Work Text:
“...The difficulty should automatically adjust based on your answers to the previous questions. Do you have any other questions or do you want to just get started?”
The teen sitting in front of Aizawa at Detective Tsukauchi’s kitchen counter just shrugged. After hearing about the boy from Nezu and All Might, he’d been almost intrigued by the chance to meet Tsukauchi’s Yakuza foster son, Miyake Ohta. The kid had been “rescued” in a raid Tsukauchi and All Might had conducted on a warehouse during the bus accident incident a few weeks ago and living with Tsukauchi ever since. Nezu had immediately taken an almost obsessive liking to the kid in spite of the fact that the principal’s animal mouth made it nearly impossible for the deaf teen to understand anything he said. Normally UA avoided transfer students mid-year, but Nezu was determined to make an exception in this case. Small problem - according to the kid’s own admittance, he’d never been to school before despite being fifteen years old. As far as Tsukauchi could tell the kid seemed to be well educated anyway, but even the principal couldn’t justify enrolling him if Ohta couldn’t pass at least a base level placement test.
“It’s easy enough. I can figure it out.”
“Okay, I’ll be in the next room if you run into any problems.”
Aizawa slid the laptop closer to Ohta who immediately clicked in to open the first test, already ignoring the pro hero beside him. Hizashi had made it clear to him that being unable to hear clearly did not always make it easier to focus, but in this case the kid seemed to be using it to his advantage.
Wandering into the living room, he could hear Tsukauchi just finishing up a call with All Might. What the detective saw in the insufferable man that allowed them to be friends, Aizawa honestly wasn’t quite sure he understood. The detective was a mostly rational man while All Might tended towards the height of irrationality. Others might say that the friendship resembled his with Hizashi in that respect, but ‘Zashi at least could be reasoned with and he was competent at more than one thing. Every teacher was new at some point - and Aizawa was very aware that he’d made many mistakes when he’d first started - but the number one hero seemed to be particularly bad at it.
That final exam All Might had administered to Midoriya and Bakugou had been as much a test for All Might as it had been for the two of them, and Aizawa couldn’t say that he’d thought his coworker had passed, not that it would make any difference what he thought. Nezu was determined to keep him around regardless.
From what he could follow of Tsukauchi’s conversation it sounded like the pro had just landed on I-Island, and of course he’d taken Midoriya along. Midoriya was strong - Aizawa would grant that he’d improved in a way that had been impressive in such a short time - and it was clear that his quirk was similar to All Might’s, but did he really have to play favorites like that? It wasn’t doing any of the kids any favors, least of all Midoriya who was already way too obsessed with the man.
Aizawa dropped down onto the couch and propped his feet up on the coffee table. The injuries he’d sustained in the USJ incident and the bus accident so soon after had long since healed, but that many serious injuries in such a short time period were bound to take a toll on the human body. Random chronic aches and fatigue were the unfortunate side effects.
Tsukauchi finally finished up his call and settled into the armchair across from Aizawa. “Sorry about that. All Might is running down a lead we had regarding the Delphi Resort chain and their flagship location just happens to be on I-Island. That he was invited to the expo ended up being a perfectly timed cover for the investigation.”
“How’s the investigation going? Any more progress figuring out the specifics of who was behind the abduction attempt on my class?”
Tsukauchi shook his head. “Unfortunately not yet. We’ve gotten a few leads but nothing conclusive, and of course we’re still looking into the other trafficking cases as well, not to mention the League of Villains is still at large. Actually those trafficking cases are the reason I asked Nezu if you could be the one to administer Ohta’s placement testing.”
“Oh?”
The detective opened the drawer of the side table next to him, Aizawa noted the well hidden keyhole near the top, and pulled out a thick folder, a familiar looking ‘discarded’ stamp blazed across the front. “This was one of the thickest cases in all the boxes, and your name is all over it. What can you tell me about the Naruhata Primary School case?”
Aizawa chewed his lip. Up until a few weeks ago he hadn’t had a reason to think about that case in nearly five years. Considering recent events however, he wasn’t surprised Tsukauchi was asking now.
*****
Aizawa swung down from a light pole to land next to the school playground. He’d only come on patrol less than half an hour ago and already he could tell something was going to be off about tonight. The air had been tense from the moment he’d stepped foot in Naruhata. The half dozen cop cars he was now seeing parked around the entrance, lights flashing, confirmed it. Sauntering over to one of them he leaned against the hood and poked his head around to the open window where a rather young looking cop, probably a rookie, was fidgeting with his radio.
“What happened here?”
The man - barely warranted that term, he hardly looked older than the high schoolers Aizawa had recently been tasked with teaching - practically jumped out of his skin. “Oh! Eraserhead! Hi! Word is that four kindergarten girls were snatched on their way home this afternoon.”
Hmm, he knew his name. Aizawa supposed that was inevitable after how long he’d worked this area. “Any leads?”
The cop shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t think so, but you’d have to ask the detective in charge. She’s inside meeting with the principal - Oh wait, no, that’s her just coming out now.”
