Chapter Text
“What do you think you're doing?”
Perched on his fence like an overgrown crow, scarves and hair lifted as if by an invisible wind, Eraserhead glares at him.
“...Gardening?” he says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.
The hero is unimpressed. “It's getting dark.”
Wildcard shrugs. “I've been at this all day, man, seedlings need a lot of patience.”
That in itself was the truth: obvious signs of work across the smallish plot of land are everywhere. Rows upon rows of darkened worked soil run lines between immaculately swept cobblestone paths, stakes and trellises marking tiny little fresh sprouts that disappear into the night's shadow. There's a couple of trees, indistinct in the low light, but not anything too large to overtake the garden's landscape. Wildcard himself has a little iron-and-glass solar power lantern hooked to a staff above where he's working, its light soft enough to provide visibility in a small area.
“I'll ask again. What are you doing here?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing here? I live here.” He doesn't have to even try to put on an affronted air; when he's doing something peaceful like this, emotions are easy to come by and easy to show.
“You live here.”
Wildcard looks at him, unimpressed. “Yeah. It's called a home. Not sure if you've ever heard of one.”
Eraserhead ignores the jab and simply watches him, but the vigilante breaks the stalemate to crouch back down again, lifting a couple of tiny plants from their containers with gentle fingers.
“You, uh... gonna arrest me, or?” he asks after a while, not deigning to glance back at the hero. “If you're gonna try, at least can you wait until I finish this? I waited a bit too long, their roots are getting tangled. Moving them this late in the season is gonna damage their roots a little, they're gonna be stressed from it and I'd rather they were planted instead of left to wither, y'know?”
Eraserhead knows leaving him to his own devices is not ideal. Nobody knows enough about this vigilante – Wildcard – or his quirk, hence the callsign that's been given him.
He's got the mannerisms of someone fairly young, but that could be any span between late teen to late twenties, and that's a group of people too large to investigate.
Everything physical aside from his height is hidden by what he wears: a hoodie, of a sort, modified into almost a hooded cowl complete with a face mask, and nondescript pants. He keeps his wrists and ankles taped in the way freerunners do, to reduce wind resistance in the cuffs of the clothing. Everything's a muddy forest green except for his black boots – again, no distinguishing features to pin down stores or support teams he may have 'acquired' them from – and the mask, also black but with a reflective pattern of tickmarks across the lower edge.
He's a fairly typical vigilante, one with less of a community service approach and more hands-on with small-time criminals when the opportunity arises, but there's usually a couple of those in every city district.
Wildcard has been known to interrupt thefts, disrupt assaults, apparently stopped a kidnapping once, but there wasn't enough of a visual to confirm – at least, no CCTV recording that's actually stayed in the police's possession, but there's no trace of whoever's tampered with the files – or, more often theorized but not solid, a quirk involved somehow.
None of this on its own is enough to try and book him, because there's no obvious quirk usage involved. Of course, it could be an invisible quirk that he's using, but without knowing for certain, there's nothing they can do. For the most part, the local police force that encounters him was content to let him do his thing as long as civilians weren't put in harm's way – excellent track record on Wildcard's part for that – and that no lasting damage was done to the involved criminals beyond the initial scuffle. It was prone to change as soon as they didn't have anything better to do, of course; he was still breaking the law, but until they weren't run ragged, he simply wasn't a priority.
Recently, however, there's been a small number of what are likely murders – with the vigilante being sighted in the vicinity around the same time that the bodies are found. There's no evidence to link the two, but it's a fairly alarming coincidence, and police haven't ruled out the chance of them being related.
While there isn't a warrant for Wildcard's arrest, a detective assigned to the case has made it apparent that he's needed for questioning, if at all possible.
And if he's somehow involved in the killings...
Eraserhead sighs.
“The most we'd be able to do is hold you for questioning, and I know people like you will just give the run-around on whatever we ask you, until your holding time is up. For some reason,” he says, obviously knowing the precise reason and it's immensely agravating, “-all of the evidence we keep against you somehow vanishes within hours of its recording, and we can't contain a person on hearsay alone.”
Wildcard has the audacity to smile at him. It's not quite genuine, more what he'd call a shit-eating grin, but there's still some joy in it that reaches his eyes. “Gosh, what a mystery!”
He pauses to scatter some sort of fertilizer in a new patch of soil, turning the earth over thoroughly with a garden fork before picking up the last tray of seedlings.
“Check these out. I grew em from seeds I got from last year's crop,” he says, blatantly ignoring Eraserhead's disinterest. “They're a bit young to be planting out, but for some reason they're unhappy in these little pots. Aren't'cha?” he asks the seedling he's scooped out, dirt and roots and all, addressing it like it's a tiny child. “Hope you feel a little better in here, yeah?” He dissolves into baby-talking each plant as he rehomes it.
Eraserhead forces back the urge to roll his eyes before resettling himself in a more comfortable position on the fence. His knees were starting to ache from holding a crouch for so long.
