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Very rarely has Daichi ever pleaded in his life. The last time he even got close to pleading was when it finally clicked in his highschool volleyball team’s minds towards just how dangerous his mutation could be. It was when they had been walking as a team to the store to get meat buns. A mutant with pyrokinetic powers had tried to rob them and managed to Kinnoshita’s left forearm which he had raised in defense before Daichi, the only one with a mutation, took action.
He remembers his grandpa, the person who he inherited the X gene from, telling him about the war that almost broke out in the early nineteen hundreds, between the end of World War One and the start of the next one. Mutants used to be greatly discriminated against, feared. Many got surgeries to remove their mutations if they were one of the rare few who got it. But as activists started to grow louder and mutants actively helped end both World Wars, more people tried to stop anti-mutant movements.
And now, a almost a century later, they’ve mostly succeeded. People will always get discriminate against, regardless of whether their a mutant or not. It’s become rarer for mutants to be born too. And mutants have become romanticized too. Instead of being seen as people with dangerous add-ons, they’re now seen as people who could become superheroes, the closest the world now how. But back then, he hadn’t known how his team would of seen him.
He can’t really hide his healing factor. He doesn’t have to concentrate to have a papercut, scrape, or minor bruise heal within seconds. He doesn have to concentrate to have one of a few cuts heal faster, extra focus to make sure it doesn’t scar. He can’t really do anything for the enhanced senses and stamina that he only recently learned were actually enhanced. He can’t hide the almost fang-like canines at the front of his mouth. He’s told some people about the three bone claws per arm that lay nestled in his forearms. Of course he’s practiced with them sometimes against things like trees, healing factor easily regrowing them within a few hours if they somehow manage to break.
But then, he has to do something, or else the mutant would of killed at least one of them or injured them. And he doesn’t want Hinata, Tsukishima, Kageyama or gods forbid, Yamaguchi or Yachi getting injured. So before he knows it the next wave of fire aimed for Kageyama this time with his body. Sure his t-shirt melted off and he probably gave the kid nightmare fuel, but at least he wasn’t hurt.
But he himself? It burned . Burning hurts, a lot. And he can already feel the energy sapping from his as he draws on his healing factor, forcing his cells to replicate omre and more quickly so that they don’t have to see his burned body even more than they already need to…
And it hurts. He needs it to hurt less. He can already feel the strangeness of burned skin starting to peel off like tree of a bark and he shudders from the pain, hunching over instinctively.
“DAICHI-SAN!” He hears numerous voices call out. He grits his teeth together, opening his eyes. The left one, dang it, it’s damaged. His next step makes him waver a bit and brings him nearly face to face to Kageyama who looks like he’s about to through up, expression becoming more and more clear as his left one quickly heals itself, vision reforming.
Then, for the first time since grade school, he takes out his claws in front of people who aren’t his parents. The feeling of skin being torn open from the inside out as the trio of bone claws slide out of the back of his hands is nothing compared to burning skin, warm blood feeling like a cooling balm as it slides down his skin in a crimson river.
He turns back around to face the pyrokinetic. By then, his claws have emerged fully. He guesses the sight of a heavily burned teen still standing with literal claws dripping blood paired with a probably murderous look on his face for threatening to hurt his friends just for money is enough to send the guy running. And then rather unsteadily, Daichi turns around again.
Strangely enough, fear is quick to run through him at a greater degree now that they’re technically safe. But he’s not scared for his friends. No, he’s scared for himself.
The only people who know the full extent of his mutation to are Kiyoko, Asahi, Koushi, and Takeda-sensei incase anything happened. But what are they going to thing now? Now that three of them plus the rest of the team have truly seen his mutation at work, performing how they would of him just like other mutants had been sent out to fight for their country. He probably looks deranged. He can perfectly feel where the fire reached. At the moment, his left ear is rebuilding itself while the worst of the burns lower themselves to the severity of the ones around them. Along with the burned skin getting replaced by a new layer, pieces of his jacket and t-shirt flutter to the ground like ashes.
They look scared. Horror is obvious across their faces. Daichi watches a flake of curled skin fall from his forehead and past his eye as it travels to the ground. He sees Tsukishima of all people take a step forward. Daichi takes a step back.
