Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Prologue:  

True to form, Izuku knew what was coming the moment they’d landed.  

“You know you can’t run forever.”  

And he almost wanted to laugh at the notion of that comment. He almost wanted to laugh at the idea of what this man was trying to impart to him.  

“You think I can’t?” He retorted, voice tipping low, brow quirked almost amused. “Tell me how you think I’m not capable then? Why I couldn’t possibly do just that?”  

Ha. Of all the stupidly simplistic notions he’d come across, this one took the top spot. This idea that he, of all the creatures of the vastness of space and time couldn’t do as he pleased? 

Who needed to explain anything to him ?  

Him? The Doctor?  

Who knew better about him than himself? The logicality of the notion was as sound as it ever was to Izuku.  

And yet…  

Dark, emerald orbs briefly flickered upward towards the sky, searching the stars. Consternation flared brightly as the sky glittered overhead. 

No one could know better than him.  

“You’d be surprised how much I know about you, kid.”  

“I severely doubt that” He muttered his reply instantly, displeasure coloring his tone. Agitation seeped into each syllable as chilled fingers idly flicked against the woolen coat pocket, tapping a tuneless beat into his thigh. It was a familiar drumming that he’d grown used to.  

One he’d known from long ago. 

“You could only ever scratch the surface when it comes to me, human ,” The Doctor cast a sharp glance towards his companion, his expression neutral, mouth drawn taut. “But you’ll never full grasp what I’ve lived, what I’ve done.”  

Not that he’d ever really wanted him too either. No. The idea that anyone should bear the brunt of what he had? The idea that anyone should or could or would share in his misery?   

The idea was laughable. Absurd. Obnoxiously ridiculous and uncannily obtuse.  

What a lark . He was nearly, nearly laughing aloud himself at the jibe and the supposition that anyone felt it necessary to impart any sort of explanation to him of all beings in the vastness of the universe. Him.  

Or to try to claim they understood him on that beyond surface loyalty and love.  

Izuku–no. No, not that one. Not that name.  

Wait? What?  

Wisping green curls gently bounced at the boy stewed and hummed to himself, trying to understand the conflicting thoughts that burst like firecrackers against his skull. Lifetimes lived, memories remembered–and not remembered–at least not by him–reverberated like long and pitchy.  

People and faces and words and phrases all his and not his. All known and not known. And he wanted to run and not run away from it.  

The Doctor–or was it Izuku? --paused for a moment considering the differences in himself. 

That was…that was wrong, wasn’t it? That was…odd. He wasn’t two different people. He wasn’t…he was just the one. The one life-liver. The one and only. No matter how many regenerations he’d gone through.   

He was The Doctor.  

The boy frowned for a moment, eyes narrowing thoughtful and critical because that still wasn’t true either, was it.  

And that was the danger in it all. That was the frustration, the fear, the worry that he carried.   

He was both , wasn’t he. Both Doctor and Izuku. One and the same. Intricately interconnected and interdimensionally inextricably interwoven.  

Ha. Oddity personified. Strangeness embodied.  

Terror given a face and identity crisis renewed within him. He loathed it and it almost terrified him to consider what the implications of such a differentiation and flair of fixed and unfixed being meant and… who might be responsible for it.  

Because someone always was.  

Someone was always playing a damned game, trying to prove a damned point! The universe just loved to mock him, didn’t they? They loved to chortle and croon and jeer! And for what?  

A pittance of a moment of pleasure at his expense? What a lark that was.  

And yet… 

“You don’t get to tell me you know why I’d choose to run,” The boy’s voice was soft, imperceptibly gentle and biting all in the same breath as his gaze glittered with intensity of starlight that would consume the void. “Why it would matter to someone like you who could never understand…”  

He challenged the man’s mortality with his accusation, with the forced perspective of truth that Shouta Aizawa had to consider… 

That he could never understand, for all his utter brilliance and wit and tact and experience? This man was utterly clueless. Stupidly blithe and tritely ignorant.  

He was morosely simplistic.  

And he couldn’t grasp what Izuku meant, what he was trying to say .  

It figured– 

“You’re afraid of being alone again, kid. And you seem to think that you’re the only one with something to lose again.”  

The boy’s thoughts shuttered and slammed to a wearied halt as the languid voice hummed softly overhead, coiling around his ears.   

“You’re afraid of your past, as if you’re the only one with a past to fear.” 

It was fire.  

Starlight and fury and the softest breath of existence blowing gently into his lungs.  

Precious sensations of pleasure and pain and he was burning .  

And it was fantastic and brilliant and tiresome and torturous and beautifully exhausting .  

He wanted it to stop, pleading for the misery and ecstasy to end.  

He wanted it to last forever.    

His body begged for sleep, as energy streamed through his veins, and pulsed in his lungs choking him. He drowned in it, gulping down the power as it tingled and tripped along every pore and prickled through every pulse and beat. Music of the universe, singing in the stars and screaming in his ears.  

The mournful tunes of death and life and being .  

Everything and nothing and all and some and none encased him in shadow and light.  

Glorious power seeped into every particle that was him , tearing and twisting and undoing his fingers and nails and hair and teeth. OH god his teeth. Would they even be the same? Or would they be so far from the ones he’d known?  

And the hair. Dear God… He’d quite liked the hair…well…sort of. He wasn’t always so keen on the choices he’d been given of late. The spindly and flat, muckish mess that it was. 

Ugh. They were so difficult to style. And never ginger . He’d never been ginger yet and that was a nuisance all on its own.  

He’d always wanted to be a ginger. After Bess? The glorious fiery goddess that she was? Well, before Bess too, really. Ha!  

Who wouldn’t want to be a ginger themselves? 

Ah well…Not that any of that mattered. Never actually did. None of it. It was all just a pittance of thought. Stupid, really. He…he didn’t… 

He didn’t really need to care whatsoever about it either. The Doctor tried to hiss, his voice depleted, his words escaping, drawn into the starlight. 

He…he didn’t…he couldn’t rightly care anything about the inconsequential, the meta-physicality of it…the pain or pleasure or… 

Sadness perhaps that he felt picking at his bones, making the ache stronger.  

‘Goodnight, dear fellow!’  

‘I don't want to go.’ 

‘Off you pop, then!’  

Each voice hummed and buzzed through the air, memories zipping and tricking him into sorrow as the last vestiges lingered like shadows against his flesh.  

And right. He needed…to stay on task, on track, on the right and upward train of thought that streamed outward towards the expanse of cascades and the universe, towards existence, towards reality. He didn’t need to think of the rest of everything, the thoughts turning to a jumbled mush of distortions and mixings of abstract remembrances and memories.  

They couldn’t be real. They couldn’t…They were nothing but figments. Bursts of nothingness that meant… 

That meant he was dying ...  

Not while he burned and drifted, losing sense of time and place and thought and faces and ideas… 

And he was straying, in and out of consciousness, his very capability to coherently speculate and theorize and ponder losing its relevance.  

He wasn’t certain what was real anymore, as sense and sleep and existence blurred and blended.  

Not when everything was nothing but particles now, dust and fragments of starlight and atoms that whirred and fizzed and sang together as his jumbled mind concocted several memories, stringing them together, pushing ideas and names and faces into the forefront of thought and existence as he raged and screamed and burned silently, the supernova within consuming the smile and light and energy without.  

He was being disassembled and unwound and unthreaded, strand by strand and bit by piece by bit. His was a tapestry that’d gotten one too many knots in it and some damned cosmic creators saw it fit to have a laugh and undo all the blasted stitching and work that’d gone into the damned thing just to get those bits of knotting out again.  

It hurt and healed and tore and tingled, making him feel almost giddy in the process of it all as fingers and toes and eyelashes and his damned nose etched and reappeared once more.  

Power and light and fury and anger and joy and bliss and creation danced at his fingertips and coursed in his blood as he felt the waves of energy roiling off of him, dancing along his fingertips and lighting up the Tardis.  

He drank in the emotions, hanging on each moment like they were his last, savoring the high. Mourning the shift.    

Almost addicted, starved of that light and those moments of feather touches of warmth that cascaded across his shoulders and dripped through his blood as his hearts started to beat in rhythm with one another, each keeping time. 

It was…too bright.  

His head was pounding now. Too many thoughts whirring and coiling and cramming together as he bent forward. Energy rumbled and snapped, sparks hissing as his fingers shook, his face glowing, features gone, as the supernova burst erupted around him, and the regeneration amplified as he dropped to his knees.  

‘I don't want to go!’ 

‘Stay back Deku!’ 

‘Hold on, Nine!’  

‘Young Midoriya?’  

‘Don’t leave.’ 

‘I promise I'll protect you.’  

The world swirled towards a colored swathed mess of noise and elation and fury and sound and light and energy.  

Voices streamed and beat against his ears and temple.  

Light cascaded, energy pulsed as he lurched forward.  

Then dropped to nothing, as he slammed down to the floor.   

‘I promise…’  

It was the instant connection that signaled the shift for him, the regeneration and the start of the new era.  The drumbeat that pulsed in his mind and reverberated through the connection to reminded him that it was at an end.  

The man quirked a smile, peering out towards the stars as the burst of energy ripped through the universe. Waves and pulses touched along the curvature of the seascape of the cosmic streams and rivers.  

“It was a success then,” He murmured, almost smug into the dark. “As I knew it would be. A delightful comedy, to say the least.” 

He was looking forward to this very much and he had been for quite some time.    

It’d always been so predictable with The Doctor and finally, he’d set it all straight again.  

His head was pounding.  

The concrete sense that his head, his actual, physical head hurt, and an ache rocked against his temples, as the world around him swayed, brought him back to his senses.  

The sound of beeping tickled his ears in the most unpleasant way, its incessant chirping grating against every nerve as he groaned, his voice scratchy and gravely, yet light and decidedly cracked. Fingers twitched as The Doctor slowly came back to awareness, his muscles, and senses firing to life, regeneration sparking the energy of alertness of consciousness slowly took hold.  

A tired hum rumbled in his chest as he allowed himself to lay there, feeling the cool of the floor, savoring in the sensation of feeling one thing for a moment.  

Cold, tangible metal. One, apparent thing.  

Tenderly, his hands (his hands!) reached out and quietly skimmed across the smooth, chilled surface of the floor as he drank in the sensation of feeling the ripple of movement across his palms and fingertips.  

He could feel.   

He could touch .   

There was a soft thrumming beat, pulsing hums and beeps in his ears as The Doctor slowly let his eyes slip open and watched the world spin for a moment as his head protested the sudden influx of light and color.  

He hissed involuntarily at the jolt, the sudden shine of light and the amplification of sound from opening his eyes (and really who knew that could happen?) made him wince as he took stock of his surroundings as the world bounced and bobbed and jostled.  

He’d been sent spinning for a bit, lying on his stomach and unable to move while the regeneration had happened. Colors, shapes, and clarity had vanished as he’d dropped into the darkness.  

Yet now…?  

The Doctor’s lashes fluttered idly, as he blew out a warm breath, savoring in the sensation of breathing and feeling and being somewhat whole again.  

Whole and lying on his stomach, hands smack flat on the floor of the Tardis and fingers trying to dig their way through metal it seemed, as he scritched and scratched against the polished flooring, his smooth hands languidly running along the floor with practiced, yet unsteady movements.  

Like he’d done this a thousand times, yet like it was still the first time too.  

And here he was.  

The Doctor. Once more. Once again.  

Everything in its proper place, renewed and reassembled.  

Regenerated .  

Tilted a bit sideways, yet, lying on his stomach as he was, with his sleeves a bit wonky and…billowish.  

Which was odd enough.  

But that was a pittance compared to the regeneration business.  

He was whole again, every arm and finger and toe and nose!  

And ears!  

The Doctor bent his elbows and grit his teeth, teetering on dizziness and ecstasy as waves of regeneration still coursed through him, his skin alight with power, golden glows of sunkissed richness cascading around him, like starlight and sundrops dripping from his fingers.  

Carefully, he pushed his palms flat on and heaved onto his knees, mindful of the fabric of his clothing that…hadn’t changed much from his previous regeneration. Still the rather posh looking suit shirt…a bit tattered as it had been during the last…skirmish that’d led to this whole damned mess of a business.  

And perhaps there was a hole or two there on his sleeve. A singed bit from where Strax had shot his laser. 

Had it been Strax? Or had that been…perhaps he was getting his regenerations mixed up…The Doctor hummed softly to himself confused for a moment as a jumbled series of images flashed through his head. 

Strax had been the one with the giraffe dancing, hadn’t it?  

But then…he also recalled the library and the laughter…and Wilf.   

The shirt was there. That was for certain. For both of them? Or neither?  

Perhaps he’d worn it on both occasions? The Doctor furrowed his brows.  

Eyebrows he’d need to investigate to see if they were as…angry as he’d been once upon a time when he was…very Scottish sounding…as he peered down at the familiar shirt, narrowing his eyes at the object that seemed to have just as much a history as he did. 

Except now it was rather…enormous?  

Which wasn’t…so normal.  

Sleeves that had once fit were now puffing and pooling around his hands, which looked almost comically small in his dress shirt, as he stared down at his hands for a moment in consternation and wonderment, watching as his fingertips still glittered beneath the pillows of fabric that were his shirtsleeves.  

Then of course there were the pants! The Doctor didn’t even want to consider… 

His nose twitched as he did , in fact consider just how long everything had gotten as he slowly adjusted his glasses and made to stand.  

Knees only buckled once as the Tardis gave a soft whine and burble of discontent at the flurry of energy that surrounded The Doctor as he muttered and hummed and cascaded with light, turning his thoughts towards studying the present as he tried to make sense of… 

Why the hell was he now barefoot?  

Pants that, yes indeed, were too, too long pooled at his ankles as his feet–his bare feet! --freely peeked out from beneath the folds of fabric.   

And what’d happened to his shoes? Socks?  

His socks too? Those had been some of his favorites too. They’d had little ducks on them. A gift they’d been from Rory for Christmas…

The Doctor…He’d never gone without those before. Not once. Not in any tiny speckle of a thought of time had he ever regenerated without his…his damned shoes!  

Not that he was overly attached to his shoes mind you. He could go without any particular shoe and just get a new pair , but to regenerate without any? That was…awkward.  

He did mourn the loss of the socks though.  

So… 

“Where are they…oh my giddy aunt, is that my voice ?” 

The Doctor faltered and balked, stiffening. His voice cracked , actually cracked as he floundered and flubbed through his thoughts as they verbalized from his lips.  

And oh no.  

“Oh, that’s no good. Not good at all,” He murmured, his lips twitching as his voice cracked again, the lightness of the timbre setting him on edge even as it twisted his lips upward into a wry smile.  

Because…he hadn’t heard his voice do that in quite a long time. Embarrassingly long, if you wanted to get technical and press far too long in asking him for his age… 

And as it was, this voice…and dear god why did he have this voice? What was the point of it, because it made The Doctor… 

Entirely too childish to be considered properly Doctorish, which wasn’t entirely him , now was it?   

So, with a wearied, and almost resigned, yet curious gait, The Doctor maneuvered towards the mirror that hung haphazardly nearer the door of the Tardis. It wasn’t a large thing. Hardly conspicuous.  

Small round thing that hung on a string. Bit of twine, actually. If you wanted to be all proper about it.  

Didn’t match a single thing in the Tardis. But it was wholly his…picked it out himself…and the old, tarnished gold leafing and battered edging kind of reminded him of himself sometimes, as he peered at it.  

Well… 

Except now of damned course.  

He loved the stars.  

Almost as much as he hated himself.  

But it wasn't supposed to be that he hated himself so terribly that staring at his own image made him wince and recoil.  

But then again, he was not reduced to being a child...a…a child.  

He was a child.  

The Doctor. Him. He’d regenerated into the form of a teenaged child.  

Fucking hell in a hand basket.  

The…the boy. ..he wanted to shudder at the thought of referring to himself as such peered down at his hands and feet and cringed because this was all so annoying to consider because here he was, with a universe of knowledge and life and experience...trapped in this body, with this face, almost cherubic and far too unassuming in its looks with these eyes and this pouting expression! 

And these strange feelings that made his skin crawl! The boy’s excitement burst just as quickly as his fear and nervousness did, each frothing and pitching and nipping in his veins, coursing through every thought and coloring his view. His emotions, which had always been so present, so profoundly surface-level, were now more apparent, more pronounced, and far harder to control. He was amplified, expanded, feeling and thinking and seeing things through a lens of hyper awareness of his emotional foundation.  

Fear. Joy. Pride. Anger .  

All the things he'd...most...learned to control, to contain, to lock up tight in the boxes of his mind, containing them within little Tardises of memories and lives that no longer need bother him or make him feel ...and now they were crashing together, coming undone.  

Undone because he was...reduced to this form, these fingers, toes, face, and freckles . 

“Dear god, I have freckles on my face. I’ve grown spots!”   

Freckles. Of all the damned things to have...  

“But what a joke.” Izuku retorted after a moment, the thought sneaking through as he leaned closer to the mirror and tugged at his curls. "Still not a ginger even...that's a bit of a lark. I have the freckles now," He chimed into the silence, a roll of his eyes sending his vision into a blur at the speed of the movement. "Freckles but no ginger-ness. That hardly seems fair. You'd think they’d balance…"  

And yet... curls were somewhat new. Well...new-ish. Along with the haphazard way they haloed his head with their downy, earthen hue... He’d admit that the green tint was a new look for him. Never been that color before.  

Not a bad change.  

Though, Izuku would admit that this first peer in the mirror was shocking to say the least. Wide, doe-like eyes stared back, brilliant green gems of fire sparked within the frames of his lashes. And swiftly followed confusion, and a ponderance of consideration as The Doctor mused about the oddity of this flicker of familiarity. Deja vu was hardly a reality of a feeling for him. He'd lived too long to really chalk things up to happenstance. And yet, the unsettling feeling that he knew this child's gaze...would not ease within him. He knew those eyes, that mouth, the hair, even the damned freckles...  

Yet he couldn’t place it.  

Couldn’t figure out the how of it all. Which bothered Izuku immensely. Because he liked knowing.  

Just like he liked knowing where the aura of sadness came from and the downward flicker of light that tempered the fire in his gaze… 

The Doctor couldn't distinguish what was his look, his aged wisdom, his experience, his...sorrow. And what was not. Because...there seemed something else there, something wholly his, and wholly not ...two within one… 

Him and not.   

"What a fascinating consideration," Izuku mused, reaching up on his tiptoes to see better. The boy deliberately ignored the bothersome reality that he was, in fact, too short for much of what he once was, what he once wore , who he once portrayed...and stared at reached up to grasp at the fluttering curls at his forehead, a wry smile of bitter curiosity dripping through his senses as the golden regeneration continued to twist and coil and curl around him, seeping into and out of every pore, illuminating the pale face. Golden hues of renewal and life flared around him.  

A new start.  

A new face.  

A new him .  

The oddity of the name he'd felt so familiar in reciting about himself slipping easily off his tongue. "Izuku, huh? Where might that have come from now?" He pondered, his title wavering in favor of the familiar name, the non-formal moniker a pleasing sound that sat astride his official descriptor. The Doctor . He couldn't decide which felt the better coming off his tongue, tripping along his lips. And he couldn't, for the life of him, figure out where he knew that name, where it came from or why it seemed his own... 

Because he'd given up names long ago, worlds and lifetimes in the distance, his own nature and sins forbidding him from taking on humanity in such a way. He wasn't deserving of a name, a familiar term, an identity beyond just The Doctor... But now? The snaking feeling of glee and guilt intermixed, making his stomach churn as energy burst at his fingertips. He hated himself, much as he disliked the shadows that misted at the edges of the universe, lonely and dark and waning as the light crept past them. Never towards them. Izuku...The Doctor, he amended quickly...hated the idea that he was darkness and yet gifted, gifted with this light each time, each regeneration. He hated seeing the hope in that gaze--the boy flicked another look into the mirror as his sleeves puddled around his elbows, the suit too big, too overgrown, too...too... 

"Too aged...for the likes of me." He scoffed bitterly, wanting to reject his youth, his renewed life, his...inescapable sense of longing and loneliness that seeped into every fiber and feeling within him as this boyishness got the better of him and the wide, caring look he received back from his reflection judged him, and laid bare his own insecurities.  

Izuku instantly quashed the honesty and rejected the utter possibility that he was anything other than what he had been.  

A lonely traveler.  

Singular.  

Solitary.  

"I'm better off alone," 

He retorted into the stillness, energy seeped out of him like a waterfall, his emotions wavering like a flickering candle. The frustration the boy felt boiled softly beneath his touch, making Izuku...vulnerable, almost too weak and misunderstood.  

"I've always been better alone."  

'No, you haven't. You're tired of being alone," A familiar tinny hum made Izuku's ears prickle, as he narrowed his gaze on the reflection of the youthfulness that bounced back at him, eager to face a universe of adventures, though something…something seemed to hesitate…something or someone begged him to hold back.  

“I don’t need anyone,” he retorted to the thought, his boyish voice making it harder to sound convincing to his own ears, as he tried to laugh and downplay the emotions.   

'You've never been good at being alone. You're just a scared little boy--'  

"I didn't ask your opinion," He murmured to the memory, the voice, the ghosting face that flickered through his memory, another eye roll erupting as he dropped his hands and pushed back the feelings and memories and...and honesty. Into another box, into another safe, small space that he could close up, lock away and just cast back into the shadows once more. The Doctor grinned and shook his head.  

Because no, he didn’t need anyone. Not a single one!  

He’d done that. He’d been there. And this was day zero. A new dawn. A new him! 

Even if he seemed like a child.  

He was still…he was the Doctor!  

And this… 

Izuku swallowed.  

This was absurdly mad.  

Beyond mad really.  

Positively bananas , if he wanted to get all…old-timey about it and sound somewhat…well somewhat stupid and dim when he said anything, really. 

Who called things ‘bananas’? That was just daft. And who decided that calling something ‘bananas’ was a bad thing? When did that ever start?  

He rather liked bananas, thank you. They were decidedly delicious…you know, when they weren’t so entirely mushy and somewhat…bland when he bit into them.  

And alright , Izuku didn’t like bananas.  

But that didn’t make them bad. Quite the contrary, because when he of all creatures in this great, wide universe was bested by something, then that something was rather remarkable.   

And in a good way, mind you.  

So, yes, bananas were delightful things, even if he didn’t personally like to eat them.  

But this situation?  

Oh, dear god was this situation the opposite of bananas.  

“Huh, I wonder what that would be then?” He murmured, a wry smile, twisting on his face, as his glasses slipped down his nose, and he moved one hand to roll the sleeves of his shirt up.  

What was the opposite of a banana?  

The damned sleeves were hanging over his fingertips, making it hard to simply maneuver let alone attempt to appear even remotely capable or polished or… 

“Tall. That's the word I'm looking for,” he hummed somewhat sardonically, feeling his brow twitch as the history of his humorous preferences tried to seep through this new form. “Why am I so damned short this time ‘round?”  

He lifted his hand and stared at the overlong sleeve that easily drooped down and scrunched about his elbow, noting with a critical scan that everything was billowy and floppy and just too weird to be comfortable now.  

New bodies, right? 

Oddities and paradoxes in and of themselves. Not that Izuku ever had anyone to really talk to about the whole, you know, new body thing, but still . 

He frowned, staring back at his hand.  

“Not older this time so back to the spry type.” Izuku quirked his head. “I can work with that at least–” 

The boy stumbled once, a warning that he couldn’t, in face work with what he was wearing.  

But that was only a minor inconvenience and one he’d change as soon as they were back in the sky and on a course to a safer, brighter destination than where they were.  

The boy’s fingers tingled in anticipation, as his legs burned with the ache of unused energy.  

"Besides," He chirped, too cheerful, too giddy. Too forced . But for whom he was forcing it was a mystery. Izuku didn’t need to act. He didn’t need to try to pretend "I can't let this deter me from getting on with things, now, can I?” He was speaking aloud, to whom or what, he wasn’t so sure as he adjusted his pants, once again.  Best be off on settling things and traveling and whatnot. Can't waste my time moping and mumbling about the...the trivialities of life."  

Or the people.  

Life .  

Ha.  

Shaking fingers tapped almost impatiently against the counter, as Izuku fell back flat onto his feet, his pants catching beneath his heels at the control panel, anxiousness eating at him as he considered the possibilities of where and when he could go.   

A wavering sense of longing flickering briefly again, before he pushed it down again, forcing the bile back into his stomach, the ache away from his chest as he hummed a familiarly unfamiliar tune. The Tardis hummed back, whirring and chirping in response to his trembling notes. "Can't go getting soft again, now, can we?" He retorted to himself, the buzzing in his ears continuing to mock. 

But no, this time Izuku wouldn't let himself fall prey to those ideas, those thoughts, those...lingering hopes. Nothing but trouble that was. A whole mess of trouble that caused him nothing but… 

“Well, nothing but trouble , and that’s a terrible use of language, Izuku,” The Doctor muttered to himself, peering down on the screen carefully, his thoughts straying to study the possible trajectories he could choose, as he perused the controls carefully, his fingers alight with power, still unfinished in its regeneration process.  

No, he wasn't worth that much.  

He needed to focus on the others, the rest of the universe.  

The worlds and faces and creatures that existed and deserved to exist. Because Izuku? The Doctor?  

He was... "Nothing important," The boy whispered, "Just a passerby. A blip. A flickering speck of..." Nothing. 

And yet…for all the nothingness, and non-being, Izuku–The Doctor, was utterly foolish in his assumptions that his lack of worth would excuse his coordination from causing a…flurry of issues.  

Izuku was clearly and totally wrong in assuming that he had any total understanding of his own skills or ability to work his new body. That is, he was far too hasty in trying to get this whole new body to work and in his eagerness to run away from the growing shadows that edged around this new moment, this new regeneration, this face, this life, and his new persona, and name , Izuku…miscalculated several things. 

That is, he rather forgot about several things.  

Rather rather, he neglected to consider his own lack of height and tripped and tipped into the Tardis control panel, hands splayed out and smacking into too many knobs and bobbles with a loud ‘oomph’ and a groan as the wind rushed from his lungs. 

And oh, fucking hell.  

He was cursed.  

“Damned height gods, whoever you are.”  

The Tardis lurched and burbled uncomfortably as Izuku (Izuku?) was tossed back and smacked his head against the railing, scrambling to grab onto something to keep steady as the Tardis went into a tailspin, the control panel giving a whine before an electrical spark shot upward like a firecracker and burst, sending a spray out.  

Another lurching, jerking toss, had the boy jumbled and whipped backwards and then to the side as his grip loosened on the control panel before he was knocked backwards, a stupidly wry smile on his face.  

His back rammed into the railing that separated the controls from the rest of the main cabin area of the Tardis’ wide expansive roominess, as the world twisted and spun and toyed with his vision. Blurring and blending and deviating from clarity, the boy recalled a ginger hellion who did the exact same thing not so long ago… 

“Oh, Donna Noble,” He murmured, his voice too youthful and too foreign in his mouth to fit with the words. “You’re a bad influence!” 

‘Steady nine! Don’t go getting distracted now…’  

His fingers twitched, golden light still swirling as the regeneration remained active, green eyes blurring for a moment as the double beat of hearts thundered in Izuku's chest.  

