Chapter Text
Shouta faded in and out of consciousness for… a while. He couldn’t tell how long he was awake nor how long he was asleep. He was somewhere soft, and warm, but he ached down to his bones.
This is probably the most sleep I’ve gotten in one go since that time that villain put me in a three-day coma, he thought to himself during one of his more lucid moments. He couldn’t quite remember where he was, or why, though. That was… odd.
It definitely wasn’t UA. It was too quiet for that, and the lighting was too dim. It wasn’t a hospital, either, though; it smelled faintly mildewy and not at all sterile. Not his apartment either, or it would be completely dark.
So… where was he?
There weren’t any memories surfacing. His thoughts bounced around inside his skull slowly, disconnected and hard to catch. At least he didn’t feel like he was in danger, but still, something was… off.
Before he could chase the thought further, another wave of exhaustion and pain pulled him back down into a restless, dreamless sleep.
The next time he woke up… wasn’t of his own accord. Someone was gently shaking his shoulder, and with reflexes born from over a decade of paranoia and training, he grabbed their wrist and had them flipped to the floor before he was even aware that there was another person with him. He rubbed at his eyes, feeling bandages scrape bandages and a deep pain shooting through his right eye.
“Sorry! Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” the stranger squeaked out.
“Where am I?” he said, wincing when his throat felt just as raw as the rest of him. He needed to assess the situation. Trying not to look away from the stranger, he quickly glanced around the room. Looked like a shitty apartment, all-around very average and non-threatening. Which didn’t mean anything. Villains could have average apartments, too. It did look very Western, which was a bit odd.
“Um, Apartment 33. I found you on the floor, you were really hurt! Are you feeling better?”
They seemed genuinely well-intentioned. But at the same time…
“How did I get here?”
Because, from the extent of the damage he must’ve sustained, he really should be dead right now. The last thing he remembered, albeit fuzzily, was a villain attack at the USJ, and he wasn’t inclined to think they would’ve left him alive.
“I don’t know! Can you please let go of my arm?!”
Shouta blinked. Narrowed his eyes. If he needed to, he could probably fight this stranger off. If not, they would probably kill him regardless.
He released the stranger and let himself fall back onto the couch he’d been sleeping on. The pain was a little dizzying; he’d started to see spots. What was the damage? Starting from the top, he took stock: his head ached deeply, radiating out from his right eye, his neck was weak and sore—whiplash? His shoulders were either sprained or had been dislocated, his arms—
“Thank you. I’m Sam. You are…?”
“Irrelevant. I need to get back to my students. Where am I.”
“Oh, are you a teacher?” Sam said, quickly backpedaling at Shouta’s glare. “Umm, this is my apartment building. We’re on the north side of the city, if that helps.”
Shouta gritted his teeth, accidentally sending sharp pain sparking up his face. He tried not to flinch. “What city?”
“Oh! Montreal. You really got lost, huh?” Sam looked somewhere between pitying and amused, but Shouta didn’t care about anything past Montreal.
“In… Canada?” he said, hoping Sam would correct him, hoping he’d heard wrong.
“Yes…?”
Shouta went to push a hand through his hair, but he was shaking too hard. He hadn’t even noticed that he was trembling.
“Where’s the nearest airport? I need to get back to UA.”
“Oh…” And there it was, just like Shouta should’ve expected, why would he be in this situation if Sam wasn’t secretly kidnapping him, or a villain, or something, “I… you know about what’s happening outside, right? I assumed you did. How’d you get so hurt?”
“...Villain attack.”
“I guess you could call them that. On Twitter, I saw someone say ‘Witness,’ which seems a little… nicer, even if they are attacking people.”
“Right.”
“I’m guessing you don’t know, then. I don’t know the details, but once Sybil gets back, maybe she can explain whatever I mess up… as far as I can tell, there’s something outside, maybe in the sky, and anyone who looks at it gets turned into,” Sam made a vague gesture that Shouta wasn’t sure how to interpret.
Sounded like a Quirk running out of control. A child who’d just manifested theirs and didn’t know how to control it? A bad interaction between two peoples’ Quirks? Someone hopped up on Trigger?
Or a villain, hurting people on purpose?
“Don’t worry too much, though, okay? This’ll all blow over in fifteen days. Fourteen, by now, really. We just have to make it two weeks.” Sam offered a smile that was probably supposed to make him feel better. It didn’t.
Two weeks? He didn’t have that kind of time! His students were in danger, those villains could’ve kidnapped them, they had that guy with the portal Quirk, and Shouta had to be there. “I need to use your phone to make some calls.”
“Oh, sure! I think there’s still service.” He handed Shouta a phone that was definitely from the pre-Quirk era, was this a joke to Sam? “...Is there not service?”
Punching Sam was a bad idea right now. Even if it sounded tempting. Shouta instead punched in Nedzu’s personal number, double-checking that he’d hit the right buttons through his shakiness, and waited for it to ring.
There was no answer. The answering machine was unfamiliar.
Hizashi’s number. No answer. Nemuri’s number. We’re sorry, this call could not be completed as dialed. The UA main office. No answer. His fingers were slipping on the buttons, sweat pouring from his palms. Kan’s number. A nervous-sounding convenience store employee, telling him they weren’t able to do deliveries at the moment before hanging up. Tsukauchi’s number. No answer. “Fuck!”
Sam held out a hand for his phone, which Shouta was a little tempted to crush, and he gave it back. Why wasn’t anyone answering? Was everyone dead? Even then, their answering machines should be the same.
