Chapter Text
Hitoshi stares at his ceiling.
Like he has for the past few hours
His mind runs in loops around itself, totally sure he’s losing it.
Was he really a civilian?
Why was he carrying sutures and medical supplies?
What was he doing in that bar?
Did he recognize me?
Does he even know who I am?
He didn’t pride himself on being a very well-known villain, but Mindjack terrorizes all kinds of people.
On the contrary, Hitoshi Shinsou is somebody nobody knows.
He made sure of that.
That train of thought makes him shudder, stopping that train of thought before the paranoia can kick in worse, pressing the palms of his hands deep into his eyes.
God, that stranger could be anyone.
He could know anything.
Eyes wide shut, his mind replays every second of the man.
Dissecting each little fuzzy detail, piecing together the mess of what that stranger might've been.
He’d long since given up on forcing the man out of his head, given the fact that every single attempt had failed.
When he opens his eyes again and sees his stupid ceiling staring down at him, he groans.
“Fuck.”
After multiple hours of living in his mind, Hitoshi resigns to the conspiracy that he was, in fact, a civilian.
There was no other reasonable explanation.
It doesn't make the pill any easier to swallow.
If he’d been legitimately anything else, Hitoshi wouldn't be rotting in his bed, mind full of a stranger.
He could handle heroes, vigilantes, information brokers, police officers, rogue agents, anyone.
A stranger with ‘good’ intentions?
A liar.
An anxiety attack for Hitoshi, especially after this long hearing nothing,
He excelled at his work, striking hard, fast, and quietly, with a lot of pride about leaving nothing about himself in the open. He checks (steals) his own police file every now and again just to know if they're close to catching him.
But he's only as good as he is because he knows his enemy. He’s not stupid, he never enters a fight blind. Maybe using his voice modulator to mimic the contacts of his victims to extract a verbal reaction is underhanded, but it's gotten him this far.
A wild card, a helping hand with no known motives other than kindness?
He wants to crawl out of his skin.
It's practically his kryptonite.
Worse, his kryptonite was so kind.
Sweet,
Kind,
Well-intentioned poison.
What the hell.
He turns over to lie on his stomach, oh so tired of his ceiling and those green eyes.
Hitoshi sleeps because that stranger lives in his daydreams.
God, he doesn't even know his name.
...
At some point in the days that followed, he’d started looking out for him.
Not even stalking, just being slightly more aware of his surroundings.
Keeping an eye out late at night for any trace of the man.
He takes longer routes, stays out later, and lingers near office buildings.
There's a reasonable explanation, he swears.
Fewer cameras, less foot traffic, the patrol routes of underground heroes, schematics like that.
Nothing to do with one man in particular.
Besides.
He probably couldn’t even trace the man if he tried.
Green hair, well dressed, carried medical supplies for some reason.
Freckles?
God damn it, why’d he have to be bleeding out and barely conscious?
The very vague things he remembered weren’t much to go off on.
Granted, he knew madmen who could trace anyone to the ends of the earth, but he figured if his mind was fucked enough to reach out to someone to find this guy for him, he might as well do it himself.
It was counterproductive, given the fact that this kind of work wasn’t anywhere near his area of expertise, but the idea of describing this stranger to somebody so that they could track him on his behalf made his skin crawl.
For some reason.
Besides, he wouldn’t stoop so low, spending money that could potentially go towards the things that matter, like energy drinks and takeout.
The peace of mind wasn’t worth it, no.
He sharpens his eyes to keep watch for green hair.
It's a common color, totally not related to tracing a stranger.
A handful of buildings in the heart of the city happen to have employees leave late.
If he keeps a closer eye on them, it's nobody's business but his own.
Maybe he's irrational, sick in the head, or just tormented with paranoia.
He feels foolish, keeping tabs on a man he's never properly met, and knows next to nothing about besides the texture of his hands.
For all his efforts, he could be wrong about a dozen things; maybe it was the lighting of the bar making his hair green, or the man was dressed like that only for a meeting.
