Lightning Serenade

Epilogue

A/N: Started in November 2021 and now here we are! This is a monster of a fic and I never knew I was capable of something like this! Thanks so much to all my readers, both the ones who have been there from the beginning and the new ones who are just finding this story now that it's completed. Thanks for being a part of my journey and I'm glad you've stuck it out through this longfic!

The prisoners had started to relax.

Ever since the people's hero had come and gone, taking Full Throttle (and maybe a chunk of the ceiling) with him, it showed everyone, prisoners and guards alike, that Tartarus wasn't as inescapable as it was made out to be since it was erected all those years ago. It just needed the right people and the right weak point, and BAM! They blasted through like it was tissue paper.

No others escaped.

Not for their lack of trying.

It was oddly suspicious that their attempts weren't met with escalation and degradation and scare tactics like usual, though. Instead of being shoved into solitary confinement like usual, they were just led back to their typical place in general population, kindly asked not to attempt to do it again as it would not work, and largely left to their own devices.

It was weird.

Nazato Janari didn't like it.

He had already felt like he was walking a thin line when he had helped the people's hero back when he still believed him to be Toga, and then continued to help him and give him information about what it was really like being a prisoner in Tartarus when he asked once he figured out that he was, in fact, actually Chargebolt and not Toga Himiko in disguise.

When Eraserhead, the underground Pro Hero who had been the one to take down his family's drug ring, had been walked through the halls, trailed by Pro Hero Phantom Thief and another Eraserhead, Nazato felt deep in his soul that something big was happening and was waiting anxiously for the other shoe to drop.

Would he be pulled aside for additional interrogation? Did they need more information on his family and their crime organization?

If he didn't have the information they wanted, would the guards beat him down? Would Eraserhead and company help or just idly sit by and watch, thinking that made them innocent in his mistreatment?

Phantom Thief is associated with Chargebolt—the people's heroes. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as he feared, but he couldn't afford to get his hopes up. Prepare for the worst, wish for the best, as his family's saying went, and it surely had helped him out more than once behind Tartarus's walls already.

But then days passed and Nazato hadn't been pulled aside for interrogation (or torture under the name of interrogation; all the same inside the walls of Tartarus). No one had, as far as he could tell, and he hadn't seen a reappearance of the weird trio of heroes again.

Nazato had allowed himself to relax, and then promptly regretted every decision he had ever made that had led up to that moment when he and a few others were called by name to stand at attention in the recreation center. Looking around, he noticed that he was surrounded by familiar faces, and he nearly startled when he realized it was the same exact group that had cornered Chargebolt and then spent the afternoon playing cards instead of ravaging him like they were supposed to all that time ago.

Was their punishment so delayed? Were they waiting until the media moved onto bigger and better things? Until the heat was off of Tartarus from Chargebolt and Full Throttle's history-breaking escape?

Nazato felt woozy with the sweat gathering on the nape of his neck as he mentally berated himself to pull it together and fell in line with his fellow inmates, trying to stay calm to keep the calm among the rest of them as well. If one panicked, they could be sure that they all would.