“Daichi-san” Tsukishima tries to calmly say. His voice is unsteady. “Coach Ukai’s store is right there. You need to rest and you probably need a lot of food to heal yourself.” Daichi’s eyes widen. Dark spots start appearing in front of his eyes.
“You aren’t-” he slowly starts.
“Scared?” Tanaka finishes. “Hell yeah. No offense, but even with your creepy mutant healing or whatever, this is still giving me the creeps. I feel like you’re going to drop dead any moment now.
Daichi’s mouth slowly opens slightly. For a moment, he swears that Tanaka and Nishinoya have superspeed because all of a sudden, he’s being supported by the two of them. He lets out a gasp of pain because their touch hurts .
“It’s okay, Daichi-san. Less than a minute and we’ll be there!” Nishinoya happily chirps. “Although you may want to put those claws away. They’re wicked cool though.”
“I-I can’t” Daichi says. “My muscles aren’t fully healed yet.”
“He’ll be able to once he gets some food. My brother get tired more easily with his mutation.”
Daichi lets out a small sound. Nishinoya is quickly replaced by Koushi with supporting him to the store. Coach gets a scare but is quick to shove meat buns at him for free, which he’s quick to shovel down. It’s unnerving the way Hinata stares at him through the whole healing process, gasping “wooooah- so cool”. And then Kageyama joined him too, asking him questions about how he’s feeling one after another. Together, the two of them made him more tired than that whole ordeal had.
And, for some reason, they never thought about how unsanitary his claws would be. Because after that incident, they would freely ask him to cut stuff open for them: bags, zip ties, apples. He would tell them, but alas, only the adults and the girls are wise.
But now, he doesn’t have any of them with him, to keep the fear from overtaking him this time around. At the moment, he feels caged. He feels helpless and vulnerable. He’s strapped down with metal cuffs by the wrists, elbows, ankles, and waist to a porous metal bed which hangs from a concrete ceiling by wrapped around pulleys, keeping him above bubbling water. He’s been stripped down to his underwear. It’s not the humiliation only that comes with that part of his state, but also the cold. He thinks he’s been here for a full day and the only thing that has happened is a man dressed in all white with a mask covering his face coming and marking up his arms and body.
“We’re going to do this in stages” he had said. “We’ll do your arms first and then move to the rest of your body after that part of the procedure is done.” And then he had left.
He’d been walking back from a Marvelous X-Gene Meatheads meeting. And no, he wasn’t the one who came up with that name. Both he and Ushijima, to keep from getting bothered by the ridiculousness of the name, have come to just quietly calling it X-Men, since they’re all male and X-gene is too long.
It turns out that when he had protected Kageyama, that was when he had learned that Daichi was a mutant. His shock had been towards the fact that there’s a mutant at Karasuno. According to Kageyama, both his only senpai Oikawa Tooru, captain of Aoba Johsai, and the captain of Shiratorizawa, Ushijima Wakatoshi, are mutants. And even though Oikawa doesn’t like the other on the court, they get along alright off of it because Oikawa calls their meet ups Mutants Everywhere, sort of like a mutant support group made solely of a duo of volleyball captains.
So Daichi started going to their weekly meetings. It was really fun. They even continued them after Karasuno’s loss to Seijoh at the Fall Preliminaries and Seijoh’s consecutive loss to Shiratorizawa. Ushijima has ferrokinesis, or the power to control metal. The demo was fun because it was Ushijima lifting Oikawa into the air by the metal of the watch, causing the other to kick and scream obscenities. Oikawa, on the other hand can manipulate the weather. So if Daichi would be having a bad day or he wanted to make a weather bet to get more money, Oikawa was only a text away and he suddenly has two hundred yen.
Then Karasuno was invited to Tokyo for a week-long training camp. Their practice match against Nekoma, for Daichi, had comprised mostly of him sizing up the other team’s captain, Kuroo Tetsurou. He never had the time to consider the fact that he’d be a mutant.
