Chapter Text
Keeping several dozen children quiet in a single room, Shoto decided, had ended up being a much easier task that he had thought it would be. Sure, everyone was reasonably well behaved on any normal day, but this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normal day. He had expected chaos; questions from so many little boys and girls all asking what was going on or maybe just being generally anxious of something new that was happening. Maybe even just the ever present terror of being too small to think properly. At the very least, he was surprised it wasn’t louder in here.
Most of the littles ones were only murmuring faintly and looking around. The basement took up the space of the entire ground floor without the walls that the upper levels had; a wide, open space with the freedom to explore. They must have been curious; he doubted any of them had ever even been down here before today. A couple of them were palming the walls as if the brick that made up this particular part of their home was any different from any other part, the newness somehow making it special. Were they looking for secret passages like in books? The stories about children finding entrances to magical worlds in wardrobes and tiny hidden doors were popular enough. Shoto watched, faintly amused, as several children were transfixed by a stain on the wall.
He had known that the basement existed, at least, but even he had never been down here before. There just hadn’t been reason to; there was nothing down here. Well, nothing that was supposed to be down here, anyway.
“Come on, baby, come on…” A strained mutter followed by a soft clang. Mei was on the cement floor, laying down beneath her latest invention, head hidden beneath metal and wires. Most of it was bolted or glued to the ground – he wasn’t really sure how Mei made sure it didn’t move and at this point was too afraid to ask – but there was an opening on the bottom just large enough for a young inventor to stick her head inside.
“Please tell me you’re not having trouble.” Hanta badly stage whispered from above Mei’s machine.
“I thought you were done with that thing!” Denki did just as horrible a job at the whispering thing from a bit further away.
“I was! Mostly!” Mei was fiddling with what looked like wires from between the walls of what she called a ‘housing unit’. The sides of it were made from oven trays and some sort of metal twine Momo had made. “It’s probably just a calibration issue. You know, just some late stage errors for debugging. No need to be alarmed!” She did not sound particularly calm.
Shoto had absolutely no idea what half of those words meant and knew better than to ask. Usually, Mei’s explanations just left more questions and worse confusion than what started it. What he did know, though, was that they were running out of time.
Taking a deep breath, he took what felt like the twentieth headcount since they all got down here. He was nowhere near the tallest of their group, but the crisp clean bleach white of everyone’s near identical uniform – the skirts and trousers issue the only difference, really – made it easy to pick people out from the browns and grays of the basement. Subtract the one, but add the extra little one, their newest addition, who was sleeping soundly in Momo’s arms. Don’t lose the two behind Mezo, someone really has to talk to him about being more aware of his surroundings… That comes up as almost right, but subtract the other one, who was acting as the distraction upstairs right now…
Everyone here and accounted for. Everyone that was left, that is.
“Okay!” Mei shot to her feet, giving a small jump on the floor as she did so. She held a very small box covered in bumps in one hand. What had she called it? A ‘remote control’? “Okay… I just want to say…” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t really know what’s about to happen. I don’t know if we’re about to go someplace without any breathable air or where dinosaurs are still a thing or, worse, end up someplace exactly the same as this place…”
A creaking came from above them. The sound of the old wooden floor bending beneath a body. Shoto held up a hand, giving just enough power to his left to let off a small, glowing ember; it usually did the job of getting everyone’s attention. Mei instantly quieted down. A bare second later, so did everyone else.
He looked up, focusing in the silence. From the corner of his vision, he noticed the little ones copying his motions.
Then, there came the pounding of shoes hitting the floors above. A quick bang-bang-bang of limbs in motion; it rang loudly in the air.
“Time to go.” Shoto barely breathed.
“I love you all!” Mei hurriedly shrieked. She pressed at the largest of the round bumps on the small box; as soon as she did, the machine she managed to cobble together let out a loud pop. Gasps went around the room.
Two prongs on the top of the machine – made out of wire hangers twisted together – arched with electricity the way Denki did during bad thunderstorms. They erupted, then, at a point in the middle of the air a few feet away. The floor beneath the sudden blast of lightning turned black, but the air where it hit kaleidoscoped in to a swirling mass of colors; blues and greens and golds twisted and churned in a perfect circle. It reminded Shoto, somehow, of a toilet.
The pounding from above them moved to the stairs. The slamming and locking of a door followed it.
“Move, move, move!” Katsuki roared as he stampeded down. “Sensei is right behind us, move!”
For a few seconds, no one did. The youngest ones looked up at them with confusion.
