Work Text:
(15:40) Shigaraki Tomura
whatcha up to
Overhaul turns his phone over and glances at the text when he feels it vibrate. Right now it’s on silent except for a select few numbers that he’ll still be notified for. Across the table in the dark paneled Gunga Villa executive office, Rikiya (Yotsubashi, not Katsukame) idly flips a pen as he goes over their recruitment efforts with the rest of the leadership. They’re all listening attentively.
Overhaul respects Rikiya - Re-Destro, whatever he goes by. He keeps his team in line.
Shigaraki is supposed to be out of the country in China on a mission to hunt down one of that country’s big-name villains and either recruit them or eliminate them. A diplomatic vacation. Of the three leaders that constitute the triumvirate Shigaraki is certainly the most flamboyant, and, as Overhaul has eventually come to appreciate, the best suited for this kind of external management job. Especially now, since he’s matured and grown so much since they first met.
They’ve both grown.
(15:41)
Meeting with leadership
Need something?
(15:43) Shigaraki Tomura
picked you up a present
happy anniverasry
He narrows his eyes. Trumpet shoots him a curious look. Really..? Was it… October, that’s right, actually. He’s surprised that Shigaraki remembers. They usually don’t pay much attention to these things, especially now that so much of their time together has been monopolized by Hiroto.
But it is their anniversary, strictly, according to their marriage license. Overhaul hadn’t been sure if the marriage would stick so he hadn’t bothered celebrating the first several, but now they were a good several years into their domestic partnership. Usually they both forgot about it until weeks later and tried to make up for it with blowjobs and gift cards. He’d be lying if he says that he wasn’t a little pleased that he’d remembered this time.
(15:44)
Should I be concerned
(15:46) Shigaraki Tomura
excited
a treat for you and Hiro, my favorite men
Underneath his mask Overhaul smiles as he clicks his phone off, trying to ignore the little flicker of warmth he feels in his chest. Even after years together, the wretched League iconoclast still has this hold on him. They’ve seen every facet of each other and every grimy corner of the other’s minds - they’ve physically and psychologically fused themselves together, that’s how close they are - and yet he still falls a little bit more for him each time he sees him. In love or into hell, who’s to say. He’s already probably in the latter.
“Anything newsworthy?” Curious asks from next to him, flashing her lovely, manicured smirk. He remembers that he’s supposed to be paying attention to the discussion, not texting his husband.
“Nothing urgent,” he says, slipping his phone underneath some of the papers on the lacquer conference table in front of him. “You’ll find out what it is as soon as I do.”
Knowing Shigaraki, if he’s this excited about a gift then it was going to be something violent and spectacular, and he can’t even begin to speculate what it is.
He puts on his second mask of executive indifference and gets back to work.
Later, once the meeting is over and the members of the former MLA command are filing out with their processional congeniality that he despises, he stops and looks out from one of the high bay windows that face the side of the mansion. It’s a crisp day in October, the trees at the edge of the grounds are just starting to yellow and the window glass is cool against his face. Curious’s inane chatter fades into the background as he watches the leaves gently rustle in the breeze like ocean waves.
From the forest below he sees two figures lope out - Chrono and Ryota, probably done with their morning sharpshooting practice. He’d been hearing the distant crack-crack of their firearms all meeting.
They’re tiny figures from this far up, but they look loose, congenial, a little muddy. Chrono always said that he belonged in the city, like Esuha where they grew up, but he’d still been raising Ryota like an English nobleman hunting in the woods, practicing marksmanship and tracking. He seemed like an excellent mentor; Overhaul would find himself watching their combat sessions and father-son sharpshooter contests with intermingled pride and envy. Ryota was so energetic, so eager to please, bouncing back to his feet with fists up every time he was thrown with Dabiesque spunk. Charming and personable, although a little inclined to disobedience. He must be a joy to teach.
He thins his lips and turns away. Bitterness is always a bad look for a leader.
He should find Hiroto. It’s technically a weekend, and so the boys are spared from lessons for the morning to focus on their particular skills; since Ryota didn’t inherit a power quirk he didn’t need specific training, but Hiroto still couldn’t use his Churn for anything resembling an offensive attack even after years of practice. They were overdue for a session in inorganic overhaul.
