#but he can’t find anything and then suddenly he doubts his worth and abilities and place in the universe

[lyricalchrysanthemum]

With unknown implications, abstractions stay silent, peace starts breaking, but we have no way to know.

An obscure night’s sign fascinates our unstable mind. Hey, have you still not realized? If you don’t even know their names, even now, the strange will harm you.

Ah, if I were able to speak about such a world, I would never be scared. But I still can’t fall asleep tonight, so I’ll keep wandering late at night.

[1][3][6]

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

📓 mha?

I do have this one fic that I affectionately refer to as “that one where there’s a lot of lost limbs.” TW for loss of limbs/general mutilation/this one gets pretty dark.

The premise is that Midoriya Izuku gets on the train to go to the UA Entrance Exam and never arrives.

Months later, Iida Tenya walks into an alley.

Basically, AfO had been watching all might and realized 1) that he had picked his successor and 2) when he transferred OfA. Then, he basically swooped in and kidnapped Izuku in that threeish hour window between when all might did the transfer and when he could actually use the quirk. Izuku was just. Legitimately defenseless and it happened too fast for anyone to do anything. He disappears off the face of the earth and no matter how hard All Might looks, he can’t find him.

After the sports festival, Todoroki is worried about Iida. They’ve never spoken. Neither of them really have any friends in the class. Todoroki doubts that anyone’s checked in on him since his brother was injured. But he saw the anger on iidas face and it’s one he recognizes from his own. It stays in the back of his mind.

Then, his dad fucks with his work study.

He was supposed to be on the other side of the country from his dad. But the office he signed with canceled last second and suddenly, his dads office was the only office that could take him. There was no doubt that his dad was the one who arranged it. He ends up with his dad in Hosu, boiling with anger.

And then he hears Manual looking for Iida Tenya.

It’s pure luck that he finds him. He basically just takes off sprinting for back alleys and stumbles on them all by accident. He doesn’t ask anyone for help; he just runs himself. When he arrives, the alley is full of blood.

The Hero Killer had offered a very twisted sort of mercy to Iida. Instead of killing him outright, he decided to just get rid of his ability to be a hero. So his legs are. Well. Just about gone from the knee down.

This is a dark one.

He’s not alone in the alley, however. There’s a strange kid who’s glowing faintly green who’s put himself between the hero killer and Iida, and odd tendrils coming off of him putting pressure on the wounds. The hero killer keeps trying to shout philosophy at him and the kid is more of the stance of “I’m going to throw this dumpster at your face” they just. They don’t get along.

The kid does recognize him from the Sports festival and they team up very quickly due to sheer necessity. The thing is that Todoroki refuses to use his fire and the kid is like “are you fucking kidding me” and basically screams at him to either figure his shit out or drop out of the hero program. If he wants to be a hero, he has to put peoples lives above his own ego and mental blocks. Like, he is literally half assing it and his classmate is about to die. If his mental whatever is worth the lives of the people he’s meant to save then he shouldn’t be doing this to begin with.

Todoroki lights up in a rush of flame.

The hero killer goes down hard between the two of them, but in a lot of ways, they were too late. Native is dead already. The pool of blood around Iida is big enough that there’s no real doubt about whether they can get him to a hospital in time.

The strange vigilante kid tells him to cauterize iidas legs and then give Iida to him. He thinks he can give Iida a chance. And Todoroki is like “fuck no, I’m coming too,” and they have so little time that they can’t really argue with it. They both take off, and the vigilante kid takes him to an old abandoned warehouse not too far away. He had, apparently, been squatting in the area, and he wasn’t doing it alone.

There’s a little green-haired girl waiting for him with a small horn in her forehead, and he asks for her help. It’s her choice, but there’s someone who really needs help and he thinks she can give it to him. She agrees, and then she kisses Iida on the cheek, and her horn begins to grow, and so do iidas legs. He’s like new.

And well Todoroki wasn’t doing anything particularly interesting before this. Might as well hang out.

Iida’s passed out, but he’s getting very devoted attention from the little girl, Eri, who has decided that the rules of hospitality means she needs to cover him with her little kitty cat blanket and balance her plastic princess tiara on his head. He is her patient and she is the doctor. This is all very serious medical treatment. Todoroki decides hes just gonna hang out here until Iida wakes up and they can go home.

Over the course of the night, several things happen:

Todoroki tells this total stranger his entire life story and deepest traumas completely unprompted

He may or may not be in love with the stranger. He’s speedrunning his gay awakening. They had some screamed conversations that led to emotional realization and now he thinks he likes guys and specifically this one. It’s been a weird night

He learns that this vigilante has little to no memory. Like, they’re working with a couple of months of working memory max. He thinks his name is Deku. He can’t really remember for sure, can he? But he apparently once thought it was important enough to try and remember it, so maybe it’s his name. See, he’s pretty sure he’s the one who carved it into his own arm.

