Chapter Text
“Come on, just use it once, they won't let me on the plane like this, I have to fly tonight, come on pleeeeaase!”
You shrug off your sister's arm. It snakes back around your shoulders like some kind of alcohol-powered tentacle. “No quirk license! Let go, leech!”
Apparently new-year hangovers are far stronger motivation than any of your arguments about illegal quirk usage and how it’s not actually healing if you have to trade your own health for it. The tentacle tightens its grip. “I’ll buy you lunch! Dinner! A buffet!”
She’s never going to let up. You close your eyes, concentrate on your quirk, and whap her on the head.
"Ow, you fu- hey!" she tries to stop you rifling through her wallet, but you step out of her reach. "Why's my head still hurting?"
She knows it takes a while; she's just being a pain about it. You'll never understand how this drunkard got a job that trusts her to spend years on end in faraway countries, but you're late for work, so you skip the needling and just leave her to roll around in your hallway.
---
You stumble through the workday in a headache-y fugue (thanks, quirk! thanks, sis!). Looking at your laptop is like staring into the sun. Meetings last a lifetime. When lunch finally rolls around you give up, pop three aspirin, and drag yourself to the nearest pharmacy.
It's in the middle of being robbed. Of course.
"Fill it up!" the villain screams, jabbing between the terrified cashiers and the open sack on the floor. People stream out the doors in a panic. You'll never understand them. These places get robbed, like, every other week. You sneak along the shelves, grabbing pills as you go—you can just come back later to pay. You've done this a dozen times, and you'd think these places would have learned to accept online orders by now, but who are you to give advice? You can barely get through the day as it is.
You've stashed the pills in your bag, and you look like a petty thief, but no one's going to stop you when there's a much bigger, much more threatening petty thief, right? The siren song of extra-strength medication (and also the actual police siren in the near distance) calls to you. Time to get going.
You make it exactly two steps before the ceiling above you crashes in. You hurl yourself out of the way, slam into a shelf, and quickly get buried under a small mountain of sanitary pads. Your bag flies across the room in a slow, graceful arch, and you can't see where it lands, because now your view is being blocked by a much bigger obstruction.
"I am here!" it bellows. You grope blindly across the floor for your bag.
The fight is loud, violent, and lasts about five seconds, which is plenty of time to ensure that anything that once belonged to you is fully buried in the resulting debris. It takes excruciatingly long for the dust to settle before you can make your way across the rubble to where you think your bag got buried—just long enough for the police to rush in, which apparently is the hero's cue to leave. And he does. Through the roof.
You sit there as fresh bits of concrete and dust rain down upon you, and wonder what exactly you did to deserve this kind of day.
---
The police take your statement as a matter of course, and say they'll at least try to find your bag, but all you can hear around them is All Might is so awesome! All Might is so cool! All Might is—
All Might is a goddamn clown, is what your latest post says (sent from your laptop, because your phone was in your bag). And contrary to the adoring crowd earlier, you're not the only one who thinks so. Like after like after like. You have a very engaged audience.
So sure, your hobby is running a twitter account dedicated to hero complaints. And sure, that makes you petty and vindictive. But they're public figures, and if they didn't want to get personally dunked on they could have joined the police force like everyone else.
Like he couldn't fit his giant dick through the front door like a normal person, you post, attaching a news photo of him flying out through the pharmacy roof.
Like. Like. Like. Who knew it was this easy to gain an audience? Another notification.
Maybe he was in a hurry! People need help all over the city!
Oh, god damn. Another fan. You'd think by now they'd learn to block your account and move on.
In a hurry to shill his action figures lolol, you type.
A reply comes immediately. No, he had to go! There was a fire downtown! I'm sure he was trying to help!
Fucking hero stans. You send a gif of a dancing, middle-fingered monkey.
There was a family trapped in the fire!, comes the reply, as if your gif was a polite invitation to continue the conversation.
What the hell is happening? Who the fuck is this? You keep sending insulting images. They keep their one-sided defense going.
Fine. You dig through your image folder. You can do this all night.
---
You give up at two in the morning, around the time they're describing an earthquake in the next prefecture and you've run out of gifs. You don't know where the last four hours of your life have gone. You don't know anything anymore.
