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vaguely-humanoid-form · 29 days ago

Text

maybe I haven't been looking at the sky

post-sonic 3 fic about stone. stobotnik too. oh yeah baby it's time for some pain.

word count is a bit under 3.6k

featuring: grief like so much grief, lots of hurt, a smidgen of comfort, second-person narration, so many goddamn timestamps, did I mention hurt, acknowledgement of shadow the hedgehog being like an actual teenager, shadow the hedgehog being kind of like a weird cat, the smallest hint of sonadow, and, of course, hurt.

have fun! >:3

p.s.: the title is from Maud Gone by Car Seat Headrest because I like that song and it fits too well

June 24, 2024, 3:26 AM

You wake up.

You don't immediately open your eyes, though, because if you stay in the darkness, you can pretend that everything is alright. You can pretend that nothing's changed.

You can pretend he's still here.

You open your eyes.

It's still dark, and you can only just barely make out the hotel room ceiling above you.

You can hear the soft pitter-patter of the London rain against the window.

You spare a glance at the clock on the bedside table.

You know you won't be able to fall asleep.

Four hours of rest is enough, anyway.

You get up.

You take a shower.

Your reflection in the mirror seems to bore holes through your skull.

You brush your teeth, and you get dressed.

You work, because you have nothing else to do.

You go to get shitty hotel coffee and breakfast.

On instinct, you grab two cups.

You decide you don't want coffee anymore.

June 24, 2024, 12:58 PM

Your lunch is tasteless, and not just because it's British.

You think you would've laughed at that only 24 hours ago.

You don't think about if he would've.

You don't have much to work on.

Your hands itch. Everything feels so still. So static.

You try not to think about it. You try to think about anything else.

You think about how cold it is for a summer day.

You think about the smell of rain on the sidewalk.

You don't look at the sky.

You count your steps to fill your mind with something, anything.

It takes you precisely 673 steps to get back to your hotel from the lunch spot.

You don't think about how odd it feels to walk so slowly.

You don't think about how lonely you are.

You don't think about the Crab sunk in the Thames.

You don't think about him.

June 24, 2024, 7:31 PM

It's been 24 hours since it happened.

You feel empty.

You feel empty and sweaty and gross despite the wind chill and you shower again.

Your reflection stares at you again. It accuses you, blames you. It says it's your fault.

In its eyes, you can almost see something like him.

You cover the mirror.

You get yourself ready for bed, and you lay there under the hotel duvet, air conditioner blasting, and you shiver, but you don't get up to change it.

The Doctor prefers it cold, so–

You stare at the ceiling. It looks blurrier than usual.

You don't fall asleep for another few hours.

June 30, 2024, 1:08 PM

Montana is certainly better than London. At least, you'd say so.

It was a good idea to keep paying the lease on the Mean Bean. It's something you know.

You can't decide whether the familiarity makes you feel better or worse.

At least G.U.N. doesn't want anything to do with you, which you are more than welcome to.

Your “house,” if it can even be called that, what with its studio apartment style, in the back of the Mean Bean feels foreign to you, but the warmth feels nice.

The café stays cold.

You say it's to save money on the heating bill.

You were always good at pretending.

July 23, 2024, 4:23 PM

It's been exactly one month.

The hedgehog visits you today.

You know you should be plotting against him. You should be planning your revenge. You should be scheming to get rid of him once and for all–

But you're just so tired.

And in the end, he didn't want what happened, either.

He smiles at you as he orders a hot chocolate, but you can see the tightness in his face.

You bring up the other hedgehog, Shadow, and he falters for a moment.

You don't smile, not really, but your face softens as you come to an understanding.

You can't talk about him, but listening to Sonic talk about Shadow helps to dull the pain for a moment.

Before he leaves, Sonic gives you a sad smile, and tells you he's sorry about the Doctor.

Your throat closes up.

You stand still as the door opens and closes.

Your hands are shaking as you close.

August 16, 2024, 1:15 PM

Ever since he visited you the first time, Sonic has come back every other day for a hot chocolate and a chat.

The kid seems to always have something to say. You suppose he's hyperactive in many ways.

He's nice to you, and a part of you hates it, but you can't get yourself to get rid of the kid. Even if he says he stops by to check on how you're doing, you know it's helpful for him, too.

Deep down, you feel guilty for commiserating with the enemy. The guilt is something you opt to push down, though, because it makes you think of him.

You're interrupted when Sonic walks through the door with his human quasi-father in tow. Tom, you think his name is.