(I told you this one gets very dark)

Deku has the kanji for Deku scarred into his arm, clumsy, almost like it was cut off, and a phrase written in full “DONT LET THEM TAKE IT”

He doesn’t know a super large amount about where he was before this? His memory is sort of fucked, is the thing. They had some guy whose quirk just—cut off pieces of you? It’s hard to explain. They were trying to take away something about who he was, and he’s not sure if they succeeded or not, because he can’t remember what it was that they were trying to take.

The thing is that he knows the people were Bad and he’s been trying to find a way to get information to the right people about them. What he remembers about them. There has to be someone who can stop them, but he doesn’t know who to trust. The thing is that he’s sort of on the run. From whoever he was with first, and also sort of the Japanese government, and also sort of the yakuza.

The thing is like a while back he finally managed to escape whoever had him and he didn’t super remember the outside world all that well but he sort of thought he could get help but instead the HPSC caught wind of his Quirks when he first went to a hospital and tried to. Enslave him. Hawks was there, it was a whole thing. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

Oh yeah for some reason he has more than one quirk. No, he doesn’t know why either.

The thing is that it’s an open secret on the streets that if you have a useful enough quirk, you’re not all that safe. If the HPSC doesn’t come for you, someone else will. Healing quirks are especially dangerous to have, because they’re so rare and valuable.

He’s also got a few “arrest warrants” out for him because he may or may not have forgotten vigilante justice was illegal and when people told him it was he said “that’s really stupid” and kept saving people anyway. Just. A few arrest warrants. A normal number of arrest warrants. Don’t worry about it.

The thing is that the people who had him were contracting with this experimental quirk erasing drug group to keep him under control (re: fuckton of quirks, no, he doesn’t know why he has them all either. He assumes that it’s something to do with the people who had him before this but they super fucking hated him so he can’t imagine why they’d give these all to him) and apparently he met a few of the people in the ring and forgot because they recognize him and he did not fucking recognize them. Anyway that was his secondish kidnapping. He thinks. If there were others before that he doesn’t remember them.

So there was this guy in a bird mask who was a huge asshole and was like, torturing this little girl down there and he thought that just because Deku was on the quirk suppressant drugs he would be manageable and he was Wrong. He had a touch-based destructive quirk and Deku figured that would immediately be no longer his problem if he just cut off both of his hands. So. That’s what he did. Took Eri. Left. The end.

Anyway the yakuza could not possibly be more pissed at him.

Eris quirk has insane healing potential, not to mention the quirk erasure and Deku just. He can’t take her anywhere. She was already taken apart because of her quirk; he can’t let her ever be used again. Someone would take advantage of her if he tried taking her to the authorities, if they even made it that far. He’s taking care of her. She’s finally happy again. She finally doesn’t think her quirk is a curse. She’s obsessed with recovery girl and wants to be a doctor when she grows up, actually. No, her quirk is not kiss activated. She’s convinced that is a professional standard she’s meeting.

He knows they’re on a sinking ship but he’s not ever letting anyone hurt him again and he’s not letting anyone hurt her either. He’s just. He’s doing his best. He’s trying.

He finds Todoroki inexplicably trustworthy (he is having his gay awakening too). He has written down everything he remembers about the yakuza and the people who had him before this. He wants to give it to Todoroki, so that Todoroki can give it to the hero he finds most trustworthy. As for him and Eri? They need to be out of Hosu as soon as the trains start again. They can’t stay here.

Iida wakes up with surprise cut off pants and, even more of a surprise, two more limbs than he expected to have and also that really stoic and intense kid from class is there inexplicably making an unusual amount of eye contact with a homeless vigilante teenager in a tshirt that reads “tuxedo”. No, he doesn’t know what’s going on.

There is also a Very Tiny Girl here who is Very Excited that her patient is awake.

Eri, age 6: I am your doctor

Iida, who woke up with 2 more limbs than he thought he would: I--thank you. You are very good at it

Eri: we have to do your check up now

Iida: check up?

Todoroki, completely monotone, inexplicably holding the vigilantes hand: she's a medical professional Iida let her do her work

Iida: yes of course

Eri, pulling an Actual Adult Stethoscope out of a recovery girl themed backpack: *puts it in her ears* *holds it up to Iidas chest*

Iida:

Eri, leaning back: you have a heart

Iida: that is excellent news

Eri: *puts an actual blood pressure cuff on his arm*

Iida, helping her do it and waiting patiently: what's the prognosis doctor

Eri, solemnly, reading the blood pressure cuff: you have numbers in your arms

Iida: is that good

Eri: I have no idea

THE PLAN IS THUS:

Look Iida got to commit crimes last night that todorokis going to keep quiet about so now he needs to do some quid pro quo here. Todoroki needs to go give this vigilante boy all of the money he can get out of his dads bank account without anyone noticing and they will not be turning them in. No one is turning anyone in. Do not ask why he is holding hands with this kind vigilante.

