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There’s a tugging at his arms and at his shoulders.
He can’t breathe, a feeling of something cold being poured down his throat, a horrible pressure pressing outward at his neck and there’s a rough texture at his lips. Is he—did he get hit in the head? Yes, that has to be it. That would account for the feeling of floating…
What is…this...
He feels too much and understands far too little, but it’s no matter, really—the darkness has no answers for him, anyway.
The feeling at his neck is back. Opening his eyes seems entirely out of the question and Izuku is confused as to how his muddled thoughts can even put together that much, but the feeling is back. It comes to him in a disturbing epiphany that they have placed something in him. Something down his throat—
He doesn’t know if his arms are moving or if he’s imagining it, but he claws at his face—at his lips, at the tubing being shoved down his esophagus.
“...stop….hold o-……...edative…”
The words fade and half of them don’t make sense but he thrashes anyway, desperate to avoid sleep again. If he sleeps he won’t wake, this he is certain of with every slow, clumsily-firing synapse of his brain, and he feels the calming presence of One for All hum underneath his skin when he calls for it.
“Get security!”
He won’t let them take him like this, not when he’s in the darkness and they’ve done something to him he doesn’t understand—
“Shh, my boy. It’s alright, it's alright—” a voice rings clear. For a moment, Izuku goes still, something instinctive compelling him to listen, to reach out for that sound...a nice sound. A good sound.
And then the object is roughly pulled from his throat and is replaced by long, crooked fingers that have him retching for what he thinks must be forever, before he passes into the darkness again.
Toshinori stands back, watching as nurses and doctors man-handle Midoriya’s body, limp and unconscious as it is. He can feel saliva and bile beginning to dry at his knuckles, and the thought sickens him for reasons far more complicated than the mere presence of the bodily fluids.
His own panic bleeds from him, as he takes deep breaths that tug uncomfortably at his scar tissue that lays tight across his abdomen. He rubs at it absently, eyes never leaving his protege—his boy. Midoriya had been prepared to use One for All; Toshinori could feel it with each building breath of ozone and with the energy he felt crawling under the boy’s skin from where he had placed his hand in an attempt at comfort.
When the nurse had called for security, Toshinori quickly jumped to delay that for as long as possible: “Please, let me calm him. He’ll listen to me— He’ll quiet down for me.”
And then Toshinori had stuck his own knuckles down the boy’s throat in order to finish what the stomach pump would have done had it been given the chance: rid the boy of the poison that was slowly eating away at him from the inside out.
It had been such an enjoyable day, up until a little over an hour ago. Rare time spent together at an outdoor market, a slow and soft Saturday afternoon that began with a wave goodbye from Inko as Toshinori had picked the boy up at his front door. Midoriya’s red shoes had been gleaming from a fresh clean, he could tell; his boy was excited.
If only Toshinori could have known how things would end up—with a man using his quirk, some kind of poisonous substance, in the sweet buns he was selling—he would have left the boy home with his mother. Safe. Unharmed.
But instead, Toshinori bought one with his own money and handed over the treat with his own hands.
It wasn’t long before people started dropping around them.
Midoriya had figured it out first, eyeing a woman who dropped to her knees with some white substance foaming out of her mouth, remains of a bun clutched in her hand, but Toshinori was soon to follow.
“Midoriya, did you take a bite—”
His question had gone unanswered, possibly unheard as Midoriya leapt into action, turning over those who heaved from poison wracking their bodies, and comforting those who couldn’t breathe.
Toshinori couldn’t breathe either.
“My boy— Midoriya! You must stop moving, you’ll only quicken the effects!” Toshinori had yelled, ashamed that his first and most pressing thoughts were not of the numerous civilians in need, but of his boy, his student, who had not begun to feel the consequences of the poison he had ingested but was only delaying the inevitable—
And then his boy had stopped. As he dropped to the ground, knees folding like damp paper, Toshinori had not been fast enough to prevent his skull from cracking against the pavement.
Then the seizing had started.
Toshinori’s mind replays Midoriya’s distress without reprieve, taunting and tearing at his broken insides with no concern at all for his well-being. The ambulance ride, glaring fluorescent lighting that whipped by Toshinori as they wheeled Midoriya into a room, tubes and needles and unknown antidotes, all play by in a blur. And then there’s the matter of what he’d done with his own hand. Absently he notes he needs to move and go wash the evidence of the terror he had felt from his skin, but moving seems nigh on impossible at the moment.
He had to do it—Midoriya would have only lost himself further to the anxiety that being half-awake and restrained would have caused. He can’t forget the way the boy had scratched at his own skin in his attempt to tear the tube away, Toshinori’s eyes looking to the blood red marks that stain Midoriya’s lips, nose, cheeks—self-inflicted violence on his peacefully sleeping face. Toshinori wants to soothe them, wipe away the evidence with a cool cloth, clean the rest of the results of his boy’s suffering from freckled skin.
The nurses still shuffle around him from where he stands, more like a shadow than a man he thinks, as he looks down at Midoriya who appears pale and so, so young upon the bed. Midoriya’s chin tucks into his chest unnaturally, neck turned at a soon-to-be-painful angle, and as soon as the nurses leave them be, Toshinori will do something about it. He’ll place strong arms under thin sheets to ward the cold, and he’ll adjust the boy’s head to lie flat upon the pillow.
It’s the least he can do.
“Are you his guardian, sir?” a nurse directs at him, startling him from his labyrinthine thoughts. Toshinori blinks.
“N-no, but I was with him. He’s my...student. Will he be alright?”
The woman eyes him warily for a moment, her short brunette bob swaying about her chin. “Are his parents on the way? Normally we would like to inform them first.”
It washes over him like a heavy, crushing wave that he hasn’t told Inko, too caught up in the commotion and subsequent guilt of his actions to do any of this properly. He must do better, he resolves within himself. He straightens his shoulders as he answers the nurse, “I will call her immediately. I apologize, things have been moving quickly, is there any way you can give me a general overview of his health? Will he be ok? ...Please.”
Toshinori is prepared for the woman to fight him, but instead she shifts on her feet impatiently, as if she has other places to be; Toshinori assumes she does.
“His vitals are stable and the antibodies in his blood have gone to work, aided by the antidote given intravenously. Information was sent ahead by law enforcement regarding the quirk used on the numerous patients we’ve received,” she rushes out all in one breath. After taking another deep one, “Please tell his parents this when they arrive if I’m not around.” And with that she turns on her heel, sole making a small noise as she leaves out the open door that the rest of the staff had vacated the minute prior.
It’s only himself and Midoriya left now.
The boy’s breathing is a calming constant as Toshinori takes the chair that sits crooked next to the bed, and he doesn’t hesitate to reach out and grab at the hand nearest him as he sits. Midoriya’s skin is clammy, still sticky with sweat from his earlier discomfort and it twists something in Toshinori’s gut.
“I’m sorry for what I did, my boy...but I find I can’t hate it too much if you’re well on your way to recovering.”
Midoriya inhales deeply and sighs in his sleep, the hair at his forehead that has loosened to hang in a tight curl between his brow swaying back and forth. Toshinori reaches up and puts it back in place with his fingers, combing them once through Midoriya’s hair. The slight frown lines between the boy’s eyes seem to lessen, if only by a bit.
Toshinori smiles. That’s my boy.
And then he dials Inko’s number.