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It all happened so suddenly.
One minute, Hizashi had been standing in the streets, helping civilians evacuate from a crumbling office building. A villain with some kind of growth quirk had gone on a rampage in downtown Musutafu, smashing their way through the financial district. The infrastructure of the surrounding buildings had started to fail, and although many of Japan’s citizens weren’t particularly keen on heroes at the moment, they still had a duty to protect.
Aizawa was out here with him, somewhere. Without the use of one eye his quirk had been severely limited, but hours upon hours of physical therapy and strength training had allowed his friend to work his way back up to his former physical prowess. He wasn’t quite as light on his feet with one prosthetic leg, but that was something he was working on. As it was, Eraserhead could still fight and - although it was very limited - could still cancel out quirks with one eye.
Those were the rolls they had ended up with. Hizashi directed civilians away from the collapsing building. Every once in a while the villain was careen in his direction, struggling to shake off the three heroes that were surrounding them. Hizashi would shove the villain away with a well-placed scream, the sound waves more than sufficient enough to direct him elsewhere, and resumed his task.
And then, in a heartbeat, everything went wrong.
All of the heroes had earpieces in, of course. Communication in a situation like this was key. But Hizashi’s attention was so focused on drawing citizens away from what was very rapidly becoming an unstable building that he didn’t notice Aizawa screaming his name until it was too late.
The villain came catapulting into the street, a giant, towering mass - much like Mt. Lady. Their feet crashed into the concrete and caved gaping footprints into the asphalt. Civilians screamed in terror, scrambling to get away.
Hizashi opened his mouth, breathed in deep, prepared to blow the eardrums on this brute if that’s what it took to finally get it to surrender-
There was an awful crunching, crumbling sound as the foundations to the office building finally broke. Metal twisted and creaked, the beams warping as the building began to list sideways, began to fall-
This time, Hizashi did scream. A last ditch effort to blast apart the rubble as it descended down on him. But it wasn’t enough.
There was an eruption of noise all around him, then pain , so much pain, as chunks of concrete and metal and glass and other detritus from the office building rained down all around him.
Then, darkness.
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Hizashi woke up to absolute agony.
It was everywhere. It was all consuming. His first breath turned into a choked gag as dust, thick and metallic, settled on his tongue and the back of his mouth. His eyes burned, even though all he could see was darkness. His head throbbed, and something sticky was running down the side of his neck.
But the worst of it all was his chest.
It felt like somebody had placed an elephant directly on top of his sternum. Hizashi tried to breathe again, to inhale fully, but the weight was crushing the air out of him in a cacophony of pained whines and groans. Frantically he clawed at the object - which felt stony - with his hands, which were almost numb. Nothing helped.
His microphone was gone, probably lost in the fall. He could hear sizzling and sparking from where the amplifier around his neck was damaged. If he could just inhale enough to get a good call for help out…
Hizashi tried, he really did. But this time his staggered, panting breath only caused the stone on his chest to shift, and with it brought burning . Something crunched with the movement, a feeling that ricocheted throughout his entire body. He would have screamed if he could have breathed enough for it. As it was, he was left gasping for air.
I might die, Hizashi realized dazedly. He’s a hero; he’d been through scrapes before. He’d been beat up and shot and burned. But this, this… this was worse than anything. This was agony. This was sheer panic.
A memory resurfaced, suddenly. Something he tried very, very hard to suppress. Images of a rainy sky, of collapsed buildings. Of Aizawa, standing alone in the rubble, blood coursing down his arm and a face filled with absolute shock.
And of a body, dragged out of the debris in pieces. One of a dear friend.
Oboro… Hizashi sobbed, unable to help himself, as the weight pressed down further and further. Panic made him struggle, made him writhe and squirm and try to fight his way out, but he was pinned like a bug to a pinboard.
Was this how Shirakumo felt? Trapped under the rubble, bruised and bleeding and broken? Had he been terrified, hoping for a rescue? Feeling the weight of a building pressing down on him, breaking ribs, crushing the life out of him?
The building rumbled above him, more dust falling into his face. It blinded him, choked him. He coughed, each spasm only causing the stone on his chest to dig in more deeply. An awful rippling pain spread upwards through his chest, and coppery blood abruptly flooded his mouth, spilling past his gritted teeth.