Aizawa had scarcely looked up when - “Hero! You are a hero, right? You know this area?”
He nodded. He’d never met this detective before so she must be new to the area. Unlike the rookie cop though she looked like someone who’d been doing this job a while. She flashed her badge, but he didn’t catch the name on it.
“Good. I’ve got four missing five year olds and six hours lost already to find them. Parents of two of them reported them missing when they didn’t come home from school. Third report came in about an hour ago. Mom had thought her daughter went home with a friend. I’ve got CCTV footage from the street behind the school showing those three girls plus a fourth, all of them students at this school, turning the corner next to the playground, but none of the four show back up on any of the cameras in the area.”
“You’re thinking they were grabbed in a blind spot between cameras.” Not a question. It was the obvious assumption.
“Yes. We thought we had something with one of the vans that had been parked in that area for a while, but it came up a dead end. I’ve got guys going over every inch of this school and the street and running background on the parents just to make sure we cover every base, but so far everything’s coming up clean. No ransom demand yet either.”
“I assume you want me to join in the search. Can I see pictures of the girls?”
*****
“And it turned out you actually knew a couple of these girls didn’t you?” Tsukauchi interrupted Aizawa’s narrative.
He nodded. “Nekozaki Kazuko and Nakamura Kára. Cute girls. The two of them used to play in a park along the route I patrol on Sunday afternoons. Kazuko’s quirk gave her cat ears, a tail, and retractable claws. Kára had white feathered wings. The first time I met them, Kazuko had climbed a bit too high in one of the trees and her friend was trying to get her down. Kára decided my capture weapon would make the perfect ladder. After that I saw them there a lot. They liked playing ‘heroes’ the way most kids do. Kára called herself Cherub. I always guessed it was a nickname her parents called her from the way she talked about it.”
“She was the fourth girl, right?”
“Yeah. Kazuko’s mom was the third report. Those two girls were always together so she’d assumed they’d gone home together. In the end it was actually the school who officially reported Kára missing. That was the only true lead they had at the time I came on the case. Turned out Kára’s parents were missing too.”
*****
Aizawa slipped from shadow to shadow across the yard surrounding the warehouse his investigation had led him to. The place looked pretty much deserted this time of night, but he’d spotted a lantern outside one of the truck entrances, and as he got closer he could see a man sitting on a stool with a broken mirror propped up on a barrel attempting to bandage his face. That tip from the Hotta brothers looked like it might pay off after all. They might insist that they didn’t do that sort of thing anymore, but they still kept their fingers on the seedier pulse of this neighborhood. It wasn’t too hard to persuade them to share anything they knew.
He came to a stop behind a forklift just out of sight, but paused when a second man came out to join the first, pulling the metal rolling door down behind him.
“I talked to Shoku. He’s still negotiating. Said for us to wait a bit longer before we make the delivery.”
“Easy for him to say! He’s not the one who nearly got his face clawed off!”
The second villain picked up the lantern and shoved it closer to the first’s face. “Oh, get over it! It’s not that bad! Besides, women like guys with scars.”
“Then you try letting that vicious little brat get at you! Why’d we even let Shoku talk us into this? Miyake told us he didn’t wanna get involved with the Italians.”
“What Miyake doesn’t know about, he can’t take a cut of. You wanna pass up the biggest payout we’ve had in months though, be my guest. The little devils are already gift wrapped. Shoku just has to work out the details of if they’ll be taking a second one, we make the delivery, and they’re not our problem anymore. It’s not like we got stuck with the really dangerous job.”
Aizawa didn’t like the sound of that last comment, but everything else had given him what he needed. The girls were definitely close. Erasing their quirks and leaping out, he had both villains subdued and tied up in his capture weapon before he even had a chance to find out what either of their quirks was .
He left them unconscious and dangling in the open doorway to guarantee they’d still be there when he finished his search of the warehouse.
It was a large building with rows of crates and shipping containers. Where to even start? The villain had mentioned the girls being gift wrapped so that probably meant they were tied up somewhere, that or just otherwise imprisoned. In such a large warehouse that didn’t help narrow it down much considering the small size of the captives. They had said they were just waiting for the word to deliver the girls somewhere else however. Would they already have them ready to move then?
A fleet of small box trucks were parked along one wall, and he headed for it. He started out attempting to open the back of each cargo area. About half were unlocked and opened easily to reveal nothing but empty metal space. The remaining half he resorted to banging on the sides and listening to see if he could hear any response from anyone who might be trapped inside.
He’d nearly given up that they were in one of these after all when, on the second to last truck, he heard something that sounded almost like a muffled scream. It was faint like it was coming from far away but also coming from inside at the same time. If he hadn’t been standing with his ear pressed almost to the side of the cargo area, he might never have heard it, especially since the truck had been backed up against the wall with what appeared to be just enough clearance for the doors in order to make it appear a less likely target.