Overhaul makes his way through the maze of hallways from the administrative side of the building to the living spaces in the East wing. It’s quiet this morning; the air is cool and dark except for the rich slices of light coming in from the windows. He doesn’t really notice that, though, he’s looking through bedrooms to find his son. First Hiroto’s, then Ryota’s next door, then Chrono and Dabi’s, and then the little tatami-mat anteroom that they converted into a classroom for the boys.
It’s there that he finds him, curled up at the chabudai table in one of Shigaraki’s hoodies with a little fortress of books around him. They’re old textbooks, Overhaul recognizes, ones that he picked up during the Quirk Erasure project when the research that he’d found on the internet was too limited by scientific morality. The old-fashioned books had a primitive honesty about the speculative origins and potential treatment of the Quirk pandemic, and so he’d collected them whenever he found them.
Hiroto’s reading one that Overhaul had annotated years ago, he sees, his tight katakana in the margins and sticker tabs hanging off the edge of the page. A very dense read for a six year old. Maybe that was Overhaul’s influence on him, he thinks with a bit of new pride. Ryota might be a fighter, but the mind is more powerful than a rifle would ever be.
Hiroto looks up and then turns around to face his father, eyes wide. He snaps the textbook shut.
“Research?”
After a second the boy nods awkwardly, not making eye contact. The pride in Overhaul’s gut starts to sour.
He looks so much like Shigaraki, with the skin around his eyes peeling and discoloring. Hiroto hates the smell of the soaps and creams that Overhaul has tried to get him to use for it, so it’s not getting any better. Even his movements and posture are stiff and corpselike.
“Are you ready to put your textbooks into practice in training?” he asks, extending a gloved hand. “I want to see you keep your quirk under control without your gloves.”
Hiroto stands up, ignoring his hand. The boy’s gloves are kid leather with a special quirk-dampening mechanism installed on the back that keeps him from tearing things apart by accident like he used to do when he was a toddler. Re-Destro had had a whole set specially made for him, after he got tired of hearing him scream after he decayed his own arms for the hundredth time. Thankfully that hasn’t been a problem for a few years, but the child still seems traumatized enough to keep wearing them. Hiroto peels them off awkwardly now and stuffs them into the front pouch of Shigaraki’s hoodie, which goes down past his knees.
Overhaul lets his own hand drop as his son joins him mutely, and they make their way back to the center of the house where they can go to the basement and train.
“What are you reading about?” he tries.
Hiroto keeps looking down as they walk, then purses his lips together and shrugs a little bit.
“Biology or theory?”
“Biology,” he says, so quietly Overhaul can barely hear it. It’s aggravating enough to make him lose his temper, this continued mutism, but he remembers the times that he lashed out at Eri a lifetime ago and forces his bile down.
“It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Considering how a progenitor mutation can create such a variety of phenotypes.”
Hiroto doesn’t respond.
Overhaul grits his teeth under his mask. Just like Eri, the boy doesn’t respond well to aggressive counseling. He hates this, though, trying to tease out a response from a mute, dumb, staring little creature. Well - there were a few things that could reliably prompt a response from him that didn’t involve soft torture. “Your father says that he’s got a present for us.”
Now he looks up, perking up a bit, peering out from under his mop of dark bangs. Overhaul crinkles his eyes in a show of smiling. “He should be coming home tonight. He says that he’s bringing something back for both of us. What do you think of that, Hiroto?”
He smiles back, then. Finally a human response. Overhaul curls a lip underneath his mask. Of course, he’d always favored Shigaraki, who was absent nine times out of ten on Official League Missions while Overhaul stayed home and played the disciplinarian. He’d hoped that being the primary caretaker would mean that he had greater influence over his heir, but instead… it made his son’s obvious deficits that much more difficult to deal with. Shigaraki, meanwhile, got to swoop in once every few weeks to shower the little thing with kisses and presents before leaving again. It was the one bastion of bitterness he has towards his husband and former enemy.