“Is your quirk plant-related?” he asks casually.
Wildcard snorts, evidently finding the question amusing. “I wish. Be far easier convincing them not to die, like this poor cutting here.” He briefly gestures to a wilting stem, half of its leaves shriveled up and brown. “Was fine until I planted it. Just unlucky, I guess.”
Eraserhead gives a vague sort of hum, showing he's really not particularly interested in the state of the plant.
Wildcard smiles to himself.
They'd met, of course, as most heroes and vigilantes do: a clash of interests. Namely, Wildcard was interested in fleeing the scene, and Eraserhead was interested in preventing him from doing that.
He'd felt the instant the erasure hero had cut off his quirk. Or at least, as many as his quirk factor could afford to cut off. Wildcard's own was far beyond normal means.
He was and is still, infinitely thankful that fortune landed his face-changing quirk as one of the less essential ones, and a selection of more demanding quirks he wasn't using were cut off instead.
Still, he knew of Eraserhead's capabilities, and had precautions and strategies in place to be sure he knew how to escape without depending on any of his quirks. This came with the additional benefit of keeping the hero guessing about what his quirk actually was.
He'd flipped him off as he all but parkoured across the rooftops.
Eraserhead pursued at a frankly alarming speed, with the help of those weird scarves, but in the end Wildcard managed to drop into an alley out of sight and pause time while he ran across the other side of the city.
That had been a year into his vigilantism, once he'd risen from a fairly unnoticeable helper on the street and into breaking up street fights or removing citizens from dangerous situations. Since getting involved against actual villains in that capacity, though, the local police finally assigned a hero to apprehend him.
Since then, he's gotten to know how the erasure hero operates: stealthy, incredibly fast, and fuck-off levels of tired at all times.
“So why are you here?” Wildcard asks him, straightening up at last. He's got the gardening fork hefted over his shoulder, a casual stance all that keeps Eraserhead from restraining him just in case it's wielded as a weapon. “Or do you make a habit of staring down anyone minding their own business?”
“Keeping tabs.”
“Yeah, yeah, like you knew where I lived anyway,” the vigilante says. “Or perhaps an anonymous tip-off?”
Eraserhead's eyes narrow behind his goggles. “What would you know about that?”
“I'm actually just making wild guesses for once,” Wildcard tells him. “This neighborhood's a good one. There's some sort of watch system going on. I'll wager someone saw me climb in through my own window and got suspicious if that's the case – I mean, look at me.”
It did seem... weird, to say the least, seeing someone doing yardwork with a hoodie on (minus the parkour tape, though) and a face mask covering everything except the eyes, but then again, it's evening, and there are plenty of people out there with morphic quirks they're not confident in and prefer to hide their face. Coupling that with climbing in a window, though, Eraserhead could sort of see the point.
Wildcard hooks a couple of fingers into the handle of a watering can, wetting the soil around the newly planted seedlings, before setting it back on the ground haphazardly and reaching up to snap the lantern's light off.
Night shrouds the scene, lit by streetlights and the soft golden glow from neighboring houses.
The gardening fork over his shoulder is brought down to stab heavily into the earth, but he leaves it standing there as he dusts crumbs of dirt from his hands against his pants. There's a sort of awkward pause as he regards the hero for a moment, before he speaks.
“Well, you found my place, so uh... I guess the polite thing to do would be to invite you in? Nobody else has ever really... visited. Before.”
Against his better judgment, Eraserhead finds himself lowering his goggles into his capture scarf and stepping across the threshold into... a very normal-looking home.
The structure itself is a comfortable mix of traditional and modern-western design. The entrance is tiled and small, leading into a wood-laminate living space with cream colored walls. A couple of rooms are off to one side, separated by sliding doors, and the kitchen is decently stocked and open, attaching to the lounge area directly.
Rugs are scattered about the floor, with a glass-top coffee table set up in the middle of them, and three well-built wooden chairs pushed up to the kitchen counter island. The entire place is immaculately clean.
It's very unlike what he'd expect from an independent and alarmingly competent vigilante's hideout. There's not even a setup for tracking or wiretapping (how is he getting all his intel then? Is there a leak in the department?), no weaponry, no sign of... anything.
Just a comfortable home.
Wildcard stands to the side, evidently enjoying the confusion. “I never take my shoes off in here because I don't give a fuck, so don't worry about it either,” he says. “So what do you think? I had to do most of the décor myself, but I'm sure that's not what the police are interested in.”
“It's... a house,” Eraserhead says intelligently.
“Gotta sleep somewhere,” Wildcard responds matter-of-factly. It's... the same way Eraserhead lives, but the hero doesn't really see himself with this sort of setup any time soon.
The entire thing was completely off for someone who apparently got his hands on very professionally made footwear – they're not combat boots, at least in build, but they're extremely well-fitted, heavy duty but light enough in material to be silent when the vigilante moved. True to his word, he doesn't take them off as he heads further in to the living space.
“Want some coffee? I'll get some from this neat li'l cafe.”
