»»————- ☩ ————-««

The human mind is the most powerful part of the body.

It was the reason behind every decision, every breath, every step, every word of our lives.

Composed of cognitive and noncognitive aspects that function throughout the body, that make a person unique, having something entirely of their own. Just as it is powerful the human mind was efficient and tactful, hyper-aware, and alert. Whether the owner of the said mind knows this or not—the human mind held a plethora of secrets that have never seen the light of day.

Odd, isn't it? How something that belongs to a person—that is the person—can harbor something from its owner, tucked in a dark corner. Sifting through endless piles and piles of information is gathered throughout a day, a week, a month, years and deciding on what was important and what wasn't.

Weaving shadows over the unimportance.

It was one of the only things about the body that fascinated Izuku the most. For it was constantly in motion, retaining the smallest of details without the owner being aware of it. His mother had taught him this: another lesson he hadn't understood until now.

Standing in a clear path of the boy who made the gears in his head spin on rapid-fire.

The air between them was thick. Heavy with one-sided understanding as the white-haired Native trudged the leather-like chest armor from his body.

Izuku paused, holding his body rigid as he held his breath for one second. Two. Three. The feeling had been eating away at him for far too long—gripping him by the bones with a forceful hand, grinding away at the marrow till he felt like a pile of dust. Something wasn't right. Of course, it could be the tenuous through-process of a paranoid boy who suffered great loss and tragedy. Or . . . he could be right.

Either way, he had to be sure. 

He inhaled, holding his breath again as he made his way into the room. It was room 202, once the possession of a family with a small child—Izuku had seen them around the Bunker fleetingly over the years. Larger than most rooms, the father had been a head pharmacist—level ten—earning him higher quality equipment, food rations, etc. 

Plaques and awards aligned the walls, wooden-carved toys scattered on the floor—speckles of blood painted them. Izuku shook his head, this wasn't the time for another breakdown, not when there were more pressing matters at hand.

So, Izuku did what he does best, he became a statue and finessed his way in. "Natsuo, wasn't it?"

"Yeah," the white-haired guard kept his face hard and impassive, studying Izuku as he stopped a few feet away. "Are the girls gonna be okay? Shinsou's been worried sick about Mina."

Izuku nodded, assuming Mina would be the pink-haired woman. "For now . . . I have to keep monitoring their vitals. But they should be okay." he leaned against the post of the bed, "Forgive me for being so blunt, but what's with all the staring?"

Natsuo blanched, an undecipherable expression carving his features before they smoothened out. Akin to Izuku's face, void of emotion. "What can I say? It's not every day that we run into your people . . . It feels surreal at times, sorry." he explained with a short laugh.

"No, I understand—" Izuku's eyes flickered over to the leather armor, a shiny glint reflecting from a pocket hidden on the backside. "—I feel the same way about you all. So, I hope you don't mind me asking a few questions?"

He took Natsuo's silence as an opening to continue, slashes of disquietude scathing the surface of his stomach as he dared a step closer. Some part of Izuku screamed at him, thrashed in its repressed corner for him to leave, he locked that piece of him away. It was of utmost importance that he assessed whether or not this boy would be a problem for him.

For, despite his unease with the situation, a problem would need to be dealt with properly. No matter the cost.

"What's it like? Being on the guard I mean," he kept his voice feather-light, unhardening his face. The mask of innocence. "Our guard never got much action—" he grimaced, "—until yesterday, of course. They were mainly a precaution, just in case something . . . something like this happened."

Natsuo nodded in understanding, the corners of his mouth tilting up. "I'd imagine our guard sees a lot more than yours did. I'm assuming my brother told you about the neighboring tribes to ours?"

Now, it was Izuku's turn to nod. He hesitated before speaking, not wanting to share too much information . . . he was still wary of the boy. "Researchers from my Colony ran into a few of them . . . They aren't like you guys?" 

He hadn't meant for it to come out as a question. The neighboring tribes were rather antagonistic, not Excor's, however, they adapted to the survival in a less civil way than most of the Natives. Which led to the unproven belief that all of them were the same way. Izuku was beginning to have his doubts about that fact.

"No. They're pretty aggressive, but they can be useful when they're not trying to start another war with us," Izuku noted the emphasis on 'another', locking this piece of information in the back of his mind for later.

Natsuo jumped as a gentle hum reverberated throughout the entire building, the walls rattling and floor buzzing as if a swarm of bees had resided beneath its surface. While Natsuo appeared to be frightened by the noise Izuku welcomed it with another wave of nostalgic comfort. The back-up generators had turned on, the air around them cooling and the artificial light brightening.

It had been his mother and father to design the new generators, designed to function properly without anybody working the control board. They had still been working out the kinks in the noise it enkindled, albeit, other than that, it ran smoothly. Izuku heaved a sigh, turning back to the white-haired boy.

"Shoto's your older brother, right?"

Natsuo's façade finally cracked, Izuku smiled to himself as he watched Natsuo's eyebrows furrow together. "No. He's my little brother," he said with an ironed over smile etched onto his mouth.

The freckled male had known this, from the first time they had met Natsuo had made his status blood-wise known. Always emphasizing that Shoto had been the younger brother, and he the eldest. However, Izuku's reason for bringing it up had been almost purely out of curiosity in terms of the royal hierarchy of the tribe.

"But he's the leader—or you call it a Ductor," he explored, raising an eyebrow. 

Itching to pull a reaction from the boy, to determine what kind of a person he was . . . What his motivations were.

Unfortunately, before any other words could be exchanged between the two Kaminari came bounding in. Hair disheveled. Eyes blew wide with shock. And chest heaving erratically.