“Right… okay. Well, uh,” Sam pulled himself to his feet, “in case you were wondering, you were out for about ten hours. I did my best to patch you up, but it’s just Purocare bandages, so you definitely need a real doctor.” That… raised more questions than answers. How had he gotten here? Assuming his injuries were from the USJ attack, they should have taken him to Recovery Girl, not some random civilian’s apartment building. “You should still leave them on as long as you can, though. Your arms were… very, very broken. I don’t know how to set bones, I’m sure they’re crooked, but you can get them re-broken later, I guess.”
“Whatever’s going on outside. Do you know whose Quirk caused it?”
Sam squinted at him. “What?”
“Or whatever you call them in Canada,” Shouta said, irritated.
“I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you mean. I think you hit your head pretty hard.”
With a frustrated growl, Shouta pushed himself to his feet, swaying a little as the room fuzzed out into static for a moment with pain and a sudden change in position. “Have you called emergency services? I have police contacts, I can—”
Sam cut him off, shaking his head. “You’re not getting it, man, everything is shut down. It’s worldwide. There’s no cops, no ambulances—no one can go outside!”
“There must be something, I could call—”
No one. He couldn’t call anyone. If none of those had gone through, there wasn’t anyone else he could think of that might answer. There weren’t any other numbers he had memorized, anyway.
“Hey man, take a deep breath,” someone was saying. “Hey! You’re alright.”
He forced himself to follow instructions, and tried his best to ignore the chills and shivers that ran through him.
Sam seemed trustworthy enough. Shouta had to trust him, right now. At least enough not to stab him in the back. “I need a restroom.”
“My bathroom’s right over—” Before Sam could even finish, Shouta darted to the bathroom as quick as his sore legs could take him.
Alright. Compartmentalize. Worrying right now did him no good. He pressed the feelings down and back, and let cold determination take over.
He was in an unknown location with a questionably trustworthy (supposed) civilian. His students were in an unknown condition. Physically, he’d been worse off, but he needed treatment from a real doctor as soon as possible, so as not to aggravate the injuries further.
Something was supposedly ‘happening’ outside that prevented anyone from leaving their houses. He needed more details about that. Above all, he needed to get back to his students as soon as possible.
That was his mission. It seemed he’d have to solve Montreal’s ‘outside’ problem first, so that would be step one of the mission. He was making progress, by working to solve this issue. That was all he could do for now, unless someone called him back.
He took a deep breath and braced himself against the sink to look himself in the eyes.
Eye. Shit, he looked worse than he’d expected. A deep purple bruise crept out from under the bandage, and even his left eye was swollen and blackened.
What the hell was he wearing? Looking down at himself, he wrinkled his nose at the ratty pajama pants and faded t-shirt, clearly a free giveaway from an event of some kind, that certainly didn’t belong to him. The shirt was too big and the pants were too short, but at least they were comfortable…
His arms were wrapped finger-to-shoulder in bandages, and his torso was wrapped neck-to-hips. He didn’t dare take off the bandages just yet, but they weren’t indicative of anything good.
Focus. His students. He would figure out this situation and he would get back to them. With a nod to himself, he left the bathroom and went to ask Sam some more questions.
—
Sam’s story would be unbelievable if Shouta couldn’t see the proof for himself. He was beginning to suspect that, somehow, this was another world, or timeline, or dimension, or something, partially because the years didn’t match up, but mostly because, apparently, Sam had never heard of Quirks.
He hadn’t mentioned his theory to Sam yet. First, he wanted to get a little more information.
From what Sam had told him: before that morning, everything had been normal. Sam woke up to his neighbor whispering through the wall that he should look outside, and then quickly shouting for him not to, because something bad would happen. He left his apartment and followed a trail of blood to a knocked-down door, where one of his neighbors attacked him and grew a gigantic eyeball where a wound in his stomach had been. With a baseball bat he’d found, he beat the neighbor until they stopped moving (which was… something else Shouta needed to address), before being attacked by two more and heading home to calm down, which was when he’d found Shouta. With supplies he’d scavenged from the dead neighbors, he treated Shouta before going out again to look for survivors. The healing capabilities of basic medical supplies in this world were also something Shouta needed to get some more clarification on, because Sam hadn’t elaborated on that.
Sam had gotten a little cagey around that point, and with some pressing from Shouta, he’d figured out why. The apartment directly next to them had been full of people, people who had been turned into monsters, people who were now dead. Because Sam had killed them. In self-defence, he claimed, but even then, had the man never heard of non-lethal force? It was strange. Shouta saw nothing but well-intentioned kindness from the man, but he believed that he’d killed those people. He must’ve been compartmentalizing hard, and the fallout from that would be very, very bad later.
Well, that wasn’t Shouta’s job to fix. He couldn’t save people that were already gone, he could only stop more harm going forward, so he did a little more compartmentalizing of his own, and listened to the rest of Sam’s story.
He’d broken down a completely frozen door to look for more survivors after not getting a response from any other apartment. There hadn’t been survivors, but there had been more very aggressive, questionably alive neighbors, and they almost killed Sam before he ran off. He’d met a woman roaming through the halls selling supplies, so he knew there must be survivors. But the day was growing late by then, and he was hurt, and there wasn’t time to keep going, so he’d stayed home.
“And that brings us up to speed,” Sam said, looking exhausted. If he was to be believed, it made sense he was so tired. He’d had quite the ordeal.
Shouta hoped Sam went to sleep soon so he could at least be done with all this talking. Normally, he had a higher tolerance for painful conversations (he did teach high schoolers, after all), but after the day he’d had, he just wanted some quiet. Plus, he was certain there’d been some times when Sam could’ve used reassurance, but then Shouta spent too long trying to think of what to say and the moment passed. So the man probably didn’t have a great opinion of him, which wasn’t ideal.