“I'm not-” Eraserhead starts, but then Wildcard vanishes.
Seconds tick by, and then a minute. Eraserhead idly tosses a pen through the space where the vigilante used to be, just to make sure it wasn't invisibility. He certainly hadn't heard any footsteps, and the door hadn't been touched. Honestly, it raised more questions than it answered.
About five minutes later, Wildcard makes a reappearance, a little out of breath, and holding two drinks and a receipt. “I love that place,” he says. “They don't believe in closing times.”
Eraserhead eyes him critically.
“Teleport quirk that relies on stamina?” he asks. “Explains how you evade capture so easily.”
“Man I'd give you a round of applause if I didn't want to waste like, 800 yen worth of god beverage. Pretty close guess, from an outside perspective! There's a lot of... oddly specific limits, though.”
Limits like locked doors, specifically, but there's always other quirks to bypass those.
Wildcard hands him a lidded cup. “You look like you need straight black coffee. And I mean, all the time.”
Eraserhead actually takes the coffee, although it's with great suspicion, and he doesn't drink from it. “No thanks to you,” he grumbles, and Wildcard can't help but grin at him.
“Was that an honest-to-god joke? Maybe I teleported to a different universe,” he says. “The Eraserhead I know never makes jokes.”
The hero elects to ignore that statement.
“It's been what, two years since you first appeared, nobody's identified your quirk. And now you use it right in front of me to... buy coffee?”
Wildcard raises an eyebrow, but it's not sardonic – more amused. “Yeah? You guys were taking your time coming up with pretty interesting theories, so I figured I'd give it a bit of a jump start. Besides, I like you. You're fun.”
“...Fun.” Alright, that's it. Eraserhead had him figured for someone eccentric, but this guy is clearly insane, if that's the conclusion he manages to draw.
“Besides,” Wildcard continues, sliding into one of the counter island chairs. “I've been using my quirk in a lot of ways right in front of all of you, but it's got those subtle effects to it.” He wiggles his fingers as if to illustrate some sort of magic or supernatural power. “I guess you could try and nab me for unlawful quirk usage, but from what I can tell, there's no evidence I've used it on other people or outside a private space. Not that I would,” he adds, an unpleasant twist to his lip. “I'm not gonna do that to someone else without asking first.”
He pulls the fabric of his face mask down so he can take a sip of his own coffee, and Eraserhead can't help but stare, committing the vigilante's features to memory. Wildcard looks up at him exasperatedly.
“Really? You've never seen anyone drink out of a cup before?” he says drily. “Rundown of defining features, then. Pretty standard freckles. Weird burnt-orange eyes. Extra cool eyebrow scar I totally got in a sick fight against like, ten guys. With swords.” He points to each in turn. “Awful cheekbones, boring nose. You good to let me drink now?”
With a scowl, Eraserhead turns away. “That wasn't necessary.”
“I'm really not that memorable outside of the fancy getup. In fact, you'll be hard pressed to find someone who knows who I am, even within the system.”
The hero gives him a calculating sort of glare. “You're untraceable and have no outside connections, then. Protecting the real you?”
“My real self? Ha, that's almost poetic. You'll definitely be seeing him in the future if he puts enough effort in,” Wildcard says, rather dismissively. “Maybe again later, if he's lucky – or very unlucky, depending on the circumstances.”
“You're talking as if you're two separate people.”
Wildcard watches him over the edge of his own coffee cup. “Gotta keep personal and professional life separate, you know? Though... I suppose this is more my personal life, since I do what I want instead of obeying rules. He lives completely different to how I do, so it only makes sense to not refer to him as me, yeah? Stops identity slip-ups.” He looks incredibly smug about the confidence he has in his secrecy. Eraserhead decides no matter who the alter ego is, he'd probably like them more than this vigilante sitting and sassing him at every opportunity.
“Why are you even telling me this?” he asks instead.
Wildcard shrugs. “Again, you're the first to find my place. May as well throw in a bit of a reward. I'm secure enough to toss out a few secrets – which you'll have to take at face value, without any way to confirm the truth of them.”
He says that with an odd weight to the statement, and Eraserhead is immediately on edge.
The detective who'd shown interest in the case is Tsukauchi Naomasa, and his quirk is a lie detector. That quirk is kept private, held under classified regulation in the quirk registry. Anyone who knows what it is can easily find loopholes to navigate around it; thus, it's of utmost importance to keep it a guarded secret from the public and therefore crime rings and villains who might need to be faced with it someday.
“In its own time,” Eraserhead says. “I try not to listen to most of the things you say.” He doesn't want to call the vigilante's bluff; he's not ready for mindgames this early into the night, and certainly not ones that could result in a leak of information if any of it goes wrong.
Wildcard, by contrast, has entirely lost interest in the conversation, checking his phone and evidently seeing something important on it.