He doesn’t want Hiroto’s love, he wants the respect that he deserved as his father and leader. This empty-eyed silence, this undercurrent of taciturn fear, is not respect. If he respected his father he would make an effort to please him.
This is what you wanted, he reminds himself sternly.
“I missed him!”
“Well then you can show off for him when he’s here tomorrow. I bet he’ll be so proud if he sees you without your gloves on, hm?” he said as he opened the door to the basement. Hiroto bobs his head and follows him obediently into the depths.
The boy’s quirk is humblingly powerful - if anybody knows this it’s Overhaul, who’s trained him since his quirk manifested. If the rest of him wasn’t so deficient, he would already be a matter-manipulating antichrist to cure the world at age six. He just has to tap into Churn and find out how to draw it out.
Regardless of the quality of his finished product, Overhaul would use what he had created; one way or another, he would have his perfect heir.
Hiro wakes up to the sound of footsteps and voices outside of his bedroom door, and he shoots up to sit, suddenly completely awake. It isn’t the clunk of boots from Uncle Dabi or the crisp click of Uncle Chrono’s shoes, and…
He jumps out of bed and runs up to the door. It’s still a little dark outside his window, and today’s the day that Father is coming home!
Almost stumbling over a pile of clothes on the floor, slipping on the wood, he throws open his door and is swept up instantly into Father’s arms. He spins Hiro around, his feet clipping the wall of the hallway, and then he’s laughing, lighter than air, like a scene from a movie. Against his face Father’s coat is wet and cold from the morning air and familiarly scratchy. He smells like wet wool and smoke.
When he’s finally set down he catches a glimpse of Uncle Chrono in the hallway, too, watching. Father puts his hands on Hiro’s face, his cold half-gloved hands, and smiles down at him.
“Hey, who’s this? Who’s this teenager that replaced my son, huh? Who are you?” He shakes Hiro’s head back and forth affectionately.
“Welcome home, Father,” Hiro beams, still groggy from just waking up.
“Who gave you permission to grow this big? I bet it was your Pops.”
“M’ still smaller than Ryo.”
“Yeah, that’s ‘cause he’s a year older than you,” Father rasps, ruffling his hair with both hands and standing up. “God, you’re growing up fast. You hungry? Kurogiri said he’d make pancakes to celebrate a good mission.”
Hiro smiles and grabs on to his coat, hanging his fingers in the edge of the pocket flap. The wool broadcloth is scratchy and he doesn’t have his gloves on - he wrinkles his nose at the sensation. The texture sends unpleasant shivers through him. But it’s worth it, to hang off his Father like this.
“Uncle Shigaraki!” Ryota pops his head out from his room across the hall.
“Hey, player 1!”
“You’re back!” Ryota has his earbuds on. It looks like he was getting ready to do some training and missed everyone’s arrival too.
“So’s your dad, he’s just finishing some stuff up downstairs. You eaten yet?”
“Nope! I was just heading out.” He joins Hiro on Father’s other side and grabs his sleeve. “Didja bring us anything?”
“Ryota,” Chrono chides. Father laughs.
“Maybe your dad did, I was busy working while he got to fuck off and do whatever it is he does while we’re supposed to be at work.”
Hiro wants to rest his head against Father’s leg, but now they’re walking. He hears echoes of noises and voices in other parts of the house as the whole PLF begins to wake up and unfold themselves like a cardboard box. As they make their way downstairs Father unhooks Hiro’s hand from his coat and fits it in his own, and Hiro is filled with happy warmth. Father is the only person who doesn’t seem at least a little wary of Hiro’s hands. He pops the joints in his free hand against his leg to vent some of his joy out before it overwhelmed him.
“Where’d you go to? What was it like? Did you meet anyone cool? What were you guys doing?” Ryota rattles off a list of questions. It isn’t just for his curiosity, he knows that Hiro isn’t going to ask them even when he wants to know, so he does it for him. Hiro is happy to listen.