“Do you mind if I head to bed?” Sam asked. Why did he think he needed permission from someone who was essentially a stranger to him? “Well, after I redo your bandages.”
Shouta grunted a vaguely affirmative noise. Hizashi would’ve been disappointed in him, but he was tired, and injured, and his entire class might be dead, and he had absolutely no way to get back to them at the moment. So he had a good excuse for not being terribly social with the man that’d saved him.
Besides, letting Sam manhandle him while he was awake this time was enough of a show of trust, right? He was letting an unknown factor see and touch him where he was vulnerable, run careful fingers over his fractures and map out where it hurt. If he had any other choice he wouldn’t, but still.
Sam went to sleep, but Shouta found himself up half the night from pain, and trapped in morphing nightmares for the rest of it.
—
Morning came with Sam shaking him awake and ending up on the floor again. One would think he’d have learned, but apparently not. Shouta glared at him and went to brush his teeth. His jaw ached terribly, but he used the spare toothbrush he’d been given and forced himself through the pain. That made him feel a little more human, but he couldn’t do anything about his greasy and blood-matted hair until the bandages came off, and unfortunately Sam had suggested he leave them on for another day at least.
He went back to the living room just in time to see Sam slipping out the door. Trying to leave him behind?
Shouta was a pro hero. He couldn’t stand for that. This was his job, no matter how hurt he was. He grabbed his capture weapon, followed Sam out the door—
—and there he was, and there was someone else, too, attacking him—
—he gritted his teeth and snapped out his capture weapon, surrounding the attacker—
—and Sam landed a killing blow. The man sagged against the fabric, his dull eyes seeming to stare straight into Shouta’s soul.
“Woah!” Sam said, panting. His hands were on his knees. His baseball bat was covered in blood and a few teeth. “Holy shit! Thanks for the save.”
“Why did you kill him?” Shouta said, keeping his voice as flat as he could, which was very, very flat. The choking smell of blood was thick in the air, but all he could taste was Sam’s mint toothpaste.
Sam had the decency to look a little guilty. “I mean, he was definitely trying to kill me. And, well, if anyone else comes through here, you know… I just don’t want anyone to get hurt. Plus, it sounded like his, uh, teeth thing, is contagious.”
Shouta hadn’t really noticed, but the dead man did, in fact, have a ‘teeth thing.’ To him, it’d just looked like a mutant Quirk, but this place didn’t have Quirks, did it? With that in mind, he examined the scene with a fresh eye.
The dead man’s arm was completely covered in teeth, and his mouth stretched unnaturally wide. There was blood running down his face, but Shouta couldn’t tell if it was his or someone else’s. Blood had splashed on Shouta’s face, too; it was colder than it should have been. Like corpse-blood, even though the man had been alive less than a minute ago. So this was what happened when someone looked outside.
He took a deep breath. The air still smelled like copper.
“There may be a cure, a way to fix this. We shouldn’t be hurting people who might be helped. I have fighting experience—non-lethal fighting experience. Let me take the lead.” With that, he turned away from Sam’s stricken expression to assess the situation. There was a knocked-down door just in front of them, presumably where the man had come from. From inside, Shouta could hear voices.
Crying.
A child’s crying.
Well, he hadn’t seriously been considering leaving people in need behind while he tried to get information, but now… there hadn’t been much of a choice, but now there wasn’t one at all. If a kid needed help, he’d be there. God knew he’d failed too many in the past.
He pushed away the dark, awful memories of missions gone wrong and crept inside. Sam was following. Good.
Almost immediately, a tiny tooth-creature was attacking them. Sam smacked it away with his bat, but didn’t try to kill it. He was learning. Shouta wrapped it in his capture scarf and squinted at it. He didn’t get the sense that this was a person, and looked to Sam for his opinion.
“The guy was saying something about his kid, I think, something about it being her who gave him, um, his ‘beautiful smile.’ So either that’s the kid, or that’s… a gigantic mutated tooth. I’m not sure. Maybe better keep it restrained…?”
Shouta nodded and stayed on high alert.
Sam knocked on the first door they saw through the darkness, and got no response. Carefully, still keeping the struggling tooth-creature-maybe-child in his capture scarf, Shouta nudged the door open.
There was someone there. He released the tooth-creature-maybe-child behind him, pulled Sam through the door, and quickly shut it behind them. Better to keep all his options open, in case this person was aggressive.
“Hey, let me do the talking, huh?” Sam said, stepping in front of Shouta. “They might recognize me—I mean, Vincent kind of did. If they’re… aware, then it’s better to have a familiar face, right?”
Shouta couldn’t argue with that logic. He didn’t stop the man, shadowing him from a few steps behind while he went to talk to the child-sized figure by the sink.
Who actually talked to them. Without attacking. That was a good sign.
“Oh, hey there. You the doctor? For my little sister’s teeth?” the kid said, and that was definitely a kid. His voice was soft and young, so young.
Sam hesitated for a moment before crouching down a bit to be on the kid’s level. “No, I’m just a neighbor. I was, um, a little worried.”
“Oh yeah, you live in front, right? Hi,” the kid said, still facing away from them. “Hang on, I’m brushing my teeth. What do you want?” It did smell like toothpaste in here. For some reason, all Shouta could think about was the blood on his face. This kid’s dad’s blood.
“You said your sister’s sick?” Sam said gently. It was a little hard to mesh this Sam with the one that had beat a man’s head in not five minutes earlier.