"Shinsou and I were guarding the entrance outside, we saw some people watching us from the trees." he explained breathily, carding his fingers through his sweat-soaked locks. "We chased them all the way to the northern borders of In Aqua Populo. The trail went dead at the shore,"

The water people. As Izuku listened he had become hyper-aware of the hammering of his heart, the pulse of his blood, the clenching of his teeth. An unnerving amount of trepidation knotting through his organs, clawing at the soft spots of his insides, threading ropes of fear into his mind. The most powerful part of the human body had now been overtaken by blood-curdling fear.

Logic had been cast to the shadows.

His cement wall breaking, no longer a statue but a boy. A flesh-painted, shaking, scared boy.

Natsuo, quick on his feet, shrugged himself into his armor. "There's something else, isn't there?"

"Yeah—" Kaminari's eyes flickered to Izuku, only amplifying the boy's fear. "—but it'd better if I show you."

With that they were off, leaving the shaking Izuku to wallow on his own . . . His mind rapidly firing off questions after question. Why were these people here? Did they want to harm him? . . . If they did . . . did they know about his lie?

No.

Izuku shook his head vehemently, the mind was a powerful tool, too powerful, in fact. Inhaling deeply he reminded himself of his fears being uncontrollable and untamable, wild and erratic with no facts to truly base it. Still, with the beating of his heart and his palms slick with sweat, he couldn't ignore the flickering flame of fear still residing within his chest.

Footsteps echoed through the halls, sending a chain of blood to shoot up his spine. He straightened in his place, pulling the fragments of his façade back into place—holding on tightly to the shards till they pricked at his fingers and bled. 

No matter what happens, keeping his mask on was key to his survival. His fear nearly clouded that goal.

"Hey," Shoto's voice filtered through the air moments later. "I don't know if Kaminari informed you or not, but there's a situation outside—"

Izuku shrugged. "—I know. Something about some suspicious shadows watching them from the trees?" he feigned an emotion somewhere close to nonchalance. "No offense, but it sounds like your guards are a bunch of pussies."

The dual-haired male scoffed, his brief look of concern dissipating until he was glowering at the smaller male. Still, slightly bemused, yet still annoyed. "I swear you remind me of Katsuki," he muttered.

"Hey!" he exclaimed, his face twisting into mock-disgust. "Don't compare me to that . . . that . . . puffy flower!"

With a tilted head and squinting eyes Shoto laughs. "'Puffy flower?'" he repeated slowly, another laugh drilling through his lips.

"Yeah, you know, a puffy flower. The ones that have really small petals . . . if you blow on them they float away?" Izuku's hands waved aimlessly in the air, his previous worries stilling to a sudden stop as he searched for the word.

The human mind, not only was powerful and in control, but it was the sole protector of the human body . . . the soul. Deflecting the most painful of memories or thoughts when they became too much, distracting the heart from overwhelmingly tiresome emotions. Like now.

Izuku was distracted, and some part of him had been aware of this. But the distracted faction of his mind relished in its pleasantries—especially with the elder boy standing so close to him. 

Despite all of his attempts in the past two days, Izuku could no longer ignore the attraction he held for Shoto . . . and Katsuki. While that's all his feelings were at the moment—and shall forever remain—it had been, fortunately for him, one of his main distractions. 

"You mean a dandelion?" Shoto supplied, mouth twisted into an open-mouthed smile. "Wow. You really have never been outside this place before, have you?"

Izuku narrowed his eyes, stepping back a few steps. "No. I haven't."

It was quiet for a few moments, with only the gentle warbling of the backup generators to fill the air. Izuku hated the silence, it was a gap an opening for his distractions to fade away and dwindle in the wind.

"I thought you'd be going along with them," Izuku nodded behind the boy to the door. "Doesn't a leader always follow his men into battle or something?"

Shoto shrugged, his teeth tangling with his lower lip until it was left mottled. He sat on the bed—a flicker of discomfort forming on his face as he lightly bounced on it. "Why is this so hard?" 

The younger smiled, dimples popping, teeth showing, and eyes crinkled with amusement. He thought back to last night, how soft and supple the bed in the treehouse had been—in spite of him being wedged between the two boys. An evident contrast to how the beds were manufactured in the colony, springy and giving the illusion of softness but hard and stiff after moments of laying on it.

After a while, you grew accustomed to them.

"There are some downsides to living here," Izuku commented still bemused. "But you never answered my question."

Shoto sighed slowly between his teeth, the sound beginning to sound like the hiss of steam seeping from the machines in the control room. "There are some downsides to being a Ductor," he smirked, "You have to pick and choose what battles you fight. Sometimes those have dire consequences,"

"Where's Katsuki? Isn't he a Ductor too?"

The dual-haired male stared at him unblinking, mouth pressed into a thin and hard line. His face was devoid of . . . life . . . anything. As if a part of him had been ripped away from him.

"Oh," Izuku whispered, sensing the shift in his mood. "I guess he chose to go with them, huh?"

And as Izuku continued to gaze at the boy, his grim, serious, and worry-enhanced features glimmering underneath the faux-lights, Izuku saw himself. Someone filled to the brim with worries, doubts, and secrets—someone who had too many problems with such limited time to solve them. 

Albeit, he also saw someone without any distractions. To ease the discomfort of his mind.

Izuku gripping a piece of scarlet hair that reached the peak of his chin, nearly growing below that point. 

"Have you ever had a haircut?" 

Hello Cricket Cultists!!

IDK if some of you noticed, but I'm trying to work on dialogue in this book. I tend to have a lot more monologue than dialogue . . . it's something I struggle with, so, I've been working on that.

Theories?

Let me know what you think!

Until we meet again!!!