He finds that out at training camp. Hinata apparently knew already because he texts Kenma and Kenma sent him a video of Kuroo teleporting. That led to Hinata telling Kenma about Daichi, who then told Kuroo, who then told his “best bro”, Bokuto Koutarou the captain and ace (ranked four!) of Fukurodani. In comparison to the two mutants he knows back in Miyagi whose power have to do with the control and manipulation of some external element, the Tokyo duo’s powers are more personal, like Daichi’s. Kuroo has the power to teleport anywhere and it also weirdly comes with him having to cut his nails every morning because they grow naturally into sharp points, all of their growth happening at night. Bokuto, to match his namesake, has wings. Large, white ones which are surprisingly thin, flexible, and strong, allowing him to wrap them around his body without anyone noticing; he just can’t wear too-tight clothes.
So because of Kuroo’s teleportation powers, both he and Bokuto were able to come to the next X-Men meeting. That’s the name he told the two the support group’s name is, so because of popularity, it stuck over Marvelous X-Gene Meatheads (not that the other two didn’t disapprove of it. They found it hilarious until rock paper scissors proved X-Men to be a cooler name).
And that bring him to where he is. It’s after Karasuno’s victory over Aoba Johsai and Shiratorizawa, only two days after the end of the tournament. It’s Monday night, meeting having been moved from Saturday night to Monday lunch because of the tournament they all participated in over the weekend. The time he slept before playing Shiratorizawa hadn’t been enough to regrow his tooth; it took two nights. It also just happened that because of testing for the younger grades, they don’t have school. And he’d been walking back from where he had been having lunch with them, in the middle of a call with Koushi and updating him on where he is in relation to the library, where he had been heading to for a study group with the rest of the third years. He’d even bought them snacks from the cafe!
And then he had felt a prick at the back of his neck. The world had spun for a second, and he had managed to turn around, phone and snacks dropped, to see his assailant. His eyes had met theirs when the next injection plunged into his neck.
He woke up in this state. Approximately a day ago. The only time he had slept was when another person had come in with an injection, apparently with a changed dosage to compensate for his accelerated healing. He had woken up with the marks on his arm and another man finishing them. Each time, there was always a new person. He almost managed to get that one with his claws, piercing cloth. He had pulled away before they could do more than scratch his skin.
Then he told them that the arms would be first.
“I see you have enjoyed your time?” Daichi manages to lift his head enough to look at a new man who has entered. He goes to one of the machines stationed to the side. It’s a large transparent counter which holds a melted silvery metal, bubbling and churning to that it can never cool. Hooked to the sides are two thin bendable pipes with needles at the ends. For some reason, he has a bad feeling about it. There’s a display too, different things flashing across it.
The man goes to a different machine. He wheels it over. It looks like a medical monitor but with more screens to trace different things on it. He pulls patches with wires attached to them and puts one on each of his temples, some on his chest and arms, his thighs, the back of his hands, the tops of his feet. Then he gets needles filled with different things and injects the contents in different parts of his body.
“Keep calm, keep calm” he tries to comfort Daichi as his heart rate on the monitor starts to beat faster and faster. “You’re such a brave boy, aren’t you, Sawamura-kun. Just keep your breathing even. You don’t know how blessed you are to have such a marvelous mutation. Because of those claws of yours, you got the healing factor so that your body can actually house them. As for those claws...I’m just here to make both you and them more efficient.” He walks away from Daichi and comes back with another thing. This one holds an X-ray.
“What those patches are doing” he says “Are sensing and sending out weak X-rays. Don’t worry- because of your healing factor, you can take it. Now, where was I?” He’s quiet for a moment. Then he snaps his fingers and raises a finger. “Ah, yes! Your claws and body are going to be made more efficient so that I can sell you to serve your country.”
“ Sell ?” He hisses. He struggles at the metal binds. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Lie flat, please” the man replies. “The bones of your claws aren’t smooth. They also damage surrounding muscle tissue and also bones upon entry and exit. Now if they were smoother , they could be more efficient! But according to reports, the bone heals itself to the same structure it was in.” Daichi grits his teeth to keep from asking what reports . He hasn’t even told his parents things that specific about his mutation! Not even the rest of his X-Men support group! Nobody.
Then the thing with the churning metal is taken over.
