He used to run. Now he can't even walk. What he can do is lift, and heave, each centimetre of dragging weight causing an avalanche of pain; not physical, though the two leaden streaks of flesh that hang beneath his waist certainly cause something to jump and hurl in his gut. No, now breath shudders out of him and his heart breaks, each time he is forced to crawl, reliant on quirkless hands to transport him.

Another breath gets stuck in his chest, and his fingers clench, trapping the hospital sheets with his grip, as he feels for the metal frame of the bed, the texture so similar to the smooth funnels of his engines that he still reaches out for, instinctively, with his mind. But he can't so much as force a rev from them, nor a single click or whirl to jump-start their movement. Now they jut from his flesh, a useless decoration. He actually has to reach out and touch them with his hands, in order to recognise their sensation.

He flattens that temptation, before more thoughts of that nature make him bend forward and cover his face with his hands. Or else push vomit up through his throat.

Instead he focuses on his hands, on the weight he pushes down on them, on the weight they have to drag forward and tip over the edge of the bed. Surgery has left his muscles a trembling wreck, and memories of nightmares, of red being licked from a katana, sometimes transforms the mattress his whole world has become, into an area of white quicksand.

'No,' he pants, half-growls at his hovering mother, before immediately feeling ashamed at the expression on her face. 'I can do this.' He says it far more gently this time.

She nods, a simple, shaky jerk of her head, and fights to keep her hands from trembling when his own, still, in some ways, much sturdier than hers, reach out and grip the metal bars of the new prison waiting for him. Then, up, up, he hoists himself up and for one brief, weightless moment he is free...

And then he crashes into the wheelchair and sends it sprawling metres away, before his body lands on the floor. There is an awful silence, as he becomes aware of his breath, slightly choked and pushing into the floor as though it could lift him up with its noise alone. He can't bend or curl over with his spine to hide the snuffled noises, there's no leverage to gain with his useless legs that lie trailing behind him like a scarf. Just one moment of misjudgement, and his hands had slipped from the armrests; the same way he had let Stain slip away from his movements.

Well. That's all come to an end now. Now there is only time to stop.

His mother apparently disagrees, because she is frantically pounding the on-call button, hovering over him again as she touches his side and starts whispering platitudes. He doesn't want them. They're the sort of thing he used to say to the people he saved.

The nurses come, and the first thing he sees of them, are their professional white shoes and not their faces. They roll him over like he's a turtle, or one of those beetles he used to show Tenya, when they were both younger and more easily impressed. Well...Tenya still is easy to impress, he guesses. But he shouldn't be anymore. Not with a brother who can't crawl among the ferns with him, or muddy his trainers, not without another human hand there, ready to help him conquer both gravity and the muscles that no longer obey the fragmented signals his brain tries to push down his spine.

Perhaps there had been flowers and cards sent to the hospital room while he was still blurry on pain-killers. Perhaps, as he was learning to swing into his chair, they had remained there and he had just stubbornly refused to look at them. Perhaps, perhaps.

But there is no escaping them when he is at home, his mother's home, even though he refuses to go to his own fan sites, no matter how many times Tenya sends him links to well-wishing twitter messages. No, they arrive in floods, envelopes of sizes, of all colours, pink ones holding florid paragraphs that praise his passion and dedication over the years, cream ones that hold calm, congratulatory tones from pensioners he pulled out of fires or away from crumbling buildings, and blue and green ones that hold childish drawings inside, depicting him as an astronaut with what looks to be spikes welded to his calves. They all tell him, with varying levels of barely-there grammar, that he's made the world a little bit better, because at some point, his legs were fast enough to save someone else.

But now he's slow. Far too slow to hide the weariness in his eyes, when he tears open another envelope. Far too slow to ever wheel his chair along the corridor to the room containing the shredder. Maybe one day, his hands will slide over the tyres and roll them through the tunnels his curled fingers form, like rope, just as fast as a sailor unfurling a sail. But not today. Today he is stuck. And the fastest thing that ever seems to move on him, is his mouth when he eats.

'Brother, I'm sorry. I disgraced the name of Ingenium.'

Tenya's voice, so brash and forceful, but also trembling, as close to breaking as it can manage, shivers down the phone into his ear. He frowns.

'Tenya? What do you mean? Did something happen at your work placement?'

Silence. Then:

'I cannot say,' his baby brother says and oh, he knows that tone. He's heard in his voice whenever he's made up a story to amuse Tenya on a day when he wasn't fast enough to save some one, but his brother was still there waiting at the end of it, his arm attempting to slice the sky in half as he instructed Tensei to tell him of the eventful heroics he got up to that day.

'Just know,' says a much older Tenya now, one who still stubbornly refuses to say whether that name Ingenium, will ever be his own. 'That I will work to make up for it.'

One day he wakes to find his phone has six notifications, all from Tenya, informing him that he is on his way home and that he deeply apologises for arriving at such short notice. Oh, and that he is bringing a rude and undisciplined interloper with him. Or so the tone of Tenya's message declares.

'Be on your guard, brother! Hatsume Mei is a ruthless and calculating fiend, someone who is more than willing to use others for her own ends. I speak from experience, having had the misfortune to experience her cold-hearted business sense for myself.'