Maybe the man flew out of the country weeks ago.
For whatever reason, Hitoshi can't seem to stop.
He isn't stalking,
of course he isn't.
…
He grew ever more paranoid, probably worse than his first few weeks as a villain.
It’s a nauseating fact, he's on edge in such a way he hasn’t felt since his teens.
He’d return to the bar every now and again, only to hear nothing from the bartender.
Curse the man and his honesty, some nights he’d wish he heard even a peep from the civilian.
He’d seen the stranger a few times.
Of course, it wasn’t actually him.
He seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once.
In the faces of a passerby, a freckled face with the wrong hair, in the face of a teen with the same hair texture but the wrong height.
Late in the night, he’d seen a woman with long green hair in the dark he watched from around the corner.
For a moment, he saw that man once more,
She looked sickeningly familiar, astute, and kind-looking.
A nurse on the night shift with that same face.
Only, it wasn't.
She was older, plumper, with thinner hair.
God, he was going insane.
The man’s face and memory began to grow warped, replayed so many times in his mind, the mere thought of the man made him feel insane.
Maybe he was a hallucination, an angel, or a ghost.
Hitoshi’s fist clenched around the sheets, a thick sheen of sweat over his body.
The summer had come, and it’d been cruel to him.
His abandoned building was nice and all, boarded off, creepy and in a place no sane person would ever enter, but the lack of cooling was a pain in the ass.
That’s why he couldn’t sleep.
It wasn’t because he’d spent the better part of two weeks hyper-fixating on somebody whose name he didn’t even know.
Sure.
His hands linger on the scar, days have passed since it healed.
It's the only proof that it happened, that he's not demented.
He sits up, a thick sheen of sweat dripping off him.
He crawls out of bed, needing some air.
It doesn't do much to help, he needs something else.
His legs take him to the bar.
It hadn't been his intention, honestly, but if his body needed the reminder then, who was to contest?
He’d been coming more recently, and he’s started to despise the alcohol more every time he tries it.
He’s sure that the bartender—Dabi, if anyone bothered using names around here—noticed. That man knows everything that happens at his bar.
They both usually keep their mouths shut, despite Hitoshi's prominent urge to ask again.
But tonight, in the summer silence, Hitoshi finds he can't keep his mouth shut.
“Have you seen him?”
His voice comes off in an awfully foul tone, months of built-up frustration and anxiety spilling into it.
The bartender’s back is turned to him, and without any fanfare, he replies, "Seen who?” in a mocking tone that suggests he knows precisely what he's doing.
“Don't play these fucking games with me.”
His anger bleeds through, tense, and drawn like a bow.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Dabi.”
He’s never considered violence as much as now, with a white-knuckled grip on the bar, that same seat where…
“Nah,” he finally says, his smug voice somehow acting to alleviate some of Shinsou’s stress.
Maybe he won’t stab the man—
“Not tonight.”
Scratch that—he is going to brutally murder him.
Hitoshi feels a rush of something he can't describe running through him.
Fear, excitement, anxiety, anger, and adrenaline were all injected into his bloodstream.
With an embarrassingly cracked voice, he utters, “He’s been back here?”
The bartender, without even dignifying Shinsou with looking him in the eye, replies, "A couple of times.”
Dabi’s signature smirk makes him want to crawl across the bar and wring every little detail out of him, and what the fuck?
“When.”
“A couple of times”
“Answer me, damn it.”
He briefly considers using his quirk, but he's not dumb or angry enough to risk it, especially since this is where that civilian frequents, apparently.
“He asks if you're alive," the man adds.
Hitoshi stares deep into the shot glass in his hands.
His reflection stares back.
…
Midoriya stares blankly at his work.
Like he has for the past five minutes.
Since that night, his chest has hurt.
It felt as if something deep in him cracked.
He’d returned to work without any fanfare, trying to slip back into the role of nobody.
