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Things got a bit weird with Eraser after their rooftop chat. Not a surprise, considering he saw her bawl her eyes out and snuggle into his capture scarf like a traumatized child (which...true, but he didn’t need to know that). He stopped actually chasing her, even though she still ran from him the first few times. Soon, instead of approaching her during work (where she still ran from him after being high on adrenaline), he started coming up to her while she was on break. The first time it happened she still tried to run, but before she could even stand up he was dropping his capture weapon on her head and sitting a foot away, staying near but still giving her space.
It was fucking weird.
The first time she could excuse; maybe something in Eraser’s conscience held him back from arresting her after watching her break down crying, but that didn’t explain any time after. He was approaching her like a stray cat, letting her run if she wanted, but still coming back.
And bringing her treats.
It was all store-bought, with clearly unbroken seals, and he always just placed it between them like an offering. The first time he had done it she shot him a disbelieving look that he couldn’t see, but she was obvious enough about it in her body language. He just looked at her, raised a brow, and opened the box and took a piece for himself. She watched as he chewed and swallowed, looking perfectly at ease, before she darted out and grabbed a piece for herself.
Gods. She was a stray. She might’ve been a little angrier about the comparison if she didn’t love cats as much as she did.
The meetings continued: at least once a week Eraser would sit with her on a roof, bringing her some type of food and do everything to convince her it hadn’t been tampered with so she would eat it. She couldn’t for the life of her figure out why he bothered, given that she was technically a criminal, but it didn’t stop her from eating everything he put in front of her (after making him take a bite first, of course, she wasn’t stupid. Eraser might be her idol but it was still his job to arrest her, even though he hadn’t tried since that night. Still, it wouldn’t do to let down her guard. She had been burned for that before.)
At first, they just sat in silence, eating and resting before they both got back to work, but eventually, conversation followed. They stuck to safer topics. She shot out a few questions about his capture weapon, not expecting it when he actually answered them. Apparently, the floating and independent movement of the scarf was from having his DNA woven into it, which she didn’t really understand but found cool anyway.
He tried to do some gentle prying into her private life, but surprisingly backed off when she drew back. They kept to simple things. Favorite colors, foods, hobbies. She ended up finding out that he did, indeed, have cats, and he ended up showing her a picture of them with a little needling. They were named Bastard and Chunk and she loved them more than life itself despite never having met them.
Meetings with Eraser became as much part of her routine as anything else, and soon she started sitting just a bit closer, shoulders just a bit looser, laughs just a bit freer. He started smiling at her more, too, and returning her quips with witty remarks of his own. Sometimes he brought extra food and they ate together, and once or twice he bought her a coffee, remembering that she liked it sweetened instead of black as he preferred.
It was nice, but Hitoshi wasn’t an idiot. She knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to make her comfortable, trying to earn her trust so she would open up about...anything. Why she was a vigilante. The bruises he saw sometimes that he somehow always knew weren’t from vigilante work. He never pushed, if only to endear him to her more but she knew exactly what was happening.
And, despite her best efforts, it was working.
She didn’t want to trust him. Sure, she looked up to him. Aspired to be like him. Took inspiration from his career. But in the event that she did open up to him, she knew exactly what would happen.
He would find out what her fosters were doing to her and she would get shuffled into another home that might be better or might be worse. She would get enrolled into another school to get away from the bullying, and the new one might be better or might be worse. If he was really serious about not arresting her anymore, then he would do his best to convince her to stop doing her vigilante activities, going on the whole spiel about how it was dangerous and she was untrained and how she should just work towards getting a hero license if she wanted to help people that badly.
He would do and say all these things, and he wouldn’t understand the fact that her life was the best it could possibly be right now.
Sure, her fosters were shit but she had had worse. As long as she stayed out of their way and didn’t make them mad (didn’t talk, ever, for any reason) they tended to leave her be. Everyone at school hated her and made her life miserable, but that was going to happen wherever she went. Her only chance at not being looked down on for her quirk was the Hero Course, and even then it was a high hope.
As for Siren…
Maybe it started out as a way to pass the time. A way to train for UA, since no dojo or community center around would let her take classes with them once they found out her quirk (yes, she checked, and the only one that would let her take classes would require her to wear a muzzle while in the building at all times). Maybe that’s all it was in the beginning, but it was so much more now.
