Thank you so much to @sunnys_stories24 for drawing Izumina for the prompt empty last Inktober! I've been looking forward to using this as banner art for a while now. Be sure to give her a follow on Instagram and go read the fanfictions she has on her own Wattpad account.
Also, I've updated the maturity rating of this fic so if you're interested in why that is I put a disclaimer chapter at the beginning of the story to hopefully clear up any confusion. It's been a while but I'm so glad to be back to updating this story. Hope you enjoy~
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"You know, I always wanted a sister," Izumina said, leaning back in her desk chair. Her cell phone was pressed against her ear, resting in the crook of her shoulder as she twirled a pen absentmindedly.
"Did you now?" Fleur's hearty chuckle echoed from the receiver. "As terrible as this may sound, in a hero's line of work, it's often better to be an only child."
Izumina paused, clicking the back of her pen as she contemplated. "Why do you say that?"
"The media likes prying into your personal life," he explained, taking a moment to choose his words. "It's easy for a villain to find your real identity, and when they do, they can target the people you care about."
The line was quiet for a moment, a sombre static filling the air between them. Izumina held her breath, aligning her thoughts in a way that could broach the topic without being insensitive.
"Is that why they went after Charles?"
Fleur hummed, a throaty sound resonating from deep within his chest. Izumina could imagine him, sitting in his living room, just as her mother always had. His eyes staring forward, empty and forlorn. His shoulders stiff and hunched.
"How's he doing, by the way?"
Fleur sucked in a breath. Izumina was careful to fixate on his breathing, every movement or shuffle. Treading the line of how much she could ask without crossing some unspoken boundary.
"He's still in the hospital. The doctors said he should be home in a day or two."
Izumina placed her pen down, allowing it to roll into the page fold of her hero analysis notebook. "This changes nothing you know."
Fleur scoffed, his voice almost cruel as he spoke. "I wouldn't be so sure about that, kiddo."
"You still love him. Don't you?"
"It's more than that. You wouldn't understand something so complicated." She could hear him fiddling with something— likely his ring— spinning it round and around.
"The public doesn't seem to love us." He fingered the band, a symbol of his engagement and affection for Charles. "Even though it was a villain this time... who's to say it won't be them next?"
Izumina sat upright in her chair. Adjusting so that her elbows rested on the desk, her phone now in her hand.
"I just... I love him so much it hurts," he sniffled. "He was hurt because of me... And I couldn't save him!"
Her vision blurred at the edges. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from losing her composure. She'd stay strong for Fleur.
"I've never loved anyone like that..." Izumina stated, her words drawn out to suppress the waver she knew would otherwise seize her voice. "But I know Charles wouldn't want you to blame yourself. It wasn't your fault."
"...I just don't know anymore..."
Izumina's eyes were downcast. "I believe, even though it's hard, having people we wish to protect is what makes a true hero."
Fleur was quiet for a long while before smiling. Even though Izumina couldn't see it, she felt it through the warmth in his voice.
"Thanks, kiddo."
...
Izumina stirred slightly before sitting up. Her face scrunched as she tried to stretch, lifting her arms above her head despite the cuffs that encased her wrists, and rolling her shoulders awkwardly. It took a moment for her to realize she was back in her own bed. The soft purple blanket that covered her matched the orchid on the wall.
Her head felt foggy. "No..." she muttered to herself as she brought her hands to her face and rubbed her throbbing temple. "It wasn't a dream."
Suddenly, snapping back to reality, Izumina checked her hand. It was still wrapped in gauze from when she'd felt around the broken coffee table for something to defend herself. Peeling back the bandaging with her teeth, Izumina was greeted by a large scab stretching the length of her palm. No purple particles of healing to be found.
She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing as she thought of somewhere safe to teleport to. The local police station she used to pass on her way to Aldera. The beach where she and Izuku trained. U.A.'s front gates...
Nothing.
Her unease grew. She couldn't help but feel vulnerable, almost naked without her quirks.