---
It takes a full week to get your bag back, and in the meantime, this one specific twitter user is making your life even more painful than it already is. They're on every single post you make, talking about how this hero's costume isn't stupid! It's actually to enhance her quirk! and this hero was injured but he showed up to help anyway, he wasn't throwing the fight!, as if you're running an actual news website and not an sns account created specifically for picking on heroes.
Every. Single. Post. Like it's a conversation happening in real life. Could you block them? Sure. But not only are you petty and vindictive, you're invested now, and if you block them, they win.
By the end of the week you're losing your tentative grip on sanity, your head feels like it’s going to explode, and they're still replying. But it's Friday, the day you can finally get your bag (and your phone, and your identity card, and your bank book) back. You rush to the police station.
A villain is in the middle of breaking out of his holding cell. Of course.
---
The entire precinct is in an uproar. It looks like his friends came to bust him out, which means there's a dramatic standoff happening between two groups of large, heavily-armed people.
You sneak across the hall and head for the pickup area. You're getting your bag, villains and grievous injury be damned. You can see it, sitting in a wooden cabinet, it's right there.
A familiar thud on the roof. The sound of cracking concrete.
You lunge for your bag, rolling into a corner and clutching it to your chest as the ceiling caves in above you.
"Fear not, officers!" All Might says, and you try not to think of how much taxpayer money is going into building repairs.
At the very least, there's something to be said about how quickly any fight involving him is over. The villain and his buddies are rounded up in what has to be record time. No police staff were heavily injured. You suppose there's a reason he's such a celebrity, you were maybe a little too quick in your judgement—
He spins around, salutes at the officers, and takes off through the same hole in the roof. Dust drifts down, coming to land gently over your entire body. You raise your arm to brush yourself off, and a chunk of concrete comes slamming down, barely missing your head.
"We need to take your statement," says the police officer, heedless of the fact that you only have thirty minutes left to your lunch hour.
---
"You saw All Might?" says your colleague. "Lucky! What's he like?"
"He's," you say, and your supervisor taps you on the shoulder.
"The police are here," he says. "They say All Might said the precinct was supposed to be clear of civilians. They got some questions."
---
HE'S A GODDAMN FUCKING CLOWN, you type furiously, staring at your phone, WHO CANNOT SEE PAST HIS OWN GIANT TITS—
"Oof," says someone. Your phone gets smushed against your face. You take a step back and realize you've taken a wrong turn into a dark, dead-end alleyway. You look up, open your mouth to apologize, but fear turns the apology into a slightly-inhuman shriek.
"Wah?!" says the giant, skeletal man, which is a weird thing to say right before undoubtedly murdering you, but you have never claimed to understand the minds of serial killers, or you would have been able to avoid this situation—
"I do apologize!" he says. You blink. He stands there, rubbing the back of his neck and looking rather sorry, even though you were the one that slammed into him. You're not murdered, very much still alive, and starting to feel a little guilty about immediately assuming he was going to kill you.
"Sorry," you say, looking at him properly. He hunches over, looking like he could pass out at any moment . You can barely see his eyes, and even in the dim light you can tell that grey isn't a color skin should be. God, even a bump like that could probably injure him, did you injure him?
"No, no, it was my mistake," he says, and immediately goes into a coughing fit. What did you do to this man? You have to keep watch. You can't let him drop dead.
"Dinner," you say eloquently. He looks at you uncomprehendingly as you drag him out of the alley.
"Apology," you explain, still dragging, and he still looks a little worried, but follows you anyway.
---
Apparently, it's a health condition, so you didn't actually injure him. You feel bad anyway.
He just orders soup. Seriously? No wonder he's a scarecrow. While you wait for your own order, you check your phone and realize you never did post that tweet. No time like the present. You tap the screen.
A very loud, very ostentatious ringtone fills the air. "Sorry, sorry!" he says, tugging a phone out of his pocket and poking ineffectually at it with oversized fingers. Then he looks at the screen, goes bright red, and fumbles the phone right out of his hands and into—
You swipe it out of the air before it can hit the soup.
"Oh, thank you," he says, relieved, and just as you pass it over you get a glimpse of the update on his screen.
