Chapter Text
It’s been a few days since what Izuku is now calling [in his thoughts at least] ‘The Endeavour Incident’. His instincts had been correct as he’d come to expect with regards to The Number One least heroic “Hero” of the modern age, his “work” having torn through no less than two whole residential neighborhoods, injuring 27 civilians and destroying tens of millions of yen’s worth of memories and lives. There was miraculously only one lethality, and it was the villain in question, who succumbed to his burns before arriving at the hospital not 4 feet from Izuku. His quirk, from what Izuku could tell, was either a very short-ranged emitter type or a strange sort of transformation that allowed him to essentially plate himself with a bony outer carapace. It could have been put to better use than petty crime, but Izuku had the feeling that its rather grisly appearance saw the wielder driven away from any positive avenues from early on in life.
It wasn’t the first time Izuku had been beside someone in their last moments, and as with every time before, Izuku was momentarily frozen as he watched the last of life’s light leave the man’s eyes, the shrill whine of the heart monitor going flat searing itself into his mind like so many others had before. It was another face, another name that would haunt him for so long as he lived, and as with every past death, he pushed it to the side at the moment. His trauma would ruin him without a doubt, but it would not keep him from doing his job, from helping in whatever little ways he could.
“Something smells tasty!”
Even as deep as his affection for his partner runs, he couldn’t help but be a bit put off by her total lack of empathy for the terrible scene they’d both been witness to. It had left the two of them in a bit of a spat, through which they’d avoided going out together again. Their disagreement was to be short-lived, however, as Izuku never could hold very much of anything against the people he loved, and this evening was to be a sort of make-up romp for the both of them.
“Who’s on the menu tonight, Izuku?”
He can practically hear the way his beloved salivates at the thought of another meal, and he can’t deny that he’s missed the feeling of power that Carnage instills within him. Even amidst their little bicker as they’ve been, Izuku’s kept his ear to the ground, listening for details that others usually miss, noticing patterns that go otherwise unnoticed, and he’s pretty sure he knows who tonight’s main dish will be. There have been whispers of underhanded dealings, such is unfortunately common nowadays, but certain names keep coming up as medium-level players in the underworld, and an alias that grows more and more familiar with every day he spends interwoven with his beloved Toga. It’ll be like the equivalent of make-up sex for them, he thinks with a half-chuckle as he makes his way into the darkest alleyways he can find. Before that, however, there needs to be some proper foreplay.
“Oi, you lost or something motherfucker?”
The voice is nasally and entitled. Izuku turns to face the source and is only just a bit surprised when a fist smashes into his face, breaking his nose and sending him to the dirty alleyway floor with a smile. It’s pretty safe to say, he thinks, that he’s found someone the world would be better off without. As a heavy boot stomps down hard on his side with the sound of snapping ribs and he curls into a ball with half a whimper, half a giggle he allows the warmth and strength of Toga to seep toward the surface, keeping her in check but only just barely.
“I think he must be, boss. No one who knows where they’re going walks onto our turf in the middle of the night.”
“Damn straight! Stand him up, let’s see what kind of pretty face I just ruined.”
Izuku feels the two pairs of arms roughly manhandle him into a semi-kneeling position in front of the man who hit him and he looks over his features while the slow smear of red begins to dribble down his face, into his mouth, and past the collar of his shirt. Pity, he rather liked this one, it says “Shirt” upside down on the front. The thug in charge is clean, his clothes are crisp, His watch is gleaming, his hair is nigh on immaculate, and Izuku wonders whose important son he’s about to murder. His smile hasn’t wavered and the thugs must take it for an insult because someone grabs a nice fistful of his hair and pulls back hard so he can’t flinch back when the next punch comes.
“I think you’re actually making him prettier with every hit, boss!”
The two thugs holding him in place and keeping him from falling over laugh cruelly as they brace him against the slow steady beating he’s receiving.
“Haah! Izu~! Let me feed! You can’t tease me like this!”
“What’s going on here?”
A deep, rumbling voice comes from the mouth of the alleyway and for a moment everyone stops. Izuku’s smile slackens slightly and Toga whimpers in fear of being edged like she has been for even longer. The thug in charge turns back around with a snarl but his shoulders seem to relax when he sees whoever is addressing them. The voice, now familiar to Izuku after a moment’s thought, continues.
“God damn it, kid, I thought I told you not to come out tonight? Kamui’s supposed to be on patrol in this area, lucky you that he had an emergency a couple blocks down and I had a feeling you’d be this stupid.”