Todoroki and Deku will go to get money and train tickets. Iida will wait with Eri here in the meantime.

At the end of this they’re all going their separate ways and shutting the fuck up about all the felonies they committed last night. This dies with them.

THE TEAMS:

Team 1: Todoroki and Deku, currently slinking around the city, condensing an entire star crossed romance drama into a twenty minute walk to the nearest atm. They find each other inexplicably enchanting.

(Todoroki, extremely isolated growing up, spoken to a handful of people his own age and most were single sentences: I've never met anyone like you

Izuku, running on two months of working memory: I've never met anyone like you either)

Team 2: Iida and Eri, currently playing princesses together. There is a startling amount of black magic and subterfuge for a game of princesses, but who is Iida to question the arts. He’s throwing his whole back into this performance. He IS princess trueheart.

Surprise Team 3: Aizawa Shouta, currently in total crisis.

The thing that everyone forgot is that they left iidas fucking severed legs in an alley with a dead hero, the hero killer, and a lot of todorokis blood and ice and scorch marks. Aizawa thinks iidas fucking dead. He’s praying to any god out there that wants to try their hand at a miracle that Todorokis somehow still alive. He just got off the phone with Iida Tensei, who had to be sedated by the end of it because he was so utterly inconsolable at the thought that he killed his baby brother. He’s trying to find Todoroki, if he’s alive, and he’s trying to find bodies to bring back to people.

Instead he follows the blood trail to find Iida in an abandoned warehouse in cut off pants with two more limbs than he strictly should have wearing a plastic tiara and declaring that he, Princess Trueheart, will infiltrate the black magic coffee shop run by the evil warlock baristas and restore peace to the kingdom.

He’s never felt such relief in his life. Iidas trying desperately to tell him something and Aizawa has no intention of listening. He’s never hugged one of his students before but there’s a first for everything. Dear fucking God, he thought Iida was dead.

A little girl runs up behind Iida. She becomes terrified as soon as she sees Aizawa.

Aizawa has some amazing instincts and works very closely with people on the streets. He knows a lot about the uglier parts of what they do and the unfairness in the system. He also knows that the only way that Iida could possibly be alive and in as good of a condition as he is would be if someone with an unprecedentedly powerful healing Quirk saved him. He also knows that it can go pretty poorly for you if you have a powerful healing quirk and don’t have the resources to protect yourself with. When he finds someone on the streets with a healing quirk, he goes out of his way to get them resources that won’t put them into any official systems.

Eri’s a very small, very scared girl who’s scarred to high heavens and acts like she’s been abused and he puts two and two together to make four. He figures out that Iida was saved by either her, or whoever she was with. The bags and blankets around here suggests that shes not traveling alone, and he recognizes Todoroki’s discarded hero costume. So he figures out that he’s got two homeless people who did some massive unregistered quirk usage last night and who will be snatched up by the HPSC in seconds if he just puts them in the system and calls it a day, and there’s way too many rumors about what they did to hawks for him to ever allow that. He’s not doing that to anyone, let alone the people that have saved him from burying Iida. He focuses on calming Eri down and getting her to trust him enough that he can help her, and he’s so busy with that that he doesn’t hear the people behind him until someone tells Eri it’s okay, go to the waiting place, he’ll be right there.

Oh. Aizawa’s been looking everywhere for you.

The thing is that when Izuku went missing, Toshinori and Inko joined forces to tear the world apart for him. Aizawa was brought in as a trusted insider and read into the entire thing—OfA, Izuku as the ninth holder, all of it. It actually became a little bit personal to him? He was completely pissed at All Might for a long time for just giving some kid his Quirk, not talking to his parents at all, and then sending him out in the world without knowing it’s history. Being the next symbol of peace is a huge burden to put on a high schooler itself, but he also got the kid fucking kidnapped and possibly brutally murdered without even knowing the dangers, even if AfO was supposed to be dead.

It was a little bit of a personal mission for him to finally bring Izuku home. He never met him, but a part of him couldn’t help but get a bit caught up in it all. Izuku would have potentially been his student. From everything he’s heard, he’s a kid who would work his ass off, who’s been kicked down his entire life and still cares. He wanted to bring him back home. He got close, too, he thinks. He thinks he got so close to chasing down someone that matched Izuku’s description a couple of times, but the person managed to give him the slip, and he wasn’t acting quite the way Izuku should have.