If you're honest, he looks like shit. His arm is in a cast and he's walking with a slight limp. The bags under his eyes are nothing to scoff at, either, but he gives you a soft smile.

He only orders a water, and drinks it slowly as Sonic chatters at his side about the shop.

You know he's been worried about Tom, and you're glad to see he's alright, but a twinge of resentment bites at you.

Why couldn't have you gotten a happy ending, too?

August 27, 2024, 1:00 PM

He's back again, and he brought his friends: the fox and the echidna.

You freeze for a moment when you see the fox. The conversation you had with him plays in the back of your mind and you relentlessly shoo it away.

The echidna is still annoying, but it's funny to see him order a shot of espresso and then immediately choke when he takes one sip.

When you're not trying to fight each other, they're good kids. You appreciate the effort they're making, at the very least.

It's nice to have noise to fill up the air. Helps quiet the thoughts a little bit, especially when the shop doesn't get much traffic these days.

Chatting with the alien children gives you something to do, too, since you can't do latte art anymore.

Your hands start shaking the moment you try.

So, you listen to them talk: teasing each other, making bad jokes, ranting about this or that.

When they leave, they all say goodbye, and while the silence is still suffocating, you're finding it slightly easier to breathe.

September 10, 2024, 8:01 AM

It's his birthday today, and you can't get yourself out of bed.

You can't even properly cry. Quiet tears roll down your face and stain your pillow.

You can't get back to sleep, either. You don't know if you would even want to. You don't know if you could bear to see his face in your dreams.

You stare at the brick wall, bare of photos or posters or plans, and you can't get yourself to look away.

September 10, 2024, 1:30 PM

The door to your “house” opens and you jump from your bed.

Team Sonic broke into your house.

You would be angry. You should be angry. But you can't muster up the energy.

Sonic says something that you don't register, and Knuckles proudly holds out a messily-made cupcake in front of him.

When you get a closer look…

Oh.

It's for the Doctor.

When you look up, Sonic is giving you that same sad smile he did the first time he came to the cafe. He says he knows how you've been going through a hard time, and that since today is the Doctor’s birthday, he wanted to do something special.

It takes everything in your being to not burst out sobbing in front of the kids.

You all sit around the cupcake and sing to it.

You falter on the name. They don't seem to mind.

You can't bear to eat any of the cupcake, so you stick it in the fridge.

The second those kids are out the door, you cry so hard you can barely stand.

September 12, 2024, 1:12 PM

Tails bursts through the shop door, startling you and the single customer sitting at a table in the corner.

He starts talking, so fast you can only make out a few words.

Before you can tell him to slow down, Sonic runs in after him, smiling brighter than the sun and presenting to you…

…Shadow?

You nearly short-circuit.

How is he alive?

You ask as much, and they all shrug their shoulders, minus Shadow who stands there staring at you without expression.

Apparently, Shadow has some sort of minor amnesia. He can't remember much immediately before…

Well.

But, still, he's alive.

And that sparks something deep in your chest.

You wouldn't dare to believe anything. You know he's… gone.

But a tiny, near molecular voice in the back of your head says what if?

And you can't give into it, but the voice, small as it is, nestles itself in between your cerebrum and cerebellum.

Back to reality, the alien children have decided that Shadow will stay with you.

Their home doesn't have the room for yet another anthropomorphic hedgehog in it, apparently.

You don't seem to have a say in the matter.

You can't say you mind too much.

September 12, 2024, 4:25 PM

You take him in and set up a futon in a clear area of your house.

You give him a tour, which really isn't much considering there are only two actual rooms.

He follows you around, nodding or shaking his head slightly whenever you ask him a question. He's quiet. Shy, even.

You make a simple dinner in silence, and he mumbles a thank you when you hand him his plate.

He falls asleep while you're working, and when you get a closer look at him…

…Did he always look that young?

Minus the 50 years he spent in stasis, he couldn't have been more than 15. Maybe 16, if you're being generous.

His brows furrow in his slumber, painfully familiar, and you're suddenly reminded of the fact that he is, in a way, a Robotnik.

You draw in a sharp breath and blink away the stinging in your eyes.

Maybe you'll sleep early.

September 23, 2024, 1:08 PM

Three months.

It's been three months since it happened, and the pain has only barely dulled.

You're starting to wonder if the coping mechanism of bottling everything up as much as you possibly can isn't working as well as you thought it would.

Shadow has opened up more, at least. He's still quiet and sometimes stares at you, wide-eyed and expressionless, but you've had a good few conversations with him.

You've shown him how to operate some of the coffee machines, even if he isn't quite tall enough to reach them very well on his own.