Well, it hadn't been so long for him , anyway…  

They spun outwards and onwards into the space for a moment, rocketing  

Shouta was tired .  

Grousing to himself, the underground hero nursed an overly large cup of coffee and made his way down the long stretch of tree-lined sidewalk near the waterway about a mile or so away from the outskirts of campus.  

It was close enough to be within calling distance, able to respond should danger arise–though Shouta hoped that would never happen (though he wasn’t so stupid as to suppose that it *wouldn’t)--but far enough away that it afforded the man a bit of peace and quiet and solitude from the overly eager would-be heroes in training that he had to deal with on the daily. And a good escape after the shitty night he’d had dealing with his more active than usual patrol.  

It seemed the usual rabble were more than a little eager to get into more than one fight the night before and Shouta was fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of several punches and attempted escapes.  

Heists gone awry.  

Carjackings.  

Attempted robberies.  

You name it and Shouta was there, in the middle of it, trying to prevent it.  

Damn near ended up in the water at one point thanks to an impossibly stupid cop with a water gun quirk who thought they’d be a bit…quick to help put out a fire that one of the assailants had started and they’d misjudged their own firing power and ended up spraying him into the fence and over the railing.  

He’d almost fallen off the pier and into the ocean, but grabbed onto the railing at the last second, using his damned capture weapon as a backup anchor to hold him secure while the blasted newbie officer regulated their nerves enough to keep their power under control after Shouta had used Erasure to stifle the other’s quirk long enough to prevent any more casualties.  

He’d pointedly ignored anyone who’d laughed under their breath at his expense, too tired to care about the bullshit, but definitely eager for that cup of coffee that he was now nursing right now as he strolled slowly back from the bakery, ignoring the fact that he should have gotten Hizashi a cinnamon roll and would, in fact, be chastised for that later…or guilt tripped into buying one at the earliest convenience.  

But Shouta couldn’t be too bothered to care. He’d been too tired from his late night and long day ahead to really think too long about the implications of what his lack of thought towards the cinnamon roll would mean. Nor could he really think too hard on what Haru, the bakery owner had said as she fussed over the long red mark on his cheek from where he’d been struck by the whip that the female quirker had used, as she’d extended her hair as her weapon during one of his first fights of the night, catching his cheek as he’d fended off four other assailants all in one go.  

Tsukauchi had been at that one. It’d been a raid, actually…long haul of a plan that they’d worked hard to take down to lead to the league– 

“Watch out!” There was a somewhat frantic call, from above us. A child’s voice echoed through the air as Shouta turned with a quizzical narrowing of his pitch-colored gaze to watch a flash of blue splash and zip across the sky as a ‘whoom-whoom-whoom’ bellowed in the air.  

There was another spark of energy, another explosion of light and sound bellowed overhead. The blue blur belched out from a portal, as another call shot out from the opened door.  

“Oi! Lazy Lad, move your bones a bit faster or you’ll be pancaked!” 

Shouta could only turn his head upward for a moment, watching with some measure of incredulity as a massive…police box? Spun erratically overhead, bashing into a few trees that lined the water way as it made a beeline for the field just across the water, and Shouta’s head.  

A flash of green and billowing white caught the man’s eye as branches snapped, as the limbs chock full of cherry blossoms fell and scattered through the air.  

“I said move, buster!”  

And shit that was a kid’s voice. The underground hero’s ears picked up the pitch and tone as he dropped his coffee, and crouched low, catching the underside of the contraption as it sailed overhead. Some of the wayward blossoms landed in Shouta’s hair, tousled by the jostling of world around him, the air dusting up the branches and leaves and grass as he ducked to get out of the way.  

There was a sound ‘crunch’ as said police box smacked into another tree, after trying to seemingly course correct, as Shouta raised himself to stand. He turned on his heel and sprinted to follow, watching as the object careened hard to the left before ricocheting off the base of another tree before flinging into a spiraled turn and tearing a few branches off the other trees that lined the perimeter of the field for good measure, before skidding across the grass and tearing up the soil on its journey to the near center.  

Dirt and mud and grass sprayed outward, caking the blue box and sending a shower of green and brown and branch and petal around as Shouta darted towards the box, his fingers threaded through his capture weapon, quirk at the ready.    

Fumes were erupting from the box of blue, as it creaked and groaned and beeped unpleasantly. A siren was blaring somewhere inside as Shouta hedged closer, eyes narrowed, and lips pulled thin because he’d been certain that he’d heard a voice… 

A groan split the air, low and guttural, as the box shimmied and tipped on its side, fully turning to land was a hard ‘bang’ as more white smoke and steam streamed out. The light atop the damned thing continued to glint as the siren silenced as a ‘clanging’ noise echoed to replace it.  

There was a knock and then a bang as the underground hero reached for the door, his quirk alight, hand at the ready.  

But then there was another ‘bang’ and an ‘oomph’ and suddenly a tousled head of mussed green curls popped out from the door, as wide, green eyes peered up at Shouta, almost unassuming, almost innocent.  

Almost.   

A boy. No more than fifteen, stared silently at the underground hero for a moment, the bottle-green orbs studying the man with an intensity that almost had Shouta stepping back in surprise. Golden light danced around the boy’s face, tingling along his skin as his freckled cheeks scrunched and lips puckered in thoughtfulness before he hummed in approval and grinned.  

“Hullo!” He retorted, far too casually for the circumstances as he tried to hoist himself upright, his elbow catching on the edge of the doorway.  

The boy slipped and nearly fell back into the box, a low ‘oomph’ escaping his lips as he tried to right himself, chin catching on the edge of the door as he glowered downward.  

“That’s rude you know,” He murmured to himself.  

Shouta frowned, quirk still active as he stared at the child who only shook his head and tried to hoist himself upright and out of the box again. A pint-sized kid…wearing overly large suit clothes perched carefully on the edge of the doorway of the police box. Long black pants extending beyond his bare feet, too baggy to be his own, and dress shirt and vest billowing comically around him as he tried to appear ‘respectable’, it seemed. The boy pushed his glasses up on his nose a bit better before extending his hand, carefully hoisting a few glittering necklaces in his other, as he smiled at Shouta.  

“Like I said, I’m The Doctor and I–”  

There was another lurching groan as they did a flip to the side, turning one way, as the boy, who stood on the edge of the doorway, was forced into a flip forward going into the opposite direction.  

Right over the underground hero’s head.  

There was a startled yelp, and a groan before a loud clanging and siren bellowed in the air as light filled Shouta’s eyes, forcing him to blink only briefly, as he watched the blue police box almost…hiss, before it shot upwards and out of sight.   

The man only considered the brief oddity of the circumstances as he listened to the boy wheeze behind him.  

"Now that's not nice you know!" The boy chortled with a choked gasp, staring up at the sky, as the distinct sound of whirring and buzzing erupted in the air.  

"I didn't need you to go off and lob me out the damned door! I could have just walked!"  

Izuku rolled his eyes with a sharp smirk as the machine disappeared, fading into the afternoon glint as the clouds lazed and the air of Earth's warm Spring weather tickled his nose. At least, he thought it was Spring. He was always fond of the seasons Earth offered. They were certainly nice enough to distract for a few minutes. Idyllic and quaint in so many respects that it distracted him from the greater expanses of the fire and fumes and stars and swirling and twisting universe that curled and grew around the naive inhabitants of this tiny little blip of a planet. 

The boy laughed as he sneezed. The golden hues curling and coiling and twisting around him making everything seem so light . His senses felt on fire , his energy was positively seeping from every pore, cascading off of him as he blinked around him, smile growing as the man stared at him in questioning, brows drawn together in consternation.  

Izuku could tell that was a familiar look on this fellow. Seemed to fit his face well enough. The crow ...how amusing that was! "What the hell was that, kid?" Izuku immediately frowned towards the human before him, his own brow lifting in offense.  

"Not a kid, need I remind you," He quipped, finger lightly circling in the dirt, before he rolled into a bounce that lifted him to his feet. Perhaps this youthful visage meant a spryer maneuverability at least.  

A perk! Izuku bounced on his heels, and leapt a few times to test his flexibility, the flow about him sparking brighter as the regeneration continued to course, giving him a drunken sense of excitement and eagerness. 

His nose twitched again, another sneeze coming. How odd ...  

"Could have fooled me, kid," The man retorted, nonplussed, eyes narrowed on Izuku. "But that doesn't answer the question about what the hell just happened."  

Izuku waved away the man's concerns easily, his smile bright as he cast a sidelong glance briefly towards the man, before flicking his attention towards staring at the trees and the skyline. It was pretty here!  

"She was just being finicky is all. Happens each time this sort of...thing well..." The boy gestured to himself, the sleeves of his shirt flapping awkwardly like broken wings as he shook his head. 

"But there's really no reasoning with her. She'll do as she pleases and spruce herself up and come back when she's ready."  

"What the hell are you talking about?" The man intoned, his voice dipping lower as his frown dripped with annoyance more than confusion. "You're skipping details, kid."  

Izuku shook his head. " Not a kid," He repeated.  

"Could have fooled me," The man replied again. "Now start over, with more details." 

Izuku huffed at the... inconvenience of it all. He'd much rather just explore the area. Or nap. He wasn't quite sure which was more appealing. The tug of sleep was definitely there, but the urge to run was pulling him in ten different directions, his stomach coiling inward and creeping towards his throat as his fingers and toes tingled with excitement. 

Or was it worry? He wasn't sure. Maybe they were the same? They'd certainly been combined a number of times that he'd forgotten how to tell them apart at this point. SO, who could say really?  

" Kid ."  

" Not a kid," He remarked with a clip and a bite that was cheerfully intoned. "But it's the Tardis." He turned more fully towards the man, reaching for one of his sleeves, trying to roll the damned thing so he could at least see his hand. He had to look somewhat refined, distinguished… doctorish or whatever rubbish people–er, humans saw as plausible to rely on as powerful or whatnot. 

Seemed his current form didn’t give him much of an aura of…credibility.  

Which was absolute rubbish if you asked him. 

…Were probably just the clothes though.  

"She's...well whenever a regeneration happens, she's gotta go through a sort of transformation too, as it were,” He quipped blinking at the buttons as his fingers shook, too much to unbutton the small shiny bit. The boy’s… Doctor’s stomach rumbled again, signaling that he was, indeed quite hungry.  

Regenerations indeed required food. 

Perhaps that’s why he was so focused on bananas– 

“You’re speaking about a box --” 

“Tardis,” Izuku continued–and why was that name coming up again? Why Izuku? 

Why did he agree to that name so quickly? The boy blinked a few times stilling, and staring off towards the tree line, watching as the idle cherry blossoms lazily trailed through the rustled branches as wind tousled the gentle petals. A soft spray of pinks and roses and creams danced through the sky. A blue as brilliant as he’d ever seen it before.  

Like oceans of tears.  

Had the earth always been like this?  

“Kid?”  

The boy blinked again and straightened, his curls–curls! --swaying as he turned towards man more fully and grinned, coming back to himself. Golden trails of stardust swirled around his fingertips as he plucked at his sleeves, shuffling his feet and digging his toes into the soft earth.  

The grass was marvelous against his bare skin.  

“She’s a wickedly temperamental creature. Not just a box , need I remind. That sort of description hardly does her any justice.” Izuku (what a name!) remarked, ignoring the questioning look in the man’s gaze as he tilted his head to the side and hummed, “Whenever this happens, she has to match my personality and it takes her a bit of a time to finagle her way through the mess of it all." 

And perhaps that was putting it lightly! He’d never been the Tardis so who was he to say what she went through each and every time this happened? And it’d happened, what? Over a dozen times now?  

Dear god was he that old? Eesh… 

No wonder the lovely beauty she was would be somewhat…agitated at the prospect of change.   

The boy snorted. "But she was a little more...forceful this time ‘round, it seems.” Izuku hummed for a moment, his thoughts straying as he peered back towards the sky and the broken trail of…somewhat destruction that the Tardis had left in its wake of pseudo-landing that she’d tried to do…not that it’d been his fault in the slightest, mind you. There was no reasoning with her when she was in this mood. Hell, she hardly listened to anyone on a good day, when things were going peachy!  

Now, here she was in the throes of change and mood-swings and– 

The boy blinked, was that because of him? Was she being all…wobbly because of his own mood. Izuku narrowed his eyes on the broken branches and swaying bits of tender tendrils of dewy springtime petals as they brushed against the backdrop of sky and pondered.  

“She mimics me, eh? So is that why she’s so…well…” It wasn’t very likely that she was so…finicky and cross because of him and his own nature. He wasn’t…the boy laughed lowly, his voice cracking at the pitch break (and that was a sore spot for him! Even his voice had lost its impact! Doctor persona, indeed).  

“You’re lost in that head of yours, kid,” the man–the human–retorted, his shadowed visage edging closer to Izuku who cast a sidelong glance towards the encroaching form. The boy only lifted a brow in questioning, clearly affronted by the supposition that he was anything beneath this mortal, this youth that stood, admittedly, taller than he did.  

And that gave the Doctor a moment of pause because when did humans get so incredibly tall ?  

‘Perhaps you’re just shorter, nine?’  

That was none of whomever was speaking’s business, thank you. The boy immediately dismissed the voice, with a silent wave and a shake of his head.  

He wasn’t about to consider his…lack of skill at growing just yet. Or the fact that he was…a teenager pint-sized Doctor. That…that wasn’t a consideration he needed to make. Hardly a jot of a thought! No, indeed!  

He was merely just spry and lively and ready to jaunt through the universe…once the Tardis made her return!   

“I’ll have you know that I’m not a kid , or a child, or what have you, despite my, er…appearance. And the Tardis just…has a mind of her own, so it’s really nothing to jabber on about and dawdle away our time on.” The boy sniffed again, carefully curling the fabric so that his arm was exposed, the stardust infused in his veins and glowing across his fingers made the world around him appear all the brighter. It was like sunlight coiled and caught in his palm.  

And Izuku couldn’t help the giddiness in his chest from fluttering as a burble of enthusiasm trilled along his lips as he whistled merrily at the prospects and thoughts they zipped and danced and tromped through his ever whizzing and whirring mind.  

Newly regenerated. So much time, so many things to do and see and places to go and be and experience! So much time, so little time too! The boy grinned, his fingers fluttering as a trail of starlight swirled in the air. He wondered, briefly what his face must look like to this human, this man. Was he an oddity for glowing? Was he strange looking at the glare of the light that the generation caused?  

Did it even matter?  

Probably not.  

Should it even bother Izuku? Should he even care if the man cared? Or should he be worried or concerned?  

The Doctor was humming more now as his fingers were tapping a silent tune in the air, a song that only he could hear, music that he’d long ago heard in a time that he’d traveled to many worlds and centuries and companions ago… 

“Kid.”  

Ah, he loved music! It’s why he tended to collect bits of it wherever he went! Had oodles of it on the Tardis! Whole storage compartment stocked to the brim with it! Records and CDs and even a lute! Which was harder to play than one might suppose. But he’d mastered it thanks to some of the better musicians of the 14th century teaching him to play it during his time as the primary minstrel troupe in France…wasn’t his finest hour, but it had been a hell of a party season… 

And then there’d been the softer piano and violin pieces that he’d always stop and listen to when he could spare it. Whenever his timing was just right, he’d traveled to the perfect moment in time.  

The moments where he needed to weep for what he was losing, or what he’d already lost.  

And there…Izuku’s fingers twitched as the pulsing beat of music and star shine sang in his veins.  

There was something straying through his thoughts, something singing at his senses… 

And briefly, for a moment…the boy could almost see something else peeking through, something different, something… 

Izuku squinted, his bottle-green gaze narrowing as he stared out across the sky, a thoughtful humming turned softer as he glazed through the thoughts that blurred and blended and curled and distorted and twisted and tossed together like a swirl of color and sound and memory… 

‘It’s not safe to stay here anymore. We have to go.’  

‘You can trust me.’ 

‘I’ll keep you safe…’  

‘...don’t leave me.’  

A hand, tentative and overly heavy landed on the boy’s shoulder. Warmth seeped through the connection, precious weight and pressure jolted through The Doctor as images turned to static, thoughts screeching to a halt, memories blurred into forgetfulness and suddenly Izuku was well aware of where he was.  

The presence of reality slammed the boy down to earth (earth!) once more as he jerked back in surprise, and reflexively brought his stance into a defensive block, catching the man’s restraining hand with his own…or rather the man caught Izuku’s hand and held it firm as he peered down on the boy with a questioning look, studying the child’s (not a child!) face with a decided frown.  

And that was too close, thank you.  

Izuku quickly stepped back, the fury of starlight swished and swirled around him.  

A beat of humanity flickered in his footsteps, as the boy’s lip trembled of its own accord. But only for a second before the cool demeanor gave way to brightness, and a mask of joviality slipped into place. 

"Sometimes I think she gets a bit jealous, ” There was a small giggle, almost drunken as the boy considered the possibility that the Tardi would ever ...”And that's why she acts so finicky and temperamental except there's really nothing to be jealous of…” he paused for a moment, chin lifted as a small hummingbird of a thought flittered by. “Oh, well maybe Bess that one time...but...nah that wouldn't have made her upset, would it? Hmmm...." Izuku narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, movements stilling for a moment as he considered... "Now Madame De Pompadour might have… and oh yes was she the looker you might have thought she was!” He winked at the man who…well who sort of resembled a man who made the habit of sleeping on park benches or sleeping behind dumpsters and drank far too much coffee.  

Unkempt and rather scruffy…dark and broody and crow-like, with that overly long grey scarf and scraggle-hair that tousled over his shoulders.  

Dark clothes and boots and that scowling face!  

Bah.  

And oh right! They were talking about the Tardis. And the jealousy. Yes, yes. Back on track!  

“But we only snogged...once. But that wasn't enough...was it? Ha! What would I know? She could have been..."  

"You're not making sense, kid," That same broody, moody man replied his tone shifting towards contemplative as he seemed to take his turn in studying Izuku–The Doctor . He watched the boy carefully, humming lowly as he quirked a brow in questioning, the silent inquiry only eliciting a shrug from Izuku in reply.  

"I rarely do, or so I’ve been told." The boy retorted, "And I'm not meant to. That's the point." He smiled again, feeling the air around him growing warmer, lighting up his skin, making everything feel too light, too airy, too fiery and fierce and incandescently alive .  

He was thriving off of it, feeding off it. 

He loved it and loathed it.  

And feared it all the same and that grin never slipped, though this time, it was a little more forced, his skin stretched a bit more uncomfortably around his mouth as the darker shadows crept around the back of his mind, taunting, voices humming as the super nova energy continued to course through him, begging his frantic muscles to burst into a leap and sprint, dashing outward, onward into the stars, far, and far, and far away. 

‘I promise I’ll keep you safe.’  

‘You promise?’

That voice…? 

There was a searing wince of pain, a harsh ice pick of pressure against his temple that had the boy stumbling for a moment, his vision blurring as a mixture of ideas and memories and thoughts twisted.  

But in a flash, it was gone, and the energy that was bright and light and frantic was swirling around his senses and tugging him towards more pleasant things as he leaned a bit closer towards the man who stared incredulous and concerned at him. 

Why concerned though?  

The notion was absurd as he was. Hardly consequential. Hardly realistic. Hardly even tangible in terms of the plausible things! 

Therefore, no one need care about him, worry, fret, or what have you. Can’t be bothered to engage in useless constructs that wasted time. 

Too boring, too simplistic, too…too… 

Izuku blew out the air in his lungs, feeling his fingers tingling, his ears buzzing, energy crackling around him as the fire burned in his chest and seeped into a golden halo around his head.  

"But as it is, I'm stuck here until she decides she's done with her tantrum…costume change…whatever she likes to call it,” The boy retorted, changing the subject, as he tried to ignore the obvious, the tingling, the searing and the way he felt too unsteady and too alive and elated, eager to fly, but dreading the fall that would inevitably happen.  

But the flittering of joy that washed and ebbed and carried through him, as the cascading energy of regeneration not yet completed, ensnared his senses and made him feel so…so… 

Izuku bounced on the balls of his feet and clapped his hands together.  

“So! What've you got to eat?"  

The man looked utterly perplexed for a moment, narrowing his eyes on The Doctor as his frown only dipped lower, concern, mixing with suspicion.  

"...Excuse me?" 

“I’m needing some food, as you can see! Regenerations are a bit of a tricky business, and they leave me somewhat…peckish? Is that the right word? Peckish? Hmm…maybe not a strong enough term. Famished?” Izuku stewed on his thoughts searching for the right word that would amplify just how hungry he appeared.  

“Hmm, but what could I possibly be hungry for?” He mused, his thoughts twisting and leafing through memory and idea and wondering what could sound so good. “What might be…not fish fingers and custard…no that won’t do this time. It doesn’t sound so tasty.”  

The boy made a bit of a sour face as he considered what might work, what tantalized and enticed.  

“And this is Japan. And I’ve been here before naturally. Great time. Lots of night life,” He chattered, considering.  

“Now hold on just a minute kid,” The man’s voice dripped with concern and a bit of consternation. “I don’t know who you think you are, but you aren’t going anywhere until you and I figure out what the hell is fully going on with this–”  

“Tardis. I told you.” Izuku dismissed. He didn’t want to consider this right now. He wanted lunch.  

And his head was aching. Which…was new for him, in truth. Something worth investigating.  

“But what sounds like a good bite? I could support some Katsudon…though I don’t think I’ve ever had that particular dish so why–?” 

“There! He’s over there! I told you I’d track him.”  

Izuku balked for a moment, a half smirk on his face turning bashful as his stomach rumbled again.  

Well damn.  

“They’re a bit early,” He sighed more than a little regretfully.  

He was decidedly hungry.   

“I always assume I have more time than I do,” The boy hummed to himself, almost bitter at the joke he’d made, as a series of flames ignited the overturned trees, and the branches. “Seems I never even have enough for lunch! Bah.”  

Oh, this was all going to shit. Absolute shit.  

And all Shouta had wanted was a coffee.  

Shouta rather prided himself on keeping calm under pressure.  

But standing beneath, nearly overturned trees, with a growing crowd as a boy continued to mutter in his oversized clothing and his golden, glowing face and bare feet , Shouta couldn’t help but feel that this… this was a rather large…shit show.  

One that he’d wasn’t so sure he could get back under control, even if he wanted to. 

Especially when this damned kid that’d come riding in on a blue box was fishing in his pocket and pulled out several marked, rare jewels from the royal family from his pocket.  

And oh, dear god.  

“This one’s mine, Eraserhead.”  

And shit. 

The underground hero, with fingers still threaded through his capture weapon straightened at the formality of the call, the hero's name falling, almost mockingly from the lips of the current number one hero’s lips.  

Double shit.  

Shouta narrowed his eyes as he cast a sharp glance behind him, as Endeavor coasted up, a trail of firelight encasing his movements, glare fixed on the boy who was now behind Shouta, still standing there with the fucking…crown jewels of the royal family in his hold… 

Oh, fuck him.  

“Oh! That’s who you are is it? Eraserhead? That’s an interesting name. Heroes I presume?” The boy’s voice was light and breezy, completely unaffected by the situation, it seemed.  

And Shouta wasn’t sure if the kid didn’t know what danger he was in… 

Or didn’t care.  

Either scenario, however, had him far more wary than he’d started.  

“The others were caught at the crime scene, but this brat made an escape in his vehicle. Seems we caused enough damage to the damned thing to bring him down in the park–” Endeavor’s explanation was cut short by the boy’s mild snort of amusement.  

“You didn’t hurt the Tardis in the slightest,” The child waved his hand lightly, his sleeves flopping as he moved. He hardly appeared intimidating. “In fact, I think you missed her entirely!”  

“Now just a minute you brat, I wasn’t–”  

“I’m hardly a brat,” The boy retorted, cutting Endeavor off, “And I’m not an enemy either. I only took these to stop the others from taking them so you’re welcome!”  

He tossed the jewels towards Aizawa with a casual flick.  

“Hardly worth anything anyway,” The kid remarked lightly. “Considering they’re fake. Real ones were swapped out ages ago by the Lizard People.”  

Shouta was caught between balancing the jewels in his hands and giving a hard stare towards the boy who was clearly injured, and clearly needing to shut the hell up at this point because Endeavor’s reaction to his quip was one of mild annoyance, to say the least.  

The number one hero peered down his nose at the kid who only grinned lightly in return and lifted his chin to meet Endeavor’s gaze.  

“You really think I’m supposed to believe that you’re neither a vigilante nor that those jewels are fake, especially when you aimed a hit at my sidekicks with your little car?” He retorted with a sneer. “Do you think that I’m that stupid?”  

“It was the Tardis and yes. I do.” The retort was clipped as the boy nodded, almost like this was stupid question. “Most humans are naturally stupid,” He continued evenly, with a shrug, “But I’d hoped you’d be more self-aware than most and actually consider the truth…” The boy hummed for a moment and tilted his head to the side. “Though judging by your expression, it seems that you’re pretty close-minded. And blind to not see those jewels are decidedly fake. Betcha the royal family knows it too!”  

At this Endeavor took a step forward but Shouta, out of reflex stepped between the man and the boy, a mixture of…mild concern for the kid’s safety weighing on him as he considered the prospect of what an annoyed number one hero could do when riled too far.  

Not that he’d outright hurt the boy, but… 

The implication was still there.  

“Stand down Eraser.”  

Shouta’s expression remained neutral as he stood firm.  

“I can’t do that, Endeavor,” He remarked simply. “He’s a kid.”  

“And a villain. A vigilante,” the hero remarked with a growl. “You know we tracked him here. Our data confirms it.”  

“But you don’t know the full details,” The man countered. “And after what I’ve seen,”  

‘And the fact that he’s already injured…’  

“I’m not going to risk it–”  

“That’s not your call to make, Eraser,” Endeavor maneuvered past Shouta with a hard shove, a blast of warm flame–not hot enough to sear, sending a wide berth between them, as the ground gave way.  

And then he was off, towards the child, who stood, grinning with head still tilted towards the man.  

“That wasn’t very heroic of you, Endeavor,” The boy retorted, as the man pressed his height and weight advantage and made to land a soft blow around the boy, encasing him in a flamed ring to keep him trapped.  

The boy, however, only tutted, and brought out a small screwdriver?  

And what…?  

Shouta leaped at the same time that the light that glinted at the end of the object sparked green as the boy pressed a button towards Endeavor’s suit, his eyes narrowed.  

There was a loud ‘hiss’ followed by a ‘sizzle’ as Endeavor pulled back at the last second, his flames sputtering for a moment, steam swirled upward and around the number one hero, covering the man’s vision and creating a screened effect that clouded his ability to effectively glance at the boy who smirked in reply.  

“How the hell…what is…” Flames erupted around the man as more steam billowed out. Endeavor’s annoyance only grew. “What did you do?!”  

“I reversed the polarity of the configuration on the suit’s mechanics and rerouted what I thought was the heat amplifiers to give… well ...to give you a bit of a steam bath, as it were.”  

The child grinned a bit to himself, clearly proud of his joke.  

And that was going to get him in a whole shit ton of trouble.   