Tensei stares down at the phone. 'Okaaay...' he murmurs. Tenya has never been one to use shortcuts when texting, true. And he's a stickler for punctuation in a way that most teenagers with access to a mobile phone, aren't. But this is still a bit much.

'So you must remain constantly vigilant, despite her admitted talent!'

Wow. Three exclamation points. This Hatsume chick must have really gotten under Tenya's skin; probably by not pulling her stockings all the way up or forgetting to write her name at the top of one of her test papers one day.

However this 'calculating' but 'talented' 'fiend' that Tensei ends up blinking at in the doorway of his mother's house not half an hour later, turns out to be nothing more than an excitable girl with hair the colour of bubblegum. And a very recognisable one at that.

For the first time in a long while, Tensei feels a genuine smile stretch his lips.

'Well,' he says. 'I didn't know it was like that, Tenya. No wonder you were so embarrassed to lose at the Sports Festival. Your girlfriend showed you up, eh?'

'BROTHER!' thunders Tenya, his arm jerking from the ceiling to the floor, in such a sharp, thrusting motion, that Tensei is surprised that a small hurricane hasn't erupted. 'THAT IS A COMPLETELY INAPPROPRIATE AND ERRONEOUS CONCLUSION TO MAKE!'

The girl meanwhile, pays the conversation about as much attention as a cat pays nuclear physics. Well, a quirkless cat at any rate. Instead she strides forward with a maniacal gleam in her eye and thrusts herself into Tensei's personal space.

'Oh,' she says. 'Not to worry; I can make a fine baby out of this.'

With what seems to be like a week later, but really, is a matter of days, Tensei ends up racing down the street and swirling past a corner-store in order to leave a street practically sparkling behind him. Any litter in front of him, from the sparkle of a twisted can, to the gleam of plastic from a wrapper, is swept in and stored by the miniature vacuum that rumbles beneath his feet. The small, magnetic pulses emitting from the back of his chair help push him steadily along; Mei had wanted to install rocket boosters, but both he and Tenya still had a small iota of common sense between them, enough to state a firm 'no'.

Ingenium is no more. Maybe Ingenium, if his brother refuses to pick up the name, will never race through the streets again. But that's okay. He's not a hero; which means he doesn't have the right to keep his old name alive.

But maybe, with a little help, he can choose to keep the streets clean a different way. So long as his brother keeps striking up interesting friendships, maybe, just maybe, he can find a new way to continue the family legacy of helping others. He probably won't receive any letters for it. But he may receive a friendly look from a woman too bent and gnarled by a spine that works only a little better than his own, when he helps sweep up something she can't reach. Or he may win a few looks of approval from people who actually like to see the actual pavements of the streets they walk upon.

Streets he will never walk over himself. But if he can make it so that others can...well. Maybe he will learn to be more than the name of Ingenium, after all.

'Thank you,' he tells his mother, as she clatters round the kitchen, a dim light starting to re-shine in her eyes as he accepts the glass she fetches down from a shelf with a real smile; even though it is a shelf that requires the additional height of two working legs to reach. 'Thank you for being patient with me.'

'Thank you,' he writes to Hatsume Mei on plain paper, before folding and tucking it into a bright pink envelope, one he decorates with the help of waterproof robot stickers and tyre tread themed stencils; he thinks she'll get a kick out of them. 'Thank you for giving me back something I thought I'd lost.'

'Thank you,' he tells Tenya softly over the phone; his voice isn't quite as weak as when they first met in the hospital after the...after Stain, but it's definitely more watery now, choked down with a sentiment that suits him far more than the gritty apathy of before. 'Thank you for being the 'big brother' for once. I'm ashamed I let it happen.'

'Don't worry, Big Brother,' Tenya replies, his voice uncharacteristically soft. 'I also did things I was ashamed of; like you, I needed some other people around me to bring me back to my senses.'

Tensei feels his lips twitch. 'So we're both idiots?'

Tenya shrugs; Tensei can't see it, but it's all there, in the way static crackles over the phone in a rush. 'No, I was the idiot; you were just struggling with recovery. That doesn't make you stupid. It just means you needed other people to step up.'

Now there's a fully formed grin on Tensei's face. 'What, does that means you were my hero, Tenya?'

Tenya coughs, sputters, stutters loudly, and Tensei laughs and laughs, as he pictures the tomato-red colour spread over Tenya's face. It's a pity nobody's there to take a photo of it for him. He's half tempted to whisper a teasing 'isn't that right, Ingenium~' over the phone, and turn the name so sickly-sweet that it flows out with a sound that curls down into a purr. But no; Tenya hasn't asked for it. Hasn't used it. Tensei should respect that.

'How's your training going?' he asks instead. And readies himself for the answer.

It is, he is sure, going to be good one.

Notes: I haven't read that 'Illegals' manga that Tensai seems to have a role in, so everything is based on what we've seen in, well, the anime really. I've read emmost/em of the manga, but the anime is what's clearer in my mind and I don't really think we've had an update of how he's doing recently, anyway. It'll be nice if he found something that he really wanted to do, that still involved helping people, given how he describes how doing so makes him feel happy, in Iida's flashback.