She wasn’t a hero, she knew that, but that’s how the people in her territory saw her. Because yes, it was her territory now. Her place, her people to protect, and protect them she did. Almost everyone there knew her name, and at this point she had lost count of the number of times a child had asked for an autograph or a sweet old lady had given her cookies or little cakes as thanks for what she was doing.
And that’s to say nothing of the way being Siren, taking down criminals and hopping rooftops, cleared her head in a way nothing else did. Even on some of her worst days, Siren had become her saving grace. When she was under the mask, she didn’t have to worry about the vicious whispers behind her back, about the way teachers looked at her fearfully every time she raised her hand despite the fact she hadn’t spoken in school in years. She didn’t have to worry about the suffocating silence of that house, only broken by intermittent screaming or the swinging of fists. Siren never had to worry about a muzzle being strapped over her face like she was a wild beast just waiting for the chance to attack anyone in reach.
Let her fosters beat her, let the kids at school scrawl hate onto her desk and ruin her lunch, that was fine. She was out there every night using her ‘villain’s quirk’ to save lives and people knew her, baked her treats, sent her off with teary thanks every time she helped them. She made this happen, she crafted this little piece of happiness, triumph, and accomplishment herself, and she would let no one take it from her.
Not even Eraser.
~
Tsukauchi Naomasa had seen a lot of weird cases in his time. He had been on the force for over a decade (gods) and being friends with the number one hero and various odd underground heroes had led to some interesting situations. With how often he worked the graveyard shift, he had seen the worst and weirdest of humanity. It was hard to shock him.
But the fact that Siren was a teenager? That left him stunned.
He had been on the Siren case since there had been a Siren case, from that first night Officer Okuma responded to attempted mugging to see someone in a bird mask taking down a guy twice their size. Siren managed to escape over the rooftops, but it was the first-and only- time someone Siren saved was willing to talk to the police, even if he didn’t have much information to give them. Just a name, a vague description, and their weapon of choice.
A criminal was waiting at the station when the officers returned, admitting to a part in the attempted robbery that had just been stopped, with no memory of ever even meeting the mysterious Siren. It wasn’t hard to follow back with all of Siren’s ‘arrests’ for nearly a year, and their record was, frankly, impressive. 86 criminals and counting.
A teenager. A teenager had caught 86, now 98, criminals on her own, with presumably no training and no other weapon than a metal bat and her quirk.
It was still impressive, but also just confusing. How was this possible? Siren had caught more criminals in a year than most cops catch in two, and showed no signs of slowing down. How strong was this kid's quirk? What even was it? Shouta seemed as confused as him (not that most could tell, but Naomasa had been working with the grumpy old cat since he started as a pro, he knew how to read him) but was determined to catch her, even as she continued to somehow slip through his fingers.
He could only pray Eraserhead managed to bring her in. He didn’t want to arrest the kid but a jail cell was a hell of a lot safer than squaring up against murderers and rapists every night, no matter how capable Siren had proven herself to be.
~
Yamada Hizashi had been married to Aizawa Shouta for 10 years (gods, had it already been that long?) and he thought it was safe to say that no one knew the prickly insomniac better than he did. Which is how he knew very early on that this Siren case was going to be much different from the others.
Shouta was nearly frantic when he came home the night he figured out that Siren was a teenager, no older than their youngest listeners at U.A. To anyone else he looked perfectly calm, but Hizashi had seen Shouta at his best and his worst and every moment in between, so he could see in the tightness around his eyes and the tense line of his jaw that he was just as worried about the kid as Hizashi was, probably more given that they’d met face to face.
As much as his crabby husband would deny it, he always had a soft spot for kids. You didn’t just become a teacher on a whim. He especially had a soft spot for kids he saw himself in, which Hizashi knew was the case as the months wore on and Shouta went from trying to capture Siren to trying to get the kid to trust him, bringing her konbini meals to make sure she was getting more food (dangerously skinny, Shou had said, especially for someone out fighting every night), even admitting he had shown her a picture of their cats.
Hizashi hadn’t met Siren (yet), but he felt like he knew her almost as well as Shou with how much he talked about her. Every time they had one of their little rooftops meals (and Hizashi almost died from cute overload the first time Shou had told him about them) he would come home with some new fact about Siren, whether it be her favorite color (grey, because it reminds her of thunderstorms), one of her hobbies (apparently the kid was smart enough to just learn languages on a whim, already fluent in English and now working on French), or how she preferred chocolate over strawberry pocky.
Sometimes the new observations weren’t so nice.