“Seemed you were a bit hotheaded, there hero, and we can’t have that, now, can we?”   

That one even more so.  

"And what do you intend to actually do about it boy ?" The man sneered, his voice dropping lower as he scowled at the child before him through the steam and the flames. "What do you think you can do against someone like me?"  

Angry tendrils of firelight danced around Endeavor's face, his eyes narrowing further as the boy before him only grinned smartly in response to the man's question, his own eyes dancing brightly, as golden light floated around his face and pulsed through his skin.  

And Shouta wavered between believing the child wasn’t a vigilante…and seeing that he was as he stood there…outwitting Endeavor rather easily.  

Verdant curls waved and fluttered, pushed by an invisible wind as the boy's fingers tapped lightly at his side, tendrils of energy dripping like threads from his fingertips as he shook his head and let out a soft laugh. "It's not really what I can or can't do, you know," He replied jokingly, his tone light but firm, almost biting as he stared back at the pro hero as though he were nothing. The steam veiled the space between them as Shouta hedged closer, trying to get a small opening, because this was going downhill fast, and they just needed…  

The man reached into his pocket and hastily pressed the emergency key on his phone.  

It’d record and send to Tsukauchi.  

Carefully, the underground hero sidestepped and pressed closer to the scalding steam bath that billowed upward, mindful of Endeavor’s sidekicks keeping the perimeter and of the civilians that milled about, watching and recording.  

And fucking hell.  

Always with the recording. 'Zashi was going to be pissed about more than just the cinnamon rolls after this.

"It's what I won't do that you should be grateful for." 

Green eyes flashed, their spark growing in intensity as Izuku lifted his chin towards the man in defiance, challenging Endeavor to strike first if he thought himself a willing opponent.  

And shit . Shouta's own fingers curled into his palms as he moved closer, his footfalls silent and heart too loud in his ears as he watched the boy's too-long coat ruffle around his legs as he stood, barefoot on the grass across from the number one pro hero of Japan, without so much as a tremble of conscious awareness of how utterly stupid he was being. 

"You damned vigilante brat," Endeavor's retort was gruff and snapping as the flames intensified around his glower and his palms ignited into a fireball of orange and gold and crimson. Steam intensified in kind to his actions, which only seemed to incite the man’s annoyance more.  

"I knew you were trouble, but the underground lot are more sympathetic to you vigilante trash than I am. Who the hell do you think you are trying to corrupt this city and take the law into your own hands. You're nothing, kid ."  

Shouta's hand was around his throat, loosening the grey of his capture weapon and threading it through his fingers as the boy quirked his head to the side and 'tsk'd' at Endeavor's tone.  

And really, this damned Problem Child had a death wish, didn't he?  

Dear God, Shouta didn't need this trouble. He leapt towards the nearby awning, making for the lamppost as the child shook his head again.  

"I'm not a vigilante, Enji Todoroki," The boy, Izuku retorted with a long-draw sigh, as though he were far older than he looked. Stupid thought, really, but Shouta could swear he saw a flash of exhaustion color the boy's features for a moment before the kid's smile widened again as he wagged that strange screwdriver towards the pro hero again, almost as though he were the adult chastising the child .  

"And it's not nice to say that I'm nothing, you know," The boy groused. "No one is nothing. Ha. What a lark that is. Nothing really isn't even nothing in the scope of, well... everything . But then again, the nothing in its nothingness could be NOTHING you know but that makes it something in its nothing and it's really just a matter of the nothing knowing that it's nothing which makes it something-- ah...well anyway. " The boy shook his head again and tapped that same thing pen-like object against his temple, the green piping along the silver edges glinting in the sunlight. "It's perhaps a bit more complicated than you might comprehend there, dear boy." 

"What the hell did you just call me?" Endeavor sputtered out a heated retort as Shouta watched the flames grow brighter around the man's mouth, his hands, his feet. "A child? I'm not a child compared to someone like you."  

At this the boy, Izuku laughed again, and Shouta could see the way the boy’s curls swayed, revealing a large knot on the child’s head. A gash that’d bled, quite profusely trailed down near the boy’s eye.  

Well hell. 

"Oh, but you are , you know," The kid retorted cheekily, his tone light, eyes still sparkling too bright as his skin glowed like starlight, the golden halo wrapping around each finger and hand and smile as he stood straighter and pointed the object towards Endeavor again.  

"And you know as well as I that good men don't need rules." The boy took a step forward, his glasses slipping down his nose again as his pant legs pooled near his bare feet. The object buzzed in the child's hand. "And you are so good at breaking the rules, aren't you, Enji ..." he hummed quietly. "So many rules broken. So many skeletons in your closet, eh?" The boy quirked a brow and frowned, his gaze shifting into something far more serious, far colder, and far more calculating and precise. "And you don't want to find out why I have so many rules, now do you?" 

But that was the wrong thing to say.  

And Shouta knew it before Endeavor knew it.  

And the kid knew it too but did absolutely nothing to stop what happened as the underground hero stepped forward and cast out his capture weapon, snapping through the fogginess to wrap around the boy’s wrist and yank him to the side as the man’s quirk ignited, as Shouta hoisted the boy by his waist and lugged him like a package into the tree line and away from the flames as Endeavor’s camouflage of anger served as their escape.  

“Well, that worked nicely!” The boy chirped over the noise, his voice like a small sparrow, and bare feet dangling as Shouta snorted, unamused and ready to throttle the child. 

Dear god, what a shit show.  

“What a delightful comedy, indeed, dear Doctor.”  

Dear Izuku.  

Chapter Text

Maybe he needed a new job. 

Naomasa tended to wonder that more often these days.

Because, really, why was it always like this? 

He wasn’t qualified for any of this…this… shit . 

A chestnut-colored gaze narrowed as hands tapped agitated against the steering wheel, the ache to go faster driving the man’s sense of urgency and traffic seemed to pin him in place. 

‘Come on…’ he chanted lowly in his head, as the signal on his scanner continued to beep. The persistent whine from his phone, coupled with the low murmurs that were almost intelligible at this point, didn’t help to ease the sense of curious dread that was prickling along his spine. 

Shouta never called him unless it was an emergency. Naomasa could count on one hand the number of times that it’d happened in the time they’d worked together when Eraser had used the emergency call to solicit Naomasa’s help with anything . Even when he should have done so more often. 

But the man was persistently stubborn. 

And the underground hero never called him so soon after a mission either.

So for that to happen now? Almost immediately after they’d concluded their time investigating? 

The detective narrowed his gaze out the windshield and frowned, grip tightening on the steering wheel.   

He needed to go faster. He didn’t have all damn day. He couldn’t just sit and let things happen. Too much to do and too little time to get it done. 

‘And protect those that needed to be protected.’ 

The man ignored the heavy bags he could see growing beneath his eyes, deep purplish bruises that taunted him, as he scanned his rearview mirror carefully, before peeling out of his position in the stream of traffic. 

He was almost as bad as the damned Underground Hero, not that the other man would ever admit it though.

Obstacles were in his way, with an accident causing a jam down the turnoff towards the school, and a stream of horns singing as an ambulance blitzed through the intersection ahead as Naomasa tried to get to the light. 

And fuck it all he needed to get going, move his engines and just get the fire put out before more than one person was left smoldering.

But Naomasa had to make sure that he was going in the right direction, moving forward instead of backtracking because he couldn’t afford to leave things hanging for too long. Shouta couldn’t afford it. 

Neither could whoever he was working to protect. The man needed to go left . And then he needed to just head down to the tunnel and he’d be right where he needed…hopefully. 

Or at least he hoped it was left because he didn’t have time to reconfirm and check his map again because the traffic was building up and with the other reports blaring on his radio and interfering with the other directions pushing him getting back over through the flurry of cars zipping past him was going to prove entirely too difficult. 

And really? Naomasa Tsukauchi was a detective, dammit. 

That meant he was skilled at deciphering messages, understanding situations before they were even spoken. 

Most of the time. 

And yet…

He was usually fairly unruffled by Shouta's blatantly vague phone calls when they did happen.

They’d worked together often enough now that he’d grown accustomed to the man’s vagaries and non-information giving habits. It was just the nature of the reclusive man. 

He needed to keep secrets. Preferred it. It helped Eraserhead do his job. 

And the detective never faulted the underground hero for his deliberately simple comments that held far more weight than first glance. 

The agreement between them had established that understanding, the nature of the job forcing that necessity to be cloak and dagger of sorts. It ensured anonymity. 

Safety. 

Which was absolutely paramount when dealing with vigilante youth, and the hazards of hero interventions and their less than restrained methods in dealing with stopping anyone they deemed an inconvenience or a villain.

Naomasa didn’t see these kids as villains. He didn’t see vigilantes as the enemy.

Neither did Shouta. Always jumping into the fray, always doing what he could to run the kids to safety when the opportunity presented itself.

The both of them. They’d been doing it for a long while now. 

Naomasa should and would know that better than anyone else apart from Shouta. As he should.  

His sister wasn't exactly steady on the right side of the law after all…as Shouta would know. 

And more than once it was Shouta that had covered for his kid sister when Naomasa had been unable to do so, going so far as to protect a kid that he didn’t need to protect. And for what? For who?

The damned idiot ...

Which meant he was a damned idiot too. 

The detective rolled his eyes and nearly slammed a hand down on the horn as he shifted through a small opening that another driver nearly tried to cut him off for. 

“Oi, watch it there earth man! That’s a close one!”

“No…duck!”  

The voices cracked through the receiver of Naomasa’s phone connection as the detective strained to keep his attention pulled towards the road and the radio at the same time as the boy’s voice carried through his speakers alongside the distinct pinging eruption of a blast that zipped through the file. 

The harsh grating of his tires screeched along the roadway. 

“Kid just…just stop and hold off on–” 

Shit. 

“No, stopping means dying in so many lives. And that’s all immensely boring , if you ask me, not that you did, mind, but then again it doesn't rightly matter! I can't be stopping once I've started and the thought niggles. Cannot and will not!”

Naomasa was almost impressed by the kid's vocabulary, though more an a little disturbed by his lack of hesitation for…absolutely everything. 

“Now hold on kid, that’s not…just wait a minute with that and don’t go trying to rip it apart!” 

As was the underground hero, it seemed. 

Shouta’s voice was stern and almost frantic as he bellowed a command. “Leave it well enough alone!” 

There was a crackled pause before the boy’s voice, childishly defiant even in its muffled state, reverberated petulant “Well bugger off with that then! I can’t just not investigate it when it’s right there and  you can't either I wager! And if you can, I suppose you're a log stupider than I took you for.”

Mouthy little shit.

The cracking, distorted sigh on the other end as another ‘BOOM’ shook the voices over the ‘com signaling that Shou clearly felt the same and knew what Naomasa also understood: the mouth would get that child killed.  

“Fucking hell, kid you need to–”

“Right, so sod off with the nonsense piddling about there, Mr…now hold on…I don’t actually know what it is you do, eh?” the boy cut over Shouta's irritation, with a blip of a laugh, too quick and too cheerful to be considered rational. Naomasa was certain of it.

 “Bebother and confusticate all of that notion though because I guarantee you that it’s something decidedly boring, or generically mundane, Mr. human man! Nor does it pay enough considering that drab little wardrobe you’re sporting. Straight from the bin, I’d reckon, eh? Or perhaps you’ve no taste? Or maybe–” 

“Kid, watch out!” 

The underground hero’s voice was sharp, staving off the consequences for actions as he and the child seemed to disagree on what was considered dangerous and what was not, the pair bickering lowly in rebuttal to one another.

“It’s just a little heat, you snarling and snippish bulldog. Good gracious! You’d think I’d never seen that before. Ha! You should have seen the plasma explosions near the quasar belt near the corners of the outer limits of the universe during the first creation. That was a sight. Or the reverse explosions on Trenza–oh…nevermind about that one.” 

Again, with the nonsense chattering, as the boy’s thoughts strayed vocal. 

Just who was this kid?

The detective couldn’t wrap his head around what he was hearing. Nothing made sense and it reminded him of his sister who also made little sense when she began her bumbling explanations about the underground activities that Naomasa had little access to or relationship with. Stories without context, situations and peoples and places that he knew little about. 

Just like this boy. And no doubt in his own way his reaction would have been like Shouta’s, trying to understand just what the hell was going on, even as he was trying to protect a child who didn’t understand their actions and the consequences. His sister’s actions would be much like this boy's were now, seeking thrills for no reason that made rational sense. Getting into reckless trouble and frustrating the hell out of those who took a minute to give a damn about these children’s survival. 

Though, thankfully, his sister wasn’t as stupid anymore, for which ‘Masa was grateful. At least, she wasn’t pissing off the number one hero anymore, and wreaking general fury and fire havoc through the city for no apparent purpose as this boy seemed to be doing. 

And in broad daylight. 

Again, for no apparent reason. 

“Oi…that’ll leave a nasty singe there…And I liked this shirt!” 

The man shook his head, confused at the laughter and lack of care in the vigilante’s words as Endeavor’s bellow whistled through the receiver. 

“You damned menace!”

But perhaps both he and Shou were more than a little sympathetic to these kids, and more than a little invested in the welfare of wayward children beyond the jobs they performed or were assigned to perform.

Or paid to perform.

Too invested.  

But…then again it was his sister. Family. 

Heroic machinations and whatnot. Not that he’d ever wanted to be a hero of any sort. Naomasa wasn’t built for it. DIdn’t have the skill or intellect or sheer, stupid force to be something like that. 

But for someone more level-headed like All Might or Eraser? Yeah, Made sense. 

They could easily set things straight and work with ‘Masa to get things sorted for the kids involved. 

Ah, but this situation?  

‘Compromise. Rabbit protocols. Hibachi.’ 

Yeah, it was bad. This meant that Shouta’d been forced to step out to help someone right in the open, putting himself and his job at risk for a dumb kid that thought they knew better–and sometimes did know better. 

But Shouta wasn't about to admit that out loud. 

Wasn't important to the immediate danger. 

What was important though was that both of them were in trouble now because of the know-it-all kid and his irrational actions. Which was information  Naomasa hadn’t wanted or needed to deal with today, as he wiped at his face and glared out the windshield, trying to get across town without running into any more damned traffic. 

The breeze tickled the trees that lined the roadways on either side, bursting petals into the air as the man narrowed a sharp look. 

“Oi, that’d be a grand thing to just grab onto if we could hoist up there and I could just lob it out–” 

“Dammit, just hold still!” 

Because Shouta's cover as a covert vigilante assistant had been blown sky high. He’d been unmasked as the helper, his intentions laid bare for judgment, by the sound of the explosions and low cursing over the receiver. 

The term ‘Hibachi’ in the message never meant anything good.  

Never .

Because it meant the number one was involved, with all his stupid arrogance, trying to take down a kid of all things. 

A kid that Shouta Aizawa needed and felt compelled to correct and protect, standing on the opposite side, his reputation be damned.

Not that he'd ever cared about his reputation in the hero world. 

(But it was a lot harder to save anyone when your name was worth shit.) 

Endeavor was a rather stiff opponent to outwit and outrun and if Shouta had foregone his cover for a kid in front of Endeavor? 

Yeah. They were fucked six ways to Sunday. 

‘Oi, lay off there, scruffaggin!’ 

The man's eyes narrowed as he cut across the lanes listening to the voices chatter through the still connected earpiece, as disjointed and difficult to comprehend as it was.  

‘At least we got away then, eh? Onward, scarf-man!’

Scarf man. Ha. Why’d he call him a damned scarf man? 

Fitting name, for the underground–

‘Now's not the time. We have to give the location and maneuver to safety so just concentrate on-’

‘Time is relative Mr. hero human as I would know better than anyone…thank you, and--omph watch the branches!’ There were a string of crackling curses followed by,

‘You did that on purpose, grousing, grubby scarffity man.’

And maybe if things weren’t so bad and he had more time to really sit and think on it, ‘Masa would admit the fact that he liked this kid already. 

Too bad that Shou did not, it seemed. 

‘Will you just fucking pipe down for a minute kid and concentrate on moving !’

Made sense, too, given the situation. The kid seemed an absolute menace, terrorizing the underground hero as the detective strained to hear their exchange from his position too far away in his car, too far from the action, too far to really offer assistance. 

The detective cut across the traffic lines and tried to beeline for the waterway and park, where he’d known that Endeavor had been patrolling for quite some time that renewed sense of anxiety flickering through him. 

‘Excuse me! I was just going to ask them if–”

‘No kid!’

‘Don’t you ‘no kid me’, garble puff. They’re not all so–now hold on there, Skippy! Wait, now. Would you just…just…no lobbing me about like some toss-happy dwarfing! I can–well shit that’s what I said not to do!’ 

Rabbit protocols. 

Problem Child behavior of the highest degree. 

Naomasa blew out a breath, his nerves tensing as his fingers tapped the wheel as the sound filtered in and out with the kid’s protests echoing in crackled broken gibberish through the speaker. 

A horn blared as another explosion erupted. 

Agitation flared as yet another bellow echoed, hard to mistake. 

‘Eraser, you’re making a mistake that’s going to cost you.’ 

The threat that laced through the commentary was enough to set Naomasa on edge as Endeavor’s voice continued to come forward 

And dammit all he needed to get there! The tracking system in his car pinged Endeavor's location as he swerved a hard right. 

‘Fancy fireworks there, feisty flame-man!’ the cheeky bastard of a vigilante child piped up as Naomasa listened to the growl of protest from Shouta reverberate at the same time.

‘Don’t–’

He was, naturally, ignored.

‘One could call it a…fire Enji–ow! It’s not that terrible a pun, I tell you! No need for physical violence here, Scarffity!’ The boy’s anger was hardly apparent as he sniffed loudly at the other’s growl of annoyance and almost defeat.

‘Please shut up for one second kid.’

‘Oh tosh. You’re just…too simplistically duncey to appreciate it! But with the display it’s all quite a delight. Blasty, bright and very shiny!” 

The boy’s quip was light, snappish, and brutally cheerful as it crackled and cackled through the airwaves. 

‘You need to just shut up kid–’

‘You damned brat!’ 

Yeah, this boy didn’t really know when to stop, dial back, or retreat in any semblance of the word and while the pride and confidence were admirable, Naomasa could sense that these actions were going to end up getting the kid in a whole slew of trouble. 

More than they already had. 

More than with the likes of Endeavor–and already formidable enemy to cross, if you were a vigilante or sympathizer of one.  

‘But come on, you know it was a good one,’ the boy continued, ignoring the pleas for him to just keep his voice behind his teeth.

All of which were being rejected.

‘Large words but slow movements, Endy-vore! You'll have to do better than that to get me to, oomph! Hey! I'm not that heavy you blasted–!’

The receiver filtered out again as another booming blast reverberated through the earpiece before  silence fell again, much to Naomasa’s frustration. 

Oh God. This was about to go sideways quickly, wasn’t it? And Naomasa didn’t have any backup. He didn’t have recourse or a plan. No escape or justification for helping this situation and pulling Shouta and the kid away from Endeavor. 

A hero who was just doing their job. 

There was no fucking way he could argue his way out of this one, especially with Endeavor on the other hero’s ass as close as he was, trying to get at the kid-would-be-vigilante for whatever the hell he’d done to piss the man off. 

No way in hell they’d have a chance to talk sense into the number one. No one ever could. Which meant they’d have to outsmart the bastard. And that was always easier said than done. Enji Todoroki was many things but stupid wasn’t among them. 

“You better have a plan, Shou,” He ground out into the whirring noise, his thought ticking with the beat of the changing lights as the prickling of sirens reverberated nearby. 

Not his though. No, they were others. Other help on the way. Other…distractions that were certain to be make this harder for Naomasa than it really needed to be. 

Which was shitty timing, if he were being completely honest. 

‘You better have a plan…’ He repeated, biting back a snarl. 

Knowing that man though…? 

It was never certain. 

This kid .

“You’re quick on your feet but could you just stop jostling about for a moment so that I can just–” 

“No,” The underground hero snapped quickly between puffs as he tried to ignore the way the kid in his arms pushed against his hold to the point that Shouta had to adjust his grip and focus his attention on his footing to avoid tripping over a fucking root that would have sent them both sprawling into the trunk of a tree.

Definitely an idiot. And a fucking Problem Child at that. One who didn’t listen and didn’t even care to try to pretend to listen.  

‘Always picking up strays! You’d never leave them behind.’ 

Dammit all. 

Shouta tried to sprint through the thicket, greens and greys and browns and blues melding together into a distorted mess as his stance shifted and he dipped into the brambles, mindful of what he was holding onto and well aware of what the kid had just done for the pair of them.  

The underground hero watched as the boy’s almost phantom fingers float into view as they traipsed gently along the air, plucking at branches and picking at leaves and some of the lingering blossoms. The billows of fabric pooled at the child’s wrists, snagging and tearing, delaying their descent lower into hiding. 

“Stop doing that,” Shouta bit out, trying to shove the boy’s hand away. He needed to stay still, and stay closer. Not keep racing to meet another enemy, or foe, or someone that would want to cause him harm in some way, even if they were a hero.  

Again though, Shouta was ignored as golden ripples of energy swirled and encircled a small branch, cupping a twig of flowers and tugging them back towards the boy’s chest as the Problem Child seemed to hum to himself, seemingly lost in his thoughts and well aware of only himself.

“It’s beautiful here,” He remarked evenly, almost too soft to hear, as Shouta cast a brief glance back towards the kid’s face, watching the golden shades shimmer and spark a contrast against the greenery, as the child spoke. His expression was bright, eyes aglow with light, energy roiling off him in beams as his nose twitched and he snorted, clearly not taking anything Shouta said to heart, not considering the danger that surrounded them. 

The fact that he’d just stood against Endeavor of all heroes didn’t seem to make the kid feel any sort of perturbed, upset, or even remotely worried, even with the man’s hollers for them to abandon their mission, and for the others to follow after the pair, this Problem Child was more focused on the nature around them as Shouta felt his chest wheeze uncomfortably, lungs unable to fill with enough air to properly dart through the bush. 

At least that’s what it seemed like. 

“The simplicity of it all. This world of yours. So beautiful, so easy to understand. And yet…” There was another hum escaping the boy’s lips as he seemed almost half asleep  as Shouta turned to make his way through the foliage, trying to ignore the loose rocks and roots, not wanting to slow down too much, but not willing to lose his footing at the same time. “Makes you wonder about this oddity in everyone’s reactions and their power , eh? Like the chemical makeup of Endeavor’s suit and–I’ll have to stew on the naming and the familiarity of it because that’s a true flustering–but then I can see that there’s some interesting aspects in the maneuvering capabilities of this other one, the angry flame-lass. They’ve certainly honed quite the power, along with the brutish bullroarer–though perhaps he’s more show and and less significance.” 

“Bring them back here!” 

There was another hum as a few more energies filled Shouta’s senses, his sensitivity to new power alight as they drew closer, speeding ever quick towards Shouta’s and child’s locale. But Shouta felt rattled at the growth in the energy closing in. 

It wasn’t Endeavor. Not yet. But it was his sidekicks. He knew that much. 

At least, it was some of them. 

But who? Which ones would it be? Which ones would make contact first and try to stop them where their leader had…failed?  

“But makes me want to know how they trained to do that and where the desire even came from. Or the attempt to even try it. How did they even discover the quirking of this innate power, if it is a power that is because as humans I mean that’s not statistically likely. You lot are somewhat simple creatures unless there’s something that I’ve missed. But that’s not possible either–” The breathy excitement whistled through the chattering mouth of the smirking boy. “But to see it here and now? It’s brilliant! And makes me curious. So many questions now. Like how they’re keeping momentum while concentrating on their aim!” 

Where the hell was this kid’s head? Shouta couldn’t understand half of why the kid was focusing  on what he was focusing on. And why he didn’t care where they were or what sort of danger they were in. 

Idiot . 

The man peered towards the child again. 

 “And they move so fast! Ha!” The boy’s glasses slipped down his nose, with his ridiculously large shirt rumpled and pooling around his wrists as he continued to reach upward, a hum rattling his chest. “I wonder if I could just…” Fingers pulsed and fluttered, trying to angle to grab at…something that Shouta couldn’t crane his neck to quite make out as he took an elbow to the cheek that made his eyes water. “And just what’s tha–” 

“I said stop ! Eraser! Both of you!” 

The child’s remarks reverberated to a clipped halt as a blast of heat skittered near Shouta’s ear.

Well hell.  

The underground hero winced and jerked the scruff of the child’s collar, trying to tug him lower as the blast cascaded around the pair. The flicker of heat and Burnin’s command snapped shut the child’s wiling. Her quirk flared and shimmered like a firecracker, waves of bright orange and greenish gold filtering in the man’s peripheral as Shouta sidestepped left to avoid a direct hit, hoisting his cargo with him.

“Ohh, that’s a fascinating display I’ll tell you what!” 

“Dammit!”

The conflicting remarks hardly improved the underground hero’s mood. Shouta grunted as he inhaled smoke, bushes smacking his cheeks. There was a bright ignition of light and singing heat as flames crackled around them all the while the child seemed decades away from the present and hardly considered the immediate presence of an issue that surrounded him. 

The imbecile. 

As if there was not thing else to be worried about. 

Meanwhile, his concern was drawn towards the immediate danger and trying to prevent this damned… kid from hurting himself while said Problem Child was clearly wrapped up in the–

“It’s all that’s rather interesting,” The boy’s voice had go softer for a moment, as Shouta sneaked a glare towards the sharp, pointed snarling frown of the woman who was flying higher through the treetops, tearing another piece from her hair, and twisting it into a sphere. 

His annoyance was peaked at the boy’s blatant disregard for the obvious situation at hand as he…fucking analyzed the world around him, eyes alight flashing with curiosity as he tittered and almost seemed to buzz like a hummingbird in Shouta’s grip. 

“Her power seems to naturally come from the very core of her being! Which I’ve never seen a human do before certainly. And then…it’s centralized in her hair? The prime point of energy containment is drawn to that access point. What an oddity that presents. Certainly the accessibility of her hair makes sense, but the makeup of the hair itself is a puzzling notion to be sure when you consider the flammability of hair to begin with,” The boy’s thoughts seemed to spill from his lips, pouring out of his mouth as his vision took on a glazed look, introspective and assessing all at the same time, as the golden glow swirled through his verdant curls and wisped over freckled cheeks. 

“Kid.” 

“I wonder…” He continued, lost in his own musings, ignoring Shouta entirely. 

Which was entirely unhelpful. 

“Perhaps there’s a way she’s naturally bypassed that altogether though? Some sort of deviation with the follicles that create a resistance to heat and reinforce its strength and durability. Not to mention its regrowth capabilities.” Energy seemed to roll off the boy as he seemed to rock in place, considering the ideas. His hair bounced as the corner’s of the child’s mouth quirked upwards lightly. Fingers danced through a fluttering twitch as the boy tiled his head and hummed more excitedly. 

But dammit all he needed to stop . 

And why was Shouta so interested or annoyed by any of this? He barely knew this child.

Hell, the underground hero couldn’t even claim to know the kid at all let alone say that he knew the boy a little. Shouta was just…

‘A softie, Shou.’ 