“As much fun as I'm having getting to know my own secrets, I'm gonna have to cut this party short,” he tells the hero as he stands up straighter. “Well, homeless man, if you ever need a place to crash that isn't a cardboard box in an alleyway, this is a pretty secure safehouse. I'm only saying this because I know you don't trust me and won't take me up on it – offer's there, I'll invest in an espresso machine, no loud parties, lights out at 2am.”
He flips a peace sign, before vanishing without a trace. He doesn't come back.
Frowning, Eraserhead takes a very tentative sip of the slowly-cooling coffee. It doesn't taste like there's poison in it, but he's also not sure he wants to test it further.
Sliding the barely touched cup on the counter, he leaves the house, leaving the door unlocked spitefully.
He asks at the coffee shop printed on the cup. (It really is a 24-hour cafe. He makes a mental note to come back here another time)
They know Wildcard, sure as rain, but there's not a single negative word they hold against him. He's polite, appears without warning but has never managed to startle anyone with it, chats with the baristas, and usually adds several hundred yen to the tip jar on his way out.
He's also very reliably shown up to stop particularly rude or demanding customers on the rare occasion they appear. Since he started frequenting it, there's never been any criminal activity at the shop.
Ever.
He thanks them for their time and leaves after buying himself a coffee that doesn't run the risk of having a snarky teleporter tampering with it in any way, and he heads for his own apartment.
Midoriya Inko is neither foolish nor complacent. She knows her son.
She's not bothered when he leaves without telling her, nor is she bothered by his dietary requirements that basically required her to buy a second fridge. She's not bothered by the finances he inexplicably has all the time.
She's not bothered when he climbs in the window at two in the morning without announcing that he's visiting.
She's bothered that he stays away for so long and so often, though, but that's more of a selfish reaction on her part – could she really be blamed, though? She wants to spend time with the son she lost for almost a decade. She understands what he's doing is important and dangerous and he can't get her involved, but... would it kill him to stay and have dinner more than a couple of days a week? Regardless, she can't complain on the times when he is here, like now.
Izuku stands in the kitchen, washing his hands before he begins to cook.
“Hi mom!” he says brightly as she enters the room.
Their residence is a small and simple apartment, two bedrooms with a joint kitchen-living space. Still, Inko has done what she could to make it comfortable, all the way down to a kotatsu in the corner for the chillier of winter nights. (Or when she's feeling particularly lonely about her boy being gone, and wants the warmth of something there, next to her)
“Izuku! I thought you'd be away for a little while more,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face.
He waves away the statement, but doesn't wave away the hug she pulls him into, nor the kiss she plants firmly against his forehead.
“Nah. I was busy making friends with a hero – Eraserhead, I think I've mentioned him before.” He has. Inko remembers the first time Izuku had come home almost bouncing off the walls with excitement at his first run-in with the guy, all moody and dark-clothed and extremely competent. “I showed him the safehouse, and you should've seen how skeptical he was about the entire thing. I thought I was paranoid about security.”
They devolve into small-talk while he makes himself something to eat.
“I've been thinking,” he starts, and she looks up at him from where she joined him at the table.
It's hard to not be apprehensive when he opens with something like that.
“About?”
“High school.”
“Oh!” she says, surprised. More often than not, he was thinking about the fallout of his kidnapping years prior. This was a welcome reprieve. “Are you thinking of attending one?”
“I want to go to U.A.” He mentions it lightly, but she can tell – if he's been thinking about it, he's really been thinking about it. That means he's going to go for it, and he's going to get in.
“I'm glad.” He raises his head to meet her eyes. “I'm glad you've decided, honey. For a long time, I thought... you might back out, thinking it was all a dream you had when you were a child. Or something foolish that they'd frightened out of you.”
His expression softens, even as he reaches for more tofu. “C'mon, mom, you know me better than that. I'm nothing if not a force of nature.” He pauses mid-bite to watch her, amused. “Must've got that from you.”
She squeaks, red-faced, fussing with a bowl of rice. “W-well, I don't know about that. So why U.A?”
He taps his chopsticks up against his lip thoughtfully.
“Don't you think it would be a fun degree of pettiness to go to the same school that All Might did? One final kick in the nuts,” he says, eliciting a flustered 'Izuku!' from his mother. “But then... that's not really why I want to.”
Inko gives him a patient smile. It's good to see him thinking for himself and what he wants, even if it's not new progress any more – anything's better than the terrified boy who wanted so much to make others proud, and before that, to make others suffer, with his decisions.
He's making them for himself now.
“I want to... make connections, I think,” he says, after a moment's thought. “Akatani's doing a lot of good, but it's all alone, or regarded as bad or illegal because of how I'm doing it. I want to be challenged by things that aren't life-threatening, at least for a little part of my day.”
“What sort of challenge?”
Ah, but she's sharp. You don't get this far in the business of parenthood without learning to dissect word choice.
Izuku gives her a wry smile. “It's going to be nothing short of a nightmare pretending to be an actual teenager around other kids,” he tells her, and she laughs.