Oh, Hizashi realized hazily, that’s really not a good sign.
Internal bleeding. A sure way to die in a situation like this.
A crippling sense of hopelessness washed over him, carried along with a river of dizziness. He slumped back against the ground, hardly able to expand his lungs at this point. More blood gushed into his mouth with each breath.
He hoped Aizawa didn’t blame himself for this. It was a tall order, knowing him. But with Nemuri gone and now Hizashi himself… that was all he could hope for.
The building rippled again, shaking, but Hizashi could hardly feel the pain. He still couldn’t see anything, but it felt like a new kind of darkness was beginning to sweep over his vision, something darker than any abyss and just as all-consuming.
He closed his eyes. There was nothing to see, anyway. Might as well save Aizawa the suffering of having to see his dead, empty gaze when they eventually pulled him out of the rubble.
I’m so sorry, Shota.
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There had been a very long healing curve for Shota after the Paranormal Liberation War. Some would say it was still going, to which was something Shota would respond to very tartly, because he refused to let his usual life be interrupted any longer. He had students to teach (and comfort) as well as a career to scrape back together. He had dignity, he had pride, and at this point, he had months of physical therapy and extensive workouts under his belt.
The result was that Shota was just as strong now as he’d ever been, if not a bit more stiff. His missing leg and eye sometimes still throbbed with phantom pain, and he was still shaking off the bone-deep weariness that liked to accompany injuries of such a scale, but other than that, he was fine .
It had taken a great deal of convincing to get the hospital to release him when they did. It had taken even more to get Mic to finally allow him to join him for quick field missions. He had just gotten to a point where he felt like, despite the missing eye and metal leg, he could hold his own in a fight, and then this villain decided to show up and ruin his day.
As far as villains go, it should have been a simple job. The villain could grow larger, much like Mt. Lady. The size made them big and unwieldy, but that also made them incredibly dangerous when situated directly on the city streets. Each trip, each attempt to catch themself led to property damage. Civilians had to be sheltered from raining debris.
Mic was already working to evacuate civilians from one of the more unstable buildings, using his amplified voice to call them all down from the upper levels. Meanwhile, Shota, Vlad King, and Ectoplasm were working to get the villain restrained.
It was proving to be more difficult than expected, and Shota knew that he was to blame. With both eyes open he could have shrunk the villain down almost immediately, but one eye - accompanied by an instant headache - made the process much slower. And since the villain kept fighting all the while, Shota was forced to blink, and that restarted the process.
But they had things relatively under control. The villain was growing tired. If they could just get them to shrink-
It happened so suddenly.
One minute, the villain was in front of them, grappling with several of Ectoplasm’s clones. In the next, they were careening off course, apparently deciding to abandon the fight. Their massive form leapt away from them and towards Mic and his crumbling building.
“Mic!” Shota screamed into his earpiece, every nerve in his body lighting up in terror. “Mic, get away from there!”
Either his friend couldn’t hear him, or it was too late. The shockwaves from the villain’s descent onto the ground properly broke the last of the building’s foundations. Shota stood, frozen, as the building swayed unsteadily before promptly folding in on itself and crumbling to the ground in a plume of smoke and dust. There was an awful scream that seared through the earpieces, making him claw the device out of his ear before it could damage his brain with its intensity. But only seconds later he was stuffing it back in.
“Mic?” Shota panted, feeling dizzy. “Mic? Are you there? Are you alright?”
There was only static.
A deafening roar shook the air. Shota snapped his head sideways to see that Ectoplasm had grown to his full potential form, a massive shape that grabbed the villain and, with a sort of righteous anger, slammed it headfirst into the ground. The whole world trembled, but the villain was knocked out instantly.
With that, Shota’s attention completely shifted. He was running, speeding across rooftops, his metal leg clanking slightly with each step. He leapt into the air and grabbed the nearest telephone pole with his capture scarf, swinging his way across the expanse of shaken, damaged buildings until he could reach the scene of the collapsed building. The building where Mic had been standing just moments before.
No. I refuse .