“I got some pictures I’ll show you at breakfast. There were a lot of big old buildings in South China - some huge cities where we met with some real seedy villains. I think that we adequately convinced them not to get in our way, though, so who knows, maybe you’ll be able to come with us next time we go. The street food was great! I missed it after living in the middle of nowhere this long.”
“You weren’t scared?”
“Of what? The city or the other guys?”
“I dunno, the villains?”
“Hah, even your other dad could’ve mopped the floor with them if he came. I just had to show up and they ran off like rats.” Father sounds proud. He squeezes Hiro’s hand. Nobody can beat Father or Pops, they’re just too powerful. The whole Hero society tried, and they didn’t just survive, they’d found a home and built a whole Army in the woods. Hiro couldn’t be more proud.
In the servant’s kitchen Uncle Kurogiri is already at work cooking, with his inimitable, calming grace. Other people were scared of him, but Hiro likes that he doesn't have a real face and he doesn’t make small talk. It’s comfortable to sit in his lap in companionable silence and not be expected to do anything. Besides, people were scared of most of his uncles.
“Kurogiri never did any of this for me growing up,” Father says mirthfully, looking over into a bowl of batter. Kurogiri shoos him off with a whisk.
“You would have thrown a tantrum and upended the plate, Master Tomura,” he says solemnly. “Young Master Hiroto has shown less of a predilection for making messes.”
Hiro holds up his hands and receives a plate of pancakes and then hands it off to Ryo, who’s vibrating with excitement next to him. The air around them crackles for a second and then his older cousin is halfway across the room sitting at the little kitchen island pouring a generous amount of syrup on his pancakes. Ryo uses his time freeze quirk a lot more than he’s supposed to, he thinks. Hiro looks up and gets his own plate, too. They look like pancakes from out of a movie, perfectly brown on top and golden in the middle. Uncle Kurogiri has done a lot of practicing.
When he sits down to eat, on a little pillow that boosts him high enough to see over the granite countertop, Uncle Dabi has joined them and the four of them enjoy the morning as Kurogiri clatters around cleaning up. Uncle Dabi uses his heat quirk to soften the butter up enough for Hiro to put on his pancakes, and then heats up his own coffee. Uncle Chrono stops in and kisses Dabi on the head before leaving - all his spiky white hair just like Ryota’s. The pancakes are warm and steaming.
Hiro doesn’t like the stickiness of the syrup, clinging to the sleeves of his hoodie, but he can’t get them to stay up his arms until Ryota leans over and briskly folds them up so they don’t get in his way. Hiro goes back to his pancakes. It’s perfect.
He hears someone come in behind him, over Ryota and Father’s chattering, but he doesn’t look up from his food until he feels a hand come to rest heavily on his shoulder. Then he looks up to see Pops looming over him. He’s got a plain black mask on, so he’s not doing official duties.
“Good morning, Hiroto.”
Hiro closes his eyes and bobs his head good-morning.
“Would you like to come see the gift that your Father so thoughtfully got us?” His voice is warm and bubbles like it’s carbonated. Hiro has never heard him sound like that before. He turns to Father, who’s grinning at him.
“You like it that much, OV?”
“I like it very much. I think it’s perfect.”
“I know, I saw her and thought of you. You’re gonna bring Hiro along to open her up?”
“M-hm.” Pops looks down at him. “He’s been getting into my textbooks lately. It would be a great first lab project for a budding scientist.”
Hiro turns and takes Ryota’s wrist and then looks back to his parents. He wants Ryota to come, too, even though he’s not interested in school he - well, Hiro doesn’t do anything that Ryota doesn’t do, and vice-versa. If it’s a present, then it should be for both of them!
“No, kid, Ryo’s not coming,” Uncle Dabi says. He has a strange look on his face, and Hiro worries that he’s done something wrong. Ryota pouts.
“Dad, whyyyy? I wanna see the present too.”
Dabi reaches over and spears a piece of his son’s pancake with his fork. “‘Cause I said so. And I want to spend time with my beloved kiddo after a month at work, and because I know that Chrono’s been letting you off easy in training.”
“He does not!!”