“Yeah! She bit me on the nose when I was playing with her…”
“Oh, are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. I didn’t even cry!” The kid sounded way too proud of that, but he was a kid. Hadn’t Shouta been like that, too? “But I caught what she’s got, and now brushing my teeth takes forever!” He took a second to spit toothpaste in the sink, and it didn’t sound quite right. Shouta didn’t like this. Something was definitely wrong, wasn’t it. Sam had said that the man’s ‘tooth thing’ was—
“Mmh-hmm, still brushing, just a sec… other jaw…”
—contagious.
Shit.
Shouta readied his capture weapon. He couldn’t let Sam hurt this kid, and he couldn’t let the kid hurt Sam, either.
“And, um, your parents?” Sam asked cautiously. Shouta saw him edging back a bit, and did the same.
“Oh, Dad left to get help. Have you seen him?”
Well, shit. That all but confirmed that he was the guy Sam had killed, didn’t it.
“I haven’t seen him, sorry,” Sam said with a guilty little cough. If he’d been looking Shouta’s way, he would’ve seen the truly impressive glare being leveled his way.
“Okay.” He spit into the sink again. “Alright, that’s the first three rows done. I’m halfway there.” Well, at least he seemed to be coping with his new mutation pretty well. “And Mom’s just in my sister’s room. My sister bit her a lot. She’s been spending a lot of time in the bedroom. The doorknob is broken, though. It was always loose.”
“What… happened to your mom? Is she alright?” Sam asked.
“She was the first to get bitten. She was nursing my sister when it happened. She’s got a lot of teeth all over her now. She’s scary!” That was the first real sign of any of this being distressing that the kid had shown, which was a little worrying. But kids were resilient, Shouta had seen it firsthand more times than he wished he had. He mumbled something that Sam nodded at, but it must not have been important, because Sam didn’t say anything to Shouta.
“You have a brother, too, right? Is he okay?” Sam said hesitantly.
“As bad as I got it, Ben got it way worse. He got too close and she jumped on him and bit him a lot. He almost died! But he’s all better now. He’s in our bedroom right now if you wanna see him.” The kid paused for a moment. “Well, what’s left of him…”
Shouta closed his eyes. He wished as hard as he could that this was all a dream and he wouldn’t have to see this poor kid’s dead brother and dead father and mutated-beyond-recognition mom and sister, that he could wake up at home the day before the USJ trip, that he could take his students to train them and they wouldn’t do all that well because they were first-years, but he would teach them, and they’d do better and every one of them would make it to graduation and become heroes, that every child he’d ever taught would make it to twenty-five and every friend he’d ever had was safe and warm and alive.
He knew, of course, that there was no hope of any of that. But he wished.
“Okay! I’m all done,” the kid said, and finally turned around. Sam jerked back, but once again Shouta didn’t see it as anything too unusual. Half the kid’s face and partway down his neck had been overtaken by a massive, toothy mouth, but he still smiled at them with the half of his regular mouth that remained intact. “Every day the brushing routine gets worse. I hope they stop growing soon. I can feel more growing already. Yesterday my mouth grew into my eye, so I lost it. It felt funny. I think my other eye’s about to go…”
He clutched at his face suddenly, his remaining eye growing wide and then—then the mouth kept growing, looked like the kid was right, it was going right for his eye, down his neck, and he was moving like it hurt. He was a little too old to be manifesting a Quirk, Shouta thought to himself, but of course, it wasn’t a Quirk. Of course it hurt. And he was about to watch this kid turn into another mindless attacker, wasn’t he? He wanted to close his eyes, he didn’t want to watch, but he owed it to the kid, didn’t he? “I think… the teeth… they’re… growing in my head… I can’t… think… I’m… scared… F… Fuzzy…” and then his face was gone, only a gaping mouth in its place, and he was lunging at them, teeth snapping at Sam’s face before Shouta pulled him back, panting.
They rushed out the door and Shouta cursed as the little tooth-creature bit at his ankle, quickly wrapping it in his capture weapon. When another came at them he did the same. This really wasn’t good for his broken bones, but he had a duty to uphold. A duty that didn’t involve passing out from the pain.
(Although he would definitely need either a break or some very strong painkillers before he went looking for more information. He could already hear Recovery Girl scolding him for his recklessness.)
“Well. Um,” Sam said, uncomfortably close to Shouta so that he could avoid the snarling tooth-creatures. Shouta was… relatively certain they weren’t people, but he couldn’t be sure yet, so for now they would stay in the capture weapon. “Should we check on his brother…?”
Shouta nodded. It was a little hard to talk when his arms felt like they might disintegrate. Sam cracked the door to the next room, peeked inside, and then went through with a gesture for Shouta to follow.
There were two more tooth-creatures that Shouta carefully maneuvered to catch in his capture weapon; it was really starting to strain his arms, and he was almost certain now that they were just… non-sentient side effects of the sister’s Quirk. There were too many to be members of the kid’s family. After they talked to the brother, he could get Sam to bash them with his baseball bat, or something.
He hadn’t noticed, but it looked like Sam was already talking to… what was left of the kid’s brother. That hadn’t been an inaccurate description after all. The only part of him that seemed intact was his arms. He seemed to be playing with little toy soldiers. There wasn’t any hero merch anywhere, which helped solidify his theory that this wasn’t his world.
