Izuku POV
When I woke up I was in a room that I didn't recognize, chemical smells overwhelming my senses as I tried to look around. I was in a bed, the sheets a stark white that almost perfectly matched the shade of the walls around me. I was laying on my back, a pillow warmed from the amount of time that I've spent here beneath my head, but when I tried to sit up I didn't make it very far.
The cool bite of metal on my skin was something far too familiar for me to not know it by touch alone, but the hopeful part of my mind wanted to see it to know that it was real. It's the same part of my mind that I have always hated more than anything else in this world other than myself. Lifting my head up, I will myself to look down at my sides and sure enough there's silver wrapped tightly around each of them, the other half of the cuffs securely locked to each side of the bed in an unforgiving embrace.
And suddenly the room is as dark as the night sky, the only light there is in the room slipping in from under the crack of the door. And I was back in the days when time meant nothing to me because I had no clue of its true passage, only guesses that I would never know if they were right or not. The cries of monsters that should have never known life echo in my ears as my body remembers the aches of a few fights too many.
And I'm struggling and struggling because the wails are drawing closer, the cage walls rattling louder than I'd heard them before, engraving themselves so deep into my mind that I would have to die to forget them. I know that I can't go back there, that I'll die if I do. I know it in the primal way that animals know who is a predator and who is the prey. Because even if I survive the seemingly endless number of beasts, there is a monster lurking behind them, clinging to life as if immortal.
There's a pain in my wrist, in them both, but I ignore it in the way that a child ignores every problem that comes their way in hopes of it going away. And there's someone calling my name, a familiar voice that I know as well as my own, but their voice is so far away, and everything else is just so loud, that it falls into the background.
But then there's something on my shoulder, something with a grip of its own, that jars me out of my trance. The touch, no matter how friendly it may seem, is an unwelcome one given by someone that I still can't see, the room still being dark though a part of me knows that in reality it is not. My hands are still bound, the metal restraining me, confining me to the bed, sinking further and further into my skin, but pain is a dear friend that I have held longer than any other. My teeth snap widely in the direction of the stranger in the room, making me no better than a rabid animal backed into a corner.
"-zuku! Come on, Izu. Snap out of it!" The voice pleads once more. They sound louder this time, closer than ever before. There's an emotion there that doesn't fit the owner, a desperation that they shouldn't hold, but I still can't remember who they are, anything but the dark room.
But even as I think that the darkness begins to fade.
Hito.
The world comes back slowly, the noise that only I could hear being slowly replaced by the sounds of ragged breaths that took me some time to realize that they were mine. My throat burned as my body slumped against the bed once more, all of the fight leaving it at once as it tired quickly. There was a wet feeling at my wrists, but I didn't need to look down to see the blood stained sheets there.
I didn't need to see the metal still laying there as if it had any right to do so.
"Hito," my voice came out much more gruffer than I had intended it to, much softer as well, but the purple haired boy heard it still.
"Hey, you bastard."
—-
Hitoshi POV
I wanted to still be angry with the other boy, he'd lied to me for months, ever since we met, but couldn't be. Not after seeing what I just had. Not after watching the pure terror rip across the smaller teen's face. It was the most emotion that I had ever seen the other boy possess. It was more than I had even thought him capable of doing so. And the first time that I saw him express such emotion, it had been something beyond simple fear.
I've never wanted him to feel something less.
—-
Izuku POV
Hito and I let the silence ring between us, waiting silently for the other shoe to drop as we each undoubtedly knew that it would. Luck was never on the side of children like us, it never would be. That was a lesson that we both had learned early in life, much too early for a child to know.
The other shoe dropped only a minute or two later in the form of the hospital room door opening, pushed open by a stranger coming into the room from out in the hall.
The man wore a tan coat that cascaded around his body as if it was a protective shield, though I knew from looking at him that it had no connection to his quirk. The piece of clothing was just one of those things that people wore as if it were armor. There was a hard look on the man's undeniably tired face even as he tried to school his features into something softer. I knew just exactly what this man was long before he ever introduced himself, I could see it in the way that he carried himself. It made my body go cold, alarm bells ringing in my mind once more.
Following the man was a strange sight in itself, something that was just enough to stop my breathing from going out of control once more. The creature was small, but held an air about him that was just different from that of the man before him. It was the air of someone with power that used it in a different way from that of the adult in the room, to build rather than capture and imprison. The creature was a chimera, holding aspects of multiple animals about him though he was not just one of them. He was dressed in a small suit that fit the stature of the creature, a scar running down the left side of his face that told me just how kind life had been to him as well.
While he was interesting, the chimera wasn't my concern right now, not even as he stared at me with an intelligence that no mortal being should have.
"Detective," I called out in a piss poor greeting that would make my mother question where she went wrong in raising me (though that same could be said for so many things about my character so I didn't dwell on the idea too much), taking the first words of what was sure to prove to be an annoying conversation.
The man looked at me with a raised eyebrow, his expression schooling itself as he tried to hide his own surprise. It didn't work. "You know who I am?" He asked, trying to gouge the conversation as the chimera looked upon the scene with interest, Hito openly staring with the curiosity of someone that didn't know any better.