Yet, he’d been growing ill in the head, his mind making his work more than it was, in the same way he did that night…
Stop it, that’s enough.
His mind is anything but blank.
It’s computing analysis in a way it shouldn’t be.
A report on a fight between Kacchan and some D-tier villain.
His job is to merely deal with the damage.
That's it.
Calculate collateral damage, structural integrity of surrounding buildings, insurance of damaged property, estimated cleanup, and schematics like that.
Not combat, strategy, hero moves, villain tactics, potential plans, and certainly not battle analysis.
So why can’t he?
He’d looked too far into this, observing all the wrong things.
He’s observing the battle strategy, the way Dynamite deployed AP shots in such a way that caused minimal damage, and how he attacked the villain’s legs to only damage the street instead of the surrounding buildings.
How the villain used his warp quirk to damage Dynamite’s gear in a failed attempt to cause him to lose the precision aspect of his quirk, altering the surroundings to force Dynamite into a hard spot.
“Midoriya, where’s that Dynamite report?”
A colleague asks as she passes by his desk.
Like many of his coworkers, she makes a point to never address him unless absolutely necessary.
Her expression, mixed with the chatter of his peers, makes him think she’d been appointed to speak to him.
Perhaps she lost a bet to his other colleagues.
He doesn’t ever think too hard about how excluded he is in his work environment.
Truly, he’s grateful to have a job like this.
It pays decently, even if he’s never really part of the work environment.
He works efficiently, he talks to nobody, and he goes home.
“Oh, uhm, give me a second! I just need to finish something.”
Izuku stutters out, slightly panicked.
He’s always been on top of his work, going above and beyond usually just to keep his right to work.
He might even be the hardest worker in his building, not that it’d ever be acknowledged.
Ironic, working to earn the right to work.
His traitorous brain can’t seem to go back to normal.
It’s been a few days, and he’s made sure to scrap any traces of that night. It was a misstep, stupid and dangerous.
He avoids any unnecessary trips, gets home before it gets dark, and steers clear of the uglier part of the city.
He’s tried to work quicker, getting more done to get home quicker.
It proves to be difficult, his mind getting caught up on the wrong things, analyzing in a way not only not paid to do but really not being done.
Reluctantly, he skips out on his little treat of alcohol.
At least— he tries.
He’d begun buying drinks at his local grocery store, the disgusting beer not hitting the spot or doing anything to alleviate the stress of his brain malfunction, leaving a disgusting taste on his tongue and leaving him feeling shittier than he started.
It feels different, wrong in a way he just can’t explain. It feels like rock bottom, drinking alone in his apartment. Maybe drinking in a bar was the same, but it felt different somehow.
He’s tried to push past his stupid analytical brain, put it back in the box it belonged in, lock it up, and leave it in a dark corner of his brain.
Return to his regular 9-5, living yet not alive.
It hasn’t been working.
If he lets his mind drift, it succumbs to that mechanical, almost instinctual analysis.
He sliced open his finger last night, thinking back to that stupid battle with Dynamite.
Too entertained by his own mental dissection of a stupid fight, it took the sharp slice of his finger to realise what he was subconsciously doing.
He made a mess of his dinner; blood mixed into his diced vegetables.
He didn’t have dinner last night, nauseated by it all.
God damn it, why can’t he go back to normal?
He could’ve sworn he’d gotten over this in middle school.
So why did he fight against every atom in his body to pull those notes out of the garbage?
That day, when he’d returned home from work, he threw away that bloody dress shirt.
He almost burned it, too anxious about what it might mean.
What if it’d been evidence of a crime? It was the blood of a villain.
What if somebody saw it and called the police? It connected him directly to an infamous villain.
He’d sworn up and down he wouldn’t investigate it
he would forget it.
He cracked a day later, after a particularly unproductive workday.
Anonymously, on a public library computer, wearing a hoodie that hid most of his features, a town over, he researched using everything he remembered.
It took a while, trying to find a masked man he’d seen once, covered in blood in the dead of night.