The locked door above them rattled.
“Children?” Sensei said from behind the door, voice stern but carrying the air of his usual calm. “What’s going on down there?”
“Okay, everyone…” Shoto gave his best smile to cherubic faces that turned to look at him. “I need you all to run through the glowing circle thing, all right? Just like we practiced in hide and seek. I promise it’s not danger –”
“There’s no time! Move!” Katsuki shrieked, far more intense this time. Then, he ran through the swirling miasma.
Several of the children cried out but not in alarm.
“Hey, no fair!” “I want to play!” “Wait for me, Kacchan!”
And, just like that, they all started to rush through.
Shoto took a moment to shake his head in stunned bemusement. Of course it would be that easy; everyone always wanted to follow Katsuki in all the games, the ones disguised as training, that they played. Still, he waited until the last of the little ones went through; youngest to oldest seemed to be the order. Momo, carrying the not-quite-infant in her arms, rushed through along with them.
“Children?” Sensei’s voice came through louder and more severe. “Open this door!”
The call, for a moment, startled him. Then, Shoto glanced to the rest of his family; the last of them that remained in so many ways. Fear echoed back his own uncertainty; fear of whatever was on the other side of Mei’s last-ditch escape attempt for them all, but they all knew that it would be worse if they stayed behind. They all knew what waited for them here, now.
Shoto took a deep breath as he watched each of them go through. He lingered, listening to the increasing rattling above; the calls from Sensei were getting more urgent now. Still, Mei’s warning about ‘non-breatheable-air’ lingered at the back of his mind when he finally took the plunge. He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, just in case.
A bright light waited for him. It took a moment to realize that it was the sun.
And he could breathe.
Behind him, there came the sound of wood and metal crashing down.
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The security alarm at U.A. went off, on average, roughly three times a day. Typically, it was someone from the media getting too close to the wall. Once in a while, an animal managed to trip something, or some poor sap playing citizen journalist or autograph hunter tried to sneak on to the campus grounds. Though, usually it was the media; once in a while, at a rare blue moon, it was someone a bit more nefarious.
And then, after everything that happened with the League of Villains on school grounds – and off school grounds – and the subsequent increase in security that immediately followed, well, three times a day was eventually considered a good day.
The equipment at the school was next to none, barring some military facilities. Aizawa had, after all, looked at the reports himself; he had made some of the implemented suggestions. Quirks of all sorts were taken in to account with the assumption that villains would have access to every single type and hybrid combination that was not only known, but also theoretically possible. Hell, there has been measures taken for quirks identical to the faculty; with copy-cat quirks and shapeshifters, their own skills could just as easily be turned against them. Most importantly, however, they accounted for what was already known fact.
Portal-creating quirks were incredibly uncommon, but they already knew of one villain in the League that had it. In fact, Kurogiri had used it against students in recent memory. Naturally, it was the top thing that they had gone to the extra effort to both scan for and prevent.
Supposedly, the equipment that they had brought in would prevent any sort of future portals coming from outside the school grounds. Anything trying to get in would simply not succeed; it would fizzle and die thanks to sophisticated scrambling transmissions that, frankly, Aizawa never bothered to really understand. If it worked, it worked, and that was all that he cared about.
Which was why, when the alarm went off and the system told him – and every other faculty member and the nearest six police stations – that an unauthorized portal was opening on school grounds, Aizawa lost his ability to think coherently for roughly two seconds.
It was after class hours. The students were in the dorms, assuming none of them had gone to any after-class activities. The text alert told him exactly where the portal was and that it was in the courtyard closest to the dorms. Was the League attacking the school? Again? How did they get through their supposedly uncrackable system?! There was going to be some words with some people after this.
After those two seconds were up, Aizawa moved. He had been grading papers; nothing that he couldn’t put off to later. The door to 1-A was thrown open as he ran down the halls.
As soon as Aizawa arrived on scene – an empty indented clearing with scattered chairs and a fountain by the dorms, a place made to be peaceful for the student body – he immediately saw the problem. Still, something wasn’t quite right; the swirling portal that hovered mid-air was… Off.
“Those are not the League’s colors.” Vlad King’s frown was audible as he stopped nearby.
He was right; instead of the swirling oval of purple and blacks, it was a perfect circle of a rainbow. It had so many bright neons going on that it was almost nauseating. Both the shape and color were not of Kurogiri’s norm.
That, and the fact that nothing was coming out of it, gave him pause.