With shaky hands and sore wrists from the restraints, Izumina pulled the blankets off of her and stood. She was alone in the room, as far as she could tell. Her violin was where she'd left it, propped against her desk in its case. The countless books and journals, which typically littered every surface, were all tucked neatly on the shelf her father had installed for her a couple of years prior. Other than that, nothing looked out of the ordinary.
Overcome by frustration, Izumina thrashed in her cuffs. She put her elbows together before breaking her arms violently in a downward motion. The metal didn't budge. She placed her foot on the short chainlink, bearing down on it with all her weight in hopes of snapping the swivel, to no avail.
Izumina paced the room, fiddling her thumbs with clasped hands for comfort. Despite the circumstances, she was grateful her handcuffs had been locked in front as opposed to behind her back. Glancing towards the window she realized that light was shining through its curtains.
Rushing forward, Izumina clumsily threw back the fabric to see the outside world. The sun blinded her, bringing tears to her eyes, but she refused to look away. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed the sun. It's funny, how easy it is to take some things for granted.
She didn't know what to do, but despite this, a strange calm filled her body. Maybe it was the warmth of the sun kissing her cheeks, perhaps it was the after-effects of the anesthesia. Whatever the reason, Izumina was finding it hard to reason.
As she eyed the pavement below her window a disturbing thought filled her mind... She knew she probably should jump for it, escape by any means necessary, but she couldn't bring herself to do so. Not when the possibility of breaking her legs was practically guaranteed. It'd be futile if she couldn't run away afterwards. Besides, there was still the matter of getting the handcuffs off.
Was she scared? No... this was different. She turned, taking in the familiarity of the room once more. The bedsheets wouldn't be long enough for her to climb out the window. Not in mid-April, when she slept with only one thin blanket to combat the warmth. On top of that, there was nothing sturdy enough to hold her weight if she were to tie a makeshift rope.
She looked again for something, anything she could use to her advantage. Only the past stared back at her, in the form of three smiling faces encased in a wooden frame.
Izumina stepped away from the window and approached her bedside table. The picture of Izuku, Katsuki and her as children was just as it'd always been. A reminder. A form of comfort. Now wasn't any different. She picked it up.
Spinning, Izumina scoured the room for her phone. She didn't know where her father was, which made it too risky for her to act without a plan. Her quirks hadn't come back yet, and she had no idea what he was capable of. If a fight were to break out she'd be putting innocent civilians in danger. Running without a way to fight back or protect people who get caught in the crossfire would be foolish.
The best course of action, she rationalized, would be to call for help.
She had to find a phone.
The landline didn't work. It had been disconnected for as long as Izumina could remember. Up until now, with her cell, she'd never thought much of it. She cussed at the inconvenience of the situation.
She'd have to find one of the portable phones. There were only two options: her father's– which, for all she knew could be bugged, or worse, connected to the villains– or her own.
Setting the frame down, Izumina crept to her door. Pressing her ear to the wood, she listened and heard nothing in the hall beyond. The coast was clear.
Turning the handle before opening the door, making as little noise as possible, Izumina peaked her head through the crack. Her father wasn't in the hallway. From the looks of the open entrance to his bedroom, he wasn't on the upstairs floor at all.
Izumina stepped out of her room, closing the door behind her ever so silently. It was a risk, but if a phone was going to be anywhere it'd be in his room. She inched across the hall, peering over her shoulder and towards the stairwell until she made it safely across the hall.
"There's got to be something here," she pleaded more so than she thought as she rummaged through drawers. She found clothes, pictures of her mother and her from when she was a baby and a spare pair of glasses. But no phone.
Pondering the possibility that he could've gone out, Izumina– pressing her luck– ventured out of the room and towards the stairs. She thought over everything she'd learned and tried to formulate a backup plan, in the event she couldn't find a phone. Would it be too brazen to believe she could get away if she simply walked out the front door?
Taking a nervous gulp, Izumina clutched the banister and made her way to the main floor. The house was quiet, she tried to convince herself that was a good sign. She looked around, thinking of where a phone could be. That is until she got to the last step.