‘Picking up a stray and saving anything that looks at you with those damned big eyes.’ 

Like hell he was. Shouta never considered himself a soft-hearted or compassionate person. Not like this, not for any of this. 

He was logical. 

Rational. 

“Do you suppose her regeneration ever stops then or if it’s some sort of ?” 

The man snapped glare upwards, towards Burnin’ as he gripped the child tighter, trying to quell his movements, keep his steady, push him back towards the ground. 

Towards safety. 

“Just hold on and be quiet for a moment kid,” He retorted with a hard click of his teeth, as the chattering continued around him, the boy seemingly oblivious, or disinterested in what Shouta had to say. 

The underground hero’s knuckles were white though, with his energy focused on scanning his surroundings as noise rustled in his ear, an eager and assessing voice bumbling through their thoughts beside him. 

Half of him wanted to understand where the boy’s head was at, reach out and tackle the mystery that seemed to be the chittering loneliness of a child that was undoubtedly lost and on his own and trying to make sense of something that was beyond anyone else’s grasp.  

The other part wanted to slightly throttle the boy for being so…careless with his time and company and one who thought it the best course of action to get into trouble and steal something that’d already been stolen. 

To prove what?

Prove it to who?  

Fuck his life. The kid needed to just…

“That’s certainly a talent…hmm, and I wonder if her power is naturally made or synthetically enhanced by some sort of mechanical contortion that she can mechanize through her hands. Ah…because the hands could be the key, eh? Though…hmm, that wouldn’t make sense though given the rapidity of the regeneration…it’s a rather quick one, isn’t it?--”

Who was the kid even talking to? Didn’t really seem like any of the comments were directed his way.

Shouta’s ears rang as the boy’s voice chimed and chirped.

“And her disinterest in showing any pain at all? That’s another oddity, especially for humans. So, she’s either so used to the power that’s gotten, or perhaps … And through hair no less. That’s a unique property altogether that doesn’t seem to be artificial, but perhaps some sort of particle bonding perhaps?” The reverberating drone against Shouta’s ear grew louder as the boy’s obvious interest in the situation took deeper root, of course, as Shouta tried to bite back his frustration, while scouring the area for a clean opening to escape. 

“Kid.” 

The man could feel his brow twitch in response to the incessant hum of analysis–and why the kid wanted to analyze right now of all things confused the hell…this wasn’t the time! Why would anyone ever think that it was? 

Shouta needed the kid to focus. 

They both needed it, needed to focus on what lay ahead. But the boy’s words rang, too loud and too consuming as it mixed with the air and chanted against his senses. The noise struck hard at the man’s skull as he tried to concentrate, tried to focus on the world around him, as his charge remained somewhat useless and distracted from the obvious danger. 

But maybe the boy didn’t see it that way. Maybe he couldn’t consider that this was a danger. Thought that made the man wonder just what would make this boy, eager and wide-eyed as he was…consider something a real threat. 

A real worry and a real danger. 

It wouldn’t do to get annoyed. He knew that. He knew it wouldn’t help their situation or provide the cover or safety they needed to get out of here. 

Though there was something to be said about timing when it came to the boy’s comments, and Shouta was trying to help him see that…

They didn’t have time , really. 

“You have to focus, kid–”

“There must be some deviation,” The glowing face murmured and pulsed, voice near excited, though curiosity seeped into each syllable. “It’s more than likely much like the Endeavor hero that she’s clearly working for…which would call into question the nature of how they could have possibly come into these anomalies in the first place because humans don’t–” 

”Kid.” Shouta barked as he pivoted, dipping his shoulder and barreling through into the bush. His fingers dug into the boy’s arm as he tried to keep a steady momentum, build space between the opponent and themselves. “Just stop and listen to me for a minute, would ya?” 

The heat was growing somewhat unbearable, even at this distance and he needed to put a greater distance between them.  

Just to catch a break, make some headway in an escape before it all hit the fan and they were shit out of luck and completely at the mercy of Endeavor’s sidekicks and the flame hero himself–

‘And shit! ow!’

An elbow to the man’s cheek had Shouta’s eyes watering, his grunt of disapproval stifling the sputtering of thought and musing as he glowered in the bushes, still tugging the boy closer towards the ground in his fall.

“The costume too, perhaps? Maybe it’s connected there as well. Just like her partner…no…not not partner. That’s not the right word is it. It’s something else it’s. That man was too smarmy and…glib…no, it was definitely a Boss-man,” The boy shoved his heel into Shouta’s shoulder, the small foot’s bony roughness making the man wince as he grabbed at the child to keep him down and out of harm’s way. A hand on the billowy material that fluttered around the child’s torso had the boy tumbling backwards as Shouta hissed in annoyance. “Bossa-nova man, haha!”    

Dammit all, couldn’t this kid just stay…still?

Light danced and waved around the boy with each flicker and flutter of the boy’s boundless energy as he twisted and turned, wriggling and muttering, mouth and breath and words bouncing as much as his fingers and feet seemed to jitter about. 

Did the child even know how to stop himself? Did he even care to try? Especially when it was important --

Another elbow almost colliding with the man’s nose had Shouta growling. 

“Stop reaching…reaching out and–and just help me out and…just shut up for a minute, would ya kid? Fuck’s sake. I can’t hold onto you when you’re flopping like a fucking fish.” 

A half beat of silence was all the man received for his snappish reply before he heard the distinct tinge of displeasure color the child’s tone.  

“I beg your pardon?!,” A hardly harsh sniff resounded, as a kittenish glare slithered down towards the man. Shouta was less impressed as he was exasperated at the boy’s petulance as the child frowned, and bared his teeth with a clipped sniff, affronted. “Kid? Child? Ha! Hardly such a notion. I’m not a– omph .” 

He felt the collision before he could rightly see what’d happened. A hard smack struck the Underground Hero’s knees, sending him nearly sprawling, as a cracking blow pummeled into his ribs, making Shouta see stars, his vision hazing for a moment as he buckled. 

“Down, Eraser!”

Another cascade of sparks and flame screeched overhead, rocking the pair off kilter even as Shouta tried to steady himself and move to his feet once more. 

It was a somewhat lost cause as their assailant–the hero’s sidekick–perused overhead and let their energy fly outward and around the pair, flame and heat, and scorching energy singing the hair’s on Shouta’s neck as he angled away from the draft. The child’s hands flailed lightly as they stumbled–and really Shouta should have let go, yet remained stubbornly determined to hold onto the green-haired child–as he was notched forward in the spray of sparks. 

Heat and tendrils of angry firestorm sailed high, striking the larger willow that Shouta and his newfound charge tumbled through, rolling to the ground and losing their balance entirely this time beneath the jutting roots as the weeping branches obscured vision and gave them cover for a moment at least. 

It wouldn’t last though, Shouta knew that. And being isolated beneath a tree of all the damned things wasn’t going to help them make it out of the situation. 

Unfortunately, Shouta didn’t have too long to ruminate as his collision with the ground made for a more immediate, and pressing issue. Even under the cover of the willow, they were hardly safe from the firestorm and from their own clumsiness as the boy was lost from the underground hero’s grasp as he smacked into the ground and rolled, the pair of them tossed into a heap as the child let out a small chortle of displeasure. 

“Rough landing there, Captain!” the child snarked out with a hiss, that sounded more like a whimper as fingers gently clawed at the earth, bottle-green orbs staring into the grass, as the boy hummed to himself. 

“Bit of a tricky bit there at the end,” He intoned, mostly to himself with a wry smile. 

“I imagine the ascent will be a bit worse off though. But since we have time I’d love to know why you’re actually called Eraser,” The boy’s mouth continued to drawl, voice pitching and rolling off his lips too easily as he stared unabashed towards the man, completely unperturbed by the situation. 

“That’s a rather interesting name isn’t it? And there’s certainly a story that goes with it. Or at least a plausible explanation for why you’ve got the name, eh?” 

There was a soft shrug as the boy tried to lift himself to his knees, as another fire strike descended. Green eyes glowed as the flames glimmered in the boyish gaze. 

It was impossible to miss the wisps of hairline blasts that singed against arm and cheek as they flashed past, nearly burning as they kissed Shouta’s skin as he turned on his side and rolled to his knees. The man’s grip returned upward as fingers searched for the familiar grey capture material as the air crackled, oranges and reds devouring spring pink.  

It wasn’t too hard to find the material either, he nearly sneered to himself, his hands too practiced from too many fights and too long as a fighter to not be practiced in the habit. 

Except it wasn’t always against another hero, which was a firm gut-punch. 

Shouta’s thoughts turned somewhat derisive as his nose twitched. Scraped knuckles ghosted his own throat as the man watched the child lightly bob to his feet and stand too straight and unperturbed by fire and glow that haloed around him. 

Dirt smudged the boy’s cheek and a long trail of dust dirtied the overly large sleeves as the kid stood barefoot and blithe to his situation. 

And for a moment, Shouta realized he didn’t even know the boy’s name, he realized, watching the smaller figure’s toes tapping as his face glowed and fingers twittered excitedly. Eagerness ignited his features, etching into his expression as he turned his face upwards, still unruffled, and unaffected by the fire storm that seared around them. 

“Stop, kid. She won’t listen–” 

“Tosh that she won’t!” The boy replied without sparing a glance towards Shouta. Freckles crinkled as the child’s eyes softened around the edges, creasing and narrowing as he stared up at the enemy carefully, kindly, inquisitively. 

“She’s not completely stupid.”

Bastard. 

“And really it’s all quite stupid,” The kid continued, his smile growing as Burnin’ hedged closer to the ground, and the boy. “It’s obviously a childish notion that she’d not want to speak about all of this is daft to be sure, to be sure! And especially after I bested her boss….” 

The boy muttered the last part lowly, with a shake of his head before he tilted his chin upward and waved brightly towards Burnin’ who loomed above them, trying to garner the woman’s full attention and patience. 

Patience that wasn’t likely to last. 

Like a moron. 

The move was wildly stupid and more than a little ridiculous and Shouta wanted to yank the child backwards and down to the ground and into the bushes as the fiery sidekick spied the movement and the flickering of that boy’s glow below and halted her assault, her hands hovering, as she narrowed her gaze down on the child, clearly suspicious. 

The tendrils of light rippled and roiled as the kid tugged into his pocket, pulling out a large, glinting piece of jewelry. 

Or rather it wasn’t a piece of jewelry so much as it was a magatama jewel. 

And fucking, dammit. It better not be. 

“Don’t tell me that’s what I think it is, kid,” The man snapped, earning a cheeky grin and a wink in reply. 

“Naturally it is, dear man.” The boy quipped easily, almost laughing as he tutted his finger towards Shouta. “I never do things by half!” 

This kid . Oh hell. 

The breeze lifted through the branches, tousling Burnin’s hair, making it dance and waver as it kissed the sky, much as Oboro’s once did…

Shouta hastily thrust the thought aside, hand outstretched, fingers curling around the scruff of the boy’s shirt as the woman scowled and pointed at the boy and at the stone in the child’s grip. 

The rare, sacred stone in the child’s grip.

The rare, sacred stone from the crown jewel collection and for the enthronement ceremony.  

“You! You need to come with me now, boy!” The woman’s frown deepened, her pointed teeth bared as she glowered with a fixed look on the curved, green jade stone in the boy’s grip, her fingers twitching, eyes hardening briefly as she seemed to consider something, assume something. 

“You don’t know what you’re messing with that. It’s not just a cash grab, kid. That stone is not a toy or something to be so recklessly–” 

Again the boy seemed too easy in his response, too quick to display a brightness and cheer in his response. 

“Tosh. I’m not stupid .” The boy almost sounded offended by the assumption on Burnin’s end as Shouta maneuvered as close as possible, knowing this tense cease-fire wouldn’t last as long as either one of them would like. 

“I know exactly what this is.” 

The stone lifted into the air, tossed easily by the child, as he smirked towards the woman. “But it’s not nearly as important as you seem to think.” 

“Stop what you’re doing now, kid. I won’t miss next time,” Burnin’s hair wrapped around her ears and pushed at her chin as she tilted her head. The threat lingered on her lips, slipping into every wavering pulse of energy that rushed downward and towards the child who rocked onto the balls of his feet and met the challenge with a firm stomp…as awkwardly powerful as the child could muster in his oversized pants and fluttering shirt.    

“Brilliant!” He cheered loudly with a small clap of his hands, tapping a finger against the jade. “That’s precisely what I’d hope you’d say, though only after you’ve heard my proposal.”  

And then the boy quirked his brow and smirked. “I don’t suppose that you’ll miss again if you really wanted.” 

Hands slowly went down again as the boy stepped forward, his hands reaching into his pockets as Shouta spied a trickle of blood on the boy’s temple. 

Well fuck. 

“But I do have to say that’s a neat trick you’ve got there! And so thoughtful in your throws! Precision at its finest!” Again the boy tapped the Magatama, his smile ever stretched, shoulders pulled back, and back straight. 

The man was moving forward too, knowing damned well that any kid, especially powerful ones like this were prone to…

“Really you’ve got the Sontaran fleet beat with that type of attitude and action!” The boy let out a small whistle before he winked. “It’s almost like you were trying to miss us.” 

Stupidity.

That idiot. 

And frankly Shouta didn’t want to have the time to attempt to play the game. 

The man let out a soft groan to himself as he flexed his fingers. 

He was getting too damned old for this. 

“Now that’s an impressively stupid idea.” 

The man snorted, staring into the haze of steam and smoke, watching chaos unfold from his perch as sirens blared somewhere across the city. 

Getting closer. 

No doubt on their way to help the hero, which was admittedly a first. Usually it was the other way ‘round.

“It’s a hazard. Surely you can see the danger.” 

A wry grin snaked across the man’s face as he assessed the scene, arms folded, fingers tapping lightly against his arm as he continued to sit and watch, not wanting to move, not willing to surge forward just yet. 

Entirely happy to just watch for now. 

“Isn’t it always a danger?” He bit back, joking now. Realizing the scene was discomforting, as his curiosity remained piqued. 

He had questions too. Same as they did. He wanted to know how this happened, how that kid was able to best…well the best. 

“If he’s an enemy to heroes–”

“It’s one instance,” The man snapped in reply, his voice even, giving nothing sharp or defiant away. “Seems like he’s just a stupid kid, doing something stupid. Vigilante perhaps.” 

Couldn’t do that now. Couldn’t disobey, now could he? Wouldn’t want to cause waves. Misbehave. 

“You saw what happened. Reckless or no, there’s a danger there that needs to be assessed.” 

“You realize that this is way below my paygrade, right? What about Aizawa? Much more his wheelhouse.”

Another explosion slithered upward, branching cracks across the skyline as Kiego tilted his head and let his wings catch the breeze as it ruffled past. 

“He’s never been one to follow orders to the letter. You know that. We need someone more…reliable. Consistent. Stable .” 

Another sharp grin pointedly etched Kiego’s face, tightening at the corners of his mouth. 

Oh, he knew. 

He knew why too. They all did. 

But they never spoke of it. Never could. It was a taboo of sorts to bring it up. A hush hush sort of thing that you accepted and didn’t really acknowledge unless it got in your way. 

“Well. Seems you’re stuck with me then,” The man peered down at his nails briefly before scanning the sky again, assessing trajectories and skimming the sightlines for observers before he let himself step off his lamp post perch and coast towards the fervor that loomed ahead. 

Sharp sight alighted him to the slim figures darting through bush and treelines in the park, as bitter orange singed and devoured the springtime. 

“Pity,” He muttered with a shake of his head, as a mop of green curls bobbed and bounced in a grip of grey capture weapon, an underground hero’s face illuminated a shadow through the fiery flumes. 

Ah yes…it was a pity, though Keigo really wasn’t surprised by what he saw…who he saw. It was almost par for the course at this point.  

‘A pity you don’t listen, Shouta,’  Kiego’s grin dipped a little and he rolled his eyes, expecting nothing less. 

But knowing damned well this was going to make it harder than he wanted in cleaning up the mess. 

Maybe this was a little above his pay grade then. 

He’d have to wait and see.   

He was making a mess of things. 

Rightly and properly messy. 

Which was just as he needed it to be, to test things out. To make sure. 

The Doctor…Or Izuku? That was a less formal title and being as he was… well, he was decidedly less formal as of right now, perhaps he could decide to be less formal in his self-reflections on a name?

For now. Until he sorted things in his own head, which would come later when he could stew on this how flibberty gibberty nonsense. 

As it were however…

Izuku…the Doctor Izuku? Had done it on purpose, the messing of it all, the harassing, the aggravating, to make sure that this woman would have enough restraint to hear him out, even in the annoyance. 

Yet that didn’t seem to stop her from igniting a few more hearty throws of pulsing green-gold flams that twisted towards orange and peach and angry red, towards the boy as he stood proudly watching from his position on the ground. 

A cascading dance of snakelike flames trickled downward towards the boy and his new minder–minder? Is that what he was? The human…person as the woman frowned at Izuku’s barbed reply to her command to ‘stand down’. 

And admittedly neither human being seeming impressed with his commentary. 

Of course that was the right point of it all. 

And not that he could or would stand down either. 

Stand down? 

Ha. He was short enough, mind. Standing further down would be a right insult and he didn’t have time for that. 

With a deft–well wobblishly deft–sidestep that turned into a push and stumble thanks to the man’s interference (and really that was quite rude to assume that he needed that minder man to interfere at all), the boy flailed a bit before rolling his shoulders and adjusting his stance as the world melted and fluttered in time with his heartbeats as he beamed at the woman, chin lifted. Regeneration sparks flickered around, starlight residue encircling his person as he sniffed indignantly. 

“It’s always the vicious mockery that gets them,” Izuku laughed a little at his thoughts. “Human pride is easily pricked and deflated. But that’s not the point and the problem! And hardly the reason I mentioned your…penchant for nearsightedness,” The boy’s remarks were quick and almost jumbled as his voice cracked partway through, eliciting a frown from him as his glowered briefly and mused about the continual absurdities of this regeneration’s oddities and unexplored questions. 

‘Later…I’ll explore it later. Something more pressing is now.’ 

“I needed to distract your…rather enthusiastic supervisor,” the boy continued with a small shake of his head, as he thought about the brooding man with the flame facial hair. 

Took being ginger to a whole new level, that one did…

“And you seemed the more reasonable sort, so I only wanted to ask you a few questions! Though I suppose I misjudged you,” He boy exaggerated a sigh, repressing that drunken giggle that threatened to erupt from his lips at the absurdity and the overly bright life that cascaded around him as his synapses fired  too fast, thought flickering at lightning speed, and memories traveled faster than he cared to process. Logically he knew the severity of the situation…

Yet the humor of it all couldn’t escape his notice either. 

The franticness of every particle in his grasp and pulsing through his person seemed to fuel that discord in him as well, making it harder to concentrate on the logicality of the mature notions. 

Voices chittered in his ears, warmth and chill and worlds and lifetimes revolved in his molecules, singing in his veins as golden hues of newness tinged his skin like sunlight.

“And here you are lobbing fireballs at me and for what?” A cheeky lilt lifted the boy’s timbre as he snorted, trying to see if he could elicit another rise from the woman. 

Trying to test the waters again, just to make sure he had it right and that he wasn’t going to . 

“What are you playing at, kid? Just shut up and move ,” The man hissed, trying to pull him back, even as Izuku dug his heels in and shook his his shoulder out of the man’s grip. 

 “Or who? Your boss ? The supreme , executive leader? More like a broody man-child,” he chortled lowly. “Hardly someone to take a command from!”  

This voice–chirping and squawking as it was–was far more smart-ass than he normally permitted himself to be (at least out loud). Even with its cracking and half-breaking–signalling the youthfulness in its timbre–there was still that sense of weight in his words, a harsh bite with each vicious call he let sail without reserve.  

Not that he really minded too much. It was almost refreshing to allow himself to speak so freely, assessing the world so…unrestricted and unfiltered. 

“ Kid .” 

That warning was becoming familiar in such a short amount of time that Izuku–the Doctor–wasn’t sure if he could or should feel comforted by the fact or disconcerted. 

Perhaps both? Neither? 

Did it even matter to him in the long run? Would this man even hold significance to him after this moment? 

After he’d left this singularity and entered into a new adventure and a new twist in his timeline? 

Perhaps. 

But perhaps not. 

(And maybe that’d be all the better.)

“You cheeky bastard vigilante,” The woman’s eyes flashed with a hint of that energy and ferocity that signaled at her hidden power that she’d yet to actually showcase here and now. 

Yet Izuku was pricking at the woman’s resolve. At least a little bit. The woman hero frowned, lowering herself closer to the boy and the grey and black wearing grub-scruf of a hero that was hovering nearby, clearly mistrustful of Izuku’s intentions. 

“You think this city is your playground and you can just make your own rules, kid?” The woman’s voice was hard but Izuku’s breath hitched lightly as his own green gaze leveled on the women’s intensely interrogating stare and that way it shifted between studying him and then peering towards the Magatama.

Expectant.  

As though she was waiting for something to happen. Anticipating an inevitability with the jaded jewel that still rested neatly in his palm, almost tantalizingly so. 

A brow quirked in curiosity as he watched the woman’s fluid movements, her fingers reaching for her hair once more as her expression flickered through a myriad of emotions, twisting through a search of Izuku’s face once more, studying, searching. 

And the boy was ready to meet her assault, and could sense the man’s own tense stance nearby as he ghosted a shadowy presence closer to Izuku as the pair stood tense and ready, even though Izuku tried to play off the situation’s severity, especially with the way he could almost feel the energy and power roiling off the opponent’s lithe form. A rippling drip-drop that rained around them. 

Because the woman hesitated and that was the tell. 

She refused to attack right away, refused to engage in a full assault instead of hearing Izuku out which marked her clear difference from her ginger flame beard supervisor.

Bottle green orbs settled on the woman’s gaze once more as well and noted that the ferocity could have and should have been there was actually lacking instead. The certainty that’d tinged the voice was absent within the depths of her look. 

Conviction missing from her expression, despite what her words would have tried to make the boy believe. And there in the early spring, with the golden glows of flames that melded with the blues of the sky to curl and bleed together, the boy could see the way the woman’s amber gaze glowed with a softness that defied her harsh, biting commands. Her hair fluttered near her ears,  contrasted against the darker new spring leaves, and pink flowers, with its greenish-yellow tendrils that curled and twisted upwards freely and unrestrained, except for the soft red and white headband and tucked it away from her face.

Hand extended, reaching through the trees.  

“You’re going to come with me, vigilante.” 

Not an attack. Not an assault. Not a full rejection of what he’d been saying. 

Izuku smiled, his own mouth upturned less harshly and biting this time as well.  

He wouldn’t be coming with the woman, wouldn’t give himself up so easily. 

That’d never be an option because what purpose would it serve? 

Justice? Not likely. 

Padding someone’s ego? Yes, but that’d do hardly one jot or tittle of good. 

And she would learn that, and he’d certainly let her know that too. 

Though…

“I don’t believe I will be coming with you,” He muttered, turning his attention back towards the Magamata, as he reached back towards his pocket and withdrew his Sonic. The familiar weight was almost like a tether to rationality in his mind, sending a string of coherence through his thoughts as the silver and blue glittered against the flames and haze of fire around them. “I have a curiosity that’s piqued my interest.” 

The boy hazarded a glance towards the hero again, flicking a look through his lashes, his thoughts stewing now as questions started to rumble through the drunken haze and frenzy of energy that beat a fiery spark of energy in his veins. 

“Was your boss the one who designed these damned things in the first place, eh?” 

Carefully, his thumb traced the outline of the jade, feeling the weighted balance, even as one side of the teardrop-shaped gem created a lopsided effect that ought to have shifted the balance to one side, the drop in the tear. 

And yet…

“Isn’t it odd though?” He mused softly, his other hand gently lifting towards the Magamata, Sonic screwdriver beginning to whir as he flicked the switch upward. The pulsing blue light glittered sapphire as he tilted the thinner end  towards the Sonic with deft movements, an orchestral whirring in his wrist flick. “It’s so well balanced.” 

Balanced when it shouldn’t have been. Evenly distributed when it didn’t make sense to be. 

What a mistake, that was. The boy nearly rolled his eyes at the stupidity of such a common and trite oversight. 

‘Especially when so much care went into the craftsmanship of the thing too,’ he assessed carefully running a finger along the drop-shape, hoping to find the opening, and expose the inner workings of…whatever this was. ‘That couldn’t have been intentional, could it?’ 

‘Surely whoever put so much thought into this would have considered how to counter the weight to make this more believable.’

But then again, stranger things had happened, as he would know. The Doctor had seen his fair share of oddities in his life. 

He was one of them. And standing here with this things now, he could suspect a few things of what this might and could be. He had a few good guesses. 

“And you’re just as curious as I am it seems,” The boy hummed, as the screwdriver’s buzz echoed in his ears. “Humans always are. Can’t help themselves.” 

And they couldn’t. It was in their nature after all. Always getting into trouble with their natural curiosity and penchant for stupidity in seeking out the unknown. 

Though that wasn’t always a bad thing, he could acknowledge. It sometimes brought them to him. The Doctor.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, kid?” There was the scruffy hero’s bellow, unscrupulously agitated–as he always seemed to be as he tried to reach for the boy who leaned away with a spritely trip and trimble of footwork…that only had him half stumbling and nearly tripping over a small bush. 

“Don’t you trust me at all?” The child quipped lightly, with a small, sidelong glance towards the woman as he forced pressure against the Magamata, hearing the jade pieces ‘ CRACK’ in his grip. 

The boy’s brow furrowed. 

‘That’s odd…’ his thoughts churned in curiosity on a measure of discontent. A tick towards ‘wrong’ rang in his head. 

He didn’t like that.

“Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing–” The woman’s indignant retort snipped to his right as he returned to his job, the echoing reverberations of the Sonic humming in his hand as the almost imperceptible seam. 

“I’m hardly imbecilic ma’am,” The boy retorted softly, his expression flattening, concentration locked on his task as he sniffed briefly and tilted his head. He was well aware that at any moment one of the two ‘adults’ (and that was a plucky and stupid thought to consider in contrast to himself) could quash his activity against the Magamata and stop him. 

So he had to hurry. 

And they needed to just…trust him for a little longer. 

Hopefully

“Aha!” The boy’s voice cracked again, making him wince at the sharp incline in pitch. The crowing turned sour, a scowl bending at the corners of his mouth and puckering his lips as the jade in his hands cracked and a chill erupted around his fingertips. 

‘A chill. Well that certainly…tells me nothing.’ 

Well not entirely nothing. Not wholly nothing and diddly. 

It certainly didn’t tell him loads more than he already knew, which had been absolutely nothing more than this Magamata was an imposter and the real one, the original that’d been used for centuries for each Enthronement Ceremony, had been replaced. 

He hadn’t known when. Or how. 

Or why. 

But it had. 

And the why of it all was the rub that really irked Izuku’s thoughts and made him ponder. 

And inside this one, this false imposter, was the key. 

The boy pressed the Sonic to the seam again, watching as the edging spidered outward, creating tendrils of webbed cracks across the surface of the jade, bursting the facade of wholeness, and destroying the image of the Magamata’s identity in Izuku’s hand. 

