cheap aftershave and underneath it something like warm plastic from a charger left running, and all of it faded but not gone, kept, the way bread keeps behind a shut door. Denki's hood was over the back of the desk chair. The bed was made badly, hospital corners done by someone who never learned them, one sock balled at the footboard like a missed shot.
Kirishima stood in the doorway and breathed it in, and his eyes burned, and he didn't step back.