Every day you spend with him, the more it sets in just how young he is.

For the first week or two after… what happened, you resented him for being a part of it all. But now?

You just see a scared kid.

Team Sonic has been back to the Mean Bean a few times since Shadow arrived. He's incredibly socially awkward and is not one for idle chit-chat, but you've seen a hint of a smile on his face a couple times, and that's enough for you.

His memories have been returning slowly. Despite the voice screaming at you at every waking moment, you don't want to hold out hope. You don't want to be crushed again when the inevitable reality hits you that he is really gone.

You remember when it happened, when three months ago, you watched the Doctor dedicate his last words to you.

You remember going through every stage of grief and then some all at once.

You remember thinking you were done with that process, then, after it hit you like a freight train in all of 20 seconds.

You checked into a hotel, perfectly calm. You went up the elevator, fine. You unlocked the door to your room, ok.

Then you shut the door behind you and realized you'd accidentally gotten a room with two beds.

You remember the taste of bile at the back of your throat.

You blink and you're back where you were, alien children conversing at the counter in your coffee shop. You realize you've been holding the same empty mug and towel for a while.

When you set them down, your palm is indented from the fabric.

October 12, 2024, 2:00 PM

Shadow has warmed up to everything a lot more since he arrived last month.

You've seen him shoot back straight espresso like it was water, which drove Knuckles insane, and, for whatever reason, made you glow with pride.

He's slowly started asking for things directly: meals, things to do, what have you. You finally got to make that revenge guac for you both. It was great.

You had to try to not choke on it.

He's insanely excited for Halloween. It's refreshing to see him like this. He's usually a pretty doom-and-gloom type of guy, and there's a pain within him that you resonate with. But right now, he looks so happy, asking if you can decorate the cafe for the holiday. Of course, you do.

His memory is almost fully restored, too. You're happy about it, but it also instills an intense anxiety in you.

You aren't sure which situation it is that's making you feel like this.

Maybe both.

It'll be 4 months in a little under a week.

You don't think it's stopped hurting.

When you get a moment to be alone, it all comes rushing back at you, and suddenly you feel like you did when it first happened.

But the hurting isn't that bad all the time. Not anymore.

It settles in your chest when you're distracted by something, knocking on your ribs when you're reminded of it.

It's constant, like a bruise that just won't go away.

But it's manageable.

What is less manageable, however, is the voice.

Every day that passes, the voice gets louder, crawling further into your brain and making itself known.

Hell, it's even shown up in your dreams.

As annoying as it is, though, it makes you think about your grief beyond what you had been.

Whenever you have one of the dreams, you wake up and shower, and sit in the water and think.

Mostly, your brain has focused on his absence. The fact that he's… gone.

But, then you start to wonder.

Would this have happened if you'd told him? Would he be gone if he knew how you felt?

Would that have even changed anything?

You have to stop before you spiral too far. Asking questions is dangerous.

You convince yourself that it's just the shower water running down your cheeks, even if your eyes burn.

October 23, 2024, 1:02 AM

You wake up.

You don't immediately open your eyes, though, because if you stay in the darkness, you can pretend that everything is alright. You can pretend that nothing's changed.

You can pretend he's still here.

You open your eyes.

The room is not silent. Faraway thunder rumbles in the sky and Shadow lightly snores from where he sleeps.

It's four months now, and you've suddenly forgotten how to feel numb.

Your hypothesis about emotional suppression seems to be correct.

You sit up.

You stare at your hands.

You can't breathe.

At first, you think someone is trying to kill you. That's the obvious answer.

But then you feel the tear drop down to the tip of your nose.

And then you break.

You lose all sense of time as your vision is flooded. You hiccup between sobs and you know you've always been an ugly crier.

What makes it worse is when you feel a hesitant hand on your shoulder, and look over to see Shadow looking at you with so much concern and understanding.

You don't want to cry in front of him. You're meant to be strong for him, for this kid that you've grown closer to, for this kid that you want to take care of.

But when he reaches up to hug you, all you can do is fall apart on his shoulder. And you feel so bad, because no kid should ever have to be the one to comfort an adult, but the tears keep coming and you can't make them stop.

You don't know how long you sat there, weeping on him, when it seems the well has run dry.

You try to mutter an apology to him, but he gets up and walks away. You stare at nothing in front of you and curse yourself for making this child have to support you, but he comes back with a glass of water, averting his eyes nervously.

You think back to the first week he was here.

He'd had a nightmare and woke up screaming and crying. When you'd gone to comfort him, you brought him a glass of water.