“I guess by this point there's no curriculum that could stand in your way, other than practical training in heroics,” she says. “Although, if they decide to pull anything like what you've already been through, so help me I will fight them myself.”
“Like I said,” he says, the laughter evident in his expression. “Force of nature.”
-
Tsukauchi stands to the side, concern stamped honestly upon his otherwise plain features.
Reports have confirmed the body to be that of Magne, a fairly renowned villain but still not one associated with any particular group.
Without any connections, this was just a random murder.
At first glance there wasn't even a cause of death. No outward injuries or bruising to indicate internal damage, no pinprick syringe wounds, no signs of choking or foam in the mouth for poison, nothing. Just a corpse.
The more the officers at the scene investigate, though, the more discrepancies show up. Rigor mortis hasn't set in yet, but it's obvious the body isn't recent. There's no residual body heat at all, even though the flush of her skin should mean death wasn't more than a couple of hours ago.
A quirk is very obviously at play here, but it's unclear as to what sort. Tsukauchi doesn't like the implications.
"Reports of Wildcard being sighted a couple of blocks away, sir!” the radio on his hip crackles to life, words shouted from it in a rush.
Just as expected, another piece to the mystery that has no direct correlation. He quickly unclips the mouthpiece, calling instructions into it.
“Capture teams to stand by, I want him brought in peacefully if possible. If he runs, Eraserhead has full grounds to pursue and apprehend.”
“Understood!”
Tsukauchi leaves the body to the forensics team, moving back towards the road. There's not much more he can do on scene, so he'll make his way back to the station and wait.
He can't help but feeling entirely like he's been pulled into something much too big for the police department to handle alone.
Wildcard notices the flurry of police in the area, of course, and decides it's not a good place to stick around.
“Why are they even here...?” he mumbles to himself. “I haven't heard any reports in.”
There's a shuffle of fabric behind him and he takes off running before whoever's sneaking up on him has a chance to make a move.
“Well, shit!” he says in a sing-song voice. He can't activate timeskip, not when there's a high chance someone has eyes on him. He has an inkling as to who it is, but he'll wait until-
Something wraps itself around his ankle, flexible and sturdy all in one, and he knows instantly Eraserhead is the one hunting him.
That can only mean the police in the area somehow knew of his presence. Something tipped them off, and now he's curious, burningly so.
The issue with them catching on to having all their digital records erased is that they stop keeping documents on him where he can easily see them. The truth-quirk detective must know something about this.There's probably far simpler ways to reach the guy, like complying and not resisting, but Wildcard has no patience for stuff like that, not when there's obviously no other active threat the police are dealing with right now. He has the liberty to have a little fun before letting himself be caught.
To that end, he lets himself get kicked off the roof with his leg still snared by Eraserhead's capture scarf, no doubt as a scare tactic, activating Timeskip as soon as the fabric snaps taut and stops him from smacking his head on the pavement below.
From there he untangles himself, lets time continue as usual, and books it down the alleyway.
Eraserhead pursues from the rooftop. Smart guy, keeping the vantage point as well as cutting corners by... literally leaping across them.
Cheater.
By the time the hero catches up, Wildcard is on his way up to the rooftop himself, clambering up a brick-walled building with a frightening amount of flexibility. As it is, Eraserhead manages to cut him off, pressuring him to drop back down into the street, but the vigilante seems largely unconcerned with being cornered.
“Hey, buddy!” Wildcard says. “Try not to smack my teeth out so hard next time, yeah?”
Eraserhead's hair lifts from his face as he activates his quirk, bright red eyes burning into the vigilante's. “We're not friends,” he hisses.
Wildcard puts on a mock-pouting expression. “I should've known, after I went through all that trouble to get you coffee you never even drank-”
Before he even finishes the sentence he flashes forward with a burst of speed, slams one hand up at the hero's throat while the other hand aims a jab directly under Eraserhead's ribcage, and flips him.
Instead of slamming into the ground, though, Eraserhead gets his feet under him first to land, and pulls hard on the capture tape, sending Wildcard over his head.
Wildcard smacks into a wall and slides down it.
A trickle of blood runs from his nose, and he pulls down his mask and wipes at it with a thumb before he starts laughing, entirely genuine. “Damn, that was savage! My fault for thinking you'd maybe pull punches for little old me,” he says, from where he sits on the concrete. “Well, you win this round – I'll play nice. You should know by now I work on a rewards-based system, so I'll hand over some info to the police. Shall we?”
Eraserhead shoots a level glare at him before tugging his hands behind his back and snapping cuffs across the wrist.
“Ooh, quirk inhibitors,” Wildcard says, clearly delighted at the level of security, while the hero busies himself calling in a police cruiser. “They don't really work the way you think, did you know that? Not a true suppressant, more like a disruptor. I guess suppressing quirks on a nonviolent opponent is kind of unethical, after all. Hey, but get this – it disrupts quirk use with a specific sort of dynamic current, which is why they use different ones for electricity-based quirks. Neat, huh?” He pauses to blow a drop of blood from his top lip; the stream of it from his nose hasn't let up yet. “Ugh. Didn't think you were one for torture, cuffing me so I can't wipe this. It's going down my neck and it tickles like hell.”
