#they’re all just scared kids

[loveinhawkins]

ao3

A gnawing sense of foreboding creeps up on Steve as they head to Eddie’s trailer, armed with weapons.

He tries to outrun it through action: ensuring he’s the first one to go through the Gate; jumping back and forth between The Upside Down and their world whenever someone forgets something, “It’s okay, I’ve got it!”; triple checking that the cables for Eddie’s amps are long enough; searching for the slightest thing than seizing upon it with an enthusiasm bordering on desperate, “Hey, we could use this, right? Better take it, just in case.”

But that only works for so long, and then Steve’s just standing in Eddie’s kitchen, the real one, staring blankly at the cupboards, all out of distractions.

Out of time.

He hears a grunt of exertion behind him, then an unsteady landing, a muffled curse. Eddie.

“Jesus Christ, Steve. Wanted to fit your aerobics routine in?”

He’s teasing, so light-hearted despite it all; Steve can’t stand it.

Keeps his back turned, gut twisting, opening the cupboards then slamming them shut, thump, thump. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He never has.

“Uh, so I was thinking,” Eddie continues, like Steve’s not doing anything weird, “that I could stretch out the, um, the song? My playing? Could buy you some more time, anyway.”

“Sure, great,” Steve says shortly.

He thinks—with a numb kind of calm—that he’s going to be sick.

He gets to the bathroom, tries to shut the door, but his grip slips on the handle.

Turns on the faucet, scoops cold water from his hands into his mouth, and it helps until it doesn’t, until he’s almost choking on it, and he’s been here before, the feeling familiar: a shadow looming over him, just waiting, waiting, and he knows it’ll pass, it always does, but he can’t stop thinking of Robin, it might not work out for us this time, and what if, what if—

He can hear Eddie knocking on the doorframe, just out of view—as if he’d seen Steve’s failed attempt at shutting the door and wanted to respect it.

“Hey, man, you okay?” Then Eddie mutters to himself, “Obviously not, get a fucking clue.”

Steve’s laugh is strangled but real. He wipes his mouth dry and shuts off the water.

“You don’t need to talk to a wall, dude,” he says.

And Eddie steps into view, leans against the open door. His eyes flicker across Steve’s face, and Steve doesn’t want to know what he’s noticed, so when Eddie opens his mouth hesitantly, he speaks first.

“We should—they’re gonna wonder where we are.”

Eddie pauses on the verge of speech; Steve watches him reevaluate whatever he was going to say.

“Well,” Eddie says, gesturing to the bathroom, matter-of-fact, “we could be peeing.”

Steve manages a chuckle. “You’re an idiot.”

Eddie grins like he’s saying yup, that’s me, like he’s won a prize.

Steve has seen him wear something close to that expression not even an hour ago: when the kids had started a line to use the bathroom in the RV, and Eddie had snorted, giggled with a childish kind of delight, “You—ha! You all look like you’re on a field trip,” before joining the line himself—calling out that he hoped their plan accounted for bathroom breaks because, “There’s no way I’m pissing in the alternate dimension,” and that had made Nancy break, laughing in a way Steve was certain he hadn’t heard since ‘83.

Eddie steps into the room and shuts the door quietly. Steve gets why: his breathing’s still all wrong, and if Dustin happened to see him, he doesn’t think he’d ever forgive himself.

“Sorry.” Steve sucks in a breath, tries to hold it. Loses it in an exhale that shudders at the edges. He speaks through the tail end of it, hoping that’s enough to conceal the sound, “Gimme, like, two minutes.”

“Make it ten,” Eddie says.

The way he says it makes it seem like it’s already a done deal; he must’ve spoken to Robin and Nancy before he tumbled through the Gate.

Despite himself, Steve feels a wave of relief: just for a little while, he has time; it overpowers the shame, leaves him sinking down to sit on the closed toilet seat.

He closes his eyes, just breathes. In… out… in…

He doesn’t realise that Eddie’s sitting down, too, until he hears the clunk of his boots, the rustle of clothing as he moves.

“Sorry,” Steve says again, and it annoyingly still comes out a little shaky, like he’s in the pool and he’s left it too long to snatch a breath. “You can go back, man, I’ll… I’ll be right there.”

He opens his eyes to see Eddie shaking his head, sat with his back against the bathtub.

“Stop apologising,” Eddie says, and then it’s as if the seriousness of it is too much for him, because he adds, with a self-deprecating smile that Steve hates, “I get it. You’re walking into the dragon’s lair, I’m just putting on a concert.”

“Don’t,” Steve says, and he doesn’t intend for the word to come out as sharp as it does, but that doesn’t change the fact that he means it. He means it.

Eddie’s smile fades.

“Don’t,” Steve repeats, quieter. Not quite an apology.

Slowly, he moves off the toilet seat, until he’s sat next to Eddie. There’s just enough space that they don’t need to touch, but Steve presses his shoulder against Eddie’s anyway, like he can somehow pass on everything he means through that alone.