You had awkwardly stuttered about how crying can be dehydrating in a sad attempt to make him feel better, social skills be damned, and it had worked.

That was the first time he'd really smiled at you.

And now he's doing the same for you.

He says something similar about water and dehydration and you can't entirely understand what he's saying, but you smile as best you can through the tears in your eyes and take the glass with a choked thank you.

He lights up at the affirmation, and you feel a warmth bloom in your chest as you realize that you are to Shadow as Tom is to Sonic.

You gently ruffle the top of Shadow's head, the corner of your mouth quirking up. He flusters at the action and tilts his head, almost like a cat, you think, sporting a ghost of a smirk.

You tell him you're alright now and to go back to bed, and you yourself fall asleep with the knowledge that you are this weird alien hedgehog’s weird quasi-father, and you don't mind it one bit.

October 31, 2024, 5:30 PM

Turns out Tom and Maddie made a costume for Shadow. Sonic had apparently told them about something Shadow said about it after one of his trips to the Mean Bean, and they'd decided to surprise him. Needless to say, he was ecstatic. Others may not have registered the level of happiness he was at, but you know Shadow.

You know your boy.

Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails somehow convinced Shadow to go trick-or-treating with them. You encouraged him, too. He seemed a bit nervous, and even sort of embarrassed, but he ultimately agreed, smiling as he waved goodbye to you.

This was the first time in a while that you've been really alone. The pain starts to catch up to you and for a moment, you feel incredibly empty. Your throat begins to tighten.

You take a deep breath as the grief curls up once more, resting for the moment. It makes you cold.

You make yourself a simple latte and draw a little jack-o'-lantern on the top. Your hands still shake, but it's not too much to deal with.

You doubt anyone else will come into the shop. You already planned to close early for Halloween, and the sign at the front tells as much to any prospective customers.

You turn to begin dealing with the back counter, cleaning the machines and putting things back to where they belong. You've grown fond of the routine.

Then you hear the door open, and turn around to see Shadow running into the shop. His eyes are bright, brighter than you've ever seen them.

He tells you that he remembers everything now. He says, excited—God, it makes you happy to see him excited—that his memory is back and he can tell you what happened to–

The door opens again.

You look up.

He's there.

He's alive.

You stand there for a moment, completely still, completely silent.

You almost scream.

You leap over the counter, running and tackling him in the tightest hug you've ever given anyone.

He smells horrible. Like smoke and sulfur and dirt and grime and he's alive and he's holding onto you just as strong as you are and the voice is cheering and exploding into fireworks in your brain and the pain squeezes your heart in its hands and he's alive.

You don't even notice when the tears begin to fall. You only notice his pulse, alive, his breath, alive, his arms around you, alive, alive, alive.

When you finally pull back after what feels like both an eternity and a millisecond, you get a look at his face, and you put it in your hands and holy shit he is alive.

He looks absolutely disheveled and it's possibly the most beautiful thing you've ever seen, and then he smiles, wide, genuine, warm, so rare, so real, and then he leans forward and kisses you and you can't think anymore.

He tastes awful and you've never loved him more than you do now.

#ripley doesn't say stuff #ripley doesn't know how to write #stobotnik #sonic 3 #sonic the hedgehog #sonic movie 3 #agent stone #shadow the hedgehog #ivo robotnik #fanfic #im really proud of this one #made my sibling want me dead (this is a good thing to me)#im having a little bit of brainrot #you know how it is #genuinely though this might be one of the best things ive ever written???#which is crazy considering its sonic the fucking hedgehog fanfiction #but what can i say im good at writing pain #also i did so much like. way too in depth research for this #i was looking up the weather in places on specific dates i was looking up sunrise times.#im normal. i swear. (lying)#fun fact if youve made it this far for some reason:#shadows costume is a clockwork orange!#ive never seen the movie myself but i feel like maria would've gotten her hands on it and watched it with shadow #ouuhh the siblings.....#anyways.#youve got better things to do than listen to me ramble in the tags #SCRAM!#angst #angst with a happy ending #teehee

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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 2 days ago

Note

pez dispenser debris for the fic ask thing? 👀

As much as this is my “kill no darlings you will get EVERY flashback” fic, there’s overarching sociopolitical backstory explaining why Izuku and the rest of class 3A exploded in the public eye that I don’t think I’ll ever fully fit in.

It’s a combination of it being more of a meta analysis than anything and also requiring information from a perspective that I know will never appear in the fic. Like, the fic still gets the different moments that make up this analysis, but there’s no explicit connecting thread to show how they all locked together to create this sort of global cult following of class 3-A. I almost put in a little fake news article opinion piece that was meant to sort of walk the reader through why society is Like This, but I decided it was too heavy handed and deleted it.