The front door was right there. The sun was shining, calling to her.
She could make it.
Rationality left her body, every reason she'd had to play it safe left her mind as she ran for it.
She was close. So close she could feel the exhilaration building in her chest. For the first time since the night she confronted her father, she could feel hope.
Freedom as a concept, once the mundane had felt so far away in that dark dingy laboratory. But now, she could practically taste it.
Her fingers had only just grazed the doorknob when a voice reverberated from down the hall.
"Not so fast."
Izumina's heart stopped. She'd been caught, cornered like a stray dog in an alleyway by a group of stone-slinging teenagers. She'd been an idiot.
Turning slowly, her eyes met her father's. He adjusted his glasses, a single file folder in his hands as he walked towards her.
A lump formed in Izumina's throat as she stepped away. Her back pressed against the door as images from the past few days flooded her senses. The darkness, the restraints, the needles...
"What– what did you do to me?"
Her father looked pained as he took in Izumina's frightened state. "I'm sorry, Princess. I hate that I had to put you through that." He cupped her face, causing Izumina's breath to hitch. "But it's over now... I promise."
"No..." Izumina fought, her voice quivering. "It's not..."
"It is," Nakiro reassured, embracing her. Izumina froze, too scared to protest. "You're absolutely right though. I haven't gone about this the right way." He pulled away, cupping her face so she'd be forced to look at him. Hoping she'd see the sincerity in his eyes. "You deserve to know everything."
Izumina's eyes glazed over. She felt short of breath, and yet– like a deer in headlights– she couldn't move.
Nakiro sighed. "I hate seeing you like this. I should have explained things further, so you could understand and not be so frightened. I want to make things right."
Izumina blinked back at her father, words failing her.
"Please, if we could sit, I promise to tell you the whole truth."
Inhaling to regain her composure, Izumina nodded slowly. She didn't know what else to do. She certainly couldn't hope to escape now. Not while she was still cuffed without any trace of her quirks.
A small smile made its way across Nakiro's face as he gestured toward the living room. He watched as she walked obediently into the room. Her bangs shadowed her features as she sat on the sofa.
The broken coffee table was gone, as was the mug of spiked tea from Friday night. The old grandfather clock remained in the corner, its frontal frame shut as though it'd never been able to open at all. Izumina wondered if it led to her father's lab or if she'd been taken to a secondary location for his experiment.
"Do you have any questions you'd like to ask now that you've calmed down," Nakiro asked as he sat adjacent to her.
Izumina shook her head solemnly before pausing to mull over her options. "Day... How long has it been?" Despite the lump in her throat. Despite the physical pain she felt in her shoulders and chest as she broke the promise to her mother repeatedly. If she was going to get out of this, she knew she'd have to gather as much information as possible.
"Thursday. It hasn't been that long."
So it'd been about 6 days: 5 in that awful laboratory plus today, she thought. Biting the inside of her cheek, Izumina restrained herself from doing anything rash. Not that long? To her, it'd felt like years! Then again, the mind has a funny way of dealing with unresolved trauma. It always comes back at the worst of times. Like a tidal wave, it envelopes you. Leaving you with nothing but a cold sensation and the air knocked out of your lungs. Perhaps it had been years. She'd just failed to notice how much it had affected her until now.
Nakiro sighed, as though he was hyping himself up before speaking. "Nomus, as you know, are beings who've been imbued with more than one quirk through the miracle of science."
He paused, opening the file he'd been holding and sifting through the papers.
"But it isn't just a miracle. Projet BEHN: Bio-Engineered Human Nomu, refers to an experiment I designed from a theory that'd been posed to the medical board a couple of decades ago. 'Why can't the human body withstand multiple quirks?" Simply put, the body lacks the capacity to contain and control that much concentrated energy. As I'm sure you know, it isn't impossible. In rare instances, a person can be born with seemingly numerous abilities; however, it is never two-separate quirks. Rather, a fusion of two compatible quirks. Elemental types, for example, can often be combined to create a single quirk. The same thing goes for mutation types, which grants the user an abundance of animalistic qualities."