For the few seconds where nothing happened, Aizawa prepared himself for the combat he was certain was about to take place. Some kind of villains were about to come through; perhaps more Nomu, perhaps a whole new group not affiliated with the League. He was prepared for this. Everyone on staff were, to protect their students.
What he was not prepared for was the rush of children that came through. He was certainly not prepared for the first one; the blonde that was an exact duplicate of Bakugo Katsuki, or the dozens and dozens that followed. Toddlers and school-age children and preteens, all wearing an identical asylum-bleach white uniform. There was something on their necks as well, some smudge that he couldn’t quite see in their frantic movements; he could figure that part out later, but for right now…
The Bakugo look-alike saw him. He careened to a halt when he did, stopping short, eyes wide and bearing an expression very much unlike he had ever seen on Bakugo before; a deep, unsettling fear.
“Shit, shit, shit…” Bakugo’s doppleganger started to back away, but he didn’t run. The blonde looked back to the portal and then back to the two teachers; he looked unsure and thoroughly petrified, as if he were an animal trapped between two cages and wasn’t sure which type of death he preferred.
Some of the smallest children had stopped, expressions varying between confused and terrified. A toddler, a little girl, ran directly for him and clung to his leg. Aizawa stood there awkwardly.
If it had not been for the boy that looked like the picture image of one of his top students, he would have attributed this to some kind of escape. Children fleeing imprisonment and going to the most secure place with known heroes in the country; that would have made sense. There was precedent for that, news events both recent and old. How they wound up with a portal as their means was something for later investigation, but the most important thing would be to get all these kids together and in safe hands.
From the swirling portal, more children were coming through. The taller they got, the more familiar they became; many of them bore a face identical to his students.
What the hell was this?! Himiko Toga couldn’t be all of these people and Twice couldn’t make this many copies. Not as far as he knew. Even if he could, it didn’t account for these discrepancies; for these odd uniforms and these other unfamiliar bodies running about. Why make children too young to be able to talk? Or five-six-seven year olds?
It didn’t make sense as a trap; not with this chaos, not with these elements in play. Aizawa shared a glance with a similarly stupefied Vlad; these kids were running away from something.
A version of Todoroki was the last to come through – missing the burn mark over his eye, which begged all sorts of other kinds of questions – when all hell broke loose.
Long stretches of cloth swung through the portal from the other side, streaks of white that forced the fleeing teenagers in the back of the path to scream in alarm and jump out of the way. The fabric and how it moved was horribly familiar and it took a stunned few seconds to realize why before Aizawa realized what it was. The color was all wrong, but he knew his own capture tape when he saw it.
That was a version of his own weapon. It was trying to grab the children.
The notion that these were escapees cemented itself further. The who they were or where they were from would have to come later, but right now was right now and the toddler clinging to his leg was starting to cry. He looked down at the mass of black, messy pigtails, possibly made frazzled by the running, and pried tiny fingers from the cloth of his pants. He didn’t get a chance to tell her to stay where she was.
A copy of Uraraka – longer hair, this one, but that was still her round face – chucked a floating little boy in their direction; Vlad caught the impossibly quiet kid that couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, but it was in that moment, with the boy mid-air, that Aizawa saw what was on his neck. A string of large, black numbers sat on that little boys’ neck. He had seen a similar smudge on the rest of the white-clad children and the very notion of tattooing children with such a thing had far too many reminders of a few too many past wars to be taken lightly.
Well, this made things significantly more disturbing. All white uniforms? Numbers on their bodies? It would have sounded like a ham-fisted over-the-top allegory in a movie script, but here it was in front of him.
The little girl grabbed his leg again. This time, he didn’t try to take her off; instead, he decided to stay where he was and lashed out with his own capture tape, grabbing at bodies to pull them away from the portal.
“Oh, crap!” That was a duplicate of Kaminari who had stumbled his way closer, a version who looked absolutely terrified; and with his hair cut in that familiar style, it was easy to see the numbers on his own flesh. The look on his face wasn’t wholly foreign but it was aimed at him, this pale-faced encompassing fear. “We made a mistake, we made a mistake!”
That was naturally when his own students decided to get involved.
It would have to be later, with security footage available and the ability to pause to catch details, before Aizawa would know exactly how everything happened.
The capture tape from the other side was whipping at random, but the body attached to it never came out from the other side. There was the shadow of a body, but Aizawa doubted that his counterpart from another universe could see anything at all through the mess of colors. If that was who he was starting to suspect it was; everything else was just too strange to not keep that notion possible. But why wasn’t he coming through the portal to chase down the escapees?