Everything that I’m going to reference has already appeared in pez dispenser debris to some degree, and none of it will ever actually materially impact the plot. They may receive a little more detail down the line if they’re mentioned in passing in the fic, so out of an abundance of caution, I’ll stick it below the cut so people can avoid this, but I don’t personally consider any of this spoilers.

Izuku and the rest of the class are famous in pez dispenser debris in a way that’s pretty much unprecedented for students. Canonically, not even all might had a name for himself until after his graduation. Pretty much everyone from class 3A are public figures, with Izuku specifically being considered a major global figure.

In my mind, there was this perfect storm right during their second year that catapulted them into fame. The class personally has varying levels of awareness of why they got so popular, but there was this perfect cross winds of societal unrest and fear that made them household names.

There was an approximately one month span in their second year where they were just hit one after another with a major firestorms of events: The UA Sports Festival, the Sidekick Strike, and the Tartarus Prison Break/Desertion of Yokohama.

The UA Sports Festival is the one that the kids attribute this most to, because so many of the news articles that followed referenced their performance in it. But it probably gave them less mileage than what the other two events did.

What the UA Sports Festival did was showcase their skills to the world in a venue designed to show them off. The public was already on edge. All Might had retired, crime rates kept going up, and people were rapidly losing confidence in existing heroes. Class 2A made such an insane showing of skill in the second Sports Festival that it made the public rave about them for weeks after. It was extremely reassuring to Japan that they had such powerful heroes in the barrel and would soon be on the streets. But that attention probably would have died down had it not been for the Sidekick Strike and Yokohama.

The Sidekick Strike actually had nothing to do with them. But it undermined the public’s faith in heroes at just the right time.

The Sidekick Strike is just one of those things that I have no POV that would even tangentially be involved in it so we’ll get a few passing references in media clips and it’ll never be discussed in depth. Which is a shame because it’s such an interesting conflict to me.

The Sidekick Strike was heavily inspired by the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Effectively, it was the height of the labor rights movement, and police officers got together and went on strike to get the police union recognized. They had tried to negotiate and negotiations failed, and so they all walked off the job. The city descended into lawlessness, the national guard was deployed, it was a whole thing. Famously, Calvin Coolidge fired the entire police force over it on the grounds that there was no striking from public safety.

I thought it would be really interesting if there was something similar that happened with the sidekicks. The thing is that the heroics structure as it stands really incentivizes abuse towards sidekicks. We have a society where there’s a decent amount of heroes who are only in it for the fame. A not insignificant amount of money must come from marketing deals. And it’s a ranked system, so they’re all in competition with each other.

Heroes wouldn’t be incentivized to showcase their sidekicks—they’d be incentivized to take advantage of them and take credit for their work.

Like, think about the work-study experiences. Momo didn’t even officially work for the hero she studied with. She wasn’t getting paid. An adult woman used her for a shampoo ad. Who wants to bet whether Momo saw a dime from it? It’s probably very predatory because the nature of the system incentivizes predation.

I thought the underlying legal issues would be interesting and complex. Who owns a sidekick’s image—the agency or the individual? Who gets the proceeds of their brand deals? This all would be governed by their employment contracts, and sidekicks just starting out have very little leverage compared to big name heroes. And those heroes would want to keep their sidekicks names small and theirs big. The rankings are competitive, after all.

It’s a situation where I do think that like. The sidekicks would have a point in unionizing. The use of their image, appropriate compensation, and proper credit for their busts would all be like, very legitimate concerns in a normal employment context.

I see agencies like Idaten settling immediately with the union and having their sidekicks back on the street before the day is out. In my mind, idaten is considered the gold standard for sidekick jobs already, and their employees mostly did it out of solidarity with the people they worked alongside of. Like, Idaten was already doing most of the union’s demands and signed off very quickly on the remaining ones. If it was just about the Idaten sidekicks, none of them would have gone on strike, but they had a lot of colleagues who they depended on in the field who were in terrible situations. What were they gonna say, sorry, sucks to be you, I got a great gig though so condolences? These were the people keeping them alive. They went on strike because they knew Idaten would publicly settle before the day was out and set an example for the rest of the agencies. Hopefully it would help other agencies follow their lead.

But that didn’t happen. Some agencies, like Endeavor’s, fired everyone immediately. And I think a lot of agencies spent a long time picking over every line item in prolonged negotiations. It dragged out.