The thug responds and Izuku feels like this must be fate, for Carnage’s main course to come and present itself like this.
“Fuck Kamui Woods. What am I paying you for if not to let me have my fun? Just keep him busy or send him away or whatever, aren’t you his senpai?”
Death Arms grumbles but doesn’t say anything else, instead, planting himself at the alley’s mouth and keeping watch for a hero that will actually put a stop to the crime he’s allowing to happen. A cackle begins to rise out of Izuku as the red dribbling out of his nose seems to soak into his clothes even more freely than before. He feels the strength of his rage and Toga’s fervor settle over him, and without much preamble, the alleyway becomes not the scene of an assault, but instead the scene of several murders in progress.
The first to go is the heavier set of the two thugs holding him upright, and he’s sent into the alley wall with enough force to crack the stones. A wet cough rises out of him along with all the air in his lungs, and the snap of several bones in his arm and in his chest is like music to Toga’s ears. He collapses to the ground only barely conscious and stunned into shock with pain.
Next comes the other, and he’s dealt with through means of a sharpened blade of red material. His hand sails away in an arc that paints the alleyway in such vibrant red and leaves it so much finer smelling than before. There isn’t enough time for him to cry out in pain before Carnage manages to prove that a fist can indeed fit in his mouth. Bodily hefting the disarmed thug, Carnage locks his sight onto the third and final thug, having dispatched the prior two so fast that he still can’t seem to process just how far off script everything has gone.
The weight of a thrown body is enough to send him to the floor, and before he can get another breath in Carnage is upon him.
“Tell us that we don’t know who we’re dealing with! Tell us just how very fucked we are for having our fun with you! And then know deep in that blackened heart of yours that no matter what retribution we will face, you will die Horribly before it even has the chance to fail against us!”
The force of a semi-truck smashes into Carnage’s side and sends them off the pinned bodies with a grunt of effort on the “hero”’s part. Such a blow would have killed anything not built expressly for surviving such a blow, and it only reaffirms that Death Arms is no hero. He’s just a bigger, stronger thug with a line of shitty unpopular merchandise.
“You’re that red slime monster from the bank heist!”
“One and the same! And you are a failure! A pathetic excuse for celebrity. You have never been a hero, not since your debut, not since you stood to one side and grumbled as a child drowned before your eyes! And certainly not since you humiliated and berated another child for being a better hero than you ever have been!”
With an animal shriek, the mass of red surges forward and seems to explode out to swallow the false hero whole. The failure of a hero punches out with a thoughtless bellow, too dull to try anything else and incensed at having his failures thrown in his face. His last sound is as eloquent as he ever was, and moments later he is as dead as his career has come to be. The figure of Carnage spasms and shifts as it consolidates the new mass, all the delicious genetic potential. The two consciousnesses deep within achieve a sort of release that would leave them both stunned and gasping if they didn’t have each other to cling to, such that when the motions settle and Carnage exhales a deeply satisfied sigh they nearly forget the last of the three thugs in their eagerness to get home and cuddle.
“Y-You ate him? What the fuck are y-”
A spear spike of their body punches straight through the thug’s head, careless for words gone unspoken, content to feed without the dramatics of before. In the afterglow of what they’ve done, to get riled up again with no satisfying conclusion would no doubt sour the experience for them to look back on. And as Izuku and Toga again become two separate entities both with the same body they both know that they will indeed spend a lot of time looking back on this particular meal they’ve shared.
Carnage spreads themself out, collecting every drop of blood, every hunk of gore, every last trace of what’s happened in the dark alleyway before escaping away. Nobody will report the sounds of a short sharp struggle, the few confused screams that managed to make it out to the road, and people will assume that the cracked wall, the caved-in trash cans, and the scattered filth are the result of rowdy hooligans just being themselves. Kamui Woods will radio in to check on his senior partner and receive no response, and he’ll grumble to himself about how his partner continues to spit in the face of regulation by shutting his comms off. It won't be until the end of their patrol shift in six and a half hours that anyone will begin to suspect anything has happened, and by the time an investigation is started, Izuku and Toga will be asleep in their bed, spooning each other in a way only they can.
Toga will whisper loving reassurances into Izuku’s ears as he shudders and sobs under the weight of the crime he’s willingly committed, conflicted by the sense of intoxicating power Carnage has afforded him and the ceaseless ardor of Toga against the certainty that what he’s just done cannot be considered anything but villainous.