The stone grew colder still, more dense as the smoothness gave way to bumps and pitted portions along the surface as the boy stared on, fascinated and entirely aware of the shifting in energy around himself and how it mixed together with the regeneration light. 

Pooling cascades of golden starlight and inky shadow swirling and swathing against his flesh, striking and mixture of golden and pitch, shadow and spark, across his arms and upward. Together they would, the mixture of his own regeneration and it’s ancient ache and the new rawness that stitched him whole coiled together with a deeper, older power that snared a thin rope around his hand like a thread of nightmare. 

Ah. 

“What the fuck did you just do, kid?” The man’s call wasn’t as sharp this time, though his question was impertinently demanding to Izuku’s ears as he stared, transfixed by the transformation of the Magamata in his hand, the foreboding and curiosity weaving together in his chest. 

“Get back,” The Doctor whispered softly, concentrating on the changes the stone elicited, wracking his thoughts, his memories, trying to part through the haze of newness that was himself to rifle through his pastness to deduce what he understood. 

Question after question struck against his skull as he felt the weight grow denser still, his fingers numbing. 

He knew this. It was familiar. 

“Get back!” He stated again. This time harsher, more commanding. 

A dark ooze, delicately stretched from the crevices, pouring from every crack and crease as the chilled energy encircled Izuku’s hand for a moment. 

“Kid!” 

“Not a kid,” The Time Lord reminded the man with a sharpness to his words, a glare narrowing his gaze as the oozing mess continued to spill upwards and outwards, moving along the boy’s arm as he took a step backwards, away from the heroes, as a pulse of power erupted around them, raw and angry, and full of suspicion and fear .

 This was a mistake. This was wrong. This was…

“What did you do ,” The man’s voice implored again as the other fighter, the woman with the fiery green-gold hair huffed and sniffed angrily, eyes widening as the wave of energy and the dark chill descended around the three of them more fully, almost exploding outward like a dense fog that shrouded color and dampened senses. 

At least the good ones. 

Dammit . 

Izuku had been right then. 

And he disappointed that he’d been right and wrong all at once. Right that it’d been an imposter hiding in plain sight. 

Wrong that’d been an oversight to balance the weight. 

Because it hadn’t. 

It’d been a trap. 

The boy felt a measure of dread mix in with his over-abundance of self-assurance and energetic glee as the darkening thoughts pricked at his senses and began to take root in the whispers of insecurities that always lurked in the corners of rooms of thoughts he’d slammed shut behind doors he’d never open willingly. 

And yet…

The boy clutched the Magamata carefully in one hand, feeling the chilled weight continue to sear his fingers bitterly numb as he gripped his Sonic in the other, watching with foreboding, knowing  what was coming and hoping that those around him had much more willpower to withstand it than others had been. 

“You have to trust me,” He hummed again, repeating the sentiment that he so often did with anyone that he came in contact with, anyone that he had hope he could get to trust him. 

As he had just a short while ago…

But if he failed and it all went to shit? Well, then Izuku may as well be good as dead, eh? 

And what fun or good would that do anyone? Especially when he was just newly regenerated and worked so hard to be so too? 

The boy grinned, the worry warring with the aloofness that gnawed at his own anxieties, his own fears, as he let the spark of his youth renew his rejection of any misgivings and embrace his assertiveness again, hoping for the best. 

His fear wouldn’t help him now. Wouldn’t help anyone now. 

He had to be…more charismatic and…assertive. 

Perhaps a little cheeky if he must. 

“You can’t be so utterly daft to actually want to believe the nonsense this smarmy little shadow’s giving out to you, now can you?” He tried to make his voice sound fiercely indignant, and almost absurdly astonished at the utter stupidity of that idea. 

Really, The Doctor just sounded petulant rather than indignant at all, which was utter absurdity all its own. 

This was…ah well, he was not the petulant sort, thank you and he needed a better adjective as he stood there, guarding the damned Magamata from getting into the wrong hand and being absorbed fully by any human. 

Because then? 

Ah then that’d be a right damned problem. 

Fearmonger would love it. 

But Izuku–The Doctor? He wouldn’t stand for it. With a swift 'whirring' of the Sonic over the broken and crack Magamata, The Doctor did what he could to reseal the residuals into the contraption and keep what was left of Fearmonger's persona stuck in the device and away from the woman so that a full bonding couldn't take place. 

'If it can't get every ounce of a hold on her then maybe it can't take over completely and we can...extract it somehow. Break the hold.' He glared at the hero, watching the descent into madness shifting her person as Fearmonger's strength seeped through the woman's bright gaze, dulling sense and energy, dampening the fire in her look. 

Izuku steadied himself, meeting the woman’s intense stare, watching the flaming, glossy gaze widen, pupils dilate much like a cat, as she honed in on the boy’s face, a snarl exposing her teeth.  

And he didn’t have to wait too long to see the inevitable shift he’d dreaded. 

“Don’t let it sway you. Don’t be that daft,” He quipped again, focusing on the woman, attentive to her movements, her expression, and the struggle that warred in her stance as she curled and uncurled her fists, breathing hitching as shoulders rolled forward into a hunch. 

Dammit again.  

This was the shift. And when it happened, it was too prominent to ignore or write off as coincidence, with personality and energy altering nearly entirely as the waves of persuasive malintent took hold, engaging the hero woman to defend herself against the perceived threats she felt. 

In this case? 

“You’ll stand down, boy or I’ll blast you into submission.” 

And yes, there it was. The boy could see the growing agitation and fear in the woman’s expression as she fired comment and demand with nary a prompting. 

That was Fearmonger’s power. 

The boy watched silently, focused on the exchange of energy as he stepped back a little more from his enemy–this hero–and how he’d made the situation worse by releasing this power from its confines. 

“I know what this is,” He murmured more to himself that the world and the people around him. “And you were curious enough to hold off on your judgment until now , until it was released.”  

He knew what this was and what it was capable of. 

‘And if it’s been within this stupid Magamata for a long time, I wonder how much it’s impacted the royal family? The nation? Citizens?’ The catalogue of questions clicked and pulsed in his head as he tried to make sense of what was going on. 

Briefly he wondered if this is what Endeavor had felt and why he’d acted the way he had in front of Izuku as well. 

Other heroes too, perhaps.  

Filmy, foggy blackness smoked and puffed and coiled around him, curling up his arm, kissing his skin as it lanced upward and out, spidering towards the woman, towards the man who narrowed their suspicious glowerson the child Doctor as the weight of worlds of darker thoughts took hold. 

“You’ll give that back you little…you little brat,” The woman retorted, her pitch lowering deeper than it had ever gone prior to talking to him before. Her ochre eyes sparked indignantly, as frustrated fingers danced with a demanding wave towards Izuku, pointing towards the boy expectantly.

“You’ve destroyed it and now you’ll fix it.” 

“No I won’t,” Izuku remarked evenly, his even tone remaining though the humor dissipated as quickly as the woman’s suspicion had ignited with the fog’s surge around them. “There’s nothing to fix. And even if I could, I didn’t break a damned thing. I only released what was already available within the fake vessel you all seemed to believe was the real Magamata. Which, to put it kindly, makes you somewhat blind and more than a little stupid, if you’re lucky.” 

The Doctor’s harsh reply, though not acerbic or fiercely spoken, wasn’t met with an air of gratitude. Instead it was developed with a measure of suspicion on the woman’s part as she hissed in reply–expected–to Izuku. 

Though instead of deining to actually battle with wit and verbiage, which would have made things a great deal easier on the boy–Doctor–the woman hero decided to go the battle route, quite literally and reached up for another flame tendril that was her hair.

Which was all fascinating and highly interesting to study. But when faced with the competitive fire of anxiety that was beginning to sink into the woman’s face, watching the wayher expression twisted into something more determined and hardened with resolve, Izuku knew that the Fearmonger had and was taking over and trying to root into her core senses, twisting reality.

“You’re smarter than that!” He snapped at the woman, taking a step closer, stretching his hand with the Magamata behind him, Sonic pushed in front instead. “I know you’re not half-witted and suspicious like the rest. I know you can think rationally! Come one now!”  

“Kamiji.” 

“You’re just a damned vigilante and I was sent here to do a job,” The woman hissed, pulling at another strand of flame from her hair, coiling it around the first in her hand. 

Izuku was struck momentarily by a sense of…familiarity at the darker expression, and the pointy grin that lit the woman’s face as a flame-lit glow cast shadows dancing across her cheeks. 

It reminded him…

‘Nine you don’t have time!’ 

Blonde…? 

‘Nephew you have to pay attention…’ 

The device continued to weigh down the boy’s palm, siphoning the good energy away from the surrounding air and pushing negativity and darkness further out, tendrils of gaseous darkness and angry black that smoked outwards like a fog from his hand.  and away from Izuku until all he could feel was the shrouding anger, suspicion and bitter fury circling the trio. 

A third quick tug of flames from the woman’s hair, created a fireball that pulsed green, and gold, before turning into a familiar fiery orangey golden sunset and red. 

“Stand down , boy and give it back,” The woman snapped, before she flung the flame unhesitatingly straight towards the waiting Doctor. 

No stopping this time, no wavering. 

No consideration or deliberation on the woman’s part as she threw a powerful blow towards the boy, far larger than any of the previous strikes had been prior. 

And Izuku, who’d expected as much, had time to raise his Sonic Screwdriver in defense, trying to get a total repel of the flames before he was thrust backwards, knocking into the scarf-wearing hero.

“It’s all your fault.” 

Yeah. 

The boy’d heard that one before, the kid let out a small groan as he coughed, the air seeping out of his lungs in a sputter as the word blurred and blossom petals fell around him in disarray. 

That woman–Kamiji–was a lot stronger than he’d anticipated. At least in such a short amount of time. 

He sent a bitter glare towards the damned Magamata in his hand still hissing out the foggy darkness about them, as the plumes of deep, ashen night-grey darkened Izuku’s awareness and choked the beauty of the forest. Light and color and sound were almost choking now as the man shoved him off and grunted indignantly as the boy. 

“You fucking idiot,” The taller griped as he rolled, and tried to tugged Izuku out of the way as another blasted fireball sank towards them. “Do you always have to open your fucking mouth ?!” 

Izuku turned a sharp look towards the man, well aware of the chastisement and the glare that was leveled at him, yet he found himself more distracted by the man’s utter lack of…uncharacteristic anger towards Izuku. 

Annoyance? Yes, that made sense. That was highly normal for this situation. 

Expected. 

Who wouldn’t be? It was probably for the best, in all fairness and right-headedness. I mean, if he were some sort of logician and could rationalize as humans did (which is to say if his thinking were limited by the rationalizations of reality limited to earth existence) then he’d get damned annoyed by Izuku’s antics as well. 

But…

“You’re not angry.” 

The boy’s voice was soft. 

Soft . Ha. Why was it sordidly soft? 

But it there was an itchiness and a strange niggling sensation that tickled the back of Izuku’s mind as he stared at the absurdly odd man whose mangled and mangey mess of dark hair had tumbled over his shoulders and who was staring as him of all things with a look of…confusion!

Not anger, but confusion. Perhaps a sprinkling of exasperation mixed in there as well maybe. 

But no anger. 

And the sheer non-normalness of that was enough for the boy to…not quite know how to feel, rightly, with his chest tightening oddly up and his face twisting into something akin to a pucker. He stared back at the man who only huffed on the mele and frenzy before letting his hair float up–and was that something someone could actually do now?--as his eyes turned a damned golden color!

“Well hell’s bells there scarf-man, your power is just as fascinating isn’t it!” The boy’s voice pitch and pulsed with a liveliness that warred with that angry tussle of confused questioning that twisted in his chest as the flames fizzled again and turned to ash around them again, another moment of disintegration and as the man’s power ignited to contend against the woman’s feisty flurry of power. 

Izuku–and No he was The Doctor wasn’t he–Narrowed a speculative look upward towards the man who’d reached out to grab at him again, without sparing a glance  down towards the boy, as his grey scarf snapped out from his hand and threaded through his fingers like a rope to twist around the child’s wrist. 

He’d felt that pressure before, earlier when the man had tugged him away from the flaming ginger beard Endeavor. 

“Seems to be your Schtick, eh?” The boy deadpanned as he received a hard tug that made him wheeze, still winded. 

“I suggest you shut up, kid, especially if you had any sense in your head.” 

He was forced upwards, vertical as the sky blurred, flames and petals and branches turned and melded in his vision, before the boy was twisted and turned right-side up and standing, a hard shove to the right, near the man’s side. As a quick sidelong glare twisted his way. 

“Now move.” 

“Don’t you fucking dare Aizawa! The woman was dropping from a branch, her powers diminished for the time being, movements still nimble as she leveled a kick towards the man who dodged the blow with a strategic sidestep and a quick flourish of grey material that snakeked around and under the woman’s under-arm. 

‘Aizawa’ pulled one section of the material as he shoved past Kamiji and leaped at a tree, his boots striking against the trunk as the speed and force allowed him the bound and turn over into a back-flip as his other hand pulled a tension with the slack of the rest of the scarf. 

Izuku–The Doctor (Dammit all, why did he keep doing that?) stumbled as he was twisted and tossed into a bush, watching as the woman, far closer to the tree, had her trapped arm pulled upward from the tension, and forced back against the trunk before the man’s boots struck hard against her stomach, eliciting a hard gasp as all air was expelled. 

Izuku pushed onto his elbows through the brambles as a sound ‘THWACK’ beat against his temple, blinking away the sudden bright starshine that shattered sense and light and thought. Another tug against his arm had him stumbling as he moved to his wrist, keeping a grip on his Sonic as his pant legs drooped and his shirt sleeves billowed. A trickle of warmth slipped down near his ear as he sniffed again, feeling a strange sense of deja vu. 

Memories and thoughts and ideas blending together as hazy visions and voice mixed through the glimmer and glee of the regeneration in him. 

‘It’s not so easy to get out of this one.’ 

‘Good men go to war…’ 

‘You left me here…’ 

‘I promise I’ll come back for you…’ 

‘You have to concentrate now…’ 

The boy blinked utterly perplexed for a moment as he steadied himself and his vision and the wobblish and whimsy that swirled and swathed him, feeling the tugging from the scarf as the man barreled and elbow into the woman’s sternum, while taking a fist to the jaw at the same time. 

“This is rather fun and all, the man remarks, feeling the Magamata’s chill working up his hand now, and encircling his wrist as he reached out towards the object with his Sonic, lifting his voice and trying to catch the elder pair’s attention. 

“But if the squabbling parentals could please quiet down I’m going to bid you both adieu! Now!” 

The boy stepped…

Stumbled . 

And ha! Stumbling. That wasn’t in the cards was it. That…was odd. But the boy didn’t have too long to think on it, or the…humanity that it presented to him. Because he’d given that up a long time ago, so long ago that it was hardly a reality and more a dream that he didn’t have time to fantasize about or ever consider. 

Being sick or sad or hurt. Ha! That wasn’t or couldn’t be him. 

The boy reached to his wrist a felt the tender chill there, the darkness still sinking through him, pointedly ignoring the way the jade Magamata faintly glowed and pulsed and almost whispered soft threats to him as he found the band on his arm and flipped open the watch-like mechanism near the back of his hand. 

At least…he hadn’t been stupid enough in his regeneration to forget about putting one of these damned things on. 

“Okay kiddos!” Izu–The Doctor implored with a soft sigh, sending an apologetic look towards the woman, Kamiji, I have to go now, but I promise I will be back. 

There was a beat–strikingly hard against his ribs as the familiarity hit again. 

‘I promise I’ll be back. I won’t leave you.’ 

He stared hard at Kamiji, catching her firm glare, as his worry spiked and his understanding of what was happening flickered the compassion and guilt to life. 

Because he couldn’t…

‘I won’t leave you behind. I’ll come back for you…’ 

‘You promise?’ 

‘’Course I do…’ 

“I’ll…make it right,” He whispered. 

He wouldn’t leave things as they were. He wouldn’t be the cause of her end.

“I promise.” 

The man couldn’t keep his quirk alight for much longer and he knew it, his eyes drying too quickly in the heat as he listened to the boy’s quips and shift in tone that was so sudden and so stark a contrast that it had a warning sounding in his ear. 

Something was happening and something that was bound to cause more trouble that this already fucked up situation would or should have. And as he stared in Kamiji’s eyes, seeing the grey film that coated her normally ochre gaze, he couldn’t help but wonder…

“What did that thing do to you?” he whispered softly, only a breath loud enough for his friend to hear, watching as the woman’s gaze narrowed, her glower transfixed on the boy before slithering towards him. 

Spit flew to his cheek as she snapped. 

“You’re a traitor,” She barked, “And you always have been. Always protecting illegals, the dregs, the wrong side. And now? Now you can’t get out of it. Now? You’re going to know what it’s like to be hunted just like them, Shou.” 

Shouta didn’t have time to ponder what the filminess was, the growing grey in her gaze, and how it intensified with each barbed, vicious comment, as the boy’s words rang out. 

“I promise I’ll come back.” 

The boy’s words had the underground hero sucking in a breath and making a choice, knowing full well that if he stayed that he would end up just that: captured and then he would be royally screwed. 

“Alright then, Kamiji,” He hummed, sucking in a breath, letting his eyes slipped closed. 

With a lightning quick shift, he pulled back, as he felt the wave of quirk power return to the area. Retracting the capture weapon from its grip on Kamiji’s hold, the man briefly slammed the woman’s skull against the tree before turning and tugging the capture weapon again, still maintaining tension on the boy’s wrist as he watched the child flick a small latch on his wrist and and press a button. 

Dark mistiness spewed around him, curtained by blue light as a soft ‘ WROOM ’ echoed in his followed by a ‘ POP ’ resounded through the air as Shouta reached forward and grasped onto the boy’s arm before he felt his stomach sucked to the back of his spine and the world turn inward and inverted before mixing of color, movement, sound, and light before it all lurched to a quick and unceremonious halt . 

The pair stumbled forward, a jumble of limbs and tangle of scarf and Shouta took a moment to orient himself as he straightened, his sense of danger heightened at being caught unaware and unprepared for the situation. 

Agitatedly he reached out, one hand still on the boy’s arm, the other maneuvering to grab onto the capture weapon. 

"You've got to be fucking joking."

“Oh…well that’s a bit not good then isn’t it.” 

Keigo stared at the destruction from the rooftop a frown on his lips, the spot where the duo had been only a moment ago now vacant and a crater marking the only evidence they'd existed at all. 

He watched the sidekick, slumped and covered in the dark haze, as she groaned, her pitch shifting from the familiar to a deeper and more frantic shrill as she reached up and clutched at her hair, the flames seeping through her fingers as she began to tear and tear, coiling and building a ball of heat and flame and fire that grew in intensity. 

"You damned monster," Her voice carried. "I won't let you get away. I'll get back what you took." 

The blast shot upward, through the trees, tearing a hole through branches and lighting the sky as Keigo held back and watched, keeping his radio on, signaling to his minders that something was indeed amiss. 

“Huh,” He crooned into the wind softly, as a feather played in the air near his ear. “Seems to be well within my paygrade after all.” 

“Dammit, Eraser, stand down!”  

He’d never actually expected that they’d make it far. No, he wasn’t stupid enough to have that type of hope. 

Shouta was rational enough to recognize that there was no way to escape reality and know that they’d never get too far away. 

Not really. Not with Endeavor himself capable of speeding after the pair despite the limitations that the boy had imposed on his hero costume. 

“You fucking menace!” 

“Language, Mister hero! That’s…that’s not very nice you know!” 

But to have to outrun the damned hero twice now? That was just cruel. Absolutely, fucking cruel. 

“Talk about bananas, eh?” 

The breathy laugh that hummed in the air was enough to make the man wince as the childish whispers reverberated all as Shouta gripped limb and torso and scrambled towards the safety of the undergrowth trying his damndest anyway to get distance and coverage in his favor.

“You’re underselling the issue,” Shouta snapped back.

All while wondering why he was doing this for a boy who seemed so determined to keep his mouth running and putting them in the line of fire.

Because even with billows of steam erupting from his suit, the number one was whipping flames outwards with a minor intensity and haphazard directional accuracy that still managed to singe the man’s ankles and crackle near Shouta’s ears as he ducked into the bushes, the low-lying prickling barbs catching his cheek as he tucked low and elbowed into the thickets.

The screaming hiss of flames eating leaves and flowers tinged his ears, with Endeavor’s sidekicks too close for comfort and too many to handle on his own, as Shouta barreled into the trees and through the thicket, as branches cracked. A shower of leaves and flowers erupted through the haze of smoke. 

“Stop!”

And yet, even with a fucking fool’s hope…

The underground hero ignored the call for him to quit his actions and pressed forward again instead, tucking low and pulling himself downward, as he gripped his charge around the middle, trying not to think too hard on the hopelessness of this moment. Nor did he try to think about how fucking stupid he was for making this decision at all, and the blatant shit storm he was stirring up by intervening or the lack of understanding on his part as to why he was doing this in the first place. 

The second place. 

And fuck it all he was starting to sound like the damned brat. 

Probably because he knew he was being a fucking idiot and that he’d have hell to pay when this was all said and done. 

No, Shouta wasn’t stupid enough to think that he’d have a chance of really getting through this without someone calling for his hero license after this stunt. There was no way he’d be beyond reprimand from the commission or the number one, and no way he was capable of escaping anyone’s notice in his sprint into the trees, as he ducked down further, clutching at the foolhardy kid who seemed far too pleased and stupidly ignorant to grasp the severity of what he’d just done? 

Ha. That was probably the most ignorant thing he could ever hope for out of all of this shitfest. And seemed the least likely to happen too. 

Pity too. Because it would have made things a lot easier if this kid would just…get the damn clue and either hold still or stand up and run himself. Or use whatever it was that he had on his wrist. 

However, it seemed that not even that was a possibility. 

‘That’s a no-go my good fellow Aizawa-man! It’s a small recharge period so we have to skedaddle and get a good clearing and even then I can’t guarantee it’ll let me get very far…odd enough that it only sent me back here. Usually works much better than that. I wonder what’s got it on the fritz in the first place.’ 

It seemed Shouta was screwed the minute he’d decided to help the child, who was only scrambling to shove his elbow into Shouta’s shoulder and moving his face and arms and hands upward, a foot pushing into Shouta’s hands. 

And really what was the point of all of it? Why was this kid trying to get closer to the danger just as Shouta was trying to pull them out of it? 

And why would he try to do this then? Why go sprinting into the danger, and after this boy? 

Why do something this completely moronic when he knew he’d be seen? When his cover was going to get blown and his entire career was now on the line without recourse or protection securely in place to offer him that safety net to hold onto? 

And no solid guarantee he’d even be capable of successfully completing his mission because this damned kid… 

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, you bastard!” 

Endeavor’s voice carried through the trees, even at this distance as Shouta only shook his head still not believing that they’d even made it this far away from the man who’d used his fogged up suit to create a damned smoke screen to try to weedle them out and into his grasp, bellowing all the while as this fucking kid of all people kept launching joking attacks towards Endeavor just to piss him the fuck off. 

To call him reckless was an understatement. 

But to say it as sheer nerve on Shouta’s part though? Ha. Not hardly. 

It wasn’t nerve so much as maybe he just didn’t care what Endeavor had to say on the matter as much as he had his own moral compass to uphold at this point, consequences be damned.

Shouta never really bothered with the upper crust heroics, never believed in the glamor of the standings that Endeavor aspired towards. 

Never gave a shit if anyone really liked him.  

And maybe that’d been the whole problem with him and purpose for his actions all at the same time. Do what he wanted. 

“Brilliant display, eh?” the child he’d been protecting chirped like a hummingbird, reaching a hand to Shouta’s shoulder as he tried to leverage himself higher out of the man’s grip. Again . Fucking moron.  

And really, what the hell ? Shouta nearly dropped the boy who flopped around stupidly, zero hesitation, and zero remorse of his own as green hair whipped around the youthful face and the sparks of golden light danced around freckled cheeks as he pulled on a branch and nearly left himself hanging in out on limb like some baby squirrel. 

Seemed the kid didn’t care whether he fell or if Shouta dropped him on the ground. Which he should , because the stress of this whole mess was a little more than irritating. 

The fool. 

And yet…

‘You’re just a big softie, Shou! Always taking in strays when they pop up!’ 

The man grit his teeth and glowered.  

“Kid, keep still. I don’t…I’ll drop you–” 

“Ah but that’s hardly a concern!” Yeah, clearly the boy was an idiot as he dismissed the hero’s remark with a light chuckle. “It’s the minorest concern to be concerning with in truth…or maybe secondminorist after dealing with the bumbling brigade up there.” 

A thumb thrust upward towards Endeavor’s speeding forming that shifted ever closer.

A knot in Shouta’s chest cinched tighter still though the boy seemed unfazed at the rapidity of his new enemy’s gap-closing. 

“But regardless I simply wanted to extend an additional modification as it were! Or maybe try to talk some sense into the steampot. See if he’s cooled his jets…though it seems less likely given his locomotive larking.”

The boy laughed to himself as Shouta tried to picture Endeavor of all people as bumbling, which was admittedly harder than he wanted to admit…but less difficult as the man’s face only partially appeared through steam clouds and seemed less angry in wafts of clouded distortions, his glower flickering. 

Didn't work in his head for too long though, even with the image before him, and the glowering hero ambling forward. Wouldn’t work for anyone who really knew the hero and what he was capable of. 

This kid wasn’t really so dense enough to believe that–

“You're an idiot if you think you're safe from him, kid,” Shouta snipped trying to pull the boy down lower as Endeavor extended a hand and sent a spray of flames striking into a spiral towards the child who thrust his arm upward through the cover of trees and bush to meet the man’s strike with his own. “He’s not going to listen to you. Now just tuck lower or get off me and move --” 

“What a silly word to pin on me!” Through the crackle and hiss of branches and heat that licked at the wood and singed petals and turned the world to ash around them, the child’s words chipped at Shouta’s ears as he ducked and tugged at the boy, fingers digging into the kid’s arms, trying to rip him out of harm’s way, as the word grew warm around them.

They weren’t far enough down to avoid a direct blow with the number one hero and without enough coverage they couldn’t completely block out the flame spear that Endeavor was pulling through his fingers and angling at the boy and underground hero. 

‘Shit!’ 

It was going too direct a hit for the child to dodge and Shouta was too low to pivot the kid out of the way in time. There wasn’t enough space to maneuver effectively and stop a direct strike. 

He had to react faster.   

“Endeavor!” Shouta’s voice was low, dripping with a bitterness as he thrust out his capture weapon and let his quirk grow to encase the erasure power around them, puttering the flames to cinders and smoldering smoke around them as the flame spear continued forward, too far out of the man’s quirk connection to be cancelled out entirely, as grey material snaked around the number one’s wrist. A vice-like grasp tension connected the heroes through Shouta’s scarf as he let his strength tighten the pull and create a taut link as he tugged hard and forced Endeavor’s forward punch off-kilter and away from the child’s face. 

A golden glare pierced the steamed haze as he narrowed his eyes on the man and hero, gritting his teeth and putting more force into the pull than was necessary, as his attention and hold on the boy loosened and he felt the child shift still higher out of his safety hold. Why did he keep doing that? Why keep playing off the severity of the situation and laughing it away?