Most of the dozens of children looked confused, but not alarmed. It was the older ones, the copies of his students and some around their age, that did the running and grabbing to pull little ones away.
Not all of them could be grabbed; there were too many children and not enough of them seemed to understand what was happening. Aizawa caught sight of a very small boy with a mess of red hair, pacifier in his mouth, who turned to run back for the portal. He tried to grab the boy with his tape – Vlad brought up a block of blood in front of the toddler – but the boy only ran around it and ran right back from where he came.
It had been a mistake to focus on the confused toddler; it had only distracted him.
White tape grabbed at a copy of Jiro with mascara smeared from tears; Iida rushed in with his Recipro Burst to pull her away. The proper Jiro started to rumble the ground with her ear jacks; all it did was trip up a preteen girl with long pigtails that had been trying to chase down the confused toddler that had run back, sending her slipping through the portal herself. A crackling of green and Midoriya had shot past but missed the girl by milliseconds. The rumbling stopped after that, but the damage had already been done.
Aizawa used his own tape to pull in children that Midnight, fresh on the scene, put to sleep. Vlad set up shields of blood to block the tape from the other end to varying effect; some knew to stay where they were and others simply did not.
Tape from the other side grabbed a boy around the age of ten; both of the Todorokis came from different directions at the same time, one with fire and the other, the one without a scar, with a sword made of ice. Both stopped in surprise at the same junction and aborted their motions to stare at the other. The boy that they had both been trying to save was pulled away in a blanket of white tape. A scream pulled Aizawa’s attention to the side; a version of Asui had seen what had happened but stumbled along with a leg covered in a cast. The Asui that he taught every day was at her side and held her to keep her from moving.
“Close the stupid thing!” Bakugo’s double shrieked.
“I’m trying!” A copy of Hatsume Mei was pressing at buttons and turning dials on a device that looked like it was cobbled together with hot glue and wishes. “I can’t, I put a safety feature that won’t close it if people are too close!”
“Why the fuck did you do that?!” The other Bakugo wailed.
It was a mad dash of bodies going in different directions. Two versions of Sero were using their own tape to pull people, but they each somehow kept on grabbing the same targets. His own tape succeeded slightly better, but there were so many children. That scar-less version of Todoroki still had that sword of ice and cut a preteen boy free from white tape; both of them were pulled back and out of the way of another attempt to grab them by Dark Shadow’s claws. There was a flash of green and Midoriya was there again, helping Tokoyami to fend off the tentacle-like lashings that came for them.
It was in that brief moment that Aizawa realized that there was no duplicate of Tokoyami; there was no second Dark Shadow moving about. He noticed, then, the lack of a second Iida or Midoriya. He didn’t have time to check who else wasn’t there or to figure out what that meant.
Two children quite a distance apart from each other – a toddler and an older girl – ended up wrapped in white. He lashed out to grab one and pulled the older one free thanks to her own help, but the younger boy, wailing in confusion, freed himself from the wrong color and was pulled back through the portal.
The ground rumbled. The physical manifestation of the word for ‘shield’ appeared, blocking his view.
Class 1-B had arrived and, somehow, that made things worse. It became, as far as Aizawa could see, a sheer clusterfuck. And, really, he couldn’t see much at all.
People were screaming in panic, now, and there were too many bodies to see what was happening where. Kendo’s fists blocked things from his view and he couldn’t tell if the electricity arching was from Kaminari, his duplicate, or something else entirely. Vines were now in the air and acting as another grabbing agent, but sooner or later someone was going to get hurt from a physical tug-of-war with so things coming from so many directions. There came a loud banging and Aizawa stared in shock as a duplicate of Yaoyorozu – hair down and carrying a crying baby – held a gun in one hand and shot at the portal. Her arm glimmered where she had created it from.
Aizawa picked up the girl still clutching his leg and rushed around the word shield.
Another young boy was caught in the white tape; he had been pulled in close enough to be within touching distance of the portal. Both versions of Ojiro ran in at the same time; their own grabbed at the screaming body and pulled but ended up wrapped in more tape himself. His lookalike grabbed at the white fabric to free them – and might have succeeded, security footage would later tell Aizawa that he had absolutely had a good chance to – before one of the bullets from the other Yaoyorozu’s gun hit him in the arm. There came more than one scream before all three of them fell through. The gun immediately stopped firing.