Luckily for him, he used to be a freak. Middle school Deku found out how to illegally access encrypted files within government databases.
He remembered which websites had rumors of villains, which registries were legitimate, and how to piece together stories.
Eventually, a name turned up, one that’s been plaguing his mind, hidden away in a heavily encrypted file under the HPSC.
Mindjack.
With almost nothing under the name.
Nearly entirely blank
He should be content, that hunger in his mind should be satiated with a name.
He isn't.
A switch of a tab lands him on Musutafu’s police file, where he stumbles upon his estimated kill count in his official police file.
Updated two nights ago.
Izuku swallows the bile crawling up his throat.
Oh God...
The gravity of the situation feels heavier than it did that night on that subway.
Because at least then, it was a mysterious figure, up to speculation about who or what might have happened.
But this, a name, criminal record, danger level,
The big bold letters of
WANTED
CAUTION: DO NOT APPROACH
Makes him feel like a fool and then some
Having paid for his drink
Held his hand
That same hand that...
It takes willpower to not lose his lunch in the public library.
He looks closer at the details; for some ungodly reason he couldn't—wouldn't explain.
The kill count is a rough estimate, frustratingly vague.
Some of his acclaimed murders don't even have any evidence, just underground heroes having gone M.I.A. during the alleged activity of Mindjack.
He gets more into it than he’d like to admit, jotting down inconsistencies on library looseleaf.
Tsukuyomi’s patrol route isn't anywhere near Mindjack's alleged area of operation, and his body was recovered, killed in a way implausible for it to have been Mindjack.
Mudman wasn't scheduled the night he went missing.
Vantablack doesn't fit the profile of Mindjacks' other victims, and there was almost no information available for him.
And these are only the profiles of the heroes.
A handful are cited as his murders due to unrelated details and no solid evidence.
Disappearances at the right time, witness statements, bodies found in his area of operation, deaths with unrecoverable bodies, missing vigilantes--
Something doesn't add up.
Nobody's really sure that Mindjack did kill these people.
There's more to the story, there must be.
Because the alternative is that he did kill them.
And oh, isn't that deranged?
Not only conspiring that somebody else must be behind these murders, but hoping for such.
His hands settle away from the keyboard and to the messy notes he's written, a list marked up with varying degrees of likelihood for murders, credibility statements, dates and times.
Looks like something Kacchan would've exploded.
This is so much worse than anything he might have written in middle school.
Legitimate information on a villain, conspiracies about kill count, and real investigative notes.
His stomach twists uncomfortably.
He needs to stop.
He needs to know more.
“LEGAL IDENTITY: UNKNOWN”
No known quirk
No confirmed base of operation,
Unknown motives,
“N/A” written all over it,
Fuck, no confirmed appearance.
No reliable photograph, no distinct features,
Not even an estimate of appearance.
Izuku hates to admit that he may be impressed.
Then he thinks back to the bar a few nights ago.
The purple hair, the eye bags, and the mask that Izuku could probably write an entire analysis on.
He glances down at his paper.
Izuku realizes that he’s got the best look at Mindjack, up close and personal.
He may be the only one who's seen him and survived.
He feels faint.
Nothing makes sense.
He, strangely, feels no fear.
He should be scared, shouldn't he?
It's been days, perhaps over a week.
Yet, Izuku Midoriya is alive and well.
Despite what most assume, Izuku has a spectacular talent for staying alive.
Playground fights, years of torment from Kacchan, and sprinting away from high school bullies have heightened his awareness.
He’s no stranger to ambushes, wolf eyes on the back of his neck, just waiting to pounce when the time is right.
He’d know if he was being followed.
Or maybe not.
Maybe he’s faced off against teenagers but never hero-killing villains.
That night could've been an outlier, a red herring.
If a villain as elusive as Mindjack wanted me dead, I'd be dead by now.
He isn’t, but why?
There has to be a reason.
He needs to know more.