And then putting himself at risk all over again? 

God dammit . 

A thin, needle light of energy zipped forward towards the kid, despite Shouta’s efforts to maneuver the boy away from the blast, as the kid’s hand snapped into a block in front of the advancing flame arsenal. Even depleted to a smaller fire-spear, there was enough power to provoke injury and scald the kid no matter what he tried to do to stop it. 

Shouta’d been too slow. 

However, the boy only frowned lightly and lifted his gaze, green eyes flickering through long lashes as they glinted through his glasses. His hand lifted with a hard snap and another light erupted. Blueish-green, with a whirring echoing again, as it had that first time the boy had used the same small device to let himself create the steam eruption in Endeavor’s suit. 

This time, though, there was no steam, no attack on the hero who’d thrown the assault down on a child. Instead, a large pane of clear glass stretched outward in front of the boy’s form, directly in front of the device the child wielded as the sunset of hues slammed into the glass and began to crack the shield, spidering breaks outward along the makeshift shield as the boy glared upwards towards the hero, his frown deepening as his shield held, glasses slipping down his nose. 

The spear connected full-force, cracks splintering but never shattering the glass shield, before petering out, as Shouta retracted his capture weapon and reached for the boy who held himself steady for a moment more before he tossed the glass to the side, the shattering of thin shielding material finally giving way to the brunt force of the child’s throw. 

It’s job finished, having protected the kid from an assault. 

“That wasn’t very nice you know,” He snapped towards Endeavor, turning his device back on the man, blue light still buzzing, eyes still narrowed. “And I warned you once already, my good hero . I’m not one to be trifled with. Now, let me take my trinkets and be off for the time being. You and your sidekick have already made a muck up of this whole issue and now I’ve got to rework everything to set it right.” 

That moment, and those words sparked a small reality blow for Shouta. A signal of understanding about what was really going on and who this child reminded him of. 

“You think you can talk to me that way you damned vigilante,” 

The boy coughed lightly and waved, “Not one of those, though by the sounds of it, I probably should be with the way you carry on about their good deeds comparative to yours. You’ll have your chance to chat when I’m through with my research, and cleaning up the missteps you’ve made in protecting your people from the clear enemy that’s been lurking here for ages.”

The boy held up the Magamata that’d been in his pocket, still softly seeping its fog, cracked and distorted. 

“How long, I wonder?” The boy mused to himself, eyes narrowed, “How long did you think this would have stayed hidden before someone was smart enough to figure it out? Years? Centuries? Hmm?” The boy’s sharp look settled on Endeavor as he frowned. “And it’s corrupting people. Your sidekick. Kamiji was it? Taken her. And it’ll kill her, you know. Fearmonger . Doesn’t care. It’ll take what it wants and then move on to the next and then the next. Power hungry. Like you it seems.” 

The boy sniffed. 

“Perhaps it’s already got its hooks in you as well.”  

“You son of a–” 

“Ah, ah, ah, language!” The kid tutted with a scolding sing-song retort, quickly pocketing the stone again as he shifted his thumb along his device. The light flickered to a deep, emerald green that pulsed outward, towards the number one. “You’re going to need to clean that mouth out.” 

There was a flash, and a harsh snap, before a low reverberating ‘boom’ pulsed outward, thrusting Endeavor backwards as Shouta was forced into a crouch, watching the trees sway above, listening to the cracking of wood and the angry snapping of branches as wind tornadoes out around them. 

A sonic boom cascaded from the device. 

And Shouta peered upward in time to watch Endeavor fall back into a retreat, forced into a stumbled float as the underground hero blinked and allowed the man to renew his flames, his own attention turned towards his charge again as the boy listed and let himself fall back towards Shouta’s pull as Endeavor’s snarl of displeasure slipped into the whirl. 

“I don't dabble in idiocy.” the boy tapped Shouta on the. damned. head before continuing.

“And you don’t strike me as the type to be so…so flimsy and flippant! You’re rather handy and sturdy with your hold. And as it is, I’ve no trouble maintaining mine either so we’re square and neat and tidy and beautifully bliss.” The child continued his chattering chitter, with a dismissive way, not even sparing a glance again as his eyes returned to the sky, with Shouta ducking back into the thicket, and deeper into cover, hoping to create greater distance now that they’d been given a small, small breath of space. 

The underground hero focused on his movements deeper into the retreat as the child stared ahead instead of towards the man as he craned to look around to continue to watch the chase unfold, no doubt spying the followers still on their heels.

And whatever he’d just done, Shouta could see it hadn’t been enough to deter Endeavor for long. 

The boy flicked open the watch again as they retreated and Shouta watched as there was a brief stumble in the child’s gait, a waver in his expression as the boy blinked a few times, before pressing the central button on the mechanism. 

And this time there was a moment of clarity for Shouta who watched the world melt, felt the shift of air and heard the sound of voice and music and noise twist around him as faces and things distorted and his stomach was once again sucked into his spine though he remained upright as his charge, the boy peered upward, staring straight to the sky. 

Bottle green orbs glistened bright. Too bright, as the boy murmured something soft, imperceptible to Shouta’s ears before the words petered out and the kid dropped. 

He was basking in a pool of thoughts, drowning in his own waterfall of inescapable misery of overloaded and overwhelming, unending questions, and he spiraled downward into the world of speculation and ponderance. 

It was a lull…a lollying of gentle swaying that had him tugging inward, eyes slipping closed as the world inside his mind flared dangerously bright.  And for a while he forgot the rest, chasing the rabbit of thought through the mire and muck and down into the deeper recesses of his notions and musings. 

Dozens of thoughts flittered about Izuku’s head as the world sank away, reality coated in forgetting as he concentrated on remembering, instead what was , and what had been instead.  

Dozens and hundreds and thousands perhaps, all twisting and bobbing about like frenzied koi fish in a too small pond as they swished and swayed and crammed together too tightly as Izuku slipped between the strange oddity of near sleep and wakefulness. 

His musings…turned softer, less present as images fluttered through, each catching his attention, though each also him puzzled at the same time, turning him befuddled and more than a little confused by their existence as he parsed through the confusion and tried to make sense of it all. 

He rifled through the memories, and their familiarity as memories and non-memory alike, tragically recalling the foreignness and comfort in the sparks of recognition that tingled in his veins all at the same time. 

Izuku.

The Doctor. 

The Doctor. 

Izuku. 

Two in one and the same yet not. Split, combined, and yet, he couldn’t make sense of it. He knew them distinctly, the same. Yet, he felt divided as ever at trying to understand the why behind his relationship with those two names. Because he was first and foremost, The Doctor. 

So who was Izuku to him? 

Why that name? Why that jolt each time he reflected on that connection to the humanity in the title, that name restored? If it was restored. 

Who could even say at this point. 

‘You’re talking yourself in circles, Nine.’ 

Why would he even hope that? Why even entertain that it could or should or…might be his own perhaps…even if something else were going on here instead? 

Izuku…The Doctor almost wanted to scoff in immediacy, and nearly rejected the hopeful tingle that flickered in his chest at the fool’s notion that he knew would never or could never be reality.  

Not for him. Not in this case. That’d died when he’d died that first time, that first childish notion put to rest when he’d gone to war, decided to end his humanity and take the world away from others…

He was no one now. Just The Doctor, wasn’t he. 

Izuku was something else. Something different. 

It meant…

Ah, but then, what else? Who else? 

The boy hummed, confused, and concerned, and more than a little irked and miffed, and…and angling for sorrow and rejecting his thoughts, if he could help it. Because the more he thought on things, the more confused he became. And he rather hated being confused.

No, indeed.

That sensation could bugger off right quickly, if he had his say, and his way. 

And earth. He was on earth again wasn’t he. But when was it? And where more specifically? 

‘Katsudon.’ 

A food. 

‘Cherry blossoms.’ 

So, it was Spring. 

The simple listing helped to situate everything as the images adjusted, clarified, pieced together…the frenzied and almost gleefully bright world washing around him, lapping at his senses, made it harder to focus…

‘But when? When would the Tardis have dropped me…?’ 

And the regeneration…the wobbliness of it all was both invigorating and a bit off-putting if he were honest, because Izuku couldn’t quite switch his thoughts to a more focused realm. They were all just…jamming together! 

Bah…

The boy hummed softly to himself as he swayed, feeling the wind gently ruffling his hair, and caressing his cheeks. It was almost comforting, almost safe…

Izuku stilled, his mind running the circles, chasing the questions as he slipped deeper into himself and floated…

And who was Enji Todoroki? 

A flamed and flashing smile…and a narrowed glare…

Ice and fire…and images. Photographs? The too brief flickerings of memories–memories? 

‘Some sort of character, but with a power that’s most certainly fire based. Though it seems that there is indeed a limit.’ 

A soft, wry smile wormed across a glowing face as the aching thrum of reserved starshine coursed through him, begging for use, demanding his attention.  

Yet why did Izuku–The Doctor–know his name? 

Who was this man to The Doctor–? 

“Kid…?” 

Izuku scrunched his face, brows furrowing as he tried to recall, tried to rifle through the harried and haphazard mess of disjointed and jumbled memories and adjacent adventures that sprang towards his attention like eager guppies seeking a meal. 

Colorful dancing, and balls, and star travels along a train…

Pompeii…a library…Mars…

The London Eye…Pandora…

Sunflowers…nothing but tally marks and angels…and falling…and three knocks…

“Hey…kid…come on now…easy does it…just…stay with me, yeah?” 

A gentle hand on his brow, pulled Izuku forward with a lurch, as it shifted towards his ear and the back of his neck, as the boy’s eyes fluttered open, quite surprised, mind you, as he stared in the narrowed gaze of one…

Well…one disheveled and homeless looking human whose grey scarf obscured the man’s mouth as he narrowed his gaze on the boy thoughtfully and gently prodded the child’s head, as though he were searching for something…

And, really!

“Oi! What’re you doing there, Mr. Scarf!” The boy blinked and scooted upright, trying to pull his oversized sleeves out of the dirt as he maneuvered to sit upright…and damned well hissed from the sudden movement, and the pressure of the man’s hand on his shoulder. “That’s my shoulder thank you!” 

And damn did that hurt!

His fingers curled around his sonic screwdriver–well the last Doctor’s sonic anyway–everything came into sharper focus as the man hummed disparagingly towards Izuku. 

“And you have a concussion,” He retorted drily. “So it’s a moot point what’s yours and what’s not, kid. You’re injured and a hazard. So you’re benched for the time being.” 

The boy–No The Doctor, because no, he wasn’t just a child, thank you! Wasn’t one just…to just…!

“ Bench ?” He parroted back, “Are you quite serious about what you’re stating and to whom?”

The spark of amusement was almost too rich to ignore in his tone as Izuku pressed to sit up again, and narrowed his own gaze at the man, defiance alight, a challenge glinting. 

“And I suppose you think that I’ll simply abide by your rules and park myself right here on the sodding wet grass then, eh Mr. home–ow! That bloody hurt!” 

A firm, but soft poke against the boy’s temple had Izuku hissing and jerking back in surprise, well away from the man’s thoughtful expression and elevated hand.  

And the damned man–the insufferable human–looked far too pleased with himself as he quirked a brow at Izuku’s near involuntary whine. 

Childish whine ...

“Any other protests you’d like to make, Problem Child?” He retorted evenly. “Or are you finished for the day?”

The boy stared back for a pulse of a second, his rapid-fire sparking brain tossing the words and jibe against the register of his senses before indignation ignited and Izuku gaped back at the man affronted. 

Problem Child .

“I am hardly a problem child or whatever nonsense you’ve concocted in that tiny little human-scaled rationale you’ve got stored behind that rat’s nest of hair,” He narrowed his eyes into a glare that felt…far less menacing that he was used to giving, though he tried to ignore that inkling of thought as tried to scrambling to a standing position as the world twisted into a blurred mess that melted to colors dripping like rain. “Brushes exist. I’m almost certain of it.” 

“Fucking hell, kid just slow down.” The man was pointedly ignoring Izuku’s comments in favor of treating him like an invalid . 

Which he wasn’t , thank you. He wasn’t invalided or incompetented. He was…well…perhaps a bit peckish. Hunger could certainly make one a bit tipsy. But that was hardly a notion to consider a concern. 

“I said slow !” 

Stupidly, he missed the angry, Scottish eyebrows, and wrinkled brow that would have made him far more aggressive and aggrieved and…and well, adultish than…than…petulant and squawkish sounding as he was right now. 

Voice cracking and warbling like some damned–

A hand landed on his shoulder–too large a hand to really be considered normal (or perhaps his shoulders were just smaller now, though that could hardly be the case he denied)--trying to steer Izuku back towards sitting once more as muttering ministrations continued to chitter and chirp from his mouth like some lost baby bird all while the damned sleeves of his made it even more spectacle-ish and absurdly preposterous, what with the flopping sleeve whipping around a conductor's swish as he brushed the man's hand aside almost out of spite. 

Or at least he tried to.

It was rather stupid really. A glib and pointless thought that flittered in as he flounced his arm about like he was orchestrating some teenaged star traveler's symphony.

A conductor of the Tardis! 

Ha! 

“Just need a baton. Handles would have loved it. And really that wouldn't be too far off the plane of reality as it were because the wooblish and wobbling nature of music and sound and such and all that jibing and jibberty whatsit isn't so different than timey whimey bits of movement." The boy did another bit of a flourish, recalling that one thing that Beethoven taught him when they were both at that party on Christmas.

Or maybe it'd been Dickens? 

Mozart? 

Ah he hardly recalled now. Too many artists and all their flourishes with pens or baton.  

The Doctor sniggered to himself almost drunkenly almost too giddy and gibberish-filled and garbled as the fever-bright world swayed and swathed him in a golden hued scape of thought and hum of musicality and musing, as stared towards the man affronted yet not wholly offended yet.

Just mildly miffed as it were. 

“You have to stop, kid. You’re barking nonsense,” The man–the mortal, tiny, insignificant, human man rebuffed his comments again , like some ignorant parental figure. “And who the hell is Handles?”  

Naive. 

“Slow is hardly a pace I dabble in,” The boy recounted ignoring the question with a shake of his head, the world bobbing in his sight as he gave a sharp grin at the man, “Though I’ve been known to dally a time or two. Perhaps jaunt and traipse or tiptoe or dilly along with that dally. It’s really a pick of the lot, if you’re keen on that sort of thing. But I never slow down, let alone stop altogether. Can’t simply simper on and simmer while the rest mingle. I’ve gotta dash. Go onward, upward, my dear fellow. Especially when there’s a problem to be solved. And there is, or have you forgotten so quickly.”

And here this man was talking about Izuku being the nutter. Ha. A lark that was.  

The child leaned away from the worldly man’s grip, resumed his confident air and stepped. 

Izuku’s knees buckled again, as his vision greyed and flared to life at the same moment, confusingly amusing and oh so unpredictably predictable for him it seemed. 

Good god what was this childish form doing to him? It was so flimsy at times and astoundingly agile and limber and strong at others. 

He chuckled at the man, almost bitterly derisive, as the human caught his arm, hissing as Izuku tried to pull away in defiance.

“I said stop , kid!” 

But this was hardly an issue! And stopping wasn't going which is where they needed to be heading, whether forwards or backwards or even sideways, it didn't matter. 

A small, glowing hand trembled as the boy only grinned widely, a shake of tender verdant curls bouncing as he reached into his vest pocket, wide and loose and oh so regrettably too big now for him. 

Except…oh he wasn’t wearing a vest was he? 

No, indeed he was! No imagining that bit. Which…yeah he wasn't imagining it, but it still didn't fit proper, drooping to one side and all that smartlessness.

So, new vest then. And it’d make a nice image. The vest. Except not the big part. He’d need it more fitted. 

Perhaps plaid. The plaid would be nice.  

“M’ finnne , teacher man,” he slurred, with a sniff. Peering again and imagining the coat, resigned as he pictured it too big and too oversized as well. 

“Stop calling me that,” Scarf-man retorted with an exasperated, almost parental sigh. Which was odd enough as it was. 

“Then stop calling me ‘kid’. I am not a kid, that you. Or a child , problem or otherwise. I’m The Doctor.” 

Tragically the coat was a lost cause too, he mourned his inability to deduce a quality outfit for this new body due to its…gangly nature, as he softly slipped through the pocket of his pants and, minding the stitching as he reached and plucked out the pricking and pinching metal. 

“Don’t need your vigilante name, kid,” Aizawa remarked evenly. “Just give me your actual name and we’ll be square.” 

Perhaps he could have something made that fit better? 

Again Izuku–The Doctor --Ignored the man and let himself float through the mire of jumbled messiness that were his thoughts. And regrets, trying to deduce a solution to the current problems even as trivialities flittered around like errant butterflies. 

The plaid of this last regeneration’s clothing choices was quite nice. The greenish color a rather smart look for him…well at least he thought so. And most, his opinion was the one that trumped the others when it came down to it.

Guilt at having been overly confident in assuming that the Magamata that still remained in his pocket was benign against humans wracked him. 

He’d been foolish. Arrogantly so. 

And he’d walked right into a trap. Designed for him no doubt. Waiting for him to get there perhaps. Who knows how long it’d been.  

“S’a good vest and coat combo if I could make it. Need a new one whenever the Tardis comes back…damned thingg ,” His words felt a slight bit garbled. Not near as crisp and posh and proper on his tongue. 

And if he didn’t do something about it, and let it simply continue to fester in the woman’s person, gain strength and grow and feed on her insecurities, then she’d…

‘Die.’

He blamed the teeth. They were entirely too new and still felt stupidly buck and horse-like.

Or maybe not so horse-like. He was just being judgy perhaps. Peckishness made him judgy and a tad…whingey. 

“You need a swift head check, you idiot,” A dark gaze swam into view as the man’s frown ticked downward, as he narrowed a harsh look on the boy–the Doctor, “But since you’re apparently determined to make yourself an enemy to heroes much as a vigilante…”

He had to fix this. Without anymore humanity interference, thank you. 

“Alas I must decline,” He retorted, with false civility and more than a murmuring of amusement as he flicked his gaze up through his lashes to catch the man’s terse expression as he gently tossed the glinting jade ring upward to catch the light as it beelined towards the man’s forehead. “Don’t like other doctors…” 

The inside joke wasn’t funny to anyone but him. 

He wasn't aiming to strike the man in the face, knowing the blasted fellow seemed too quick and could avoid the blow…as he proved capable with ease,as the man caught the trinket with his free hand as he glowered towards the child, his face darkening further as Izuku blinked a few times to steady his vision. 

“Tell me you didn't.”

Izuku shrugged non-committal, teeth bared and smile wide as the world ignited with that same fervor when his curiosity piqued and the questions renewed, even through the small pulse of a headache. 

“If the lie will help,” He deadpanned, through the slight slur “though it doesn't change that they'll be looking for the signet ring after all. Broke the mirror didn’t I…and this is a core piece of the collection is it not?” Izuku’s voice hummed in the stillness, bright and cheerful.The man narrowed his glare further on the child--non-child with a deep sigh and shake of his head. Izuku only laughed again.

Didn’t have as much strength this time around. Izuku would have to work on that. 

 “I’ll never understand you humans’ need for naivety! Especially when it seems to annoy you so…and especially when you had to know that I would have at least kept one thing for myself from the damned collection, even if you’d thrown the rest of the fakers out onto the lawn in your bumbling haste to supposedly rescue me from the non-danger danger you felt I needed. ” he chirped glowingly, trailing off, “But it's irrelevant! A moot point, as it were, and it seems I still have it in my possession for analysis. So dawdling…dallying…or being slow as you called me…and that’s such an ugly word by the way–”Izuku sniffed, “Is not something I’m keen on until I’ve had my fill of solving the problem at hand…literally.” 

There was another cheeky grin that slithered across the boy’s face as he held up his hand and the ring on his finger. 

But the joke landed rough against his lips, and sparked amusement only in his own brain. 

Seemed it fell flat to the man’s ears as he stared grossly unamused back at the child, his coal eyes narrowing perceptibly as he assessed the boy’s meaning, and the unabashed blink that the boy let fall as he felt the thrum of his regeneration continue to course through him all the more eager and vibrant as the buzzing of the earth’s energy sang beneath his feet. 

“You’re spouting nonsense, kid,” The man murmured, trying to peer into the boy’s eyes, his own coal gaze thoughtful as he hummed, and judged. “Injured and muttering gibberish when all I need is a fucking name and a way to get you out of here safely–” 

“Oh come off it! I do not speak in Gibberish!” Izuku pulled back, stepping into a stumble that had him nearly tumbling, though he’d right deny it. It was just…the damned pant legs getting all wonky and tying him up and being a right nuisance. “I mean I do speak Gibberish. Five different forms of it, thank you. From four different planetary belt systems. But!” 

Izuku snorted amused with himself (or pretending to be anyway) and the way the man’s brow quirked in confusion. And naturally he’d be confused! Izuku–The Doctor understood the ideas and the implications and the verbiage, but this man? Not quite so! 

How simplistic of this diminutive human mind to conjure up such a response! Ha! A laughing notion, indeed! 

“And I’ll-I’ll have you know that gibberish jabbering is a rather refined skill that can get you out of many a sticky situation when it’s called for!” He continued chattering, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he rocked and leaned, feeling the thrum of the regenerative powers within him. A buzzing was sounding in his ear, light and flighty and flittering like a hummingbird, as he felt the urge to whip about the small clearing, poking and prodding and stewing about his next steps and his next moves. 

But this man! He had to explain it. 

“Not that I called for it in this particular situation–the Gibbering or Jabbering or what have you. But the point remains that I could have if I’d needed it, but I didn’t.” He sniffed, watching the man narrow his eyes. “And you should know that it’s a right proper dialect that requires a great deal of inflection and guttural intonation and the appropriate facial tweaking to get it down correct! None of what I did just now was anything remotely related to the gibberish garbling or mess making floundering that you’re accusing me of.” 

The man–Eraserhead was it?--only huffed in reply and rolled his eyes as he shook his head. Long fingers tapped gently against his arm as he crossed one over the other and peered down his nose at the boy. 

“Lizard people are hardly a normal response one gives to the number one hero about theft of the Japanese Crown Jewels–” 

“Well, that man is hardly a hero,” Izuku retorted with a huff of his own, “And the lizard people wasn’t the right term, I’ll grant you.” The boy hummed, reaching up for a leaf that was just budding through a small patch of soft pink petals. The rosy, velvet-soft blossoms gave way easily beneath his touch as the child left a glowing finger dance tenderly across the brilliant green, a wry smile on his face.

The soft whisper of birdsong traipsed along his ears, a distant call that mimicked the cry of something far older that resided within him. 

“I suppose I should have called the Silurian,” He amended evenly, his thoughts straying toward far distant moments, deeply rooted in the distant galaxies and pockets of time that his fingers could never hope to reach again. “Was just a stand-in anyway. Wasn’t even the real issue or…you know entity to be dealing with. I mean…they’re very real mind you but…” 

The boy’s thoughts were trailing, his words dissipating as distractability increased and he started to sink into himself and stew.  

Voices and faces…

Saltiness clouded Izuku’s vision as his mind pursued the downward exploration of questioning, twisting among the starshine that flared in his veins and the thoughts that remained shrouded, still veiled like planetary cosmos unexplored. 

Or forgotten somehow. 

Frustratingly so. 

Childlike wonder replayed them all…a little lost among the galaxies swirling in his mind, suns and stars and whirling whispers of voices and feelings and tears and terrors that beckoned him back to a home that he couldn’t…quite…recall…

A soft hum of a tune he couldn’t recall the origin to reverberated softly in his chest, too quiet for anyone but Izuku to hear as he blinked back to himself. 

With a quick turn of his face back towards the man, Izuku grinned, pointedly ignoring the concerned look on the naive man’s face. He’d have to get away from this minder too. Part ways and move along. 

Forget the concern elicited and sent his way.  

Tosh. Hardly a notion to think on!

“I’m quite certain it’s not Siluarian,” He nodded towards the towering grouch of a man who was now frowning–and really that wasn’t a good look on the man at all! “And not very nice of me to pin it on them, really. They’ve just been…getting on quite nicely here for so long that it’s not my business to ruffle feathers and cause a dust up by making an accusation against them over a few…stolen gemmies.” 

No it wasn’t Siluarians. They’d never have taken league with something like The Fearmonger. They’d never have used it.  

Then again…Izuku let himself frown as he considered what he remembered of the heist and his own interference. And after all…the idea did line up and remind him of England. But…there were some doubt given the lack of reason behind the heist of the jewels themselves and what Siluarian could want them for–

“ Kid .” 

Izuku narrowed his eyes on the man, watching the man’s face draw further into a frown, displeasure marring every facet and feature of this…this slovenly hoboish bumpkin! 

“Not a child,” he retorted. “And indeed it’s probably…maybe them. Or the…or maybe the Zygon. But the percentage of that being the case is… well ...” 

Well, it wasn’t zero ...and that was somewhat troubling…

Nothing was ever zero because that was in and of itself an impossibility and he would know. 

Izuku was the master of impossibility and improbility. 

“But how would the Zygon gotten a hold of Fearmonger?” He murmured softly, staring towards the grass, focusing on the minute, the cosmos of the blades and dirt and speckish beings that inhabited the beautiful world within a world that made up Earth . 

Idiots, humans were for not seeing things like this, he smiled wryly, chest still tight, as the woman’s face lingered in the back of his mind. The hero, Burnin’ was it? 

Taken over by her own fears, her own worries. 

And they had to be a lot. 

“You’re still not making a lick of sense kid,” The man retorted, sourly, “And I don’t take anything you say seriously.” 

“ Sense is hardly what I dabble in,” The Doctor quipped, with a spry hop as the world tilted and blurred for a moment, as he shook his head to steady himself again. “I don’t give a jot about it! Not interested in sense at all! I’m the Doctor. And I’m interested in the experience of it all!” 

A flicker of curiosity piqued across his features, forcing a furrow in his brow as he stared down at the man, Aizawa, contemplatively for a moment, studying him almost as intensely as he had the grass a moment ago, wondering…

“Lack of sense tells me, for instance, that you’re impervious nature to The Fearmonger is highly irregular,” He remarked offhandedly, and somewhat low, lifting a brow to challenge the hero, his assessing nature coming to the forefront. 

Centuries and lifetimes and galaxies of travel thrummed through the pulse points beneath his skin as the glittering golden trails of starlight flared and flashed around his eyes as watched the man expectantly, trying to goad him, almost hoping he’d squirm for once. 

And yet…

“The mist thing, wasn’t it? That came out of the Magamata that you broke ?” The man’s voice dripped with an even sense of thoughtful sarcasm that Izuku–The Doctor almost applauded as he waited, wondering what the other would reply. “I don’t know what the hell that was, kid. Or what the fuck you’re playing at by making it do what it did.” 

“I didn’t do anything.” 

“‘Course not,” The man matched the boy’s tone with an eyeroll as he sighed, “But I can’t give you an answer because I don’t have one.” 

Izuku lifted his chin and straightened with a small nod. 