Eraserhead scowls. “Do you ever shut up?”
“Nope!”
He sits on the curbside before Eraserhead can attempt to restrain him with the capture weapon, only to receive an incredulous and all-too-tired-for-this-shit look. “What? I did get caught on purpose, you know,” he quips, doing his best to look innocent and failing miserably on account of the blood still running sluggishly down his face. “There is a difference between slipping up and feigning difficulty, you just went a step further and smashed my face into a wall.”
Eraserhead elects to remain standing, just in case the vigilante decides to bolt off the instant he lets his guard down. “Saying I believe you chose to be captured, why?”
“It's... how do I put this? Within my best interests to be brought in for questioning, clear a couple of things up. I mean, I sure as hell am mystified about this – I don't remember doing anything to get this popular with the police, but if I've accidentally sprouted a third persona outside of my control or consciousness who's running around doing crimes in my outfit while I think I'm sleeping, I'd really like to know.” Wildcard shrugs.
It made sense. It's less common for vigilantes, but there are a lot of hero copycats out there, which proves problematic for obvious reasons. If someone's parading under the name of a vigilante, the danger increases exponentially for all parties.
Everything devolves from there.
The police car arrives, in Eraserhead's opinion, far later than it should have.
He's never considered earplugs during his line of work but damn if he isn't sorely tempted by the idea. The vigilante doesn't need prompting; he springs to his feet with a yell that may or may not have involved the word 'chariot'.
“Yo, check this trick out,” Wildcard says, opening the car door with his foot. “Neat, huh?”
"Um,” says the officer, clearly not anticipating this sort of behavior.
“You'll have to get my seatbelt for me, though!” he continues, sliding himself into the back seat. “I could probably get it with like, my toes? But decent footwear is always important, especially at a crime scene.”
The seatbelt is automated, snapping across his chest with a sharp click. “Whoa! What else can this car do?”
Eraserhead slams the door shut.
The ride is a bizarre one for the situation it is. Wildcard hums a pop sort of tune to himself the entire time, eyes bright and fixed on the night city passing by outside. When Eraserhead glances at him through the overhead mirror, he flashes a smile that's full of blood.
Between there and their destination he manages to get the mask back up on his face, despite his hands latched behind his back. None of the car's occupants had even seen him attempting it.
At the station he's entirely amicable to the point of being chatty, apparently delighted by the fact that Eraserhead seems to be reconsidering his entire career.
The officer at the front desk pages for Tsukauchi, very definitely not picturing the two as a bratty excitable child flittering around a disgruntled parent.
“Oh, it's you, Eraserhead- is that Wildcard?” the detective says, appearing from a nearby office.
Wildcard twists his cuffed hands around from behind his back and waves a little greeting.
“Hmm. Shorter than I expected.”
The vigilante is left sputtering indignantly. “I'm impressed,” Eraserhead says nonchalantly. “Haven't been able to get him to shut up the entire way here.”
Tsukauchi smiles thinly. “My condolences. Hopefully he'll keep up the chattiness during questioning.”
The vigilante is amicable all the way to the interrogation room, where he stops at the door.
“So, I got a couple of ground rules to establish,” he says.
Eraserhead eyes him. “You're not in a position to be saying that.”
Wildcard fixes him with a level stare before making a deft movement with his wrists. The cuffs let out a very sad sort of click and come apart entirely.
There's a moment when nobody moves, and he uses that moment to continue as if nothing happened. “So, as I was saying. We do this like a casual conversation; no digital recordings, but writing is fine. Aaaand you don't ask about my quirk.”
To everyone's surprise, Tsukauchi deems these terms fair, although he has one point to add.
“We're known to work with vigilantes on occasion, when our need for information is greater than the issue of vigilantism itself, so we can be lenient if need be. However, you do know that if we find any criminalising evidence against you, you're obliged to reveal your identity?” he asks.
Wildcard finds this impossibly funny. “That's never been an issue for me, really. All of this is mostly to keep the wind out.”
Before anyone can say anything he tugs the hood back off of his head, pulling the face mask away again. Eraserhead's previous description matches his face accurately; the only thing new being his dusky purple-black hair, possibly about shoulder length tied back into a tight loop at the back of his head. “It's to stop criminals, villains, and civilians seeing me on the street, more than anything. You won't find any visual matches yourselves, though. Ah- don't do that,” he says, moving his hands out of the way just as a police officer tries to snap a new pair of cuffs on him. “I fidget a lot, those are just inconvenient. I'm not going to attack anyone.”
The officer looks flustered more than anything, glancing up at the detective, but Tsukauchi just nods. “I'm inclined to hold you to that,” he says. “Shall we?”
Eraserhead stands outside, watching. Wildcard slides himself into the available chair, answering flippantly while apparently checking out the room as the detective goes through the necessary openings to the interrogation. Permissions and terms. Consequences.