And that went over fucking terribly.

All Might just retired. Crime is up. And their sworn defenders are bickering over who gets what cut of the action figure line. Like I think the public would have fucking hated this in a post-All Might world. It would have seemed like the only real hero just medically and irreversibly retired and the rest of them are squabbling about whose turn it is in the spotlight.

I also think that the villains would have taken advantage of it.

The Tartarus Prison Break in pez isn’t the one that happened in canon. Here, the League of Villains attacked Tartarus and set everyone loose. In the process, they made a very clear stance: they are going to leave with All for One, and they are not going to attack any civilians. They won’t fight at all unless attacked first.

All of the horrible and sadistic villains they just let go have not made the same promise.

They chose to do this now because of the Sidekick Strike. All their heroes don’t give a fuck about protecting them, so they’re strapped for staffing. So they’re taking back their leader and going back to ground, and the heroes are free to immediately go after and contain all those bad bad villains who just escaped. And those guys are headed to the heavily populated mainland, so better be quick.

The whole world knew that was their explicit reasoning and promise. Because Himiko fucking lived tweeted the escape.

The Sidekick Strike took the hit for a lot of the blame, but I do see all the sidekicks breaking strike lines to go respond to the crisis. But response times were severely handicapped by the fact that most if not all of them were cut off from their agencies. It was just a complete systemic breakdown.

And then there became the question of what crisis do you respond to: All for One’s escape, or everyone else’s?

I mentioned in one of the little fake tumblr posts that the Tartarus Prison Break was seen as Endeavor’s greatest failure. And part of that is because he chose to sacrifice the nearby area, Yokohama, to contain All for One.

I am one of the biggest haters of Endeavor’s later arc, specifically because it required going back on the nature of the abuse he had subjected his family to that was already established in canon, but that’s a different rant. This is not canon endeavor. I hate what they did with canon endeavor.

That being said, I do think that the self doubt weighed on him once he became number one. And this was the moment of his career where it really crushed him.

All for One had escaped. So had every other villain from Tartarus. He should go after the most immediate threats. He knew this. It was basic triage.

But they would never have a better chance to stop All for One.

Prisoners in Tartarus aren’t exactly hitting all their macros and micros or training daily. They are not adherents to the Bakugou Katsuki Fitness Lifestyle. All for One was coming off spending the last few months drugged up to his eyeballs and strapped to a chair in a straitjacket with at least fifty guns pointed at him at all times. The man has not scratched his own nose in weeks. He’s weaker now than he’ll ever be again.

It was their best chance.

If he escaped, and he went back to ground, he’d have the time and space to get as strong as he wanted, and then he’d come back for real. And he’d be coming back for everything.

Stopping him the first time had cost them All Might.

And Endeavor simply was not All Might. And he still wouldn’t be All Might when the next fight came.

It really was the hardest decision of Endeavor’s life. He had to admit to himself that his own inadequacy was going to cost them countless lives. But he thought it was a hard decision he had to make. He was losing the battle for the barest chance at winning the war.

So he made the call that all heroes were to respond to All for One. They had to hit the league of villains now with their full force if they were to stand a chance. They could not afford to divide their already sparse forces. They’d respond to Yokohama when AfO was contained.

He was also the one who made the call to broadcast the warning message that we hear in the Twitter post. He thought it would give civilians their best chance. He didn’t want them to act with the expectation of the heroes being en route.

Of course, that meant that the entire city got fucking sirens going off and a message telling them that the heroes were not going to save them. Which, as you can expect, did not do a lot for public morale.

In my head, Tartarus is like, the equivalent to Gotham’s Arkham. It’s borderline an institute for the criminally insane. You don’t end up there unless you did something super fucked, are super dangerous, and have extreme violent tendencies. It’s exclusively for the most dangerous and indiscriminately violent criminals in the country.

The entire world was watching in real time while the tragedy unfolded. A lot of people were livestreaming after the emergency broadcast dropped, because they didn’t want the government to be able to handwave away how terrible their death was, or because they didn’t know what else to do, or because they just didn’t want to be alone. The full expectation was that it’d be a massacre.

But it wasn’t. Because Class 2-A responded instead.

The Class 2-A defensive efforts were discussed in one of the silly little fake tumblr posts and in the fake twitter post. In those, we find out that 1) Class 2-A, along with Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire responded to the scene; 2) the entire class rolled out of Mirio’s fucking mom van and tamaki and nejire’s cars like they were fucking clown cars; 3) the HPSC claimed it was a legitimate operation blessed and coordinated by them; and 4) a lot of people think this was a lie, in part because videos leaked of Aizawa bitching them all out in the street afterwards. We also see Izuku’s green lightning at the end of the twitter video, showing him responding to the scene just as the first villains hit the mainland.

