Chapter Text
“Hey!”
With that very loud and very clear interjection, Shouta’s head shot up from his pillow, feet landing on the floor before he could even process what was going on. He made it to his bedroom door in what was probably less than two seconds and flung it open, bursting into the hallway in search of the source of Hizashi’s cry.
Maybe ten, twelve years ago, he wouldn’t have been so quick to move considering Hizashi’s penchant for screaming at spiders smaller than his thumb. When a hero cries wolf too many times, the reaction time of the surrounding heroes tends to get longer and longer. With age and a mix of therapy for his entomophobia and long talks with Shouta, he managed to start handling small bugs on his own which dulled the effects of Hizashi crying wolf all those years.
Which lead to the quiet of this deary, foggy Sunday morning broken by a shout.
Shouta rounded the corner to the living room, only to freeze and miss colliding with Hizashi and an unknown person locked together in battle, trying to pin the other down. Years of pushing Hizashi to keep up his hand-to-hand training was serving him well as he held his own against someone who was very obviously more attuned to this type of combat.
All Shouta had the chance to notice was the mess of black hair on the stranger before everything went weightless for a moment. His forward momentum sent him careening forward and off the ground.
Having left a good portion of his brain back in bed, Shouta went with instinct and promptly activated his quirk, eyes trained on the assailant. With gravity turned back on, he hit the ground chest-first and hard enough to make his jaw ache despite it not touching the floor.
Once he blinked because of the impact, gravity immediately left them again. This time swaths of long, grey fabric seemed to manifest from underneath the assailant’s sleeves, wrapping around Hizashi’s chest as if it all was a giant snake, striking with potentially deadly accuracy.
Shouta finally got his eyes back on them, this time having his feet under him in preparation for the drop.
But they were just as ready as he was, pivoting on their heel and maneuvering Shouta into the perfect position to knee him in the kidney with full force. That half-second of hesitation, while he tried to regain his breath, allowed them to kick him away
Shouta managed to roll with the impact, leaving him only slightly winded as he struggled to balance his newfound weightlessness and getting his quirk back on the intruder.
What he wasn’t particularly expecting was a line of binding to have gotten ahold of his foot and said binding to launch him across the room. Hizashi must have gotten completely snaredl because he yelped just as Shouta hit the ground. With only the protection of the recliner, Shouta struggled to untangle himself and get back to a fighting stance.
Instead of that plan working, in perfect mimicry of one of Shouta’s favorite supermoves, dozens of feet of binding encircled Hizashi before tightening, pinning the off-duty voice hero’s arms and legs together. This left Hizashi struggling on the floor while the intruder turned their attention to Shouta.
This double-fucked over Shouta because now he was fighting alone and trying to save a victim.
Rather than continue to make random, desperate moves against someone who clearly knew him well enough to fight him, he stopped for a moment and held up his hands in a sign of surrender.
“Okay, okay, you win. Just don’t hurt him.”
This didn’t last even a moment as the slight glint of metal caught Shouta’s eye and he had just enough time to break for the front entryway where his capture weapon would be before the intruder cut the tie between the rope holding Hizashi and themselves, giving themselves the freedom to go right for Shouta.
Quirks could be canceled, weapons could not. And if he kept their attention now, they’d be less interested in stabbing Hizashi out of anger.
He didn’t make it to his capture weapon.
The intruder must have picked up that Shouta’s quirk was eye-based and thus even though Shouta ducked under one snare attempt, a second one caught him around the face, tightening over his eyes.
If Hizashi going down hadn’t marked the beginning of their loss, this is exactly when that mark would have been.
Shouta was a well-trained hero with over a decade of work under his belt after his trial by fire, trying to make it in the hero world. He had survived the Nomu, dragged his students out of more predicaments than he cared to count, and was still alive to tell the tale but that wasn’t enough.
Blinded, disoriented by yet another shift in gravity, and violently spun as to wrap him in the intruder’s bindings, Shouta ended up landing hard on his chest, forcing his own fist to dig into his sternum.
Someone stepped on his upper back as they grabbed the back of his head and pressed it into the floor, their blunt nails digging into his scalp. This on top of everything made Shouta want to scream as memories of the Nomu bashing his face in poured in through the cracks in his composure. Already he could feel the nauseating ache of his nose protesting the rough treatment.
“Listen close because I don’t feel like repeating myself,” the intruder spoke calmly to him, a feminine lilt to her tone revealing at least what Shouta assumed was her gender. “Even if you managed to jam the cell signal and internet around here, every apartment on this floor probably heard every time that I dropped y’all and the furniture. I’m going to ask a few questions and it’ll be a lot faster if you just answer me before the police get here. ”
Though not the optimistic type, Shouta let a flash of hope spark up. He definitely had set off the silent alarm before leaving the bedroom and doubtlessly either a hero or the police were going to show up soon. This woman wouldn’t be sticking around for long.
“-First question. Why the fuck are you in my apartment?”
Rather than stubbornly not answering, Shouta was genuinely thrown off by this question, leaving Hizashi to sputter out the first thing.
“Your apartment!? Unless you’re the one paying a hundred bucks too much a month for a place with an a/c that doesn’t always work, this apartment is ours .”
Hizashi easily pulled her attention but it put Shouta on immediate defence as he could physically hear her joints pop as she tightened her grip on nothing. In the past 10 seconds she hadn’t resorted to physical violence and hopefully the etrend would contunue as long as neither of them made her mad.
He still couldn’t help but internally flinch when she started snapping more at Hizashi.
“That is the most bullshit lie you could have come up with. Unless you keep an exact copy of my hero uniform and weapon, this is my house, I just got ready for work and everything is where it should be.”