Several people immediately screamed Ojiro’s name in sheer horror, both his first and last. He couldn’t tell if it was his own students or their doubles that called out. Perhaps a bit of both.
Panic struck at his heart; losing these unknown lookalikes and mystery children was one thing – he didn’t know who or what they were, not quite yet – but that was one of his own students that had just been caught in the crossfire. He couldn’t get his tape far enough from here, not carrying the little girl as he was; he rushed, trying to move closer to reach through the portal himself with his tape, to do what that other person had been doing this entire time.
For some reason, the tape from the other end stopped coming through. The portal still sat there; from where he was, moving closer the way that he was, Aizawa could see the shadow of a man on the other end turn away.
He didn’t get there in time. The air was still drenched in screaming and crying, and security footage would later tell him that it had been a total of just under five seconds between the time Ojiro fell through and when it all finally collapsed.
A flash of light pierced the air and right in to the swirling miasma. Aoyama’s laser barely missed him and the child that he was carrying. For a brief moment, Aizawa thought it was his own student, but, no, he was quite a distance away holding on to a very small child himself. He had to turn to see the lookalike – not wearing a belt – who immediately collapsed and vomited on the ground.
Beyond the portal, something exploded. Pieces of metal, glass and what looked like an oven tray came showering in from the other side. The mess of colors immediately began to shrink in to a dot before the rainbow portal vanished entirely.
Then, for a moment, nothing happened.
“Open it back up.” Bakugo’s double heaved the words. “Mei, open up the gate thing!”
“I can’t.” Hatsume’s counterpart whimpered.
“Open it back up!” The blonde’s hands sparked. “We lost too many, we need to get them back!”
“I can’t! I have no way to open it from this end!” Hatsume stood there, pale faced, staring at a device in her hands.
Aizawa still had a quiet little girl in his arms; he assumed she was in shock. He started to make his way towards the pair but didn’t get the chance to speak.
A soft click came from the side; he turned his head to stare at the wrong end of a gun. Yaoyorozu’s counterpart glared at him, trembling faintly, a sniffling and red-faced baby in her other arm. “Put her down and back away.”
They were frightened children. Aizawa told himself that as he slowly put down the toddler. The little girl didn’t move until Bakugo’s other self rushed forward to pick her up, recoiling back as soon as he did, as if Aizawa would attack them.
Then, the lot of children clad in white started to back away from them. They didn’t share words over who was moving or when, they only moved as if one mind and formed a semi-circle. Their backs were to each other, faces still set in the determined sort of fear an animal in a cage held; trapped, but still fighting.
“We made a mistake…” Kaminari’s double whimpered aloud. His hands sparked and clenched.
“Please stop saying that, Denki.” That was the other Sero, tone subdued and shocked. “It’s not helping.”
“Hey, you!” Bakugo’s lookalike glared at him. “What is this place?!”
That was an odd way to phrase the question; not ‘where are we’ or ‘who are you’? Aizawa frowned and wondered if it was deliberate. He held up his hands, trying to calm the many, many… How many kids were there? At least thirty of them but probably more. “This is U.A. It’s a school.”
Somehow, that didn’t seem to do the job. They didn’t look any calmer; if anything, Bakugo’s counterpart only looked more suspicious.
Around them, the collected student body of both 1-A and 1-B were quietly scattered. He could hear confused whispers and at least two different students declare that this was ‘creepy’. He couldn’t fault them for that.
Then, a startled scream came from halfway around the semicircle; Jiro’s doppleganger, face still visibly smeared, had her hands over her mouth. She was staring at the quiet and startled faces of some students, but he couldn’t tell exactly who she was staring at.
“What the fuck…?” Bakugo’s counterpart had, however, noticed something as he turned. “Deku?!”
In the startled mass of students, Midoriya stood there with the same uncertainty as everyone else. He sputtered for a moment before settling on an unsure wave. The Bakugo a short distance from his side stared at his lookalike with narrowed eyes and identical suspicion.
Whatever it was about Midoriya – and now Aizawa could confirm that there was no duplicate of him here – did something to the line of lookalikes. The gun in the other Yaoyorozu’s hand fell to the ground with a soft thud; a version of Ashido collapsed to her knees, followed by a duplicate of Koda who then started to cry. Shoulder slumped and the weight of exhaustion finally took its’ toll on them as they seemingly mutually decided that things were now safe.
There was still the echo of crying children, but at least they could start to get a grasp on what, exactly, had just happened.