This fight has a lot of names in the backstory that lives in my head. It’s called the Tartarus Prison Break for obvious reasons. It’s also been called in some circles the Desertion of Yokohama, because of the call Endeavor made.

But it’s also called the Battle of Yokohoma. And it’s ranked alongside the Battle of Kamino as one of the finest acts of modern day heroics. And that’s because of Class 2-A. If it hadn’t been for them showing up, it would have gone down in history as the Massacre of Yokohama.

Like. It kills me that I can’t include the full details of what happened, but there’s just too much to make in a flashback. It’s a fic in and of itself. But it really was the fight that made Class 2-A.

It was the first fight where they were really the only heroes that could be counted on. Granted, they’d had to fight for their lives alone, but this wasn’t just their lives. These were thousands of terrified civilians who all thought they were going to die.

It was the first true test of them as heroes in the world. And they actually rose to the occasion. They didn’t just fight the villains—they realized that they needed to get emergency services working throughout the city if everyone was going to make it. Momo and Tsuyu conducted a mildly hostile take over of the emergency call center so they could coordinate relief. They had fucking Tokoyami and Dark Shadow single-handedly holding the line on the hospital while Kaminari, Shoji, Jiro, and Sato all learned to drive for the Very First Time while commandeering the city’s fucking ambulances. They were fighting and containing villains, performing emergency aid, putting out literal fires, everything. It was the hardest fight of their lives.

There was a hot second where Class 2-A was The Moment. Like. The entire world was watching them during this fight, and they had no fucking idea until it was over. People lost their minds when the first footage made it out of Yokohama of a bunch of teenagers showing up and immediately throwing hands with S-Class villains.

It was global news. Think of the kind of media attention that was received by the search for the Titan, the Tham Luang Cave Rescue, the Suez Canal getting blocked by the Ever Given (rip queen you will always be famous to me), that kind of thing. Class 2-A was fighting for their fucking lives and then found out three days later while they were all still in the hospital that there was a prayer vigil going on in Portugal for them during the battle and CNN had 24 hours live coverage of the fight that had so many viewers it outnumbered the population of Finland. Like what do you even do with that information.

The world expected a massacre. They didn’t expect a bunch of footage of high schoolers kicking the shit out of superpowered murders and personally ferrying the injured to the hospitals they were also defending.

The other part about this fight that really made them permanently part of the public consciousness is that it was not lost on everyone that every single person who responded to that fight did so at the risk of their license.

All of them had provisional licenses, save Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire, all of whom went AWOL from the explicit directives ordering them to respond to the fight against All for One. The operation could not have been less authorized. They had to steal their gear and jimmy the UA fence to even get out. The explicit plan was to steal one of the UA buses and have Bakugou fucking drive them to the fight (he also did not know how to drive but he seemed the most likely of them to break literally every single motor vehicle code to get them there but still be naturally talented at it enough to not kill them) but Izuku told Mirio what bullshit they were up to and Mirio, who was with Tamaki and Nejire when the news broke, immediately decided he would be on that bullshit too and pulled up in his mom van.

In my mind, there were strict rules around provisional licenses and how they could be used, and they broke pretty much all of them to respond to Yokohama. It would have been grounds to revoke their provisionals and permanently bar them from heroics. Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire could have all lost their licenses for helping them and for going AWOL.

The HPSC fucking fell over themselves to legitimatize the entire operation. They knew they were utterly fucked if they didn’t. These kids already had murals being painted of their faces in other fucking countries. There was a little old lady in Kyoto livestreaming herself working overtime to embroider Iida’s face onto a cushion because that lovely young man saved her darling granddaughter from *checks notes* horrible and painful death directly caused by the failings of the current HPSC administration. There were multiple trending posts online agreeing to fucking riot if those kids got in trouble for this.

Every single actual hero in the immediate vicinity of this disaster had responded to fight a villain who wasn’t actually attacking anyone. And then they fucking lost. They publicly broadcast a message saying Good Luck Champs Because We’re Not Going To Save You. It was an actual PR nightmare that they had a bare chance of salvaging if they just latched onto these kids like an aggressive parasite and that is exactly what they did.

They totally knew. Actually, it was a joint operation coordinated by and between UA and and the HPSC. Why would the kids be in trouble?? They had responded because the HPSC told them to.