He could tell when Siren had had a bad day because it always put Shouta in a bad mood when he came home. The days when Siren fell on the gifted food like a rabid dog, like she hadn’t eaten at all that day. The days when she turned up with bruises that she always lied about, retreating even further behind the cocky vigilante persona so she wouldn’t have to be vulnerable.
One time, Shouta told him, Siren had been so out of her head when he met up with her that when she finally caught sight of him walking towards her, she had flinched on instinct. It was so small that anyone without a trained eye would’ve missed it, but Shouta had intimate and familiar experience with victims of abuse, and he knew the tells.
Hizashi didn’t even know what the kid looked like, had never seen so much as a picture of her, and his heart still bled. If Shouta had a soft spot for kids, Hizashi had an open wound. He couldn’t stand the thought of a child so clearly in need being so close to their reach, and yet somehow miles away. Siren didn’t trust Shouta enough to open up, and until she did, there was nothing either of them could do except carry on as they had been.
~
She wasn’t going to eat with Eraser tonight. At this point, she pretty much had his patrol schedule worked out, and a logical man like him rarely ever deviated from it. Today was one of his days off, and on the odd occasion he did patrol on an off day he always made sure to reveal himself at some point during the night so she knew to expect him later. Such was not the case tonight, and she tried to convince herself the bleak feeling in her stomach was only her missing the food he would bring, and not his company.
It’s not like she was attached, no, that would be unbelievably foolish and would only end up with her getting hurt. People didn’t care about people like her.
She wondered what Eraser would do if he ever found out her quirk. None of the criminals ever remembered it (she made sure to order them all to forget ever encountering her) and none of the people she saved seemed too keen to snitch on her quirk, if they even really understood what it was.
She wanted to believe Eraser would be different, but if there was any lesson life made sure to teach her again and again, it’s that no one would ever trust her. As soon as he found out what she could do, she could kiss those late-night talks and shared snacks goodbye. She wasn’t chomping at the bit to tell him herself, but she was ready for it to happen anyway. Her luck tended to run like that.
She would deal with losing him if it happened. It’s not like she was attached, after all.
She was broken out of her morbid musings by the sound of a scream, and she started heading in that direction without a second thought, glad for the distraction from her conflicting emotions. Taking down the two guys cornering a girl her age was almost routine at this point, and she even managed to get them both to respond to her so she didn’t have to worry about any clean-up, sending them both off to the police with a relieved sigh. She turned back around to check on the victim and found herself staring into yellow cross-haired eyes only an inch from her own.
“You’re Siren!” The girl nearly yelled as Hitoshi jumped back, putting several steps between them and gripping her bat tighter on instinct. The girl didn’t seem scared of what had just happened in the least, bouncing on the balls of her feet and grinning at her. She had a pair of goggles nestled in thick pink hair, and her tank top was streaked with grease. Her eyes were darting all over Siren’s gear, and when Hitoshi looked close enough, she could see the crosshairs repeatedly getting larger and smaller. Part of her quirk, most likely.
“Uh, yeah, I am. Are you alright?” She forced herself to relax under the scrutiny, unclenching her hand from her bat but not putting it on her back just yet. This wasn’t the normal reaction of someone almost brutalized in an alley; for all she knew this girl could be working with them and this could all be a trap to catch her-
The girl hummed, nodding to herself as she finished her assessment. “Not bad, birdie. But you could do better.”
Hitoshi stared at her. This was, by far, the weirdest encounter she’d had in a while. “What?”
The girl somehow grinned even wider before sticking out her hand. “I’m Hatsume Mei, future CEO of Hatsume Industries! And you-” The girl-Hatsume-didn’t wait for a handshake, moving to take the worn backpack off of her shoulders and set it on the ground to rifle through it. “-are in dire need of some babies.”
And that, well. What the fuck was she supposed to say to that?
She could hear various clanging sounds coming from Hatsume’s pack, almost overshadowed by the girl's excited rambling. “I’ve seen you in action, mostly from sneaky videos on phones but also just now, and you’re doing great with the bat, really! But have you ever thought of using something a bit more versatile and easy to carry?” She let out a small ‘“aha'' as she removed what looked to be a metal stick from the bag, tossing it at her in the same breath. She instinctively dropped her bat to catch it.
“Twist the middle!” Hatsume was still sitting on her legs, practically vibrating in place. Hitoshi shot her a glance but she could tell she wasn’t getting out of this interaction anytime soon. Hatsume didn’t look like she wanted to hurt her, but she knew better than to assume someone’s intentions. She compromised by holding the stick as far away from her as she could before twisting the middle of it.