Eddie sighs, presses back for just a second. “Don’t what?” he asks. He sounds tired all of a sudden.

“Don’t—don’t joke like that,” Steve says. “Like you’re not—” He swallows. “Like it’s not dangerous.”

There’s a pause. Eddie reaches across and puts a hand on Steve’s knee. Squeezes briefly and pulls back; already Steve finds that he misses the warmth of him.

“Hey, don’t worry,” Eddie says. There’s no joke in this, not a trace. “I’m not gonna let anything happen to Dustin.” Another smile. Gentle. “Swear on his mother.”

I’m not worried about that, Steve wants to say, but of course that’s not true; he’s tried hard not to look at Dustin directly ever since they arrived at the trailer, because his throat would start to close up alarmingly whenever his gaze lingered, and he knows the kid’s doing that whole semi-aloof teenager thing lately, but a part of him still wants to hold him tight and never let go.

It’s more that the shape of Steve’s worry is different to what he thinks Eddie’s imagining, covers more than Dustin’s safety alone—that the cold dread in his stomach brings him back to the tunnels in ‘84; to clutching Dustin, who was so small, Steve desperately trying to shield him with his own body, thinking the kid’s thirteen, only thirteen, this isn’t fucking fair; and that if this had to end one way, all he could do was pray that he’d be the only one to…

And Steve hadn’t wanted to die, but he was suddenly facing it anyway, and Christ, looking back at it, that was crazy, the whole damn thing was crazy, but it all made a twisted kind of sense at the time.

Eddie must spot that his train of thought’s gone down a dark alley because he knocks their knees together, but he doesn’t say anything. Just breathes, slumped against the bathtub; it’s probably the first time he’s been still—truly still—in a long while.

He must be exhausted, Steve thinks.

The gnawing feeling digs in, grips his heart.

“I can hear you thinking,” Eddie says quietly. “Listen, Steve, I know I’m new to, uh… all of this shit, but I’m on it, okay? Got it all up in here,” he taps the side of his head, “trust me—”

That’s not what—I trust you, of fucking course I do, but—

“—no deviations, and—”

“Plans change,” Steve says, and he hears himself, the calm decisiveness, just get ready; Dustin’s scream carrying across the junkyard, Steve, abort, abort! “Just… just promise me.”

“Promise you?” Eddie murmurs.

Steve feels the words on his tongue, the weight of them. Don’t do anything stupid. 

He swallows them down—afraid suddenly that if he really puts a name to it, it’s going to happen.

Fuck it, he’s exhausted too, and for a long moment he evades speaking: gingerly rests his head on Eddie’s shoulder. Feels his body heat, the swell of his breathing.

Eddie doesn’t tense up, just lets him rest there. 

If I kissed you, Steve thinks, drained, would you stay?

He doesn’t say it. Instead he lifts his head and asks, “What are you doing tomorrow?”

Eddie chuckles. They’re still so close, Steve can feel his amused sigh.

“Tomorrow? I’ve not really… like, hopefully I’m not in jail. Anything else is a bonus.”

“We’ll fix it,” Steve says fiercely. “Trust me.”

“Oh, I believe you,” Eddie says, grinning fondly, but he sounds genuine. “Shit, man, I think you could do anything.” He gestures outside. “Got the fucking dream team out there.”

“We solved a secret Russian code last summer.”

Eddie laughs. “Did you?” His eyes sparkle with mirth.

You’re beautiful.

“Gospel truth, I swear,” Steve says. He tries to stay light, but he makes the vow anyway. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

I have so much to tell you.

They stand up, and Steve doesn’t know who’s the first one to move—just that they both probably sensed the time dwindling.

And maybe it’s that, the inescapable thought that something’s coming to an end that does it. Steve doesn’t know for sure, just knows that his eyes are burning suddenly—mortifyingly—with tears. He looks up at the ceiling, hurriedly trying to push them back, but Eddie notices anyway.

“Steve, what is it?” he whispers, with a look of utter devastation.

Steve shakes his head. “Just being stupid,” he says, voice brittle, cutting himself off before he can say something ridiculous.

God, Eddie, let’s just stay here and grow old.

“You’re not stupid,” Eddie says, heartfelt—he stops just short of touching Steve; he clearly wants to help so badly, but he doesn’t know how.

Steve wants to tell him it’s fine. He doesn’t know either.

Maybe nothing can help this.

They leave for the Gate in unspoken agreement; at first Steve finds comfort in the sight of Eddie dangling on the rope, not quite in either world. Like every possibility is laid out before him.

I’ll tell you tomorrow.

But there’s a near imperceptible shift as Eddie keeps climbing, and Steve needs to look away, anything to avoid the pit in his stomach: the suspicion that the path’s already been chosen.