Izumina listened carefully to what he was saying. "Kind of like Shoto and Tsu..." she realized as she processed the information she'd just been given.
"Nomus, as I explained, refers to enhanced humans. They're... you're," he corrected, "distinguished by your unique bodies, able to retain multiple quirks through medical intervention. What makes Project BEHN– you– different is your retainment of free will. As you saw at U.S.J., the Nomu heeded Shigaraki's orders like a mindless zombie. This is because, well, for lack of a better term, it practically was a mindless zombie. Nomu's are brainless, empty, mindless soldiers."
"And..." Izumina hesitated, her mind spinning for what felt like the thousandth time that week. "You thought I'd want to be turned into this?"
"No," Nakiro exclaimed, placing a hand on her shoulder. "No, I would never do something like that to you."
"But you thought it was okay to drug me? Experiment on me against my will?" Izumina's words were as sharp as daggers, but she could hardly register her own tone. She sounded like she was underwater. Muffled. As though she were a million miles away from herself.
"I can't change the past, Princess," he spoke matter of factly. "What I can do is make it right. Tell you the truth and explain to you how your quirks work. I went about this all wrong. I should've told you the truth from the very beginning."
He handed Izumina a paper out of the folder he'd been holding. She stared at it blankly, unable to make sense of his illegible scrawlings.
"What's this supposed to be," she asked in a monotone.
"The answer."
"I don't understand."
"It's okay. It's complicated, I don't blame you for feeling confused." Nakiro sighed, adjusting his glasses as he placed the folder down. "You can go through this if you'd like but I don't know if you'll be able to read my handwriting."
"I want to know exactly what you did to me. Every time I got a new quirk. How exactly–" her words were like venom, "–did you do it?"
Nakiro rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. "It took lots of preparation, but in order for your body to take on a new quirk, your old ones first had to be dormant. For this reason, quirk restraints, such as the ones you're wearing now, were used to suppress your power."
Glancing down at her cuffs, Izumina tried to process what she was hearing. Her mind felt foggy, like mist nestling in over a lake.
"From there I had to alter your DNA," Nakiro continued. "Since all quirks reside in a person's genetic makeup, in order to perform a transplant I had to inject another person's quirk gene directly into you."
"Genes..." Izumina stuttered. "Hang on, wouldn't that mean I'm genetically related to..." she paused to count her quirks, "FIVE random people?!"
Nakiro shook his head. "No, the only quirk that needed to bond in order for your body to adapt to new quirks was cellular regeneration. The DNA used came from a prior test subject whose body rejected attempted quirk transplants. Not that it matters, since the whole reason the project started was to make you stronger."
Izumina felt like she was going to be sick. There were others, people like her who'd been experimented on against their will. All for her sake...
"What happened to them?" Izumina didn't know if she'd be able to stomach the answer.
"No one was able to maintain the number of quirks you currently have. Trials were shut down after that fact was established," Nakiro reassured. "Don't worry though, I made certain the procedure was safe before performing it on you."
"So you changed my genes?"
"No, I imbued your genetic makeup with concentrated quirk serums." Nakiro took back the folder he'd given to Izumina and flipped it open. "Quirk extraction is very easy in comparison to quirk transplants. Once your body was capable of cellular regeneration, tertiary quirks were achievable through a simple injection. No surgery or invasive procedure required."
Izumina stared blankly at his illegible scrawlings. It felt as though her father was speaking in another language. "I still don't understand."
Nakiro sighed. "Allow me to break it down for you further. You have two kinds of quirks, your teleportation which you were born with, and those given to you by me. Of your artificial quirks, you have your cellular regeneration, or rather, your self-healing ability. This was the only quirk necessary to make your body into the quirk vessel it is today."
Searching her face for understanding, Nakiro realized she still wasn't following along. "Basically, your healing allows your body to take on the multiple quirks that ordinary people's bodies wouldn't have been able to withstand."
"I guess that makes sense..." Izumina said.