Right, because that made a great deal more sense. Of course the man couldn’t give an answer. And it was an oddity that this man had withstood Fearmonger’s hold. 

‘Though maybe its confinement made it weaker? Or perhaps it only wanted one vessel?--’

“But I could ask you the same damned question.”

The boy lifted his head and caught the man’s piercing stare as he peered down his nose at Izuku, expectant. 

“It only affected one person. Neither you , nor I were impacted. So, what made you so capable for withstanding it too?” 

At this, the boy only frowned and pursed his lips. 

“Because I’m not afraid of anything,” He remarked evenly. 

‘Liar,’ a traitorous voice slithered through his thoughts, and reverberated in his ears. 

Chapter Text

It felt heavy. 

Dark and heavy and suffocating as a shroud descended on her. 

Moe was left panting, nearly gasping as she blinked through the trees, feeling the stretching span of eyes somewhere in the distance. Fear and rage slithered down her spine, mixing together in a dark pool of confusion that dampened her other senses. Her head felt muddled, hazy, and overly clouded from all other thoughts as she tried to tether herself back to the present, hearing the shouts of pedestrians in the distance.

The ones she’d been trying to protect only a short while before, when she’d gone in pursuit of the boy. The one who’d…

‘The one who’d tricked you.’

‘The one who tried to ruin everything you stand for. The safety of everyone you care about.’ 

Just like the others she knew. 

The woman swallowed back the thickness in her throat and felt another shiver run down her spine as she flexed her fingers and strained with a quaking in her legs. Even hovering in the trees, above the heavier branches, she felt too choked.  

Moe never liked crowded spaces. 

Things too cluttered, too many people pressing around her all the time. Suffocating her, nearly leaving her strangled and struggling to breathe.

‘Just like when you were in the closet.’ 

The woman grimaced, feeling the surge of memories float through her head as she listened to more shouts, flickers of light dancing through leaves and flowers. 

Crimson strained to stare.

Everything was darker as Moe looked outward, peering into the brilliant orange hues and feeling the sting of flame against her skin. It was a small comfort that brought little relief to the current sensation of overwhelming dread that wrapped around her. 

‘It was his fault.’ That voice caressed her ears and gently prodded against her senses. A tremble of truth echoed like a chime. 

She felt a shiver of worry take hold as the world seemed to close in. More memories of her childhood lighted her thoughts as she blinked into the sky, staring out towards the empty air where the boy had once been. 

The boy. 

‘It was his fault.’ 

The voice repeated as she recalled the dread of being locked away, taught to fear her own family, their addictions, their greed. 

The gasping for breath as flames consumed rooms she’d been trapped in. 

Tests, they’d been called. 

Hero preparation. 

Proving grounds to show that she was capable of lifting her family out of the hell hole they were in. 

‘It was his fault.’ 

The woman blinked again, feeling her hands clench into fists, hair swaying as the brilliant green haloed around her head, and curled near her ears. 

She frowned as the terror resurfaced again and again, dread circling, shadows descending. She couldn’t escape it.

‘It was his fault.’ 

The Doctor. 

It was his fault. 

‘He’s just like the others. Make him pay before he makes you pay first.’ 

“Fearmonger doesn’t stay contained in rock. What an oddity.” 

Izuku had too many thoughts to consider and not enough attention span to consider them all fairly. 

Which was rather drab and depressing if you asked him. 

There were so many loose ends for Izuku to consider in this twirling mess of a morning…or was it afternoon? 

The world was still remarkably bright and vibrant, begging to distract the boy from the abjectly pressing matter at hand. Earth was always so delightsome like that and once one got some breathing room from immediate threats, it was more difficult to stay forthright and determined to pay attention to the pressing danger that’d once consumed all thought. 

Except…

‘It’s your fault!’

Except that. 

The boy frowned as the niggling of pesky dour thoughts crept all the more fervent in his mind despite the idyllic surroundings and the dreamlike landscape that surrounded.  

The child hummed softly considering the ideas he speculated…

“So it couldn’t have been rock then, could it. It had to be something else. Something binding it behind that barrier…that I unwittingly released. Like some glib moron.” 

Izuku knew that there was a finite amount of grace afforded him. Not that one half of him gave one jot about it really. Or, rather he pretended not to give a jot or a tittle. 

The boy knew that eventually the good naturedness of most who deemed him ‘unbothersome’ would run out and he’d be left to his own devices, wits and wisdom to see him through to the end of this decidedly subpar first experience after regenerating into this…rather irksome form with its gangly bits and high pitchying.

Especially since Izuku had gone and mucked everything up by getting too caught up in conversing and chittering like a lost little duckling instead of staying away from rabbling and rattling would-be do-gooders and their propensity for the stupid. 

It seemed completely inevitable that he’d face having something completely ridiculous happen while they were under his care. Still, he might as well make the most of it while it was available to him, eh? Let the thoughts whir for just a bit longer in the sunshine of the moment while he tried to figure out a way out of this jamminess. 

Izuku peered down almost jovially, almost forced into the cheer, as his gaze lingered on the grass, sorry that he didn’t have enough time to simply sit and admire it.

Then again, when did he have time?  

A shame really. He loved sitting in nature, especially here on earth. Especially in the warmer months too, when it was greener and brighter. When sunshine kissed shade and blades of grass. When flowers and blooms and leaves blushed together in the breeze.  

It was…almost blissful. Almost serene. Almost like time could stand still. 

‘You need to pay attention, Nine.’ 

And there was that voice again, somewhere lurking in the back of his head. Calling him Nine. He wasn’t Nine!

But oh irony of the thought of a timelord lacking time! 

Ha. Izuku amused himself momentarily at the thought, keen to forget as much as he was to investigate lost thoughts and hazy memories that lingered beyond his reach, much as a fever dream would.

But, naturally his thoughts buzzed too loud and quick to keep his merriment alight for too terribly long. He was almost dizzy from it. Drunk off it. 

There was a ticking sound somewhere in the back of Izuku’s  mind, the clockwork sound a constant hum that sang as the undercurrent of all other noise that whirred alongside the worlds and thoughts.

And how droll that was. Glibly, blithely, boringly, droll. 

Green eyes flicked upwards, towards the impossible blues of the sky and the fluffishness of the clouded atmosphere wafting overhead, wisping and lilting and listing away as he tried to quell the lingering agitation that threatened to burble up higher. 

He knew it wasn’t blue. The sky. Logically, he knew that. He could surmise the disbursement of the color spectrum and the lack of the color blue being reverberated back towards the eye as the reason it appeared blue, but wasn’t actually being blue…but to call it blue was simply…easier.

And the sky itself? Ah it never failed to make something in his chest settle and that small smile worm across his face. 

But–

“Alas,” he quipped to himself, with a small, crinkly twitch of his nose. “Was nice while it lasted.” 

It was only fleeting. Finite. Temporary. 

And it was. He rather liked when he amused himself. He thought he made for excellent company when his quick wit was this sharp. Even if it was just for the moment. 

“You realize you don’t make a lick of sense, kid,” The gangly human man’s voice rumbled in The Doctor’s ear as the boy rolled his eyes in reply at that title that the man spouted. 

And really now. This was getting a trite old at this point, calling him that as the breeze ruffled the air about the them, billowing through his shirt sleeves. 

“It’s not meant to make sense to those who don’t need it to,” Izuku retorted. He peered over his shoulder briefly, towards the towering skulker, scruffing man who stood completely unruffled and unhappy and  all the ‘uns’ that Izuku’s rather impressive vocabulary wanted and desired to conjure up in that moment of mild annoyance. 

Unkempt. 

Uncouth.

Unseemly

Unbecoming.

Unrelentingly persistent in his nagging…

The Doctor Izuku–and he’d have to figure out just why he was referring to himself by both names and sort out this rubbish mess in deciding just what this blasted name meant–sniffed lightly at what seemed to be becoming the man’s trademark grouse and grouch pucker. 

“And it wouldn’t matter if it were half-way or otherwise,” he completed, far too smartly clipped in his comments to hide his frustration. 

Clearly he was tired. And still hungry and he didn’t have the mental fortitude to entertain the smarmy and human-level pandering that he was facing.  

And he was still annoyed at his lack of time however amusing it still could be…if the idea of Fearmonger weren’t hanging over his head at the moment…

Time waited for no man. Or in this case, no Doctor. 

Bebother it all. 

“Kid–” The man’s voice dipped lower, more unamused, as his frown twisted more firmly into disapproval. “I can’t keep getting half-answers and vacant staring. You’re trapped in your head and muttering. Just stay focused and tell me what the hell is going on.” 

The man’s face was positively sour. Puckered and lemonish.

‘Like he sucked on a sour jelly baby!’ The boy sniggered to himself. 

Bah to the blustery numpty and his ‘kid’ this and ‘kid’ that. 

“Not a kid,” Izuku warned, trying to pitch his voice lower as his own face twisted into a puckered frown of its own.  

It didn’t work, dammit all. His teenage voice was too…damned…high and cracky, coming out far less intimidating and authoritative than he wanted and more…

Well...childlike. 

Izuku didn’t care to think too long on that meaning. If it meant anything that is. 

“You can call me ‘The Doctor’, thank you.” He jabbed a finger towards the man, trying to ignore the thoughts that burrowed beneath those more pressing issues. Like Fearmonger’s presence, and his marooning thanks to The Tardis’ temper tantrum.

Yet his voice still cracked again at the end of that fearsome rebuke at the end, faltering into a stumble as he stared up at the man’s less than thrilled expression. 

Oh Everything seemed…less menacing than he’d liked when he spoke it, which was somewhat annoying to the boy–the Doctor. Dammit all. 

But he’d never let the man know that, Defiant has he was. 

“It’s hardly a difficult title to forget.” 

And it wasn’t, thank you! 

The man only peered down his nose at Izuku silently for a moment, frown still firmly etched in place, arms folded. 

“Right.” 

Again the boy–the Doctor could sense that the man’s statement did not, in fact, match his sentiment. And that was highly…in character from what he could gather about the scruffagin of a human. It hardly mattered too much all things considered, he knew, as he turned back to his staring at the grass before bouncing on his heels and pointedly ignoring that displeased sigh that seemed to harangue the man ever incessantly. 

No indeed. There were far too many things to consider as he stewed about the particulars of just how he was going to remedy the situation now that he had a keener idea of what was actually going on. Not that it was an ideal situation, mind you. 

It was a rather uncannily bad one, if he were honest. But Izuku was somewhat pleased, in his own sort of manically cheerful way, that he at least had a forward trajectory to aim his frantic assessment of the situation and the potential solutions as his mind twisted with potentialities and uncapped with the long histories and long ago adventures that he vaguely recalled and fleetingly could feel coursing through his memory and singing in his veins. 

Fearmonger. 

That name was ancient. Almost as old as his race of beings had been. Uncannily stupid a connection really. And yet a connection it was all the same, he supposed as he eyed the coiling tendrils of golden light rippling across his skin and ribboning outward ever so gently. 

The boy snorted again, almost derisive as he recalled the woman’s face, twisted with fury, blame. 

And fear. Locked in the depths of her gaze, beneath the bitterness and the blame, that human woman had looked at Izuku with fear. 

Fear in her eyes as she’d stared down Izuku and bellowed at him, accusing him of betrayal, blaming him for something…well something that he honestly had no galaxial idea what she was getting on about, but he’d been accused of far less…and far more, to be fair. And this felt too familiar to be misplaced or misguided accusations in some respects. 

This felt like a familiar call, a familiar voice chanting these words to him in some ways. Because he’d heard others say it to him in lifetimes past perhaps? 

Or maybe it’d been something more to it as well. Naturally there had to be. The universe was rarely so simplistic and one dimensional

Fractilated and patternistic as it was. 

Repeated and repurposed. Mimicked and mirrored. 

Fear would do that. Familiarity would do that too.

“There’s a double meaning in that somewhere,” The child hummed to himself as he turned a thoughtful flicker towards the device on his wrist as he analyzed the mechanism for the telltale signs of wear that he’d grown accustomed to. The outer coating of the mechanisms and springs seemed relatively okay, especially leading into the heart of the system. 

But it was the inside that had the boy somewhat perplexed and worried. A few key components were starting to come loose and there seemed to be a small bend in the metal wiring connector that whirled between the two transporter dials. 

Izuku frowned, looking less than thrilled by the frayed edging that looked even more worse for wear, his thoughts ticking in time with the unseen clock that always seemed to be drumming somewhere in the distant recesses of his memory. 

“The teleport is coming undone,” He hummed evenly, cheerfulness waning as he concentrated on the immediate needs, the assessing, analyzing part of him taking over for the time being. “Might not make it too many more jumps.” 

Which was decidedly not good and would require some tinkering. 

“Need something bigger.” 

He needed the Tardis. 

If she decided to come back that is. 

‘Maybe she’s abandoned you too finally,’ a smart, sly, darker voice chipped and scraped against the inside of his head. 

Izuku only froze for a fraction of a second, hands splaying into a soft stretch for a moment as he glared.

“That’s absurd,” He muttered, pushing against the flickers of rejection that tried to pop the bubble of firmer resolve he’d kept aloft and floating, buoyant in his mind before he could clamp it down and shut it away fully. 

Reject it completely as he usually did, which could sometimes be far harder than it seemed, mind you. Especially in the darker moments, when the universe was far too still and his thoughts were far too loud, cramped and crammed with too many memories, lifetimes, and voices all begging to be released and remembered.  

Ugh. The ridiculousness of it all.

“It’s still somewhat ironic,” He mused, “It’s showing its age.” 

He flicked a look towards the fraying edges again, as his tongue struck the back of his teeth, a wry grin worming across his cheeks, pinching the freckles. 

“Unlike me.” 

Yet the device was several hundred years younger than Izuku was, created at a time when he thought it useful to have a backup of sorts to see him through some…trickier bits. “Useful as always but showing the weathering.”

This was the amusement and bitterness of it all. Here he was, growing differently, and decidedly youthful, spritely and rightly lively. While all he knew, used, and cared for decayed around him, weathered, fell apart. 

It was always so strange…and so–

‘You use them. Until they’re no longer useful.’ 

Damn. 

The boy frowned at the bite in that accusation. And the truth too. 

The boy almost had to swallow back the regret through the acceptance of his selfishness, feeling a sting he wanted to forget, but had yet to learn how to master in his nine-hundred plus years of existence.

‘Taking what you want. Using things until they’re no longer capable of giving you what you need, eh my boy?’ 

“Perhaps that’s the truth of it.” 

And maybe it was the fact that Izuku understood that the woman should fear him that made her reaction when the Fearmonger took over make too much sense. And made the sting all the more prevalent. Made him feel that regret even more. 

Maybe the new regeneration had him high on emotions, sensing the guilt much more than normal, recognizing his mistakes much easier. 

Made him more hesitant to simply try to forget the reality of the situation and look towards finding a solution instead. 

“Solutions to problems…” He ‘hmmed’ and sighed, looking at the frayed edges again before scanning the skies, judging that maybe if he waited just ten more minutes he’d have enough to force at least a quick jump closer to the city to get back to the woman and the central hub where he’d first detected Fearmonger’s presence in the first place. 

“Because I had to think that taking the device away would have been the smartest example of my acuity and intellect,” He rolled his eyes, before retrieving the stone again, and brandishing his sonic screwdriver. “Though if I hadn’t then the other…peons who were there might have scampered off with the lot and then where would I be?” 

The Doctor huffed to himself, scanning the stone, memorizing the rivets and dips in the surface.  

Ah well, best to bugger off with those thoughts for now, the boy smartly concluded–and it was indeed a smartly and decidedly genius plan, if he did say so himself.

And he did, so there really wasn’t much room for arguing things anymore. 

No, indeed not.

In fact, the better thing to do was get going on fixing this blasted issue and then get going on whatever else it was that he needed to get going on…which…Izuku hadn’t quite decided on the rest of that just yet. 

Mostly. He’d parsed out some of the particulars and deduced the specifics. 

“It clearly wasn’t a one-off, and without a cause in mind,” The boy murmured to himself thoughtfully, voice timbering out

‘Or perhaps you’re giving into precisely what it wants you to you know…’ another voice chimed, this one completely different from what the boy knew, as he blinked again and frowned almost quizzical, almost confused. 

“Perhaps, there’s that…” 

The boy’s musing was interrupted by a rather discontented huff as the man sighed, not ever so lightly and glowered at Izuku. “Again, not making a lick of sense, kid,” The man groused.

He liked grousing it seemed. It seemed a trademark for him, Izuku noted–and he keeps calling himself that. A ponderance of a wonder why. 

“I don’t ever decide to make sense,” Izuku quipped in reply, for the second time dismissing the trite human request to clarity. Clarity was such a human notion. And frankly it was a waste of his time.

Though…

Perhaps it could be useful. Maybe. 

After a brief moment of consideration, the boy…Doctor took a small pause towards the quizzical human’s inquiry after all and considered…

The one person who’d given Izuku time to speak and defend his rationale at the very least. Ah..well…

The boy shrugged. Tedium. All of it. However–

“What would it do to explain it all to you and profess that I am, in fact, a time traveler?” He blustered briefly, his voice drawling softer, more thoughtful and questioning as he peered towards the man. He watched the other’s expression shift minutely, considering Izuku’s confession, assessing his face for a lie, no doubt, as he searched the boy’s look silently. 

And when no response followed the question from the boy, Izuku only frowned and continued. 

“You know. All that wibbly wobbly time stuff. Perhaps a bit uncouth and unnatural for human minds to comprehend but quite normal for me.” The boy flicked his wrist upward, showing the device to the man. “You’ve experienced it too, just a few bits of minutes ago.” 

There was a pause on Izuku’s end this time as the boy narrowed his eyes on the device and hummed. 

“Though I don’t suppose you really realized what was happening at the time. When minds really latch onto the prospect of time travel the rest of the body tends to…catch up with the notion that it’s happening.” 

“You’re not really convincing with this, kid. And it doesn’t explain anything with Endeavor or stealing the damned crown jewels,” The teacher man continued looking even less impressed than he had just a moment ago. 

Which was a feat for the grousing grouch. 

The boy rolled his eyes at the need the foolish human had for so many explanations. 

Tedium, all of it!

“It’s simple really, I need to get this,” He patted his pocket, where the stone that’d once held Fearmonger sat oh-so-pretty, “Back to where I’d nicked it and see if there is a primary  receptor that can reverse the damage when Fearmonger was released. Reverse polarity in a way.” 

The scraggly-looking human shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, which seemed a tad excessive if you asked Izuku. 

But no one ever really did. Foolish thing, really. 

“That's fucking stupid, kid,” the man barked back,  with a small sigh following. “You're going to get killed trying something so idiotic as that. And for what?” 

A ‘boom’ resounded too close by, just behind the boy’s ear to the left, as the trees shook, flowers fluttering from the trees. 

The man’s eyes narrowed as he scoped the skies, attention drawn upward, as Izuku too took towards peering around carefully, attention diverted for the moment as he considered the plinking of the unfamiliar sensation of dread–was what this was?--filling his veins–watching to the tell-tale signs of someone coming, the familiar signals of one of Endeavor’s support heroes or sidekicks making their way to the location that he and the boy were hiding at. 

“We didn’t get far enough away like I thought. Bolox.” 

The boy sniffed, nose twitching at the mere supposition that he had mucked something like this up. 

Another boom resounded, more trees shaking in the wake of an encroaching enemy-hero making their way closer. 

“And what else could you be wrong about, kid?” The man’s rationality on this one point was rather…irksome to Izuku–the Doctor as he puckered his lips, looking nonplussed. 

“As if I would or could be so deftly dumb to want to commit myself to a plan that would ensure I'd die. What a lark!” The boy rolled his eyes and hissed through his teeth at the idea. “Ridiculous. Imagine me being so blithe to the situation and create moronic plan–” 

There was another boom, a scorching of flames igniting across the sky as a siren started to blare. 

Oh confound it all. 

“It is moronic kid,” the man bit out, leaning closer. He poked the boy's shoulder. Hard. “And this is proof. You can’t think two steps ahead.”  

Izuku winced and frowned, jerking backwards from the offensive ruffling. 

“Hey!” 

“Hey, nothing, kid. You're still not convincing me. You've not got a solid plan. And you're barely making sense and now they’re on your tail again. What’s to say I don’t just let them catch you this time?” 

The boy narrowed his eyes, a flash of defiant amusement lingering in his look as he straightened. 

He ignored the way his vision wobbled as he tried to stand straighter after the man’s harassment. Another blustering of wind ruffled his hair, bringing with it the scent of the cherry blossoms that the boy so much preferred. 

Earth was a lovely place for things of nature, flowers chiefest among them. 

He grinned. 

“I hardly pay to make sense or decide to entertain those I don’t need to,” He quipped, defiant and somewhat annoyed with the back and forth game at this point. “You’re hardly not someone I need to consider, Mr. Teacher man.”

There were a few things that weren’t adding up with the boy as he watched the child falter briefly, vision shaking as his legs seemed to give out briefly.

Another blast of brilliant oranges ignited up high, mixing in with the china blue and pillow-white of the clouds and sky. The flames were getting bigger, sounds of sirens from search committee blasting an echo piercing the air, though the flames still were far enough away to avoid the pair them feeling the heat, though they seemed to be getting closer. 

Shouta Aizawa bit back an annoyed snort as he reached for his capture weapon, lacing the material through his fingers, watching the boy tinker with his damned wrist.

“Hardly a time to consider alternatives and pander about waiting for an interrogation crew!”   

The kid was stubborn, Shouta would grant him that much. 

Not that it was a good thing to be that way. Still, the Underground Hero could commend the boy’s resolve for wanting to solve a problem that’d inadvertently gotten out of hand thanks to Endeavor’s meddling and Burnin’s interference when the boy had clearly been more knowledgeable about…whatever the hell that thing had been. 

And there was something to be said about wanting to return to fix whatever the hell had happened.

Shouta huffed, unhappy with not being in control of things, and the sheer lack of knowledge about the enemy. The way it forced him to rely on a child’s experience and expertise didn’t sit well with the man. 

“It’s a terrible plan,” He muttered lowly, eyes trained on the cut along the boy’s cheek as  he waited and watched in case the child tried to do anything…stupid or irrational. “With very little chance of success. And I’m not just going to let you go off by yourself and get killed for the sake of stupidity.”

Especially not after all the damned work he’d just done to rescue the bumbling idiot. 

The boy stalled in his movements and attention towards his device, lifting his chin and peering down his nose at Shouta’s hands as he frowned in understanding at what the man was hinting at.

Smart kid.  

A challenging look crossed the child’s face as he flicked a smirk towards Shouta, who caught another good look at the bruise that still shone on the boy’s head, blooming around the cut that still glinted beneath the halo of golden hued light that surrounded the child’s complexion. A bellow rang out in the air. 

“Eraserhead and the vigilante! Show yourselves and come into custody quietly. Don’t make us come in there!” 

“Oh?” the pint-sized defyer queried, too seemingly self-assured about his own capability and the situation, especially given his ruffled and exhausted look. 

The Underground Hero cast a brief glimpse upward through and across the sky, watching flames and fire grow more pronounced, as the world shifted towards ashen petals and fallen leaves.  

A challenging spark glinted in the boy’s green eyes when he returned to look. 

“I don’t remember needing your permission for any of this,” the child that called himself doctor retorted lightly, grin spreading, “And besides, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Teacher man. It’s a decidedly good plan.” 

The child’s defiance and self-care negligently ignored as he lifted himself as tall as he could go–which wasn’t so tall–against the man, as his eyes flashed, challenging the Underground Hero. 

Shouta Aizawa let out a sigh at the oddity that was the child in front of him and the lack of answers that lingered in the kid’s every move and action: controlled chaos and fury rippled into easygoing, lightheartedness. 

Things set at odds with one another.  

Things that didn’t make sense, and didn’t add up. 

Just like how the boy seemed to know that he was a damned teacher of all things. 

“You’re completely delusional if you think that this is a good plan, kid,” he replied, voice clipped, and thoughts stewing, watching as the boy reached for his wrist again.

And the boy had a death wish, apparently. Because he wasn’t even properly upright and here he was trying to dash off again. 

The capture weapon released, sailing outward to twist around the offender’s wrist with a hard ‘snap’ as green curls bounced, sharp glare returning to assess Shouta’s actions as the boy’s smirk twisted to a frown. 

“Hey now, you’d do well to let me go,” The boy intoned, voice lower, mirth dissipating briefly as he pushed back with a challenge of his own. “It’s none of your damned business where I go and what I please to do.”    

Yes, this child was an idiot. 

And Shouta didn’t even know his fucking name to call him out on his stupidity either. Go fucking figure. 

The boy, to his credit, or his stubbornness, only waved his hand in dismissal, curls bobbing, eyes still somewhat glazed as he peered briefly towards the man, before returning to fiddling with this small device in his hands, clearly ignoring Shouta's criticism and the capture weapon for the moment, as nothing but a nuisance that was only mildly bothering his progress. 

Which was fucking bold of the little problem child as Shouta watched the boy press the button at the middle a few time as he let the light at the end ignite and trail along the edge of the watch device. 

A flicker of green orbs pushed towards him narrowed almost condescending, almost appraisingly, as the boy quirked a brow and let his lip jut out thoughtfully before he shook his head in dismissal again. That same assessing spark of scrutiny swirled in his look as he peered towards Shouta, mouth drawn into a thoughtfully thin line as he tilted his head. But the youthful expression was at odds with the weighted shadow that sank furrows into the boy’s brow as he fiddled with his devices and let sparks of green flicker out from his fingertips. 

Golden light continued to wash over his face and across his skin.  

“Oh tosh with the rationality thing again, teacher man!” The boy quipped, after a half-beat of thought, his expression stilling, thoughts returning back behind the wall of indifference and brightness that flashed almost manic as he lifted a brow towards the man. There was a mixture of a challenge and hesitation in his expression, as that somewhat familiar device that look like a strange pen was in his hand now, having seemingly materialized from the boy’s pocket. 

With thumb pressed firmly on the button, Shouta was tugging the loose end of his capture weapon to reach for the boy’s other hand and snap it away from his scarf, before the boy could utilize…whatever the hell that device was. 

But the man was too slow and the whirring of a ‘buzz’ resounded along the capture weapon material, sending the taut grey slack again as it unwound from the boy’s arm just as the other end snapped to grab the child’s free arm. 

“Hmph! That’s just silly.” The boy leveraged tossing the device from the now confined hand towards the newly freed one, signalling it to life again as the color erupted along the edging and snapped a ‘buzz’ outward towards the grey again, dismantling the hold that Shouta had on the boy’s attention and seemingly irrational behavior. 

Another ‘boom’ resounded. This one closer as Shouta took a chance to move in. 

“Dammit kid, just hold on a second,” The man was moving closer now, trying to prevent the child from outright escaping at this point. “Don’t just go off and running–”

“Jokes on you, I’m rather good at it,” The reply was swiftly spoken, as the child tossed the loose material back towards the man’s face, forcing Shouta to grasp onto the capture weapon while the boy hummed  easily. 

“Eraserhead!” 