"You," you say, clutching his phone in your hand, the phone that currently has a “...CAN’T SEE PAST HIS OWN GIANT TITS” alert message.
"You?" he says, putting two and two together at the same glacial pace.
You stare at each other. Neither of you says a word.
"Can I get you anything to drink?" says the waitress.
---
"It was not a conversation," you say, clutching your beer. It is your third one. You can feel the awkwardness melting away.
Your dinner guest, on the other hand, didn't have any drinks, and still looks incredibly awkward. "It was a conversation! That's what the social media is for, right? To talk to people?"
You don't know how to explain the concept of "don't feed the troll" to someone who calls twitter "the social media". Also, he was actually trying to have a conversation. Maybe you shouldn’t have sent all those gifs.
---
You try to make up for it by having that actual, proper conversation. You probably should have thought of that before chugging three mugs of beer.
“Heroes suck,” you say, even though he looks like you just kicked him in the face.
“They’re doing their best,” he says, but you’re too far into the alcohol to notice.
“They just come in, fuck things up, and leave,” you slur, pointing a drunken, accusing finger in the air. He starts to say something, but you turn said accusing finger on him and he immediately stiffens like a deer in headlights.
“At least you apologize,” you say, ignoring the fact that he didn’t actually have anything to apologize for. “At least you’re a nice person. We need more of you. Heroes can suck it.”
Silence. He has no comeback. It took an entire week, and you actually had to meet him in real life to do it, but you did it. You won the argument. You try not to be too overt in your celebration.
“Why are you shaking your own hand?” he asks, but your attention has already turned to other things.
---
It could be the alcohol, or the gut-clenching guilt (or both), but for the rest of the dinner you're the nicest you've been to anyone in months. You talk nonstop, you smile, you ask all sorts of invasive questions.
He likes heroes. He likes people. He likes kids, so much so that he's planning to take up a teaching job in a couple of months.
You picture him, a kind grandpa surrounded by his grandkids. That's cute. Heartwarming. You feel worse and worse about all those insults.
"No, I don't have a family," he says awkwardly, and what have you been doing to this poor, lonely, frail old man?
"Forty-nine is not that old," he says. Your poker face apparently doesn’t work under the influence.
---
Dinner comes to an end, not that you’re sober enough to notice. It’s about as much as you can handle to grab the bill, ignore his stammering about splitting it, and herd him outside to call a taxi. It's January, as cold as Tokyo ever gets. You can actually see him shivering. Before you can overthink it, you focus, gather yourself, and stick out your hand.
"Nice to meet you," you say, and when he shakes it you shove as much healing into him as you can. You're not sure how it works, exactly, but you don't care as long as it works and he doesn't die of any of his myriad diseases anytime soon.
"Wait, wait," he says, pulling out his phone before you can push him into the waiting taxi. "Can we exchange contacts?"
You blink, too drunk to process human speech. He wilts slightly. "I mean! I would like to be friends, or I would like to pay you back for dinner, or I would-"
"Yes, yes, friends," you say, grabbing his phone and punching in your number and trying not to tear up, this is why you avoid those tearjerker news stories about lonely old folk spending their twilight years all alone, god damn it.
"I'm not that ol-" he says, but you've already put his phone back in his hands, shoved him into the cab, and started digging through your bag for those headache pills.
---
You wake up on Saturday with the complete certainty that someone's actually drilling through your skull. Your sister is long gone, leaving you alone with nothing but your regrets and the stake through your head. This is what you get for wasting your health on some strange old man you met on the street, what's wrong with you? Today is gonna suck balls—
Your phone buzzes.
Good morning. This is Yagi. I hope you're in good health. I apologize for sending this message so suddenly. I would like to thank you for the kind hospitality last night, and if it would not be too much trouble, it would be very nice indeed if we could meet again for a meal. If you could update me on your next available day—
It goes on like this for two full pages. You don't actually know a Yagi , but it's blindingly obvious who sent this. The wall of text swims before your eyes, and you can barely comprehend half of it, but you can instantly picture him typing the whole thing out on his phone like he's writing an actual letter.
You close your eyes. You can deal with a headache. Maybe today isn't so bad after all.