The sides of it, both thankfully facing away from her, shot out to extend what she was now realizing was a staff. It capped out at nearly the same height as her.
“You...you made this for me?” She breathed, spinning the staff slowly so as not to accidentally whack herself in the face.
Hatsume nodded, grin nearly violently bright. “Mhm! Press the button in the middle!”
She did so, watching in wonder as the staff smoothly detached into two smaller pieces, both fitting comfortably in her hands.
“Oooh, this is the best part! There should be a button on the bottom end of each piece, press one!” She was practically shaking in excitement at this point.
“What else could you possibly-FUCK!” She shrieked, dropping both sticks as one of them literally shocked her.
“A bo staff that breaks down into electrified escrima sticks! Perfect for your fighting style, although I’ll need to whip you up some insulated gloves for the shock, but they’re super easy to charge, and look!” Hatsume reached over and carefully clicked the electricity off, picking up both sticks to show her how easily they snapped back into one, and how quickly it slid back into the size of one stick on its own.
“This’ll be much easier to carry than your bat! You could strap it to your lower back, thigh, arm, or even under your hoodie!” Hatsume kept on, gesturing like she was making a sales pitch. “Plus it’s much more elegant than the bat, and criminals are bound to be even more afraid of you with a bonafide weapon!” She bounced to her feet, tossing the shrunken staff back at her. Her hand was still smarting but the sting wasn’t too bad, and if she had insulated gloves as Hatsume said…
But she couldn’t. Not the least because-
“I don’t have any money to pay for it.” Obviously, her fosters didn’t waste any money on giving her an allowance, and she adamantly refused every time someone tried to pay her for vigilante work, so the only money she had was from doing odd jobs in the neighborhood, and that was barely pocket change.
“You don’t need to! It’s free.” She raised a brow, not that Hatsume could see it, and scoffed.
“Right. An original creation that you put hours of work into and you’re just giving it to me for free. Sure.”
Hatsume waved a hand. “Consider yourself my tester. I supply you with equipment, you give me feedback. What works, what doesn’t, suggestions for add-ons, and so forth! It’ll be great practice for U.A!”
She must be aiming for the support course.
“I,” She stuttered, unsure of what to do when her luck had suddenly gone right for once. “I don’t know how to use it.”
“I can teach you some! I learn the basics of every weapon I make to test effectiveness! The rest you’ll pick up through experience; I bet it won’t be much different than swinging a bat and hoping for the best.” Hitoshi wanted to protest that she did a bit more than swing and hope for the best, but Hatsume wasn’t entirely wrong. She got better with the bat on the job, and she could always carry it around as a backup if the learning curve with the staff was too steep.
“You realize supplying me with equipment is illegal, right? If I get caught and this gets traced back to you, you could go to jail.”
“Bah!” Hatsume scoffed, not looking worried in the least. “Just don’t get caught.”
Right. That easy, huh?
“Look alive, birdie!” She tuned back in just in time to catch another thing thrown at her. “Burner phone. Figured I wouldn’t be able to get your real number, so this way we can chat about our babies!” Hitoshi winced, but figured she’d have to get used to that phrasing if she was going to keep working with her. “I also went ahead and made it untraceable for ya! The only number on there is mine!”
She stared down at the phone for a moment, pressing the home button and watching the screen light up to a generic wallpaper. For a minute, she thought about not taking it. Hatsume could be lying, waiting for her to take the phone home and running to the police to track her down. Then again, she had already given her a weapon, a weapon she had designed and crafted with her vigilante persona in mind, so she figured that Hatsume was equally guilty at this point.
She shoved the phone into her front pocket and tucked the staff into the front of her hoodie.
Hatsume zipped her bag closed and swung it over her shoulder. “I’ll text you tomorrow so we can set a time and place for you to learn how to use the staff. Catch you later!” She was tossing her a wave and walking towards the mouth of the alley before she could say anything else.
“Oh!” She called, turning back around. “Almost forgot! D’you have any other ideas for support equipment you might want? If you can think of it, I can definitely do it!”
She thought for a moment. She wouldn’t really know where to start with support beyond a weapon. Something that enhanced her quirk would be nice, but Brainwashing doesn’t work through electronics, so something like a voice modulator wouldn’t help her much. What else did she need?
She kept pondering before a wide, gleeful grin crossed her face. Hatsume returned it with little hesitation.
“Have you ever heard of Eraserhead?”