"Good," Nakiro sighed, patting Izumina's head. "I want you to understand. I want you to trust me."
"Trust you?" Izumina furrowed her eyebrows.
Her father looked taken aback. "Well, yes. You're my daughter, and I love you."
"How can I trust you," Izumina asked. "I want to... honest I do. But look at me." She held out her bound hands. "What kind of a father cuffs his daughter like she's some kind of villain?"
Izumina examined Nakiro's shocked expression and kept going, not bothering to hold back.
"How am I supposed to believe you didn't make me into a monster when you're treating me like one?"
Nakiro's face scrunched, contemplating how to respond. He looked like he'd just been slapped.
When he failed to respond, Izumina continued. "Please father..." she tried but failed to keep the desperation from slipping into her voice. "If you'd just take off my restraints–"
"I'm sorry, but I can't," Nakiro spoke, cupping Izumina's hands with his. "They told me not to trust you. That you'd use your quirks to escape–"
"Please," Izumina cut in. "I promise I won't! I'll do whatever you want me to."
"The league–"
"I swear I won't do anything rash."
Nakiro rubbed his thumb in soothing circles over Izumina's knuckles. It took everything in her not to pull away.
Izumina gathered her composure, ignoring the violent pulsating of her heart in her ear and the pressure building in her chest.
"If you want me to trust you, you first have to trust me."
Nakiro hesitated.
Holding her breath, Izumina watched intently as he sighed and squeezed her hands.
Pulling away, Nakiro stood from the sofa. Izumina watched as he paced the living room, taping his fingers rhythmically against his side as he did so.
Finally, he stopped. His gaze was transfixed ahead of him, not necessarily focused on anything but what was going on inside his mind. Nakiro weighed his options slowly.
Drawing his hand up to his face, Nakiro ran his fingers through his hair. Izumina eyed him, trying to get a read on what he was thinking. His face was stoic, awfully concentrated she thought. There was tension in his eyebrows, and Izumina wondered if perhaps he was conflicted.
She dared not try her luck further as she sat. Watching. Waiting. Was this what it felt like to be helpless? An eerie familiarity settled itself over her shoulders as she remembered her mother. It'd been the same back then too. All Izumina could do was watch and wait as she died. For her fate to be decided. Now was no different.
Nakiro sighed as the air in front of him began to shift. Izumina's eyes widened as, slowly, the distinct outline of a circle began to form. The air within the circle was distorted, swirling as though Nakiro were warping reality. It occurred to Izumina that she'd never seen her father use his quirk before.
"I can't take your cuffs off," Nakiro spoke calmly, as he reached his hand into the circle.
Izumina's heart sank. For a moment, she'd fooled herself into believing there was a semblance of a possibility her appeal for trust could work. What was she supposed to do now?
Nakiro withdrew his hand from the circle, the pocket of space created by his transport quirk. Within his fist was a phone with a purple case and a Miruko charm. Izumina's breath hitched as he held it up.
"Not yet at least."
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Author's Note:
Hello readers! It's been so long. Sorry for disappearing like that. I was dealing with some personal stuff and school had been utterly obliterating my free time but I'm back now! I'd originally intended for this chapter to be longer but after consulting with some friends I decided to cut it short and just post this. I'd kept you all waiting long enough and wanted to update the story ASAP.
I promise to try and update again as soon as possible. I will not be MIA again anytime soon if I can help it. This summer I intend to write like crazy, which means balancing this story with my original works. That's right, I'm finally dedicating myself to a story of my own. My current WIP is a passion project of mine, it's been in my mind for years and I've only recently had the courage to pick it up again. If any of you are interested in my original writing (which includes poems, short stories, book reviews etc.) please feel free to follow my separate Instagram and TikTok accounts: @alyssa_writes_stuff
Thank you so much for all your patience with me and my unpredictable posting schedule. It truly means the world to me that so many of you have stuck with this story for so long, and to any new readers, welcome to the show! I hope you all enjoy what I have in store for this story.
~ Snowy ❄️