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Iida, Shouto thinks, as soon as he wakes up. It takes him a moment to realize he’d mumbled it, too.
His eyes crack open, slowly, to dim lighting and concrete walls, water slowly dripping in one corner. He’s about to try and stand, to further assess the situation he’s ended up in, when he realizes both his hands and legs are tied.
He doesn’t remember how he got here. He barely remembers the fight itself. Last he remembers, Iida was still standing, still fighting, while Shouto was on the ground behind him, trying and failing to hold onto consciousness.
He can assume Iida lost based on the situation he’s in now. His first guess as to what that loss looked like is too much to even consider, so he hopes for the other options. Most of all, he hopes that Iida got away.
Footsteps sound in the hall, dragging him from his thoughts. A shadow leaks through the crack under the door.
For a moment, they don’t do anything. Then the door opens, slowly. Shouto’s entire body tenses.
His limbs are tied, and it feels like chain, but his flames, maybe–
“Good morning, Todoroki Shouto,” they say, interrupting any plans of trying to break the restraints, for now. Their voice doesn’t match either of the villains from the fight, and neither does their appearance, even in the dim lighting. “You were starting to worry us, you know. I thought my boys might’ve hit you too hard.”
The boss, then, maybe.
“Where’s Iida?” Shouto bites, ignoring everything else. “What do you want with us?”
“‘Us?’” The villain laughs, cold and eerily bright. “We don’t want anything with Iida Tenya. My boys simply couldn’t get him out of their way.”
Shouto can feel his stomach drop. “ Where is he? ” he asks, again, more frantic this time. Couldn’t get him out of their way–
“Oh, he’s safe.” They say it so casually, a smirk making its way onto their face, the light glinting in their eyes. “As long as you cooperate, your friend is safe.”
Shouto goes quiet for a second. That’s a threat, not a promise.
“What do you want with me?” He never got an answer when he said us.
The villain smiles. “Don’t worry about it, Todoroki Shouto. Simply do as I tell you and everything will be just fine.”
—-
Naoyuki clicks their tongue. “Come now, Todoroki Shouto. We can’t have your father knowing you went down with barely a fight, can we? It can’t be that hard to throw a simple punch.”
Shouto stares at the concrete wall he’s being asked to break the skin of his knuckles open on. He must take too long to do it, because the boss hums disapprovingly, and speaks into their headset: “He’s disobeying. Do it.”
Within a few seconds, a scream echoes into the room.
Iida.
Shouto turns on reflex, but Naoyuki is still standing in front of the door, blocking any chance of exit, of rescue. Bile rises at the back of his throat as he turns back to the wall.
Clenching his teeth, he curls his right hand into a fist and swings.
—-
He hasn’t gotten the chance to see himself in a mirror to confirm, but Shouto is pretty confident that this part of Naoyuki’s “preparations” is unnecessary, with the way his left eyelid is swollen and sore and the ache in his jaw.
His knuckles sting. They won’t even let him rinse the cuts, which he shouldn’t be surprised by, since they told him to be glad they didn’t want him breaking anything.
Yet. They had said breaking anything yet.
And now he knows why.
“You got him, Ritsuji?”
Shouto hasn’t caught his name yet. He’s smaller, both in height and build, than the person whose hand is on his neck.
“Yeah, I’ve got ‘im. Do your shit, Yuzo.”
His entire body had frozen up as soon as the second person – Ritsuji, apparently – had grabbed them. Their Quirk, he assumes.
“Gimme his arm. Naoyuki wanted something broken.”
Shouto tenses even more. Ritsuji pulls one finger from his neck, then taps. Cold rushes through him from where his finger hit to Shouto’s right arm. It almost feels like his ice, but harsher, forcing his arm to lift.
Yuzo grins. “Thanks.”
His hands grip Shouto’s arm at the wrist and right below the elbow. Shouto can’t move.
Ice wells up from under his skin and runs up Yuzo’s arms before he can stop it. He hisses at the sudden temperature shock, and Shouto looks to his face in time to see his glare.
“Hey, Ritsuji,” he says, voice low. “Let the boss know that the Iida kid’s getting another punishment since his friend can’t fucking behave. ”
If Shouto could pull the ice back into his skin, he would.
“I can melt it,” he says, instead, tearing his eyes from Yuzo’s face and to the concrete floor. He screws his eyes shut for good measure, before adding, quieter, “Don’t hurt him.”
Yuzo is quiet for a second, before laughing, loud and abrasive, Ritsuji joining in a second later.
“You thought we weren’t gonna have you melt it?” Ritsuji says.
“That doesn’t make up for shit, kid,” Yuzo adds, still laughing. “Go ahead, melt it, or your friend gets another.”
Shouto lets out a slow breath through his nose, as Ritsuji taps the back of his neck again and their Quirk forces his right arm up.
As he pulls his flames to his skin, his eyebrows stay pressed together.