A pair of bolt cutters found hanging on the wall near the warehouse offices made quick work of the padlock, and a moment later he was swinging the doors open… only to nearly end up looking like the villain outside as he was charged by a tiny hissing catgirl! His quirk forced her claws to retract back into her fingers, and the villains had tied her tiny wrists together, but that didn’t stop her in her attempt to hold off a perceived attacker. In the dim light he could just make out the figures of two other girls huddled in the corner of the cargo area.
Grabbing Kazuko’s shoulders as gently as he could, he held her at arm's length until she was finally calm enough to realize who was in front of her. Immediately she burst into tears and collapsed against him. He held her for a moment until her sobs had turned into sniffles and the shoulder of his costume was soaked through, before carefully turning her around and cutting through the zip ties holding her.
She stayed pressed against him as he called for the other girls to come out as well. Seeing him not hurting their friend, the two of them hesitantly crept forward and allowed him to cut their bonds as well.
“Kazuko, where’s Kára? She was with you when you were taken?”
Kazuko nodded from where her head was tucked under his chin, but it was one of the other girls who answered him aloud. “The villains took her somewhere else. Are you a hero? Are you going to rescue us?”
“I am.” He helped the three of them down from the truck and began to lead them back towards the door so that he could call for backup, Kazuko still in his arms, the other two clinging to his pant legs. “Did the villains say why they took Kára?”
“They said she was special,” Kazuko whispered. “They said she was going to make them a lot of money.”
*****
“You never found her.”
Aizawa shook his head. “The cops took Kazuko and her friends to the hospital where they were returned to their parents. Other than a few bruises, the three of them were uninjured. We interrogated the villains I’d picked up for several hours before they gave us anything.”
“The house in Sangenjaya?”
He nodded and stood up to pace the room. Thinking about what he’d found at that house always left him feeling unsettled. “By the time we got there a massive fight had gone down. The first floor was covered in bodies.” He lowered his voice almost instinctively even though he knew that the kid in the next room wouldn’t be able to hear them. Still it felt insensitive considering… “Looking into their identities turned up that they were all Yakuza, or at least had Yakuza ties. There were also places where other bodies had obviously been but had been removed. Upstairs was worse. There was enough blood on that floor for two men to have bled out completely plus samples from several others. Something was weird about it though. They ran every test they could think of, but not a single one of the samples they took turned out to be viable. Some of it was tainted, but the two largest blood stains were just… off.”
Tsukauchi flipped through the file and held up a picture of white feathers scattered across the floor. “You did find evidence that Kára had been there though.”
“Yeah, she was there. DNA confirmed those were her feathers. She had a tendency to molt if she was stressed.” He dropped back down onto the couch and rubbed his temples to alleviate the headache forming behind his eyes. “A couple weeks later, the detective on the case finally decided that she was either dead or trafficked somewhere we couldn’t reach, and the case went cold. I kept searching for several weeks… well no, that’s a lie - it was more like months - after. I even called in help from a few unofficial channels. Something never did sit right with me about it. The villains had mentioned the Italians being involved so I checked ports and airports, every shipping company I could get access to - not a glimpse of her or any evidence of her parents. Their house was wiped clean like no one had ever lived there. I did find fingerprints and DNA for her father at his work, but nothing ever came up in the system about him except a match to his daughter and there was nothing at all on the mom. It was like the entire family completely disappeared. At last I decided it wasn’t rational to keep going. I had other things that needed to take my attention.”
Tsukauchi had continued to shuffle through the pictures in the file, and now one caught Aizawa’s attention. A primary school class photo where a tiny cat girl and a girl with soft blue curls and white wings were hugging each other in the back row.
“I’d given her up for dead myself until a few weeks ago when I saw her again. I almost thought I’d imagined it when she showed up at the cabin.”
“We ran facial recognition on the video you gave us that Ashido took up there. Unfortunately it was a dead end. None of them popped up anywhere, not even for a driver’s license or photo ID. Age taken into account however, it does at least seem likely that the child in the jeep was Kára.”
Of all the things that Aizawa had ever expected out of his hero career, he’d never expected to find a case that would haunt him the way that Shirakumo’s death had, and yet… this case.
She’d only been five years old. Smiles and infectious giggles and not a fear of anything, a little Icarus that no sun would dare to burn - and he’d given up on her. Sure his reasons were rational, but in the end… in the end he’d made the wrong decision.
Heroes can’t save everyone. This was a hard truth he did his best to instill in his students. There would always be people unable to be reached. To dwell on them could paralyze a hero into inaction and anxiety. Save the people in front of you. Trust that if they can be reached another hero in a better position will try to save the ones you can’t.
Knowing that never made it any easier.
Knowing she was alive should be comforting, but knowing that she was with villains was the furthest thing from it.
At least she’d still been smiling.
Eventually the conversation shifted away from the case. He checked in on Ohta’s progress. Tsukauchi pulled out a couple of beers. They reminisced about some of the older, less traumatic cases they’d worked together. A couple hours later he collected the laptop the kid had used and filled in the last form to state that he certified the answers submitted.
Maybe after he returned the test to UA he’d take a walk to visit a particularly well kept grave before he went on patrol.