“Oh he does too, I bet he gives your baby sister all the attention, and poor Ryota is left to shoot cans outside on his own, overdue for a butt kicking-”
Pops pats Hiro on the back. “Come on, wash up and come downstairs with me,” he murmurs.
Hiro looks at Father, who motions for him to go, and then strips off his hoodie and leaves it on his chair so that he’s free to bring his plate up to the sink and wash his hands. It was a little too sweet for him in the end, but that’s okay.
Pops didn’t even scold him for not putting Father’s hoodie away, and he leads him away with a hand on his back that’s as comforting as it is unusual. He usually isn’t big on touching.
He seems so pleased. Father must have gotten him a really nice present. Pops was always in a good mood when Father was home, and in an exceptionally bad one when he left. The boys tried to stay clear of him then.
They descend the stairs into the basement, where the old fashioned wood of the house started to morph into utilitarian hallways of cement and metal. This is where Hiro would go for his weekly checkups with Pops, to get his blood drawn and his quirk progress noted. Pops said that Churn could be dangerous, so he has to take lots of samples from Hiro to study it and make sure it wasn’t getting out of control and growing like a lethal tumor. Now he’s even old enough to draw his own blood, which he’s awfully proud of.
This time Pops doesn’t take him to their usual room. They make a different turn in the same general area, though, stopping in front of the big trough-like sink next to a door that Hiro had never been through before.
“You remember how to scrub in, I assume.” Pops asks, taking off his gloves (!) and grabbing a foil packet from on top of the sink. Yeah, Hiro nods, it made his hands feel gross and dry for days afterwards.
“15 scrubs on each plane of the hands and 10 on the arms,” Pops reminds him anyways, and they both rip open their packets and squeeze the unctuous pink soap onto their hands and use the abrasive sponge to scrub. The foam is creamy soft, the color of cotton candy. They rinse it off in the special way (fingertips to elbows) and then shake their arms dry. Hiro gets water all up and down his shirt and they both look down at it dripping. Pops makes an amused huff.
“Taking a bath, too?”
Hiro smiles even though he’s already getting cold. He lets Pops tie a surgical mask on his face, and then they don their gowns - Hiro likes this part the best, it’s almost like he’s getting a hug when he walks arms-first into it.
What kind of present was this? He's really starting to wonder. They only scrubbed in when one of his Uncles got hurt and Pops had to spend a long time fixing them and wanted to stay clean.
Now they’re both sterile-clean, with the exception of the gloves. Those must be inside the room, Hiro thinks, unless they're using their quirks somehow. Pops looks down at him, hands raised to keep them from bumping into anything, and his eyes smile over his mask. They match now.
“Alright, Hiroto, this is going to be a big step for you. I know that you’re a… sensitive boy, but you’re going to grow out of it soon enough, and I don’t want you to miss out on this opportunity that your Father’s given us. This project going to do the Shie Hassaikai a lot of good. And when you’re the leader of the yakuza one day, you’ll be doing things like this all the time for the sake of the gang. But enough about that. You’re a lot like me, so I think it’ll be more of a pleasure than a hobby for you anyways. Are you ready?”
How was he supposed to know if he was ready if he wouldn’t tell him what was going on? Why was he bringing this stuff about sacrificing for the yakuza up now?
But Pops is so happy. And he’s never happy about doing things with Hiro because he never does them right. They’re not like Ryota and Uncle Chrono. But maybe now, they can share this new project. Maybe the real present would be that he could be good enough for Pops, normal enough, the heir he was supposed to be.
Pops hip-checks the door open and they waltz in.
It’s pretty dark inside, except for the cluster of big surgical lights in the center of the room spotlighting the person on the operating table. There’s a lot of other machines and things around but Hiro’s attention is on the figure draped in a white sheet. They’re so still and - is it a corpse? Is it a dead body?!? It’s so bright it’s hard to see.
“Do you recognize her?”
Hiro shakes his head.
“I wouldn’t think so - she’s a Hero. Japanese. Her quirk involves being able to create any matter that she has a chemical or schematic understanding of.”
Hiro is still staring. The woman looks so terribly pale in the black-and-white shadows of the surgery lights, eyes closed, chest barely rising and falling under the white drape as she breathes.