Simply do as I tell you and everything will be just fine.
He didn’t really believe that at the start, but it was his best shot. Now he isn’t sure what his best shot is.
But he has to get them out.
—-
Shouto’s fingers twitch. The chains wrapped around his arms hurt more than they did when he first woke up – he can blame that on the break Yuzo had gone through with. They wouldn’t give him any kind of medical equipment, but they’d let him set it, and his ice made a good enough cast for now.
“Ritsuji, adjust that light. The bruises need to be obvious. Yuzo, finish getting the camera set already, come on, we don’t have all day.”
He squints his eyes against the light. The pain briefly makes him wonder if one of Yuzo’s hits gave him a concussion, but he pushes that aside for now.
The first twenty-four hours are the most important. Shouto can now say for certain that it’s been more than that since he and Iida were taken. The chances that anyone is coming for them are, for what it matters, zero.
“If my father pays the ransom,” Shouto asks, quiet, staring at the concrete beneath him, “then you let both of us go. Iida and I. Right?”
The villains pause. He waits for Naoyuki to answer.
“Your friend has their own hero family to save them, Shouto Todoroki,” they answer finally. He can hear their smile in their voice. “We’re leaving him to them. Why don’t you?”
Shouto grits his teeth, not gracing them with a response. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be that easy. He’d overheard their ransom, and it was lower than he expected even for just himself.
“Camera’s set, boss,” Yuzo says. “You ready?”
“Almost. Ritsuji, get in frame, you’re the intimidating one here.” They pause. Shouto focuses in on Ritsuji’s footsteps. He stops close behind Shouto. He doesn’t touch him.
Good.
“Alright. Start it, Yuzo.”
Shouto looks up, watching as Yuzo presses a button on the top of the camera and a small red light blinks to life.
Naoyuki takes a breath in. Before they can start to speak, Shouto calls his flames to his skin.
The heat had been bubbling under his skin since Naoyuki had answered about Iida and the ransom. It’s blistering even to him, and the way Naoyuki and Ritsuji scream only confirms the heat to him. Yuzo stumbles back from the camera.
With the flames still burning, and Yuzo still stunned, Shouto stops putting out new flames, pulling on his ice instead. He recreates the cast around his arm first, before icing over the chains, bringing the temperature as low as he can manage before tugging at them, jerking his hands and feet away from the chair.
They snap after a few tries, and Shouto stumbles to his feet. He’s sure his wrists and ankles will ache after the adrenaline wears off, but first, he has more important things to get to.
Iida.
The hallways echo enough that Shouto’s not completely sure on where he’s being kept, but it’s definitely on the same floor as he was. A floor up from where he is now. They hadn’t bothered to knock him out to move him this time.
He almost falls running up the stairs. “Iida!” he screams out, letting it echo, still moving even as he waits to hear a response back.
He doesn’t hear a voice back. He does hear something slam against a door once, twice, repeatedly, over and over. It’s hard to track with the echo in the hall, but not impossible, especially not with it continuing.
The door it’s coming from is labeled as a supply closet. Shouto grits his teeth as he tries to tug the door open. It’s locked, of course; he shouldn’t have expected it not to be.
“Iida,” he says, raising his voice just to make sure he’s heard, “move back.”
He doesn’t get a verbal response, again, but the banging stops. He waits a second, before placing his left hand against the door next to the top hinge, burning off the part connected before moving down to the next, then the last.
The door thuds against the ground once, and Shouto moves out of the way as it falls over entirely.
The closet is empty of supplies. Iida is huddled at the back of it, chained the same way Shouto had been, staring up at him with pain and relief in his eyes.
They need to move. He needs to get Iida out of here, they both need to get out of here. He’s frozen in place anyways.
“...What did they do to you?” he asks, quiet.
One side of Iida's jaw is swollen, obviously painful. His shoulder is visibly dislocated. Worst of all, what looks the most painful, is the way his right calf is twisted, engine pipes bent out of place, one of them missing.
Shouto thinks of the screams that had echoed in the hall. He’s disobeying. Do it.
Quieter still, he asks again, voice breaking, “What did I do to you?”
Iida shakes his head, his uninjured arm reaching up and touching the swollen part of his jaw. It takes Shouto a second to realize that’s why he’s not talking. He’s not sure if he even could, regardless of pain.
A voice echoes down the hall from the staircase, paired with at least two sets of footsteps, and Shouto’s blood runs cold.
“We have to go,” he hisses, rushing closer to Iida, fumbling with the chains around his legs, trying to be cautious of the break, doing it all the best he can with the ice-cast around his ownbroken arm. He doesn’t bother freeing Iida’s arms, not yet – they don’t have time. As soon as his legs are free, Shouto fits his left arm under Iida’s right and lifts him, making sure he can lean on him to walk, making sure he doesn’t have to put weight on what’s so obviously broken.