[twinstxrs]

so much happened in this whole episode but i’m still on fig infiltrating ruben’s dream, making it look like the place where his friend was murdered, and then disguising herself as kipperlilly & repeatedly saying different variants of “somebody needs to take the fall for this, and it’s not going to be me. it’s going to be you.” while adaine as the elven oracle shows up next to her. can you imagine waking up from that, the idea of a horrible truth being pinned on you by your friend to save her own skin while the personification of fate and destiny stands there, almost as a promise that this is GOING to happen to you. we don’t even know if this kid is guilty. my god.

[rainyraisin]

I love incorrect quotes‼️‼️‼️🗣️🗣️🗣️💯💯🔥🔥‼️‼️

Set during Sonic 1 when Tom is still actively annoyed by this kids existence 😭😭😭 Even though I adore their dynamic when Tom is actively trying to be a father to Sonic, I also love when he’s just begrudgingly being a dad (he’s enjoying their time together he just won’t admit it yet)

(More yapping in the tags bc I’m an absolute yapper it’s what I’m built to do)

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

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

[solargeist]

despite how scary and big ancient watchers are, they too, see grian as a child. They don’t wish any harm

(But they also see every other watcher as a child too, bc, y’know, giant oldass bird)

[alaskan-wallflower]

have yall seen kitbull? like that one short with the pit bull in the fighting ring and the little kitten and they become friends but everyone thinks the dog is really mean until they get a deeper look at gina bf see he’s just scared, and the cat never leaves his side no matter what because the cat loves the dog and sees its inner beauty that no one else does?

that’s johnny and dally in my head idk

[nazumichi]

fan of them !!

[strngedve]

sometimes i think too hard about the angels’ dynamics as siblings and i ruin my own day

[dogrocks]

just once i want an adoption “find my REAL parent” plotline where, after the bio parent is tracked down, it’s realised that they never wanted to be reunited with their child because they abandoned them for a reason, and the reunion is super disappointing. and the lesson is that your true parents are the ones who raised you and sometimes it’s not worth chasing a ghost. or something like that

[lightblueminecraftorchid]

My roommate and I had a conversation last night and I keep rotating it in my brain and I Don’t Like It

[nympippi]

Necromancer Finney AU: Adults in general aren’t sure how to feel about Vance. On one hand, he’s got that infamous short temper. On the other hand, he’s been through quite a bit, even before the Grabber incident. Ultimately, it’s generally agreed that Vance is a victim of terrible circumstances and is reacting accordingly to them

I’m actually unsure on this one because I do think maybe in a town like Denver they’d definitely sympathize with him, and feel for his pain but at the same time I think Vance would hate it. Because it’s only after Vance has to undergo massive amounts of trauma and pain for the adults around him to see him as a kid and not some criminal.

it’s showing him that the adults had potential to care but they never did. And instead of working with him, they work against him labeling him as a troubled child who would end up seriously hurting someone. …I don’t know, I’m not too sure on my stance or have any ideas on the adults in tbp but I do headcannon Vance to dislike adults to a serious degree and it only gets worse after his kidnapping.

[eskawrites]

Arren tracked her down in the training yard. It was hardly impressive, this is where she always went when she needed... Time. Space. Alone and busy enough to shut her mind up.

"This is how you're getting ready? You want to be all sweaty on your wedding day?"

"Leave it be, Arren." She notched an arrow and took aim at the farthest target. It was no challenge, really, but it was the best she could do unless she wanted to shoot at Arren. Which, under the circumstances, she just might.

"It's a big deal, you know," he prodded at her.

"It's nothing. What difference does it make?" She asked. She had been asking it of herself since Tenar had proposed this arrangement. She hit the target dead on. It was cold out, and quiet. Flurries fell around them, muffling everything but their conversation.

"Lark," he set his big hand on her shoulder, weighty and familiar even through her armor and the quilted padding underneath. "You're gonna be queen. That's a pretty big difference, I'd say."

She scoffed. "Tenar is the queen."

He let go of her and leaned back against the outer wall of the barracks.

"And what will that make you?"

She notched another arrow. She drew and fired and split her first arrow in two.

"Whatever Tenar needs me to be. It makes no difference."

Bro how’d you know Lark would be having a crisis the morning of???

But also akgjalgkakfjdahs whaaaaat this is incredible wtffff. Just gonna cradle this close to my chest. It’s them! My kids! My dorky rogues turned heroes turned royalty!! They’re so lost and stressed and good and they love each other so so much!

[badolmen]

“I don’t know why the op said this happened yesterday when this news is four months old”

This may shock you but it’s an election year in the US and even “the lesser evil” utilizes propaganda.

[deathxproof]

hm, out of all of the things I was expecting when I slowly started putting myself back in fandom spaces, “unresolved trauma from being an autistic kid/teen who was always perceived as Too Much” wasn’t on the list, to be quite honest.

[miscomm]

somehow somehow the hyperfixation has gotten to a point that i’m highlighting the body language of these kids around their godly parent.

[zouisalmightie]

.