Well. Shouta amended his previous statement. Sam was talking to the kid’s brother, but the kid’s brother was certainly not talking back. After a minute he got up, his knees popping, and turned to Shouta. “He doesn’t really seem aware. I think he might be too far gone, but at least he’s not aggressive…”
He looked a little broken up about it, which was a logical reaction. Shouta wasn’t feeling great either, but they didn’t have time for that right now. “Alright. Should we—”
Before Shouta could finish, Sam darted across the room and grabbed something. A teddy bear. “I think this is Joel’s! He was always carrying it around when I saw his family in the halls! Maybe if we give this to him, it’ll help!” Sam looked hopeful for the first time since Shouta had met him, and he couldn’t bring himself to crush that hope. So he just shrugged and followed Sam’s lead as they went back to the bathroom.
This time, when the kid—Joel, apparently—lunged at him, Sam threw the bear. To Shouta’s surprise, Joel stopped in his tracks. “Fuzzy… hhh… you got him…” He sounded… happy? Relieved? Something positive, anyways. He walked towards Sam, reaching for a hug, and Sam crouched down to wrap the kid in his arms. He was a little impressed, considering how the man had been reacting up until now. Even when the kid bit him, breaking skin, Sam didn’t flinch. He thought the kid might’ve said something to Sam, but he couldn’t hear what.
“You alright?” Shouta asked as Sam walked back over to him. He looked fine, besides a couple cuts in the rough shape of the kid’s mouth, but bites could be nasty.
“I’m fine,” Sam said, waving something in front of him. “Plus, he gave me this, so we can check on his mom now.” Oh, it was a doorknob. “Maybe she’ll be coherent, too!”
—
She was not coherent. Shouta didn’t want to think about it any more than he had to, but he’d kept Sam from hurting her, at least. It rubbed him the wrong way, not being able to save someone that was right in front of him. At least back home, he could’ve sent her to the hospital or something. Just leaving her was… it felt wrong.
He did know, at least, that the little tooth-creatures weren’t Joel’s not-so-little sister. Seeing the baby, clearly in pain, clearly crying even through the teeth that now made up her eyes, had hurt some wound deep in his soul that could never quite heal.
At least she had her mother. The thought didn’t help much. It didn’t help to crush the little tooth-creatures, either.
“I, uh, grabbed this,” Sam said quietly, holding up a little green figure. Shouta had to squint to make it out, but it looked like one of the same toys Joel’s brother had been playing with. “I don’t know, I thought maybe playing with him would get him to talk to me?”
“It’s worth a try,” Shouta said. Because it was, and also because Sam looked like he was about to cry, and Shouta really didn’t want to deal with that.
Sam was actually right, though. To some degree. The kid didn’t talk, it didn’t seem like he was able to, but he did try. He seemed delighted to have someone to play with, which made sense. The rest of his family was lost to whatever it was that had happened to him, and he didn’t seem able to move. He must’ve been playing alone for quite a while.
At one point, Shouta thought he was about to attack Sam, but he’d just been handing over one of his toys. Sam hadn’t even flinched. He was good with the kid, gentle and playful, making him laugh more than once. Not for the first time, Shouta wondered about the man he’d found himself staying with. He wouldn’t have predicted that he was good with kids, he seemed more like the type to be awkward around them. But here they were.
As the kid finished off their game, Sam reached in for a hug. The kid hugged him back almost desperately, but luckily didn’t bite, and then handed Sam a few things. Sam got to his feet, giving the kid a little wave, and as the kid went to wave back he just… stopped.
“He’s, um,” Sam said, wiping at his eyes. “He’s gone, I can tell. Can we just…”
Shouta followed him out the door, and tried to mesh this new information into the image of Sam that he was forming.
“We definitely can’t leave Joel here. Right? He’s still coherent. He could stay with us,” Sam said, mostly to himself, it seemed. Shouta grunted in response. “Yeah! I can take care of him, at least for now. After all this, we can see if he’s got grandparents or something…” His mind made up, they headed back to the bathroom, Shouta a half-step in the lead.
Joel seemed to be having some trouble breathing, or at least talking; his sentences were broken up by throaty, rattling inhales and exhales. “Hhh… hh… hi… hhh…”
“Hey, kiddo,” Sam said gently.
“My sister…?”
“She’s, uh, she’s fine. Listen, you can’t stay here.”
“...where—hhh—can I go?” Joel sounded hopeless and hopeful all at once, like he expected no solutions but was wishing for one anyways.
“You could come with us,” Sam said with a closed-mouth smile, reaching out a hand to Joel.
He took it.
—
Shouta collapsed on the couch as soon as they got back, every inch of him aching. In particular, the inches of him from the waist up.
Before he could fall into blissful unconsciousness, he heard Joel shuffle up next to him. “Hi, I don’t think I’ve—hhh—met you before… I’m Joel, what’s your name?”
“You can call me Aizawa,” Shouta mumbled.
“Oh, it’s nice to—hhh—meet you, Mr. Aizawa. That’s kind of a weird—hhh—name.”
“I’m Japanese. Hey, Sam has some games over there, you should go play one.”
“Cool! Mr. Sam, do you have Super Jumplad?!” Shouta let out a breath of relief as he did, actually, walk over to the game cabinet and pick one out. He shuffled a little to let Joel sit down at the end of the couch, tucking his knees up a bit, and fell asleep to the sound of music from a game he’d never heard of.
He woke up a while later to the smell of greasy food, realizing all of a sudden that he was, actually, very hungry. Dragging himself upright, he stumbled to the table, where Sam was already dishing out some kind of baked bread. “It’s, uh, pizza pockets,” Sam said to Shouta’s questioning look. “They’re… easy to cook.”
Shouta shrugged. That sounded fine to him. Joel seemed excited, at least.
The food was mediocre, but for a half-starved Shouta, it was about the best thing on Earth. He’d already scarfed down his entire serving and burnt his tongue at least twice by the time Joel finished his and looked up at Sam. “Hey, Mr. Sam? I’m gonna run next door and get some of my games, okay?”