He realizes the vigilante is picking up all of the cameras in the room with alarming accuracy.
Interesting, but not unexpected. At the very least it marks him just as potentially dangerous in-person as he was out in the field.
“Do you have a name other than Wildcard?” is the opening question.
“All Might.”
Tsukauchi pauses.
Wildcard gives him that same placid little smile, wiggling his fingertips against the tabletop as if greeting him again. The smile doesn't fade even when the detective raises his eyebrows as if to tell him 'try again'.
“No? Okay, then, I'll try again. My name is Tsukauchi Naomasa.”
Tsukauchi almost drops his pen.
It's...
it's not a lie.
It's not a truth, per se, but his quirk doesn't pick up anything unusual about the statement.
The detective clears his throat after a moment. “Are you trying to guess my quirk?” he says carefully.
“What? No.” Not a lie either, but how can he trust that any more? “I just thought it was funny you were willing to conceal my identity, and then open with that. I don't have a given name, though! You can call me Akatani Mikumo, though, if you really want formal documentation. It's the one I use the most.”
Neither of those are a lie either.
Tsukauchi writes that down, managing to keep up an amicable front despite the feeling he's a little out of his depth.
“So, Akatani. Any idea why we wanted you in for questioning?”
“Absolutely.”
Lie. Thank god his quirk hasn't been circumnavigated entirely, or worse, broken somehow.
He forges on, taking the verbal response as if it had been the truth. “Regardless, dialogue for the book is necessary, so I'll tell you anyway. We have no case against you, just a series of roughly-connected circumstances, which are what we're trying to work out at the moment.” He slides a thin folder across the table, and Wildcard flips it open. He seems mildly surprised by the documents inside, especially the photos.
“Oh, these guys. Dead, huh?” He leans in to inspect them a little more seriously, before leaning back again, though his attention remains on the documents.
The detective leans his elbows on the table, hands loosely clasped. “You know them?”
Wildcard flips back through the pages idly, eyes skimming over the information. “Yeah. Well – of them, at least. Pretty big time villains, they weren't the sort of guys I'd like to tangle with alone. Wonder who offed 'em?”
“Other reports are that you were seen in the vicinity immediately before or after their deaths were recorded,” Tsukauchi tells him. “That's why you're here, specifically. Were you involved?”
There's a heavy pause, as Wildcard frowns down at the pages, not really looking at them. Thinking. “No,” he says, after a time.
True.
The detective asks about the hesitation, but he shakes his head. “Murder's not my thing, if that's what you're wondering. Thinking of possibilities. I'm guessing asking how they died is probing into classified territory?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” They don't know either, but still. Classified.
“Damn. Well, the most I can figure out is that it's organized. There's gotta be more similarities to each case than, y'know, my appearance.”
“Indeed,” says Tsukauchi. “Do you have any ideas around why these deaths happen to be around the time of your appearances?”
Wildcard shuffles the documents neatly back into their folder and closes it with a smooth curl of his fingers, pushing it back across the table.
“I don't think I have anything useful to tell you,” he says, his face carefully blank.
Lie.
“What you think is helpful doesn't mean-”
“Let me rephrase,” Wildcard says, leaning closer. There's suddenly a hard glint in his eyes, some sort of terrifying aura, and the detective is transfixed by it, unable to move past the thudding of his own heartbeat.
“I'm sorry, Tsukauchi-kun. I will not go out with you.” The look on his face is so sincerely heartfelt, complete with a soft apologetic smile and direct eye contact, so sudden and opposite from the threatning vibe he'd given off just a moment ago, the detective is left reeling.
Eraserhead can't help but smirk to himself. It's what the detective gets for laughing at him earlier about this exact thing; now the guy's locked in a room with the demon himself.
Tsukauchi recovers remarkably smoothly, however.
“I apologize if that's the impression I gave off,” he says, returning the smile. “I'm afraid you're not my type at all.”
“Oh, my god,” Wildcard whispers. “Hello, police? I would like to report a murder?”
Once the vigilante has gotten himself under control again (he alternated between staring at his hands and sputtering with barely-contained laughter), he stands up, the chair screeching against the floor a little from the suddenness of it.
“Is that all the questioning you wanted to do?” he asks.
“It's cleared up some of the more important questions for now, yes, but-”
“Excellent. I'm assuming you're going to try and run background checks and things, hold me here for the full twenty-four hour period you're entitled to, but I do have other things I'd rather be doing than kicking my heels here. I'll be in touch,” he cuts across before the detective can say anything further.
Timeskip kicks in.
Once it resumes, to those in the station it'll seem like he vanished entirely.
Akatani stretches his back, rolls his shoulders, and lets out a sigh as several of his joints crack satisfyingly.
He then proceeds to clear any and all evidence of the interrogation before flicking the lock open with a gesture and letting himself out.