“My mutation, sadly, is being able to change the phases of pure elements when I touch it” the man says. “I can turn nitrogen into its liquid form, Uranium into a liquid slush. And they stay in that shape. Even if I were to die. But hydrogen . It’s metallic form, I’ve found, is very light and incredibly strong. It’s not quite a metal, so it can’t be detected by sensors or metal detectors. The metal is untraceable, it’s not magnetic- you will be a living walking talking human weapon! And metallic hydrogen, its impossible to create in a lab, and even then, no more than a few atoms of it. But I’m a mutant- we’ve made undiscovered laws of science just by existing . Why not take advantage of our existence?” He unhooks one of the pipes.
“So I’ve put some other things in here that will probably rot your sport-addicted brain with how scientific it is.” He doesn’t mention that his mom is a biochemist and his dad a physicist who both work at labs in Sendai. They love having debates with each other and him. “But what I’m going to do is put these in your arm and they will bind in a thin layer around your bone. Perfectly.” His eyes brighten. “And then, they’ll be sharp. Sharp and so smooth. You’ll be lethal . Your whole body will be. I already capped your teeth with them.”
Daichi’s eyes widen. His tongue quickly darts to his four canines and yes, they are cool to the touch of his tongue and when he slides it across the tips of his teeth featherlight, he tasted blood.
And then it hits him what he’s going to do.
“No” he squirms. “Please, no” he begs. The man cocks his head.
“I’m sorry, but this is for your country” he pauses “and for my bank account” he says with a chuckle, as if kidnapping an experimenting on a kid who isn’t even old enough to drive or drink is perfectly legal. Now that the needles are closer (he can almost feel them- they’re already radiating heat) he can see that it’s not just one needle at the end: there’s two others that branch off, probably so they can plunge into different parts of his arm.
Daichi squeezes his eyes shut and tilts his head back. He feels the needles go in and the burn is worst than why he felt with the pyrokinetic so many weeks ago. He sharply intakes a mouthful of air and suddenly the burning increases . He feels something enting his body and it hurt it hurts it hurts .
His back arches on its own and his eyes widen. His head twists from side to side, giving him a glimpse of the x-ray:
There is something entering him, ever so slowly. His mind connects the dots through the pain.
Metal.
This guy, he’s pouring fucking metal into his body.
Aaaaand now the pain increases. He screams, fighting to escape, letting out a slew of curse words he’s never actually said before but it fits in the moment.
“GET IT OUT OF ME GET IT OUT OF ME!” He pleads. His skin start to sweat, muscles tensing and flexing. He doesn’t notice the pulleys, the chains growing longer and the ceiling father as the tray he’s on is lowering.
“I’m sorry, my boy” the scientists says sympathetically. Daichi lets out a choked noise when the skin pressed against the porous metal is suddenly in contact with ice cold water.
“Please” he weakly says through the burning fire and the chilling cold. He doesn’t hear what the man says next because the next thing he knows, he’s underwater, and he’s drowning.
His grandfather’s mutation was a healing factor. The X-gene is carried by the male parent. His grandfather had fought in a war and he described how he could never die. Once he was caught in a grenade explosion. He lost his legs but he was able to crawl to them, position them where they cut off, and within a few hours, the muscle, bone, and skin had sewn together enough that he could crawl to a gun and protect himself for however long it took to recover enough to walk. On his deathbed, he said that nothing could kill him except his own body: healing factors do nothing for disease because of how quick they act.
Drowning isn’t a disease.
It was horrible.
Along with the spreading burning in his arms, there was also burning in his lungs. With all of that going on, the cold is pleasant. It’s distracting but it makes the burning feel even worse. When spots danced in front of his eyes, he accidentally took in water, choking himself even further. The world beyond the surface of the water, so far away, was blurred. He can’t hear anything except for his own screams in his head. He knows nothing but the pain.
He blacks out and he wakes up, each of those moments only a few seconds long. It continues viciously, his healing factor fighting to keep him alive whereas any other man would of been a corpse at this point. He doesn’t know how long it was been, but the burning has now spread past his elbows.
He’s going to kill that man, he swears. He probably won’t be able to make it back home anyway. He vaguely wonders how his team is doing: have they realizes he’s gone missing? Did they realize because Koushi told them because he never showed up to the study group? Did they find his phone? Did they realize that he never made it to practice?