“Well unless you-”
“Enough,” Shouta barked. “For God’s sake, we can’t both have the exact same apartment and furniture. One of you go figure out what apartment we are actually in.”
With red hot tempers forced to cool for a moment, Shouta was allowed to breathe and maneuver himself to be somewhere between kneeling and sitting just so the blood might stop rushing around his head.
After a solid thirty seconds, he was honestly about to ask them if they took the same interior decorating class because that was the only reason they were still trying to figure it out. Instead, the woman gasped, just barely detectable over the rushing in his head.
There was just a moment too long before she grumbled, “I’m going to have a migraine by the end of the day, aren’t I?”
Shouta struggled to track her footsteps as she made her way in between overturned furniture and over Hizashi’s prone body. It only got more and more confusing as there was the sound of something scraping along the wall in the direction of their-
“Hah!” Hizashi crowed like he wasn’t tied up on the floor of his own apartment. “Even without my glasses, I personally framed those photos and I know that particular one. Untie us now and we might consider-”
“Where’s your phone?”
Hizashi stumbled over his cut-off words. “Huh?”
“Nevermind, I see it.”
She stepped around them again, this time picking something Hizashi’s phone up off the floor.
“Blondie. What’s your password?”
In another situation, the combination of the nickname and Hizashi’s scandalized gasp would have at the very least put a smile on Shouta’s face which he’d immediately bury in his scarf.
“Nunya business!” Hizashi snapped.
“Got it. November 9th 19…” she trailed off as she audibly typed the password in.
A chill ran down Shouta’s spine as she had just casually rattled off his birthdate without so much as stumbling over the alliteration. It wasn’t like Hizashi kept anything work-related on anything other than his work phone and computer but a birthdate was probably not the best password anyway.
They waited in silence for a while again as the woman searched for whatever he was looking for. Shouta was honestly kind of chomping at the bit with his eyes still covered, preventing him from knowing anything else about the situation at the very least. And that didn’t even cover how he was pretty much quirkless like this.
“Okay, give me a sec.”
Neither man had the chance to question her statement before she had her hands on Shouta’s head, tugging his blindfold off.
“Readjust your eyes quick then look at me. Are you seeing what I am?”
There was just the slightest amount of moisture in his eyes as he tried to blink away the blurred pain of a too-tight blindfold.
She had crouched down to get face to face with him, steel grey irises meeting their match.
Shouta didn’t bother processing too much about her physical appearance the first time. Honestly, he hadn’t been certain of her gender before she spoke aloud. Maybe he should have at least registered the familiar mess of black hair and the dark expression matching the one he had etched into his face.
“We’ve got something a little more serious than just some apartment door mixup. If the fact that this is an eerily similar replica of my apartment isn’t creepy enough, I’m pretty sure we’ve got matching faces.”
“Jiko?”
The woman made a strangled and frustrated noise loud enough for Shouta to hear. “What the fuck? Is that really what you got out of this? Do I look like Jiko? I-ugh. Just wait here.”
She stood up and left towards the back of the apartment, leaving Shouta and Hizashi still tied up on the floor. It wasn’t long before she came back with Shouta’s hero license, holding it up for him to see. After a moment of fumbling, she pulled out her own heroics license and showed it to him.
He didn’t have the time to read and process anything on her card beside her hero name starting with an ‘S’ before she dropped both cards and reached for her pockets so she could pull out her and Hizashi’s phone.
“I’m pretty sure We’re almost the same person plus…”
When she turned on Hizashi’s phone, she pulled up a scan of one of the polaroids back from high school. It was a relatively simple enough picture. Hizashi and Oboro had their arms thrown over Shouta who had been coerced into holding still between them. It wasn’t an unfamiliar photo. One of the few that was just the three of them not doing something stupid that had been saved after Oboro’s death. Over the years Shouta had spent hours staring at that photo and was insanely thankful that Hizashi’s moms had made scans of all of their photos.
What shook him out of that emotional spiral was the woman showing him her own phone and photo.
If it had been in black and white, it could possibly have been mistaken for one of Shouta’s. Instead, in this goofy rendition where Oboro had Hizashi dipped down to the ground, his very ginger hair almost touching the grass. Off to the side stood an almost identical copy of Shouta save for minute details.
“That’s me, by the way,” the woman mumbled, pointing at the Aizawa copy. “You wouldn’t expect that damn Y chromosome looking at me but I’d bet real money that we’re identical down to our DNA.”
She hadn’t bothered to show Hizashi which bothered Shouta a little but he was distracted with the other revelations she was still spouting.
Satisfied with his reaction, she stood back up. “My name is Aizawa Shouko. I’m thirty-one years old and a teacher at UA high. I am also an underground hero and go by the name Starshine.”
She didn’t continue, looking to Shouta for a response. Instead, Hizashi got to it first.
“Cool dramatic introduction,” Hizashi grumbled from where he was still stuck laying against the ground. “-but that doesn’t explain where the hell you came from or why you’re in our apartment.”
Rather than an understandably annoyed reaction, Shouko just huffed out a laugh, grinning at Hizashi with the same “baby eater” smile Eraserhead was infamous for. Rather than just comment, she reached down, grabbing Hizashi’s binds, and helped him sit up to look her in the eye.
“Well, considering my Hizashi isn’t a bottle blond, I’d say I came here from another dimension. I’ve got no idea how or why but I’m here and I don’t think I’m leaving too soon.”
Shouta sighed over Hizashi trying to refute her bottle-blond comment. He wished he had his hands free to rub at his aching temples.
“Is this our punishment for being optimistic about a Monday morning?”