The last thing he expected was to find him in an abandoned warehouse with a little girl and two of his missing students.

Cue a very tense first meeting where Izukus about to try and kick his ass and Aizawa’s desperately trying to convince him that he knows his mom and has been trying to bring him home for months.

Todoroki says, “excuse me, I have something to do before I forget,” walks across the room, hands Aizawa Izuku’s notebook of intel, and walks back to stand next to Izuku.

It convinces Deku to calm down a little.

In the end, it's actually Eri that is the point that Aizawa convinces him on. Because he's doing his best, but at the end of the day, they're still living in abandoned buildings and running for their lives. He doesn't have stable sources of food or water for either of them. He can't keep this up, and this is the best chance he's ever had of getting Eri into safer conditions.

Aizawa ends up taking them to Iidaten.

He's got to skirt Endeavor (looking for his son), the police (Izuku has so many arrest warrants out for him), the HPSC (probably wants to enslave both of these kids), the yakuza (so so pissed at Izuku), and the fucking league of villains (also after Izuku). But Iidaten has the resources to send a secure car and drive them straight to a secure building, where Tensei also happens to be, and he'd rather he give Tanya back to Tensei sooner than later. They had to move him from the hospital to the Iidaten infirmary because he insisted on being closer to the search for his little brother and the options were like "fuck it just let him be moved" or "medically induced coma so he stops trying to climb out of his hospital bed despite being paralyzed."

In the middle of the Iida brothers' tearful reunion, Eri announces that she'd like to fix Iida's big brother too. Izuku checks to make sure she feels comfortable doing it, that Tensei's injury is recent enough that her quirk can be more safely used to help it, all that, and Eri insists that she wants to and its fine. Iida was nice and he was her patient too and he's really good at playing princesses.

Iida, sobbing at his brother's bedside: it was an honor to be princess trueheart

So now Tensei's healed too. Honestly this all should have never worked out as well as it did.

Dr. Eri, with her stethoscope: *placing it on the wrong side of tensei's chest* your heart is missing

Tensei, doing a little gasp: oh no Dr. Eri: It is okay I will pro--pre

Izuku, her medical assistant: prescribe

Dr. Eri: yes. Prescribe a band aid

Tensei: phew. Thank you dr. Eri.

Tenya, hasn't stopped crying since his brother was healed: *choked up* yes thank you dr. Eri

Dr. Eri, placing a band aid on his chest and giving it a little tap: you can never take it off

Tensei: I will NEVER take it off

Dr. Eri: I need to tap your knee with a little hammer now

Tensei: yes doctor anything you say

Dr. Eri, tapping his knee: okay your knee is fixed now

Tensei: it IS fixed you're a miracle worker

Dr. Eri: no I am a doctor

Tensei: that was my mistake

The thing is that tensei is a consummate big brother. He takes care of people by nature. Aizawa brings him these two funky little lunatics who saved Tenya and fixed both of their legs and he's ready to ascend into being their pseudo big brother/young hot adoptive father. He summons an army of Iidaten lawyers to handle the legal issues around adopting Eri and Izuku and bring them into the iida family. Nothing could stop him from this path.

Then fucking All Might shows up with Izuku's biological mother with full legal rights to him and he's like One Thing May Be Able To Stop Me From This Path.

izuku's reunion with all might and his mom is underwhelming because he takes one look at them and insists he's never met them in his fucking life. It takes an alarming amount of conversation to get him to cede the point that he's got like maybe two months of memory and that means very little.

All Might, showing him a picture of himself on his phone: my boy i've looked for you every day

Deku: is that a picture of me sobbing on the beach? why do you HAVE that

The issue is that Izuku's normal amount of arrest warrants out for him is actually ninety six arrest warrants and that's not an easy thing to get out of. He thinks they got rid of the part of him that respected the law or authority, if he ever had one to begin with. Nedzu, however, manages to find a loophole in the law that allows him to be rehabilitated at UA because he was in an altered state of mind while committing the crimes.

Deku thinks this sounds a lot like what the HPSC wanted to do with him but with different people, but Eri will get to stay in one place and go to school and be protected from the HPSC, so he goes with it.

There's much more after this but it's very long already, so we'll cut it off here.

*bonus*

Todoroki: where's aizawa sensei

Deku: I think he's banging his head against the wall in the bathroom

Todoroki: why

Deku: He needs to take custody of Eri until she gets control of her Quirk. But Eri and I need to stay together, and All Might and Inko are refusing to give him custody of me too. So they found a solution.

Todoroki, in damning realization: oh my god

Deku: all mights off buying a house big enough for all of us now.

Aizawas happy to take care of Eri and Izuku, the issue is the fact that he has to live with fucking All Might, of all the goddamn people.