Anyway, he swears he’s going to kill him. Through the pain, a new thing rises up: lust. And not for love, no no no: for blood. If a weapon is what the man wanted to create, then a weapon is what he’s going to get.
I’m going to live he chants in his mind between flashes of nothing. Just let it all out- gods knows how I’m still alive, but I’m going to make it. Under the water, his lungs finally lets him cough up the water he inhaled. He can’t really hear it but he can see the bubbles. Then he stops himself from inhaling more water, and closes his eyes, sharp teeth shredding his tongue in an attempt to distract himself from the worse pain.
He suddenly feels the metal holding him down disappear. He feels something warm press on his arms. For all the things he thought up before, it’s a shame that he’s unable to keep to any of them with how weak his body is. And then-
He can breath.
He retches, expelling the rest of the water that was in his lungs. A hand pats his back, helping him expel it.
“You got this, take your time. Bo and Ushijima are taking care of the bastard.” That voice. It’s familiar. Daichi squints his eyes.
“Kuroo?” He rasps as his vision focuses, body trembling. It’s so cold.
“Right on, Sa’amura” Kuroo says. Even though he’s wearing all black with cloth wrapped around the lower half of his face in an attempt to not be recognized, he did nothing to change his hair. And he’d recognize that snarky voice anywhere. Daichi shudders. The tears naturally leak from his eyes. His arms...they still hurt so much.
“Hey hey- how’re you doing?” Bokuto asks. Just like Kuroo, he’s dressed in all black, covered part of his face, and did nothing for his hair. His wings are out, their movements matching his emotions. A little twitch, a ruffle. He kneels besides Daichi, soft feathers brushing against his naked body.
“C-cold but alive” he says.
“Great! He’s alive!” Oikawa exclaims, jogging over. The sound of metal bending and breaking comes from behind him. Ushijima has his hands bared in front of him, twisting his hand and fingers to manipulate the metal in the room. Daichi watches with satisfying as the liquid metal is broken out of its container, quickly spreading and cooling on the ground. The expression on his face is the same one he’s seen him get when he gets bothered by Hinata being “annoying” during the match they had.
“What-what happened?” Daichi croaks.
“You’ve been missing for three days” Kuroo says. “ Right when I get home, setter-san Sugawara called me from your phone, telling me that he found your phone and a bag of delicious snacks in the middle of the street after you dropped the phone and sounded like you were being attacked.” Daichi shivers, curling up to try and warm himself up. He can’t believe he’s made so many people worry. He wonders what his parents are doing right now, how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking.
“Daichi. You are cold” Ushijima says. He takes off the black jacket he’s wearing, giving it to Daichi. He eagerly puts it on, the material dwarfing him, but it’s warm from Ushijima’s body heat and the material is good.
“Okay guys, gather up. You got the files Oikawa?”
“Yup” Oikawa waves a few centimeters thick file. Daichi sees his face is paperclipped to the outside. The information about what they were going to do to him. Because they don’t know what happened to him the past three days.
Right as he finishes the thought, he feel the strange sensation of teleportation and he’s in the Kuroo household. Not really a house, but a large apartment. His body, apparently, thinks that teleportation is soothing. The next thing he knows, his eyes are closing and he slumps, falling asleep.
“Wait, what !?”
“Tetsu-kun. Those needles were attached to a thing with molten metal .”
“So they what- but metal inside of Daichi?”
“I sense it is only in his arms and also on his teeth. The metal coating has almost reached his shoulders.”
Daichi slowly wakes up on a bed. He can hear faint, muffled voices. He notices that he’s wearing clothes- not his size, but still clothes. He escapes the mound of blankets he’s trapped under, wraps one around himself, and follows the voices.
“Daichi!” Bokuto exclaims, lounging on a couch with a paper in his hands and wings spread, draping over the back of the couch and across Oikawa and Ushijima’s shoulders like a a pair of arms.
“‘Moring” Daichi manages, collapsing on the space of the second couch. He looks around. So this is how Kuroo’s place looks like. This is where he grew up. “What are we doin’?”