Shouta froze.
Luckily, it was Sam he’d asked, not Shouta. “That’s not a good idea, sorry kiddo.” He did look genuinely sorry. Could Joel even see to know what expression Sam had?
“Huh? C’mon—hhh—it’ll just be a minute! I just wanna grab some of my Super Jumplad games!” Joel pleaded. His voice was starting to border on a whine, and Shouta edged away from him as subtly as he could. Sam could handle this.
Although… Sam was looking pretty nervous. He was quiet for a moment before looking at Joel with a somber expression on his face. “Joel… you can’t ever go back.”
Joel froze. His little fists balled up in his lap, and he looked away. If he’d had eyes, Shouta was sure they’d be distant. “Hhhhh… why?” His voice was so quiet.
He already knew why. Shouta could tell. He didn’t envy Sam, having to break the news, though.
“Joel, kid… your family is gone now,” Sam said delicately. “You saw them, I know you did. They weren’t acting right. There’s something outside, and it… changed them. It’s not their fault, and it’s not your fault, it’s just something that happened. But your family… they’re not coming back. And it’s not safe for you to go home. I’m so, so sorry, Joel.” He opened his arms in an offer of a hug, but the kid didn’t take him up on it.
“I… think I sorta knew that,” Joel said thickly, hunching in on himself. “If you don’t mind, I kinda have to—hhh—think about some things for a while.”
“Of course. And if you ever need to talk, or just sit with someone for a while, just ask, alright?” Sam said. Joel didn’t respond, just took a chair from the table and set it in the corner of the living room, halfway behind the bookshelf.
“Should I try and talk to him?” Sam asked anxiously. “I don’t know how to do this, do you think I should just leave him alone?”
Shouta didn’t know how to do this either, but he did have experience being a teacher, and if this were one of his students… he’d leave them alone for a while. Joel had specifically asked for it, after all. “You should leave him for now. Maybe try talking later.”
Sam nodded, but his nervous expression didn’t fade. “I’m… gonna go see if I can find more survivors. I have a key to get down to the second floor, I think. You should rest. Your arms need it.”
Shouta didn’t want to agree with that, but it was true; he’d be more useful later if he healed up, anyways. “Alright. Stay safe, don’t do anything too stupid.”
Sam cracked a little smile at that. “Of course.”
It was harder to sleep when his body was trying to pull itself apart and there was a kid in the corner he had no way to help, but Shouta had gotten good at napping in any situation over the years.
—
It seemed that a couple hours had passed when Sam came back to get him. This time, he’d tossed a remote or something at Shouta to wake him up, which wasn’t his favourite. At least he hadn’t thrown Sam on the ground again.
He’d apparently gotten some new information on what, exactly, was going on outside. From an astronomer, which seemed like a reputable enough source. Whatever was outside was being referred to as the Visitor, which seemed appropriately ominous. The astronomer thought it was some kind of object passing through the solar system, though he didn’t know what it was. Something gigantic. He’d theorized that it might be alive, or might be some kind of unknown object, or Shouta’s least favourite theory, it might be alien technology. It wasn’t particularly helpful for Shouta’s purposes, but any information was more than he’d had, so he definitely needed to talk to that astronomer.
“Oh! And I talked to someone else, too. Her name is Jeanne, and she said she needed, uh, her laundry? She left it on the ground floor. I checked all the stairwell doors, all the other floors are locked. I did find a note that said the landlord’s keeping his guns in the basement, so that seems like something we should deal with.”
“...Alright.” Lots to unpack there. “You said the doors are locked. How are you planning to get to the basement?”
“Jeanne said some guy named Lyle had a way down, I guess. I tried knocking on his door, but he didn’t answer. I figure maybe he’s out and about and he’ll be back in a bit. Wanna come with?”
Shouta sighed. “Sure, why not.” Maybe he could talk to the astronomer on the way.
The stairwell reeked of death and blood. The whole building did, really, but maybe the air couldn’t circulate in here, or something. Shouta didn’t gag, but only because he had years of practice. It was a little disconcerting how unbothered Sam was.
The astronomer was gone when they made it to the second floor, so they knocked on Lyle’s door again. There was no answer. Sam sighed, his shoulders slumping, before he perked up. “Oh, hey! There’s a key over there! Maybe we can get the stairs to the first floor open!” He ran over to grab it, Shouta following a little ways behind. “It says 21… I guess it’s to Lyle’s apartment. Worth a try, I guess.”
Shouta halfheartedly nodded. Something felt off. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but hadn’t the other half of the hallway been closer before? “We should go back. Something is wrong.”
The closer they got, though, the more the hallway seemed to stretch in front of them, walls falling away to reveal absolute nothingness, the floor becoming patchy and unstable. Shouta shivered involuntarily, and then jumped when something started scratching at the floor behind them. He glanced back, and ice flooded his veins. “RUN!”
Sam, thankfully, listened, and the two of them took off down the now-dark pathway, nearly tripping into gaping holes in the floor several times, and the thing behind them kept gaining, and all Shouta had seen was bright golden eyes and bloodstained teeth, not like Joel’s but something more, something huge, and he knew it wanted to kill them, and he knew it wanted to play with them first.
They had to get back to Joel, he had to get back to his students, this couldn’t be it, it couldn’t, and then he felt teeth around his ankle and slammed chin-first into the floor, blinking back reflexive tears and trying to scramble away, but the thing had him now. It grinned with four huge mouths, looming over them, staring straight into Shouta’s eyes. On instinct, he activated his Quirk, but it didn’t do anything, and here he was, on the ground, helpless under something immune to his Quirk and too big to fight off, again.