There's video footage, of course there is. The electronics detection quirk he used to stare pointedly at the cameras leads him to a couple of audio recorders, one from the detective's pocket and another built in to the table itself, interestingly enough. “Looks brand new,” he considers; that, or they installed it once they knew he was coming, just to see what they could slip past him.
He can't interact with actual devices beyond scrambling the audio and doesn't want to risk bricking the police station's entire database, but he knows once he unpauses he has at least a minute or two to activate the remote access and wipe anything he needs to. He takes all the written information and looks over it.
He blinks.
He has a case file.
An actual case file.
He's so proud.
None of the information seems to be what the detective regards as useful. There's notable frustration surrounding his name with an annotation to look into it, but from what he can tell the most they can try and book him for is illegal quirk use in the past, and now escaping from holding, presumably with said quirk.
He adds a couple of changes in red pen, scores it out of 100 like it's a written exam, and signs it with a very passive-aggressive smiley face and a note to 'study harder next time!'.
It's cold outside. Heading back to the safehouse would be a bad course of action, as its location will probably be under surveillance for a little while longer if he's unlucky.
He turns and heads towards home, letting his clothes shift and alter around him into something a lot warmer and more comfortable once his wallflower quirk tells him nobody has eyes on him, and he's Midoriya Izuku once more.
His mother, understandably, is concerned when she sees the blood that's very evidently run from his nose: he very rarely comes home with any evidence of injury. She hovers around him, fussing, while he cooks for the both of them.
“I got interrogated today,” he says, when he finally has room to speak. “Case report and everything. They're officially looking into me now.”
“You let them get that far this time?” she asks.
He lets out a long sigh, threading fingers through his hair. “That's the thing – they've got information I'll need to look into. Someone's out there trying to frame me for murder, and the victims are some guys who had vague relation to... you know. The old gang.”
Inko's hands hesitate where they're wringing out a damp cloth to hand to him. “Do you think they know who you are?”
“Nah. I think I've just stumbled onto something big in the making, and they're trying to threaten me into backing off. The stupid thing is, I didn't know any of this was connected, so now they've just got my attention.” He takes the cloth from her hands, noting the tremble from them, before wiping his face. “You know I'm careful with my quirks. Only one at a time. They have no reason to suspect if I don't draw attention to myself.” He gestures at his face – his own, not Akatani's, round and young and solemn-looking. “Still, the police probably want to work with me to some degree, at least until these murders get sorted. As far as they're concerned, I'm the lesser of the two evils.”
“He's... honest,” Tsukauchi says in the aftermath at the station. The recordings had all been wiped or rendered useless, but that was what they'd been expecting.
There's no camera interference, nothing picking up his location. They'd bugged him, of course, a tiny little tracker chip fixed to his backpack, but it seems to have vanished entirely.
“We're still estimating a teleport quirk, which fits in with Eraserhead's own observations, but... the few users of teleportation in the registry – even internationally, we've cross-referenced – can teleport maybe a few metres at best. Wildcard managed to get far beyond this facility, outside any range of cameras, to say nothing of how he teleported an entire residential district over to buy coffee. He's either immensely powerful, or he revealed only the observable effect of his quirk and is hiding the rest.”
Tsukauchi frowns. Neither of those options are any degree of positive.
“This also runs the question of how he's scrambling all of our recorded data, as well as targeting any uploaded information. My guess is that his teleportation somehow creates interference.”
Further checks turn up nothing.
There's no records at all for Akatani's name, just as he said.
Even the house he stated and Eraserhead confirmed, has had no official occupants for at least ten years; it was slated for demolition after a villain attack in the area just under a decade ago, but has since been refurbished by an unknown party with no records attached to the manner of construction. It's lived in, certainly, but not in a legal manner. The electricity connected to it is off the grid, but there's no tampering with local lines. It's not... unheard of, as such, but they'll have to find the source of it and that's more than a basic overview can give them, so it's dropped for the time being.
“Are we going to do anything about the safehouse?”
“From the report it's just a regular home. He only calls it a safehouse to make fun of us, I believe.” As frustrated as he is with the entire situation, he's not sure why he isn't mad about the humorous jabs or energetic nature of the vigilante; maybe because they're genuine, not made in any malicious capacity. He's not out there doing what he does to openly mock heroes or the police force; he's filling gaps in their intel that they desperately need. The humor on top is more of a... package deal.
“I'm inclined to say he's only troublesome when we try to question his identity. Any information on an actual villain case, he's unlikely to tamper with.”
“So you're saying he should get a free pass by being irritating?” the officer says, incredulous. “You know the media-”
Tsukauchi closes his eyes briefly.
The media. A curse word to him.
“Yes. I'm aware of the backlash against our department if we let a known vigilante off the hook, if the public gets wind of it. No amount of grudging respect towards his skills is going to make much of a difference. They'll make us out to be incompetent.” He sorts through his folder, pulling out the records of the interrogation complete with Wildcard's additions.
“Perhaps we can come to an agreement with him. 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend,' I believe is the saying?”