“Come on over, there’s a step stool here. We’ll do a little vivisection, since we have a live subject here. I’ll show you how I use overhaul to reform living flesh. It’s really what set the Hassaikai apart from the other gangs in the area - the number of times I’ve had to reassemble the Precepts - so you should practice it too. And when we’re done with that we can take some samples and see if we can’t figure out a way to put her quirk to work for us. It’d be just perfect-” he grunts as he winches the operating table up “- to get a steady supply of Trigger and Eraser from her using her quirk.”
She looks like a doll. She looks like she’s sleeping. Or like she’s dead.
He comes when Pops beckons him over, pointing at the stacked flat stools on the other side of the table for him to climb on to look over her. At the head of the bed there’s an assortment of surgical tools, and the big heplock clamp connected to her IV filled with medicines that’d wake her up or put her back to sleep whenever Pops wanted.
When Hiro’s standing at her side he peers down at her. She’s pretty, with lots of black hair in a ponytail. The sort of face that he expects does a lot of smiling. There's a leather clamp holding her head to the table.
He looks over her to Pops. He gives him a firm nod. “I’m going to wake her up now. She’s got a chemical spinal block, so she won’t be able to feel or move anything below her neck. It’s just easier to work with someone who’s conscious, otherwise their sympathetic response interferes with the experiment.”
The room is cold. Hiro starts to shiver in his wet shirt. Pops reaches up and unlocks some of the syringes, then casts about on the metal tray and picks up a scalpel. He gingerly holds it out to Hiro, blunt end first. Hiro stares down at it. In his ears his heartbeat suddenly becomes deafeningly loud. Below him, the present’s eyelashes start to flutter and her breathing picks up.
“Go on,” Pops urges. “You can make the first cut once she's up.”
He doesn’t know why his hand is trembling so much as he reaches out and takes the handle of the scalpel in his fist, clumsy and childishly. It’s incredibly bright and clean in the overhead light. Pops pulls the sheet down, folding it right underneath her belly-button, revealing a broad canvas of soft looking skin. Hiro can’t look away from the knife.
She starts to open her eyes, he can see them glint like black marbles in his peripheral vision. He’s still trembling, he observes. He's holding the blade like a baby holds a spoon. Then there’s a hand on his own, gentle skin against skin with no gloves, guiding his hand down. “The first incision is from the xiphoid process here to right above the pubic symphysis. Right here. Go shallow at first, it’s better to have to cut a few times than cut too deep and damage the structures underneath. Come on, what’s wrong? Just think of it like a blood draw. She’s got a disease, and we’re going to help figure out a cure for it.”
Hands trying to pry Hiro’s fingers apart so he can hold the scalpel properly but his hand won’t cooperate, like it’s frozen in a fist like a plastic figurine.
“Come on, Hiroto.” Pop’s voice is sharper now and it burbles and stings like acid.
The words wouldn’t come out of his throat and now the paralysis had spread to his whole body, which was shaking without him being able to stop it at all as Pops tried to lower his arm down to the soft flesh below.
It feels like he’s a passenger in his body, helplessly watching through the windows of his eyes as he shakes his head. Just a little at first, like he’s trembling, and then vigorously. No, no, this isn’t right. This lady is a Hero and that meant that she wanted to destroy their family and make society sick, that’s what Pops and Father always told him, but - but - what could she destroy when she’s strapped to a table paralyzed like this? Could anything someone did be bad enough for this to be okay?
It’s freezing and he’s breathing so fast and the lights are so bright and it’s getting dark in the corners of his vision where the Hero is looking right at him, awake for him, ready for him to cut her open like a ripe fruit.
Now he stares back at her.
“Hi- let me take the damn knife then,” Pops snarls. Hiro can’t let go though, as hard as he tries, and they tug back and forth.