“Looking over the info they have on you” Kuroo says with a wry smile. “It’s...not that good. We got to you before they got to the worse stuff. Besides coating all of your bones with metal, they were going to try and copy your X-gene and make other people like you, mutation-wise. Then they were going to amp you up with more enhancements ” he spits the word out “before selling you to the Japanese military.”
Daichi looks at the spread of papers on the coffee table. Drawings. Diagrams. Lists. Numbers. “Oh.”
“Also Hinata kept on calling” Kuroo says. “Can’t believe Kenma gave him my number. But you might want to hurry your healing up. Your country folk have no self-restraint whatsoever.” He hesitates. “Also...sorry it took us so long.”
“It’s fine” Daichi says. “Honestly, I never considered anyone coming to rescue me.” He meets the gazes of his four friends. They all look tired. How much of their days did they spend searching for him? How did they find him?
“Think you can show us your claws?” Oikawa asks. “They were theoretically supposed to end up sharper, so that means less pain for you and quicker healing when you get them out, but I don’t understand how without outside guidance they could of ended up that way.” Daichi hums. He looks down at his arms. They don’t feel any heavier. It’s just that there’s still pain because of the foreign substance bound to his bones.
Just as naturally as one blinks, his muscles shift his claws and slide them out. They’re sharp. Instead of his skin feeling like it’s tearing open, it just stings a little bit. They’re sharp. Sharp and shiny and really reflective.
“Ooooh” Bokuto’s eyes widen in awe “They’re so pretty.” Daichi twists his arm, tracing a finger along the smooth side of it. They aren’t uneven nobby yellowish bone things now. They do look pretty. But they’re deadly. He can’t mess up miss these. But he already knows he has a lot of self-control so...He really did become more dangerous.
“Hey, do you think people are doing this to other mutants to?” Daichi asks. “Experimenting on them, I mean.”
“Yes” Ushijima says before neatly gathering the papers.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Kuroo asks, leaning forward. “We’re the X-Men, guys” Oikawa’s nose wrinkles and he mutters the original name he came up with . “We’re mutants who have field experience with using our mutations for something other than party tricks! We can help the world.”
“Like superheroes?” Bokuto sits straighter.
“Sounds exactly like superheroes” Oikawa breathes, his mood suddenly shifted. HIs lips curl up. “I like the sound of that. Us, superheroes.”
“As long as it will not conflict with volleyball” Ushijima says with the bare minimum movement to be considered a shrug. Bokuto nods.
“And what about you, Dai-chan?” Oikawa asks. Daichi looks down at his claws. He remembers all the ninja movies he’s watches. Some of them would grip their knifes or shurikens between their fingers, almost in line with how his claws would come out, and they would twist and fight with those make-shift claws. In his mind, the image replaces with himself, dressed in all black with the rest of them, bone claws that he automatically pictures in his mind quickly shifting to deadly metal.
“Yes.”
“Hey, Daichi-san! You’re safe!” Nishinoya exclaims when he comes to morning practice the next day. The team is quick to swarm him.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” He grins.
“So what happened?” Koushi asks. Daichi shrugs.
“Nothing much. Just got kidnapped” some of his kouhai look at him incredulously when he talks about being kidnapped as casually as if he’s involved with one every-other day. Koushi grips his jaw, twisting his head. The silver haired teen narrows his eyes.
“Your teeth have metal on them. They look even pointier.”
“As I said: kidnapped.”
“Hey! I have a watermelon!” Tanaka exclaims. Daichi blinks. Why did he bring a watermelon to practice? “Can you cut it, Daichi-san?” He sees Yachi’s and Kiyoko’s faces wrinkle. Daichi nods. As Tanaka brings the watermelon to him, he gets a packet of wet-wipes out of his bag. He sees Koushi cock his head to the side.
“Sanitize” Daichi says apologetically, claws emerging. Now that the openings cut cleaner, it takes only a second of concentration to get them to seal so blood doesn’t leak. It’s awesome seeing everyone’s faces when he brings out a single claw on his right hand, gleaming a beautiful light silver (Oikawa printed out a guide to decorative knife maintenance), holding a wet wipe with his left hand, wiping it down, before cutting the watermelon. “Now Yachi and Kiyoko will also eat it.”
“What the Hell.”