“H-hey, ugly!” Sam shouted, throwing a fork into the thing’s eye. It hissed, releasing Shouta, but he couldn’t feel relieved. Now Sam was going to die right along with him.
But he had to give it his all. What choice did he have, when it came down to it? He took a deep breath, pushed away the despair, and readied his capture weapon.
The thing lunged forward again, feinting towards Shouta, who jumped back painfully, but then using one of its side-mouths to catch Sam by the hand. Sam shrieked and curled over, but it was clear the thing was playing with them, because it let him go easily and just… laughed. They had to end this fight quickly.
Shouta moved in front of Sam, the thing’s eyes watching his every movement, and lashed out his capture weapon to grab one of its front legs. He didn’t quite manage to trip it, but it did seem to hurt itself a little staying upright. It growled, sending shivers up his back, and pounced. Shouta tried to dodge, but he just ran into Sam, knocking the other man back and putting himself right in the path of the thing’s biggest mouth.
In the half-second before it bit down, he could feel its hot breath on his face.
Then, for a moment, all he knew was pain as it re-broke his fragile arm, tearing through the bandages like wrapping paper and taking half of them with it when it pulled away. Gasping, he tried to orient himself, but his head was spinning and his arm was pulsing and there was a trail of clean-bright bandages connecting him to the grinning, wide-eyed villain.
Because, lest he forget it, that was a person.
From behind him, Sam scuttled forward on all fours to get close enough to the villain to hit them, slashing out with a knife Shouta hadn’t known he had to hit the villain right in their eye. They roared, stomping down frantically, and Sam yelped as he rolled away, blood already welling up in the shallow wounds the villain had left on his back.
There was no time to check if he was alright. He positioned himself in front of Sam again and ran forward, keeping his center of gravity low, to deliver a harsh kick to the middle of the villain’s face. They screeched, rearing back, and for a moment Shouta thought they would leave.
They came back down with a heavy thud, and this time they twisted, going straight for Shouta’s midsection, and he’d felt the force of those bites, he wouldn’t survive that, he couldn’t dodge, he wouldn’t make it back to his students, he’d never know—
A hand yanked him backwards, and the villain’s teeth snapped on thin air. Sam groaned underneath him, where Shouta had landed on his ribs, but they both scrambled to their feet just in time to dodge the next attack.
“Go left!” Sam shouted, and Shouta just had to trust that the man had a plan. Dashing forward, he leaped forward to land halfway on top of the villain, punching with the full force of the jump directly into their eye. On the other side, Sam did… something, and the villain wailed and hissed. Shouta quickly stumbled away after once again kicking them, readying himself for the next attack.
It didn’t come.
The villain, apparently giving up on their chance at easy prey, was lumbering back into the darkness.
“Fuck,” Sam said, and Shouta couldn’t agree more.
The hallway returned to normal, as they kept walking. Shouta was limping, and both of them definitely had a broken arm, but they were alive. That was what mattered. They could clean off the blood and put on bandages in a bit, once they were safe.
To their left was a door that Shouta was sure hadn’t been there before. He glanced down it, and when he only saw two bright, golden eyes and a wide smile, he quickly turned away. If the villain wanted to watch them, that was their business, but Shouta was in no shape to fight again.
They patched each other up on the floor of the hallway, and Shouta’s blood sang with the thrill of being alive, alive, alive and the pain of breaking again. He gritted his teeth and wrapped Sam’s bandages tighter.
“Let’s talk to this Lyle guy before we go home,” Sam said, his words a little slurred. They probably both had concussions. Or, well, Shouta had a second concussion, now. He also might’ve bit his tongue. It was hard to tell if the taste of blood in his mouth was real, or imagined, or splashback from his arm being bitten open.
“Sure,” Shouta said, and pushed himself upright. God, everything hurt.
He was half-zoned out for the beginning of Lyle and Sam’s talk, but zoned back in when Lyle suddenly reared back, looking… he couldn’t actually figure out what expression Lyle had. “Wait, y-y-you said yes?!” he was squeaking out, and Sam looked a little uncertain. “Okay! YES!” He laughed, sounding delighted. “It’s a deal! But, uh, you’ll have to close your eyes before I get close. Okay? J-just close your eyes.” What was he talking about? A glance at Sam did nothing to clear it up.
“Um, okay?” Sam said hesitantly.
“You too, uh, whoever you are,” Lyle said, glancing over at Shouta. He shrugged and complied. Seemed harmless enough. He heard Lyle saying something quietly to Sam, but he couldn’t quite tell what. Maybe he was talking to himself.
Then—a kiss? What? What? He hadn’t thought Sam knew this guy. What.
He squinted as a light bright enough to see through his eyelids flashed. “Oh! Sorry! That went off on its own. Uh. I took a picture. I didn’t mean to.” Well, that was a lie for sure. Whatever. This wasn’t his business. “...It’s alright if I k-keep it, right? You can open your eyes again! Okay!”
Lyle looked… delighted. Damn, Shouta wasn’t sure the last time he’d seen someone look so happy. At least one of them was feeling good. He handed something to Sam and started talking about photography, so Shouta zoned out again. He jolted back to awareness when Sam stepped away. Maybe he should work on that, he didn’t like being so out of it. It was hard, though; his brain felt slow, fuzzy and staticky around the edges.
“Uh, which room’s got the way to the first floor?” he called behind him, and Lyle answered with that dopey expression still on his face.
