Set You Free [Angst!] - Chapter 3

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When Katsuki got home, he found a pile of neatly stacked boxes at his apartment door. Each one had a neat little label affixed with Katsuki’s name inked on the top, the fronts labelled with date ranges which, put together, covered the whole of the past year.

He unlocked the front door and carried the pile inside, a few boxes at a time, stacking them beside his desk instead. At the bottom he left the most recent collections, holdingthe last few months of content, and at the top, the older ones, some boxes only covering one day. He knew what those ones had to be, even though he hadn’t been warned of their arrival – in the hours since their latest meeting, while Katsuki was driving home, Izuku had somehow managed to get all the papers from his lawyers sent over. For a convicted felon, he really did seem like such a nice guy.

As much as he wanted to open them up and peruse all the evidence and court documents right away, there was something else still weighing on his mind, something else that seemed more pressing to deal with. He fired up his computer, drumming his fingers on the desk as he waited, and finally, he opened up a search page.

Shimura Tenko.

The results came up instantly, pages and pages of blue links, and Katsuki frowned as he scanned over them briefly. There was a lot to sift through, from missing persons reports to arrest warrants and even speculation of child trafficking?Was this the guy Izuku had been going after when he snapped and killed people? The case that broke him?

Worse still, Katsuki found his stomach sinking as he considered, were the people he killed involved with this man?

He clicked over to the images option, finding much fewer results this time, but as he scrolled down the page, his breath caught.

With shaking hands, he opened a new tab, his search auto-completing after how many times he’d typed it in over the past few weeks.

The resemblance was undeniable.

There were only two options in his mind: number one, the men were twins, presumably adopted by different parents considering their surnames, who had somehow managed to have the same hairstyle and wear the same style of clothing despite not being together; or number two, they were the same man.

So Shigaraki Tomura, the man with no past before his induction to a huge company by his adoptive father, was a fake name? Or a new name? To cover up...

Katsuki wanted to vomit.

All the awful rumours and accusations, the trials no one could believe he got away from unscathed, the evidence that somehow went ignored, the convenient increases in wealth – or worse, somedisappearances– of lawyers and judges who were supposed to convict him, were all the same man who supposedly donated more money to charity than Katsuki would ever possess.

Charities controlled by his company.

All thoughts of food or sleep were forgotten as Katsuki began to dive deep again, finding lists of charities founded by the company and copying them to another document, digging into every single one of them and hunting down their backgrounds, their documents, their histories and personnel, everything he could get his hands on.

And soon, common threads began to appear between them; links that went nowhere, more missing persons, suspiciously absent documentation that any registered charity should have had no problem displaying. If he had no idea that there might be something going on, he probably wouldn’t have looked twice at it, but everything piled together made him start to wonder, to speculate.

By the time he looked at the clock it was already two a.m. and he hadn’t even opened the boxes yet. With a groan he saved his work and closed everything down, dragging himself into the next room to grab a snack before bed. His mind was still racing, swirling with thoughts and questions and ideas, and even a hint of concern because what if someone came after him for uncovering it all? Then again, Izuku seemed to have taken them all down, which he supposed would explain why Izuku completely lacked remorse for his crime. It was the ultimate mark of a hero, right? Self-sacrifice for the good of the world? He’d confessed to the crime without hesitation, it would make sense if he felt he’d done it for good reason. It would also explain why there had been so many appeals in his case even though he’d confessed, why he’d never tried to claim he was innocent. Katsuki had found self-defence claims in his initial research which he’d thought was weird from the beginning, considering he killed six people. But everything online had been wiped, everything prior to the deaths was gone, so it was probably hard to prove that they had been doing something wrong.

Eventually, somehow, he managed to fall asleep. Exhaustion tended to do that, he supposed. But even his dreams were filled with familiar faces – a white-haired man taunting him, a group of misfit “family” getting away with their crimes unscathed, and wide, searching green eyes, begging Katsuki to get him out before it was too late.

Somehow, he managed to fall asleep, but he didn’t get a moment ofrest.

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Despite never saying the words or discussing the idea, Katsuki’s meeting with Izuku became a weekly event. He spent all week digging through the boxes, cringing at photos of the crime scene, taking detailed notes about every evidence report, then met up with Izuku on Friday to discuss and ask questions. Izuku seemed to quickly accept that Katsuki was on his side, that he was listening and that he understood, and with that, he was much more open to share his own thoughts, the rumours he’d heard, the things he’d seen. Every week, Katsuki brought in new chapters of comic books to regale Izuku with and new drafts of his article to debate the merits of. There was just so much information to go through, he wasn’t sure how he could possibly condense it into one short news piece. But still he tried, and continued trying, and with every new attempt, Izuku sang his praises. He told Katsuki how he was such an amazing writer, how he actually listened to Izuku speak and managed to phrase it all so perfectly where Izuku himself struggled to explain, and how, heartbreakingly, he was the first person to actually talk to Izuku about it, after every other researcher and journalist had just made their assumptions from the publicly available documents and never given him a second thought. It explained a lot, really. Other articles had made him sound so cold and unfeeling, completely unlike the man Katsuki now spent his time with.

“Maybe I can help,” Katsuki hummed, when Izuku told him. “I can tell people the truth and help get you out of here.”

Izuku became quiet after that, a little awkward, and it took a lot of pushing for him to finally say the words out loud.

“I might not be around long enough for that.”

The thought made Katsuki feel physically sick. If it was all true, Izuku had been doing the right thing, in a way. Sure, he probably shouldn’t have taken matters into his own hand, but if this group was hurting people, if all the human trafficking and kidnapping accusations against Shimura Tenko were true, then Izuku was helping people. It was no wonder he’d snapped, if he’d seen something like that happening before his very eyes.

That night, Katsuki emailed the editors of the group who usually bought his True Crime articles, inquiring about a longer piece, an extended feature. Maybe he could get the word out there in a hurry, get things back on track for Izuku.

They got back to him pretty quickly, as usual – one of the reasons he did repeat work for them, honestly – but the answer was not what Katsuki had hoped for. It was polite, and encouraging in a way, but it also suggested he “pursue a different method of publishing” if he had more to say on the subject. He wasn’t surprised, honestly; newspapers and magazines didn’t tend to take on long projects, and Katsuki suspected his work was about to get very long.

The answer was right there, really. If he wanted to go long, there was one method that certainly stood out above the rest of the options, even though it was something he’d never before been interested in pursuing.

Katsuki was going to write a book.

He opened a fresh new document, staring at the blinking cursor for a minute as he contemplated. A familiar voice rang through his mind, with a pained look in ordinarily shining eyes, a smile that wobbled for maybe the first time since they’d met.

“I’ve never lied to anyone, but they don’t care. I broke the law, I knowthat, they just don’t care why. I’ve told them, over and over, but they don’t have to care about it now, they only have to deal with me. And as long as I’m locked up here, it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t want to reopen the case to find out if there was something more going on, it just takes time and resources away from newer cases. As far as they’re concerned, it’s over and done with; I’m the only one who has to deal with the consequences now.”

Slowly, Katsuki’s fingers moved, putting dark characters on the waiting page.

The truth won’t always set you free

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