The footsteps are too close. Shouto grits his teeth, gives up on the staircase, and bumps his right shoulder against the wall, doing his best not to jostle Iida too much as he does, sending a wave of ice out to block the hallway.
“There’s a window at the end of the hall,” he says, a reminder to himself and a reassurance to Iida. “I can break it open, use it as an exit.”
Iida hums, nodding his head, just barely visible in the corner of Shouto’s eyes as he starts moving the both of them to the end of the hall. Fists bang against his ice, and he glances back, the faces of the three villains distorted through the ice as Yuzo slams his fists, cracking it.
Shouto looks away. It’ll hold. It has to.
He sends his ice ahead to break the window open, kicking out his left foot to keep it away from Iida’s body as he sends fire to melt it. The window is small, but it’ll work, if he’s careful, if he does it right.
Which means going out first, and helping Iida out afterwards.
When they slow to a stop, Shouto puts up more ice behind them, letting this one spike outwards, more of a barrier against the villains still working through the first wall. As soon as he’s sure Iida can hold himself against the wall, he pulls his arm away and presses his hand against the outside wall of the building, building a platform right outside.
He steps onto it, turning back inside and holding out a hand before remembering he hadn’t gotten the chains around Iida’s arms undone. Cursing under his breath, he pulls himself back inside.
He can see back through the layers of ice behind them as he does. The first one is broken. Shit.
“Sorry,” Shouto says, before he grips the chains around Iida’s arms and lets his ice coat them like they did his own, doing his best to hold Iida’s dislocated shoulder steady as he tugs on them until they break. (He tries to ignore the muffled cries telling him he isn’t stopping it from hurting.)
As soon as they’re on the ground, and Iida’s arms are free again, he’s stepping back out and holding his hands out again. The villains are in his sight again. The second layer hasn’t broken yet, but they’re trying.
“Come on,” he says. They don’t have time, they have to get out of here.
He doesn’t have to say it twice. He does his best to help Iida through, especially with his right leg, before finally looking down to the ground.
They’re not as far up as he’d worried. Only two stories. It’s quick and easy for him to make a steep ramp with his ice. He stabilizes Iida against him, and leads them both sliding down.
As soon as they’re on the ground, he glances around at the buildings around them. They’re all seemingly abandoned, which means that without their phones, they’re going to have to travel to find help.
“Are you okay to keep moving?” he asks, glancing over at Iida. He hates that he has to ask. This is all his fault in the first place – they kidnapped them because they wanted Shouto, and they hurt Iida because Shouto couldn’t understand that that was the price of him disobeying. (He wonders what his punishment would’ve been if Shouto hadn’t gotten them out with this. Then he stops wondering. He doesn’t want to think about it.)
Iida nods, though it’s slow, hesitant.
Shouto grits his teeth, nodding back.
He doesn’t know which direction is the right one. He just starts moving and hopes.
—
They don’t even have to make it fully out of whatever this group of warehouses is before finding other people.
They’d been seen first. A “holy shit” from their left, and Shouto glanced over around Iida’s body, meeting eyes with a group of middle schoolers, armed with skateboards, one of them carrying a camera.
He makes eye contact with one of them, and he thinks Iida does too, but they still don’t quite talk to them yet. Instead, one of them leans to another, and in what he thinks is supposed to be a whisper, says, “Weren’t they in the Sports Festival?”
Shouto doesn’t bother waiting for the other to respond, interrupting their conversation entirely. “If one of you has a phone, call an ambulance. Please.”
The entire group seems to snap back into the gravity of the situation, and three of the four pull out phones at once. A weight falls from Shouto’s shoulders.
He doesn’t even have to wait for the sirens to sound, though they don’t take long. Shouto has a feeling that the kids mentioning they were UA students helped. (He wonders how long they’ve been gone, exactly, and how hard their teachers and families have been looking for them.)
He’s just happy to hand off Iida to the medics that actually, really know what they’re doing.
—
They were gone for four days, Shouto finds out, when the police come in to see him, once his arm has been properly set and casted, his cuts have been bandaged, and he’s been given pain medication that he doesn’t take and ice packs for the rest of his injuries.
He also finds out that the villains haven’t been caught, even with heroes (including his father) hunting them down. There were leads in the warehouse, but the fire he’d started damaged a lot.
He’s okay with that, he thinks, as he glances across the hospital room to the bed Iida is fast asleep in. His leg is in a specialized cast, shoulder set, and jaw wired shut for now, all things he’s sure Recovery Girl would heal when they got back to UA. His family had reassured Shouto that his engine pipes would grow back.
Four days was a long time. He doesn’t know how much longer it would’ve taken for Iida to get out if he hadn’t set that fire, hadn’t thrown capture to the wind and focused on getting out.
The villains will get caught eventually. They wouldn’t have gotten another chance to escape. Iida would’ve gotten hurt worse, would’ve been kept longer.
Shouto’s okay with what might’ve been their headquarters being burnt to the ground. They got out. That’s what he cares about.