"No," I answered simply, watching as the words rang true within the detective's mind, a quirk of some sort I'm sure, "but it wasn't hard to guess."
He nodded, something that he didn't really seem to register that he was doing. "I'm Detective Tsukauchi," the man said, seeming to have collected himself. "I'm here to ask you a few questions," he explained.
I fixed the detective with a hard glare, my wrists silently throbbing in time with my furiously beating heart. "Without a parent or legal guardian present?" I asked, my just barely falling away from its normal monotone as it mocked the older man before me. "How crude of you."
The brown haired man looked at me as if I was already trying his patience, a fair assumption to make, but the chimera just laughed, loud and boisterous, as if the misfortunes of man was his favorite thing in the world, it quite likely might be so. "You're not being arrested," he said tiredly, a sigh forcing itself past his lips with little resistance that made me think of a certain pro hero just a bit too much for them to not know one another.
I could feel the other teen's eyes on me as he silently watched the interaction, drawing as little attention to himself as he could so as to not be removed from the room. I marched the detective's sigh with one of my own. "So what do you want to know?"
"What's your full name?"
"Izuku Midoriya."
A nodd.
"How old are you?"
"Fifthteen."
A nodd.
"Are you a villain?"
"No."
Another nodd.
"Are you a vigilante?"
"No."
The detective's head began to bend downwards, but stopped as he took in the answer that I had given, freezing on spot. He knew that he couldn't call me a liar, not as he seemed to know if I was telling the truth or not by means of his quirk alone. But the answer clearly puzzled him as I had passively hoped that it would.
"Do you go by the name of Icarus?" He asked instead of repeating the previous question as I had silently hoped that he would only to be given the same answers once more, but this line of questioning was much more interesting.
"I do," I told him simply.
A frustrated nodd.
"Then how are you not a vigilante?" The man asked, his tone sounding if not a little frayed. It was amusing watching as the detective couldn't seem to find the missing piece to the puzzle that was laying right before him, but no one ever assumes that people like me could be dangerous.
"The law wasn't created with someone like me in mind," I told him, a half answer that I will leave him with to figure out on his own, I looked to the chimera happily watching the scene from his spot in the chair at my other side, opposite to Hito, "but you already knew that, didn't you Nezu?"
The principal of UA grinned happily at the attention, at the implication so clearly lying just behind it. "I did indeed," the chimera stated with a tone all too cheerful to be completely genuine, something that I'm sure he knows I've come to realize.
"Eraserhead is one of yours," I said, though the words would sound like a question to anyone else, Nezu and I both knew that it was just a simple statement of facts, "so then the offer that he had given would be yours as well," I deduced.
"Quite right," the chimera confirmed, strumming his claws happily against his legs. He still sounded pleased.
"Where did I go wrong then?" I asked, the nagging of something in the back of my mind that I'm sure I should know but had disregarded at the time as something more pressing had come to light.
"Illegal use of support weapons," the principal answers all too pleasantly, his cheerful voice ringing truthfully throughout the otherwise quite room.
The tranquilizer gun, of course.
Nezu's smile widens into something forever as he knows that I've out the pieces together rather quickly.
"Well then, it seems that you hold all of the cards," I concede before silently watching the way that the creature grimaced at the reference. Not a fan of cards then, chess seems appropriate though. "When will we be leaving?"
I wasn't foolish, I knew when I had been beaten, when I was faced with someone much better than myself. Someone that I couldn't trick out of their almost assured victory, because they already knew all of the tricks in the book.
Because they might as well have even written the book themselves.
The principal's eyes gleamed at my behavior, my easy compliance, the way that I tend to act being strange when compared with most children my age. "We'll just have a doctor come in and heal those injuries on your wrists and then we can leave once you're dressed," the chimera happily informed, acting as if there was nothing wrong with his course of action.
"No," I told him sharply, catching the attention of all those in the room as their eyes all fell upon me as if looking at someone different from the child that they had just been speaking with only moments before. "No one is using another quirk on me."
I could see the detective's brows scrunch together out of the corner of my eyes, but I didn't pay the man much mind. "Why would you refuse treatment?" He asked, but I was looking at the creature before me, finding the same question mirrored in those eyes of his.
The eyes that looked a little bit too much like my own.
"You know what it is to have all of your choices taken away, don't you?" I asked the strange being sitting in the chair at my side. I could tell that he knew that I wasn't just talking about right now. The chimera nodded. "Wouldn't you want control too?"
Control, that's what most of the marks on my body came down to, whether I was the one that out them there or someone else had. It all came back to control, who had it and who didn't. Right now I have none of it, none but this, and I wasn't going to let another person touch me, not when I had the choice.
In the end I was given what was needed to bandage my own wounds, adding a layer of bandages stretching from the base of my wrists to the middle of my forearms as a finishing touch to keep the marks covered and protected, another mark on what had once been a blank canvas but had now been turned into little more than an ugly painting made of crisscrossing angry lines.
Dressed in my own clothes once more, I was brought to UA.