“Oh! It’s the, uh, upper l-left room. The bathroom. Watch out, though, the eye thing might still be in there. It wandered in from the floor below. I hope it leaves soon…” He looked a little anxious, which made sense if someone was in his bathroom, just waiting to attack. Shouta needed to find a solution to this problem that didn’t involve killing anyone. Maybe he could cordon off one of the abandoned apartments and just bring aggressive people there…? Would they all kill each other? They hadn’t seen two of the incoherent people attack each other yet…
That was a problem for another day, though, and the two of them managed to skirt past the ‘eye thing’ that was, indeed, still there.
They had to dodge past a couple massive rats that nipped at their ankles, but it was surprisingly easy to get through the weird pathway to the first floor. He couldn’t help but think it was too easy. There’d been a constant feeling of being watched since he’d left the apartment, but it was more intense now. Were they being hunted? Was something, someone, following them, stalking them, waiting for their guards to drop? The path from Lyle’s apartment to the first floor was dark and humid, and every time he flicked his one good eye around them, he saw nothing.
Was he just being paranoid?
Either way, better to stay on guard. If there wasn’t someone hunting them now, there would be soon, he was sure.
After a few minutes, they came to a doorless entryway that led them out to the first floor. The feeling of being hunted didn’t fade, but now it was coming from everywhere. Shouta wouldn’t put it past this world for the walls themselves to be out to get him.
It was dark, and smelled a little musty, but nothing came out to immediately attack them, so he’d count it as a win. They wandered for a bit, and Shouta noted that these hallways were definitely longer than they should have been, and connected in ways they shouldn’t. That was another problem for future Shouta. Future Shouta that didn’t have a freshly re-broken arm and a maybe-broken ankle.
He almost laughed when they came across a vending machine. So normal, comparatively. It felt a little out of place in the dark, but it was a little comforting, too.
And then he noticed one of the drink options was ‘Advice,’ and Sam decided to test it, and oh, of course, the vending machine was alive.
At least she was friendly. And warned them of a ‘big monster’ lurking around—was that what he’d been feeling before? Maybe they could find a way to help her out, later; it didn’t seem fun to be stuck as a vending machine, when one had been a fully mobile person with a person-shaped body before.
Who knew, though. Maybe she was into that.
They carefully made their way to the stairs, or where the stairs should have been. The hallways seemed to go on forever and circle back on themselves. It reminded Shouta way too much of when they’d fought the smiling villain, just an hour or two before.
Eventually, though, they did find the stairs, and Sam tore off the chain keeping them closed. “We shouldn’t have to bother Lyle anymore, now,” Sam said, and of course that was his first priority. He was too considerate, really, he needed to work on that before it got him killed.
These stairs felt a lot longer on the way up. Shouta kept glancing behind him, unable to shake the conviction that something was following him, just out of sight. At least the door to Sam’s apartment locked. (Not that it would do any good against a determined attacker.)
“I didn’t get the chance to ask earlier. How do these bandages work? We don’t have them in Japan.”
“Oh, just… I mean, I don’t really know how it works. They’re Purocare bandages. You soak cloth in it and leave it on for a while and it speeds up your healing? Not really internal stuff, though, not properly at least. Your elbow, the one that was shredded, was relatively fine after a couple hours. Your skull? Might be in ten pieces, for all I know,” Sam said with a painful-looking shrug.
“That’s… good. Maybe I’ll have to take some home.”
“You said you’re from Japan?” Sam asked curiously, and damn, Shouta hadn’t meant to mention that. Now he had to come up with a cover story. He still didn’t want to mention his time-travel-slash-alternate-dimension theory, in case he was wrong and ended up sounding batshit insane.
“I’m on a business trip.”
“You’re a teacher, right? What do you teach?”
“I don’t know the English word for it.”
“Oh. Okay.”
They were silent for the rest of the walk back to Sam’s apartment, but Shouta stopped Sam just down the hall from it. “We should clean up as much as we can. We shouldn’t make Joel worry too much.”
Sam let out a single bark of laughter. It echoed uncannily down the hall, and Shouta shivered unwillingly. “His whole family’s dead, I think he can handle it.”
“He shouldn’t have to.”
“No. He really shouldn’t.”
They wiped off the blood as best they could. Shouta still wasn’t sure Joel could even see. He elevated his ankle on the armrest of the couch and watched through half-lidded eyes as Sam cooked something with his unbroken arm. At least it looked like his dominant hand was the one that escaped unharmed.
When it came time to eat, Shouta had to ask for help because of how badly his hands were shaking. He tried not to linger on the thought that he’d never quite come back from this.
—
Sam and Joel spent the rest of the evening playing games together. Joel wasn’t very talkative, but he at least looked a little more cheerful by the time they were all ready to sleep. Poor kid.
Shouta, on the other hand, spent his evening planning. There wasn’t time to sit around and enjoy himself. Sam had offhandedly mentioned that the astronomer he’d talked to mentioned a larger group of astronomers, and that the group thought they had a way to stop ‘the Visitor.’ Clearly, that was who he needed to talk to. Tracking people down in this nightmare of a building was going to be a pain, but not worse than any other mission. He even had the opportunity to rest in between rather than pushing himself to the limit until he collapsed.
(Although, truth be told, he’d rather do that, and he would be if he weren’t so injured.)
It was also becoming very obvious that no one was doing proper rescue work. Or, if there was anyone, they couldn’t reach the floors that Shouta had been on. As badly as he wanted to get back to his class, he knew he couldn’t actually change anything at this point. He and Sam were going to have to do a lot more work in the coming days, but at least he had someone helping him.
It was better than nothing.
Tomorrow, the mission would begin in earnest.