Another building rose up in his mind to greet him. A similar scene with a slate gray sky, although back then it had been raining. A horrible, familiar sort of shock started to descend on all of his limbs as he shakily landed in front of the debris, searching for a familiar shock of blonde hair, for orange glasses, for green eyes, for-
For bright, fluffy hair that misted and flowed like clouds on a summer day. For pale blue eyes, gleaming with laughter. For a mouth that smiled and cooed over the appearance of a tiny, lost kitten.
“ MIC! ” Shota’s throat hurt with the force of his scream. Panic was overwhelming any sense of logic he might have once possessed, and he tore at the debris with bare hands. Scraps of glass and stone and rebar bit deeply into his skin, but he didn’t feel any of it.
Not again. Not again, please. I’ll do anything. I’ll trade my life for his.
It couldn’t happen to him. Not Hizashi. They already lost Shirakumo, and then they just lost Nemuri. Shota couldn’t stand to lose his best friend, the only one he had left.
Your fault , his conscience started to moan, the voice twisting and rising until it hissed and spat with fury. YOUR FAULT.
If only Shota had chosen to evacuate civilians instead, or if he’d stayed to help him…
“Eraserhead, stop.” There was a hand on his arm, trying to pull him away. Shota shook it off, plunging his hands back into the rubble, frantic single-minded desperation fueling the spastic movements.
“Aizawa!” Vlad wrenched him away from the debris, his face a mask of both anger and concern. “Stop it. You’ll lose your hands like that!”
“Hizashi’s in there!” Shota snarled at him. “Let me go, now .”
“You’re in no shape to deal with this, mentally or physically.” There was real grief in Vlad’s eyes, Shota suddenly saw. That just made his terror all the more real. “Step back and let rescue heroes get Mic out of there. You can’t do anything on your own.”
Vlad’s hand stayed firmly anchored around his arm, and suddenly Shota was grateful, because his knees felt weak and he might have sunk to the ground otherwise. Every cell in his body felt like it was shaking; he was falling apart at the seams.
Not him. Not him, never him .
Not again .
It took emergency services - rescue heroes, mostly, and medics to tend to the civilians who had been injured in the attack - nearly fifteen minutes to arrive. Roads had been blocked and damaged from the villain’s earlier rampage. By the time they showed up Shota felt faint with anxiety, but Vlad’s hand on his arm kept him upright and anchored.
The heroes dug around in the rubble, pulling out bodies. Some were smashed to pieces, quickly hidden in black bags from the eyes of the public. Others were, miraculously, alive. Each voice recovered from the rubble, calling for help, ignited little sparks of hope in Aizawa’s chest. If they were alive, even if they were injured…
“We found him!”
Shota hardly realized he’d moved until he felt his good leg straining to get over the awkward shapes of rubble, his metal one clinking with each tap against concrete. Vlad was shouting his name, but Shota barely heard it. He had one place to be. One goal in mind.
He needed to be there for Hizashi when he was recovered. So that he knew he wasn’t alone, no matter how badly he was hurt.
But then Aizawa arrived at the source of the cry, and saw the two rescue heroes gently drawing up a body from the rubble. Long blond hair, matted with blood and dust, forced down from its spiked, gelled style. A face covered in crimson, eyes closed. Skin the color of paper. Uniform crushed in on itself, limbs broken, fingernails scratched down to the beds-
Bright hair gone stormy gray in death, blue eyes vacant and empty, mouth twisted in a death grimace from final moments spent in agony-
“No…” The voice that left Shota’s mouth didn’t sound like his own. It was twisted, broken, ugly. The heroes glanced at him with faces full of sympathy as he knelt on the ground, unable to stand as horror and fear and so much agony started to press down on his shoulders, wearing him into the ground, crushing him to dust. He stared in shock at the body of his best friend, then lifted his eyes to the heroes.
Tell me he’s okay, he beseeched silently. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Tell me he’s alive .
They didn’t respond. That was all the answer they could give, and that was all he needed to understand.
It was Shirakumo all over again.
Shota couldn’t move, trembling as he was. The heroes took mercy on him. With careful, respectful arms they moved Mic’s body so he rested in Aizawa’s arms. Then they turned away, giving him a few final moments.
Shota buried his face in Hizashi’s hair, inhaled the fading scent of his cologne, buried under the stench of blood and dust and desperation. He cradled him close, held his dead friend tightly in his arms, and then he cried.