She makes a noise, a little wheeze. Oh, god. Oh she’s really alive. That’s a person laid out in front of him, a real live person just like him, pinned down and paralyzed while she’d be cut open. Ripped open, cut and then gouged, overhauled, churned, a nightmare you can’t wake up from. And Hiro and Pops were the nightmare monster hanging over the bed and she was where Hiro usually was and she must be as scared as he is-
She breathes out hard, screwing her eyes shut, and then she smiles.
“Hey,” she says breathily to Hiro. Her diaphragm is on autopilot right now so she can’t really talk properly. “Hey. It’s. Okay.”
Hiro stops.
“Oh be quiet, Creati,” Pops growls as he yanks the scalpel out of his son’s fist. “I’ll have to put you under after all if you’re just going to cause trouble.”
“‘Sokay,” she whispers to Hiro like a fish trying to breathe through air, ignoring Pops. “‘M a Hero. Don’t be sad. It’ll be. Okay.”
Hiro is gasping too, he’s suddenly sobbing, he realizes, he can’t look away from her pretty face and her smile. She’s worse than dying now and he wishes that he could believe her, that it really is going to be okay, but it won’t. Not for her. Not with Pops depressing the plunger on the milky white propofol into her IV line, looking agitated and angry with the scalpel in his hand. Now he’s pressing it right at the top of her belly and its going in like he’s slicing warm butter.
As the sedative hits she stops moving again and slumps back against the steel table like a rubber band that’s lost its stretch, eyes open and glassy.
“Stop crying,” Pops orders as he cuts. Hiro can’t stop it though. This person with hopes and dreams was laid out in front of him and they’re cutting her up. All the people in the textbooks were real people. Oh, god, all the heroes that they killed were real people. They’re all bleeding black blood on white skin.
Real people, cut up, flaking off big chunks into dust, jabbed with needles, still on a bed, nightmares, shot in the forest, warmed and burned, ripped and cured and ripped again, Pops’ hands without gloves -
If it weren’t for Pops grabbing him he would’ve stumbled off the stool. It’s hard to see through his tears and the darkness and dizziness. His chest hurts. Heart slamming. Hard to breathe. Tears burning the skin of his eyes.
Hiro’s done a lot of bad things. He’s a bad son and a bad heir. If he keeps being bad is this - cut open - strapped down - blood sample - cure -
“Hiroto!”
He’s having a heart attack. Dying. Cure. Can’t breathe. Don’t be sad. It’ll be. Okay.
He doesn’t remember what happens after this.
He assumes that he passes out.
He wakes up on the couch upstairs with Uncle Chrono trying to wrap him up in Father’s syrupy hoodie again. As soon as he comes to from the murkiness of unconsciousness he’s back in that place again, back in the cold place, and he’s taking big ragged gulps of air and crying.
“Oh, hshh, it’s fine,” Chrono murmurs, pulling one of the decorative throw blankets over him. “Take a deep breath. In and out. Breathe with me. In, two, three, hold. And then out. Two. Three.”
Hiro coughs and chokes on snot and keeps crying. Chrono makes a sympathetic noise.
“Dad, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing, Ryota, Hiro just had an accident. Go - uh, go get your uncle… Compress, okay?”
“Can I-”
“No, no, he’ll be fine, just go.”
Hiro keeps crying as Chrono gathers him up and rubs his back. Over his own noise he can hear an argument a couple rooms away, Pops and maybe Uncle Dabi yelling, the sound of glass breaking, like a macabre musical soundtrack. He still smells like the sterile antiseptic soap, and now he’s sticky from the syrup on his sleeves. It’s all too much.
Somewhere in him, underneath the panic and agitation, the memory of the hero lying on the surgical table still resides. Without the blood and the panic it’s just her pale face and her weak smile, finding the strength despite her horrific incapacity to try to console him. It’s okay, she said. I’m a hero.
I guess that’s what heroes do, he thinks. Even when they’re about to die in pain they still believe in themselves. That’s a kind of strength he’s never had. He’s always been scared, weak, dependent… he wishes he was as brave as that hero.
That thought gets buried deep down inside himself, under all the love he has for his family, under the rote belief that they were going to cleanse the world of heroes and bring their system down. He'll keep that memory of the smiling hero in a secret dark place until he needs it again.