UA gave it a week of dead silence and then issued a short statement praising the bravery of their students in a recent HPSC approved mission, and then they never said another word about it. They didn’t have any choice but to go along with the HPSC’s story. If they contradicted them, all of class 2-a would find their licenses pulled by the end of the day, and lord knows they wouldn’t wait for the court of public opinion to work its magic and would just all go out and become fucking vigilantes, because why not. Aizawa has aged 100 years since he got this class. Every single day he thinks of how it was a 50/50 shot between him and Vlad.

No one in the class is fully aware of just how famous they were in the immediate aftermath, because the school bent over backwards to try and shield them from it as much as possible. Like, they have an idea, but none of them saw the full explosion firsthand because of just how hard the school worked to keep it from them. Aizawa confiscated the internet router and told them it was punishment for whatever the fuck they did to the buses (thank god Mirio was just as crazy as them because they were NOT GOOD at hotwiring cars) but really it was to try and insulate them from it a little bit. Like. Japan’s Imperial Family wanted to do an official visit. The White House offered to host them. They received interview requests from every major talk show on the planet. Buzzfeed wanted to do a puppy interview with them.

Right now, Aizawa’s terrified for Midoriya’s graduation, but in the aftermath of that, he was breathing into a paper bag about all of them. Society had sort of latched onto them like they were the last life raft on the titanic. All for One was back, and All Might wasn’t, and the heroes had publicly broadcast a message saying they were useless, but don’t fucking worry, fifteen year old Iida Tenya is on the case. Society will be upheld by Kaminari Denki, currently viral for driving a real life city ambulance one hundred miles per hour down the street while screaming “WEE WOO BITCH.” And don’t forget the pillar that will be Mina Ashido, who rushed over to him earlier that day to show him her extra sparkly pink nails. And if you have a major fight that needs to be won? Don’t fucking worry, just send out bone-breaking boy wonder Midoriya Izuku and his equally reckless brother Toogata Mirio, because their dumbasses managed to take down an S-Class villain team that only All Might could defeat the first time around. Don’t worry about the multi week hospitalization they needed after, because that’s an acceptable burden to put on children.

When Aizawa started this job, he promised himself he would never send a student out to die. Some of them would die. But it would be tragedy, not damnation. He’d have given them their best chance. Part of the reason why he made that promise was because he sort of felt like his teacher sent him out set up to die, and it’s only luck that he made it through his first couple of years.

He has gone to the funeral of every single student he has ever had who did not make it. He goes back to their graves every year.

He was fucking petrified after Yokohama that society would push these kids too far too soon. Every single one of his classes before them had gotten the benefit of being practically unknown their first few years. They didn’t have the world talking about them like they were already the top heroes. He was terrified they wouldn’t have the space to learn and grow when they started.

A lot of teachers would have tried to mine the notoriety of Yokohama to hard launch their students’ careers. Aizawa told Nedzu point blank that he would quit tomorrow if he did not help him quash this thing as much as possible, and nedzu agreed.

This world killed its real heroes. It sucked them dry and left them like All Might, and he just needed fucking time. He needed fucking time to let them be kids and maybe they’d survive.

Izuku ended up being the one who escaped the aftermath of everything the least. His Quirk was too much like All Might’s for the world to let go of him easily.

And then Stain got fucking dogpiled by idaten in the aftermath of the Tartarus prison break and implied he considered Izuku the only true hero in the absence of all might and everyone started asking super inconvenient questions like “how does stain even know you exist” and “no really he called you by your actual legal name how does he even know that” and it just. It didn’t help things. Izuku’s suffering.

So yeah. There was just this absolute collision of a total lack of faith in current heroes combined with a huge swell of public trust in class 2-a that led us to being in the landscape we are now. All of the currently licensed heroes said that they wouldn’t be there to save the public, and then Class 2-A immediately hit back that they would be there. Actually, they’ll risk everything to be there. They’ll die to protect the public and they’ll risk the entire future they had been trying to build and they will fucking be there to save them.

There’s a lot of people that never forgave the heroes for deserting Yokohama. And there’s even more people who have absolute faith in Izuku and his classmates because they didn’t. That’s why the world is watching them so aggressively. These kids are the most trusted heroes in Japan right now.

I wish I could fit in more about what happened, because I love this backstory so much, but 1) some of it absolutely requires POVs like Endeavors, which we won’t get in pez dispenser debris, 2) there’s no one POV that could tell the full story via flashback and 3) it’d just be too long of a divergence. Like. It really is a whole fic of its own. I’d love to write it one day but I probably won’t have the time