The voice cut through the clearing as both he and the child turned to look briefly at the intruder barreling towards them, red and black suit painted to represent flames moving over the body as he pointed a finger towards the boy’s chest, a laser-like sight zipping to connect a target onto the child who stood somewhat puzzled for a moment as the red dot appeared on his shirt. 

“Don’t move, vigilante!” The man rebuked, yellow and white hair swirled upward as he charged forward. Deep purple eyes narrowed into a hard glare as he squared his shoulders and kept his ‘sight’ centered on the child, who only lifted a brow in questioning. 

“You’re one I didn’t see at the initial fight!” He replied light. “Are you new?” 

“I said don’t move!” The man–the new support hero in Endeavor’s agency, no doubt, snapped, as he sauntered forward as Shouta took on a defensive stance. “You either Eraser!” 

The Underground Hero also prepared his weapon, because he didn’t recall this sidekick either, new or otherwise. 

And he knew most of the sidekicks in most of the agencies. 

The boy, to his credit and Shouta’s chagrin, continued to pander to incite frustration. 

“To be fair, I didn’t technically move. I merely spoke. Though one could argue that it is moving some part of me by way of moving my mouth…or moving the air around me to speak…would that be something to get me in trouble with you? Are you being that technical about it?” 

“Shut up, kid! I told you to not move, dammit so just–” The man was closer, the flickers of flame igniting along his fingers as he glowered at the child. 

Shouta could almost…understand that this wasn’t a support hero.

“I told you that I didn’t move, my good chap!” The boy replied lightly. “Unless you’re indicating that me speaking is movement but you haven’t indicated that much and it’s rather tiresome to try to parse through the details here and suppose that I can understand your peculiarities in the way of thinking–because I can’t. Though…that is supposing that you can think in the right proper way and aren’t just blustering about with larger than big ideas that don’t quite fit right inside of your squamish little human head.” The boy was chattering now, moving his hands as the man hissed. 

There was a brief flick of a look cast out of the corner of the boy’s eye as he looked toward Shouta before laughing a little and turning back to the man. 

Taking a step forward. 

“Stop!” 

“Oh but we haven’t clarified what movement actually means you know? What are the peculiarities? You lot seem so keen on explanations…as I’ve come to find.” The boy thrust a thumb back towards Shouta who carefully held his capture weapon at the ready as it had been just moments prior. “This yupping yapper for instance determined that I needed to explain my whole jot and tittle of a plan to him and he still didn’t get it in the end! What a gas that was. It seems a right waste of time, if you ask me. But then again, as I’ve been stewing all day, no one ever does ask me. Which is also another issue–” 

The boy took still another step forward as the man snarled and let a flame ignite and push towards the child in a laser-like shot that sailed to the pinprick of light that illuminated the boy’s chest. 

Shouta’s capture weapon thrust outward at the same moment the flames burst forward, pulsing into a hard ‘smack’ that struck the man’s arms and coiled around the enemy’s torso at the same time that the child pressed the device on his wrist for a brief flicker of a second, disappearing entirely from view before popping up behind the man as Shouta blinked in surprise. 

‘The hell?’

The unfortunate notion with the man’s quirk seemed that they needed to follow their target, moving to course correct as they adjusted to find where the boy had moved and with a hard kick to the man’s spine, he sent the enemy sprawling forward, unable to balance or dodge what was coming.. 

And in quick understanding Shouta grasped what was intended, as the flames spurned themselves forward, slamming into the initial giver of the fire, who stood like a stuck shield in front of the boy who only grinned, listening to the man hiss in annoyance as flames curled around the pair in a firestorm of brilliant heat. 

The boy only chuckled again as the world grew calmer for a moment, the boy leaning closer to the man who was still captive as he kicked at the offender’s knee. 

“So why were you late to the heist then, eh? Surely you knew about Fearmonger?” The boy demanded softly, curious. Never judgmental or mean-spirited from the sound of things, as Shouta stomped forward, keeping the capture weapon secure, holding the man contained. 

“Did you miss your train or did your minder do it on purpose?” Again silence as the man writhed and pulled free momentarily, striking out at the boy, arm outstretched as Shouta caught the intended strike with a block of his own, meeting the man’s stomach with his knee, sending the enemy gasping, as he bound up the other’s arm again. 

Not before the other hand had come free, and made for a swipe at Shouta’s cheek this time, catching the underground hero off guard briefly, as a headbutt followed, which left the Underground Hero momentarily disoriented as his eyes watered. 

‘Fuck!’ 

The grip on his capture weapon slackened as he blinked, losing visuals completely and falling prey to the loss of his sight as he struggled with the man now ramming his who head into Shouta’s stomach, expelling the wind from his lungs and forcing the underground hero to the ground, knocked onto his back. 

“Hey there! Now none of that!” 

There was a grunt from both parties as they wrestled, Shouta trying to gain grip on his capture weapon again and reassert use of the device as the damned boy stepped into the fray and actually pulled the enemy’s swirling hair backwards with his hand, tugging the man’s head back and landing a solid, smart punch to the jaw. 

Surprise filtered across the child’s face as he realized that his hit…wasn’t as powerful as he’d intended, only forcing the man’s head to the side with a soft ‘click’ before the man was turning his attention back on the child, and ramming a shoulder in the kid’s leg to force him down and stumbling. 

“Oh fucking hell!” The voice crack echoed as Shouta sniffed and reached up pulling the same maneuver the boy had just tried, only grabbing the man’s collar as flames ignited from the man’s hand once more. 

“You damned brat! Give it back!” 

The tug from Shouta’s pull had the man’s aim searing sky and branches, only grazing the boy’s shoulder as he hissed in annoyance and ducked low, his shirt darkened by the flames, new holes ignited by the heat. 

“Hey now, this is all I’ve got to wear you baboon!” The boy scrambled to his feet ramming his full weight into tackling the man head on, taking Shouta with him in the dive to assert power over the enemy. 

A tangle of the trio went down as the boy’s elbow caught Shouta’s jaw, his fist colliding once more with the man’s mouth, and curing upward to connect with the man’s nose, before Shouta made a swift shove to knock the boy out the way and pin the man down, hand on the other’s throat as the capture weapon came back around wrists to bind the offender’s ability to escape or land a solid punch. 

“Now stay still,” He hissed lowly as the boy scraped at the ground, trying to pull himself up. 

There was a soft laugh from the flame-wielder as he lifted his head of the ground briefly before Shouta slammed it back down, “You think that you know it all? You think you know what he has? What he’s done?” 

Another ‘boom’ echoed nearby. The man continued to laugh softly as Shouta slipped another coil of capture material out and around the man, binding him up tighter and more firmly in a secure hold. 

There was a grunt as the man sent flamed strikes into the ground, catching the boy’s feet and pant legs. 

There was a hiss as the child stepped back, glowering. 

The man laughed again turning towards the child. 

“They’ll all figure it out eventually, Doctor. They always do.” 

Shouta moved in close this time, pulling the man’s face towards his own as he peered into the angry gaze of the hero impersonator. 

“What do you have to do with this plot?” He demanded evenly, voice clipped and low. “Who are you working with?” 

There was another laugh as heat seared Shouta’s fingers and palm, forcing the man to draw back, his hand scorched and tingling as the man burst into flames, every particle turning to clay that seemingly dried and cracked in time with the echoes of the man’s voice laughing over and again. 

“You think you know,” They repeated. “You think you know!” 

Another ‘boom’ and the echoing of sirens continued as Shouta stood and watched flames dissolve into nothing, clay dust leaving a pile behind. 

Shouta frowned among the ashen pile, turning a sour and accusatory look towards the boy. 

This was about more than just stolen goods now. 

“What was that.” 

It wasn’t a question. 

The child only drew in a soft breath and shook his head to refuse to reply. 

“There’s hardly time to explain,” He remarked. “And besides, I don’t need a parental lecturer opining their decidedly presumed superiority in determining what they think I can and cannot do, thank you! I can galavant if I choose or run or ramble or…traipse or trot…perhaps not trot as that’s a rather trite form of transport and I rather detest it, but the others! Ah well the others I can manage with a quick flick of movement and a rapidity and flourish if you’d get out of my damned way and stop preventing it!” 

Shouta watched the boy come face to face with him, tilting his head to peer up at Shouta who slowly stood and towered over the bow as he, the man assumed, tried to appear as tall and imposing as he could. 

Which was somewhat…pathetic and admirable at the same time. The spunk the kid had was incorrigible. 

“You can’t go alone,” The man retorted evenly, well aware that this was getting more and more out of hand and far beyond the reach of normal vigilante problems as he reached out to try to grasp at the kid’s arm. 

The boy momentarily flinched and stepped back, Shouta’s hand dropping in understanding even if it stung for a brief moment. 

Not that he understood why. He hardly knew the kid, and didn’t trust him, that was for damned sure.

Still.

‘He’s just a kid.’  

“That’s the stupidest thing you could do. Even if it’s the right thing.” 

Green curls bounced as the boy swished his head from side to side, in refute. “Well, I’ve gotten quite used to that “alone” business,” He remarked, “It’s what I know.” 

The words struck Shouta wrong at their admittance as the child continued easily, brow quirked up, “And besides I don’t have any volunteers to help anyway. I never asked you to come with me. And never would likely do so to begin with as it’s hardly a human concern. I can certainly handle this issue on my own. Not a twiddling bit of an issue for you to bother yourself about.” 

Twiddling issue…

Human concern…

‘I’ve gotten quite used to this alone business.’ 

‘Zashi always called him too rash when it came to caring about certain things. 

Usually, Shouta was thoughtful in his approach to high-stress situations. 

But when it came to kids? 

That tended to go right, damn out the window. And he seemed to ponder the aftermath…well after his rationality kicked in and the consequences were eating at him and he had far littler time to consider how to work through the next steps. 

And he hated that. 

The man cast a sidelong peek towards the boy, still idly chattering away, muttering something to himself as he fiddled with his vest now, as he seemed to ponder something, and then another thing, half thoughts jumbling out of his mouth and finishing in his mind. A conversation meant for himself and himself only. 

“The Fearmonger shouldn’t have been released and if I can get it back into the orb then that’d be the ideal…but then again that’d explain…but how was that possible? The implication was certainly…so why would they have allowed? And then the idea of it attaching to her in particular? But it was almost…yes that makes more sense certainly. But then that beats the other option…”

Shouta only sat for a moment and listened and watched. Observed the fluttering, and the chittering.

“Ah but that was a blithering misstep wasn’t it? And then to have this blasted thing go right off and bugger itself into a jumbled heap of a mess like we’re in–” 

The underground hero squinted, trying to understand what the hell the boy was saying, as the child’s tongue switched timbre, language filtering into a different tone and inflection altogether as the boy spoke. 

“Je suis désolé mais je ne comprend pas le situation avec Le Fearmonger et La Burnin’. Et mois? Burnin’ et Mois? Est-ce que un piège?” The boy’s mouth continued to move, slipping into another language altogether as Shouta blinked again, tilting his head in consternation at the rapidity of the switching as the boy continued to fiddle with the strap on his wrist, eyes draw to his task, pointedly ignoring Shouta. 

Completely absorbed in his thoughts as he seemed to ponder his own world of consideration.

“Kid,” Shouta started, trying to pull the boy back towards the present, wondering just how far gone he was… “Hold on a minute–” 

“And that doesn’t make sense either really. Bolox really.” Seemed the boy was further in on his own thoughts than Shouta could reach really, as he switched back to what seemed to be English. 

‘Zashi would have loved to hear this. Probably would have replied to the boy in the same fucking language. 

But Shouta? 

Shouta would have cared to know what the fuck the kid was even saying.  

“There isn’t a right straight connection to why there’d be anything remotely enticing to draw on that hope for that long. Utter nonsense. Such a trite and stupid notion. So why would…whoever it is that would decide to do that keep a trap for that long? What would be the motivation?”

“Kid,” The man hedged again, lowering his voice to add emphasis and weight to the call, “Stop.” 

It didn’t work. The boy switched languages again, back towards Japanese this time. 

“Would it really be a trap for me? But why? What’s the point of it? And why do they think that they’d get ever think that I’d fall for something so utterly…” The boy blew out a breath, huffing in annoyance as the strap tugged together smartly in his hold. “How stupid are they?” 

“Kid.” 

Part of Shouta’s thoughts insisted that he be wary of the boy. Afraid. Or, at the very least, the man should consider the implications of what the kid was saying and not take them at face value.  

And admittedly that’d probably be the more logical and rational part of the man, the underground hero had to concede to himself. Meaning what Shouta was doing was probably, definitely, horrendously stupid as well. 

Because the child before him, as wildly outlandish as he seemed, was cleverly aware of himself at the same time, always astute and assessing, scanning situations, searching for exits, assessing people. Every move, while appearing to be so carefree and reckless (and they probably were those too) seemed too orchestrated, and well thought out. 

And it could and did somewhat scare the shit out of him. It was too much like another creature that he knew all too well. Too smart for their own good, too clever, too above everyone else to just be still for a moment and think through the absurdity of their own actions. 

And really, why did Shouta always seem to end up in situations with people like this? Seeing the world from the point of view of someone who had more to say and rarely spoke it to others. 

Shouta could see it there, in the boy’s expression as he turned a sharp expression back towards the man, narrowing a thoughtful, but almost hesitant and wary look towards the man. The result of a cluttered and traumatised mind, perhaps. He couldn't be certain. Nor could he really understand why it mattered right now to figure out the reasons. 

They didn't. But they were behaviors that indicated that something was amiss, something was so off-kilter it sent Shouta’s own thoughts spiraling into a careful assessment of what he could see. 

Brilliant golden light. 

A mop of unruly curls, with a haphazard mess of movement when the boy turned his head towards the man, letting his owlish expression bore into the man's own as he studied Shouta right back, exploring something in Shouta’s face that seemed to give him some sort of understanding that…that frankly made the man feel a tad uncomfortable. 

And far too exposed to scrutiny, though the boy seemed content to say nothing about anything he seemed to discover, only shaking his head to dismiss any and all thoughts. 

“I've nothing to explain that won’t irritate you more than I have.” The child quipped, his voice shifting back towards some semblance of rationale, the timbre and pitch returning towards assertive and decisive in such a stark contrast to the muttering he’d just done. It was a quick pendulum swing of thoughts and behaviors that Shouta was caught off guard. 

And it was done so quickly that it seemed almost as if the boy had been unaware that he’d even done it in the first place. Shifting between languages like that. 

“I’m hardly the eccentric and bumbling, blabbermouth you take me for.” 

That was rich. Shouta almost snorted in amusement at the idea, especially based on what he’d just witnessed. But, wisely held off in favor of simply watching the events unfold as the boy sniffed as he stood, seeming to make up his mind about what was to happen next. 

Undoubtedly to put his fucked up plan into motion. 

Oh god. 

A wobble from the boy’s stance, knees near buckling, had Shouta starting, fingers twitching, as he frowned at the child that was still, more than likely, reeling from his fucking injury not too long ago. 

It had knocked him near senseless, dammit. And it’d have to get looked at at some point. Shouta’s conscience wouldn’t allow him to neglect that. 

“Hold on, Kid.” Shouta was moving towards the boy, determined to…to do something to set this whole fucking mess right. 

A mess that he wasn’t even supposed to be a part of, in truth. 

“None of that, now, Teacher man,” The boy bit back, half smirk lifting the side of his mouth as he shook his head and straightened, “I’m no child. I said that. I’ve got too many lifetimes under my belt to be so…so juvenile. Hardly a thought you need to keep considering. It’s rather insulting, you know.” 

The Underground Hero straightened and stood, towering over the boy, who tilted his head and lifted his chin defiant against Shouta, trying to appear…perhaps? As if he were stronger, more assertive, more…imposing in some manner or another.

It wasn’t really working, to say the least. 

“I see,” Shouta remarked gruffly, little understanding or acceptance in his reply towards the child, who still appeared as much a kid to Shouta as ever.  And would remain looking and appearing as such in his gaze for the time being. 

“But your plan is still idiotic, kid,” He continued, watching the child’s grin slip as his eyes flashed with annoyance, Shouta’s own smile quirking up. “Admirable–” he conceded that point, “but fucking stupid.” 

The boy sputtered, almost seeming falsely offended as he grinned in amusement all the same, “Now hey, it’s not stupid. I’m rarely stupid.” 

“Agree to disagree,” Shouta cut in, “You’re far stupider than you realize. Especially after that whole fucked up display just a bit ago. And with what happened with Burnin’ I would wager you’ve won the stupidity award for anyone I’ve met so far,” which was saying a lot considering the types of people he knew, heroes, villains, and vigilantes alike. 

The man bit back a small grimace at the memory of Endeavor’s snarl and Burnin’s change when…whatever it was, had taken over. 

Shouta’s confusion at his own lack of knowledge left him frustrated at the situation and the inability to slow down enough think of a more rational plan. 

Briefly he wondered where Naomasa was and what’d come from the damned phone call he’d made to the man for help.

Shouta laid a hand on the boy's shoulder, not unkind, and not forceful, but enough of a presence and pressure to request the child’s attention as he peered down at the kid, the pressing need to solve the problem making him set aside the agitation for practicality.

“And you’re forgetting that you’ve pissed off Endeavor and probably have most of the city plastering your damned face on the news. How do you expect to get back into the city without being seen?” 

Not to mention the enemy that was clearly already onto their location. 

At that question, the boy’s eyes flashed again, a brighter grin, the more manic expression, the elation that the child continually seemed to exhibit that almost set him flying off into his babbling half-thoughts once more, washed over the boy’s face. Though he didn’t pull away from Shouta’s grip.

“Oh that’s hardly a concern! I’ve got just enough juice in this little device to get us where we need to go!” 

He tapped his wrist and that damned watch lightly, winking. 

“Just have to trust me!” 

Shouta didn’t, in fact, trust him, quirking a brow in question at the damned device that’d led them to the field at the edge of the park that was on the outskirts of the city’s left bank.

He’d been there a few times before now, when the world was calmer, and seemed ages away. 

No, Shouta didn’t necessarily trust the boy or his motivations. He had no reason to. 

And yet… 

He didn’t not trust him either. 

It was sort of like trusting Nezu in a sense. And that was fucking crazy enough that did nothing to make this situation better for Shouta, because that reality was hazard enough. 

The damned rat was a persona of questionable motivation–undetermined motivation really–and precise intellect. It was better to be on his good side than not. 

This boy seemed somewhat…the same. In some respects. 

Fuck him sideways, that was terrifying.

More than terrifying.

Yet, Shouta didn’t release his grip on the boy, as he nodded briefly, considering how the hell he was going to explain this to 'Zashi later as the boy grinned, a mark of surprise flickering briefly before dissolving behind the amusement and acceptance. 

And fucked up agreement to join in the stupid trip to save…whatever it was that the boy needed to save and set things right was right up there with the stupidest things that Shouta had done. 

Which seemed to be everything that he’d done that day. 

"Hold on now, teacher man!" the boy quipped lightly, with a wink, “We’re pressing our luck jumping with two people as it is. The mechanism’s fraying and I can’t guarantee we’ll make it the full way to the city center so we best try to move before the damned thing buzzes out entirely, eh?” 

It registered to the man that the boy kept calling him ‘teacher’. And Shouta never recalled telling him he was a teacher to begin with. 

There was a flickering of light that enrobed the child’s wrist as he reached for the mechanism once more, pushing the small dial to start up the small machine again. 

Shouta tightened his grip on the boy’s shoulder as the world blinked out of focus, twisting into a blur of colors before reassembling themselves again, unknotting into clarity as the man blinked back to awareness, ears suddenly bombarded by the blaring of car horns, sirens, and the shouts for people to vacate the premises. 

“Shit! Watch it!” 

Naomasa wasn’t prepared for the shit storm of traffic as he swerved to dodge an overeager idiot with a cell phone glued to their hand and pointed to the sky in front of them as they darted through the street to get to the park.

The same park that he was trying to get to, thank you. The same park that was blocked off by traffic and support heroes who were directing traffic, trying to keep civilians from entering a hazard zone. 

With Endeavor’s crew making it difficult to make it downtown, Naomasa was forced to use his police siren to make any headway. Seemed some of the heroes were forgetting that police were just as important as any of them. 

The thought left a bit of a sour taste in Naomasa’s mouth as he frowned out of the windshield, watching a firestorm of flames erupt across the sky in a steady stream of oranges and crimson. 

He let his sirens echo louder, upping the volume to get people’s attention for good measure, as he eased through the traffic, honking his horn for added emphasis. 

Though it didn’t make much of a difference when it came to the idle, fucking spectators that were gaping and point around the area, watching the different hotspots where Endeavor had, effectively, blown is top, and sent out a flamebursts. 

Nor did it make much difference as more flames seemed to ignite in the sky, seemingly of their own accord as flashes of movement streaked through the trees and between streets, like lightning. 

Someone was igniting flames, setting the blazes in their wake, Endeavor or otherwise. 

‘Was the fighting still going on between the two?’ 

Which, as Naomasa finally hedged closer to the park, appeared to the detective to be a lot of firestorm. 

The detective frowned at the knowledge that this mess, the flames billowing higher as smoke choked the air, were all the result of a boy, a vigilante, and Endeavor’s pride. He fucking pride. 

Because a child couldn’t or wouldn’t listen to him. 

And really, Naomasa could understand why Shouta would have stepped in to protect the kid, judging by the way the heat licked at the bark of the trees and scorched the cherry blossoms. 

‘But where is he?’

The detective quickly guided the car to a stop and hopped from the vehicle, gaze trained on the flame and lightning that moved down the bank from him, closer to the center of the park, and the centerpoint where most of the trees were still burning. The brim of Naomasa’s hat lifted lightly as a breeze whipped around, the scent of ash and burning wood singing his nose. 

All the damned blossoms were destroyed, darkening the field and the greenery, turning things to a sooty mess. The man pulled out his cell and clicked a few photos as he pressed the button on his ear piece, trying to reconnect with Shouta. 

“Swallow-tailed hawks are on full display this time of year,” He rehearsed into the receiver hidden near his mouth. The code was one they’d practiced before, familiar words of understanding between them. 

‘Where are you?’ 

The detective scanned his surroundings, searching for a familiar capture weapon as static reverberated in his ear. His frown pitched lower, the scorchmarks more apparent as he walked slowly from the car, listening to the loud crackling of fire consuming the leaves and branches overhead. 

Sirens echoed, shouts from Endeavor and civilians were growing more prominent as he hedged closer. 

The light that’d been streaking through the trees continued to dart to and fro, fire bursting every few moments in its wake. 

“It’s not a swallow up there,” He muttered into the receiver again, “So what could it be then?” 

He hopped across a burning branch as more shouts erupted nearby.

“Evacuate the area! Set up a perimeter to barricade from intrusion! We have to stop the fight!” Naomasa narrowed his eyes and frowned at Endeavor’s almost strained commands, turning towards the man’s glowing glower as he snarled upwards, wondering where and what his attention as he lowered himself out of sight, creating a wary perimeter of observation to keep tabs on the spectacle. His hands itching for his pen as they reached for his pocket. 

He needed to find Shouta and the boy. 

Yet here was something…

“We have to slow the movement down! Stop the fire before it gets worse!” 

Another of Endeavor’s support team bellowed from out of Naomasa’s line of sight, as more civilians seemed to clamor by, their shouts of fear echoing in time with the stampede of footsteps. 

“Get out of the way!” 

“You have to move calmly!” 

“Stay back!” 

The commands and panic mixed together as Naomasa watched another fireburst reverberated through the trees.

“Burnin’!” Endeavor’s voice was loud and commanding as he stepped forward, face still turned towards the sky as Naomasa startled at the command. “Stand down!” 

There was a bitter sort of laugh trapped in the woman’s throat as she stilled, coming into Naomasa’s focus, as he gaped in surprise at the frantic expression, the harried fluttering in her movements. Burnin’ peered down on her boss, her mentor, on Endeavor, and snorted. 

“Moe!” The same man called again, breaking his normal protocol to not use familiar names with one another, especially in public. 

“I can’t.” The sidekick rebuked her superior in an action that defied what Naomasa knew of how Moe would normally behave or act towards Endeavor. Crimson eyes flashed with defiance, though they seemed strained, her voice sounding forced and pained, far different in comparison to the grin on her face. 

“You won’t convince me. Not when it’s freely rampant!” 

The pain was raw in her words, the delight confusing in comparison to the tone she let escape. “It won’t let me.” 

‘It won’t let me?’ Naomasa’s brows drew together as he assessed those words, watching Endeavor clench his fists. 

The woman continued her fluttering and fidgeting, tugging at her hair to pull at its flaming tendrils as she peered down on Endeavor who moved closer. 

“Whatever happened with that damned brat, I swear to you that I’m not going to let it slide,” The man ground out, hedging closer, his own flames growing brighter as Burnin’ let a spark of green flame encircle her hand, pulled from the flames of her hair.

She let out another broken laugh as she launched the flames out towards her superior, seemingly aware that the man could easily deflect them. 

“It’s not him you should worry about,” She hummed, “There’s enough darkness in your own eyes, Endeavor.” 

Another flash of light streaked from the woman’s hands landing near the man’s ear as he snarled. Endeavor’s eyes narrowed at the accusation and the unspoken breach of the private skeletons that existed and were left unexplored. 

“Moe! Stand down!” 

The pro hero charged upward at the same time that the woman launched another sling of green flame energy outward and backwards using her hair as a slingshot to propel herself forward and around the man that was her hero-boss, her grin strained, almost panicked and conflicted as the the low laugh struggled from her lips. 

“Afraid of the truth?” She bit out, flying by, as more flames erupted into the trees, her touch igniting the branches as another snarl ensnared Endeavor’s mouth, “Or afraid of the dark?” 

Naomasa was moving closer to the conflict, mindful of staying as far out of sight as possible to avoid putting himself in the line of fire, while trying to keep the line between himself and Shouta open as Endeavor trailed after his sidekick. The world around the pair of them continued to burn. 

“It’s not so bad to embrace the darkness!” She called out, moving through the thicket, the flare of green flames igniting in her wake as Endeavor trailed after her, not as capable of handling tight maneuvering through the trees as she was. 

A downfall between the two of them. 

Naomasa pressed the comm at his ear again, waiting for the other end to pick up as the fight continued to move through the trees, civilians moving around him in a semi-panic, some towards the damned danger and others–the smarter half–moving away from it. 

“Back away from the fire!” He commanded the less-intelligent halves that seemed too invested in clicks and video footage than actually staying alive as another burst of flames erupted around them. 

The cracking of branches overhead sent a stream of debris down around them, the shrieks of the less than prepared civilians who ignored Naomasa’s command. 

The detective let out an exasperated sigh as the crackling on the other end of his receiver continued to beep in his ear, his vision zeroing on a moronic boy standing rather stupidly under a tree that was on fire with phone pointed upward at the fight a few hundred yards ahead. 

The man sprinted as charcoaled wood started to descend, falling in a firestorm around the boy who remained fucking oblivious to the obvious issue that was scattering around him. 

God help him. 

Naomasa yanked the phone out the boy’s hand with one free grip and pulled said child out of the falling debris’ path with the other as the branch gave way fully, flame and leaves and heat smacking to the ground as the kid gaped as Naomasa with a look of bewilderment and offense. 

“Hey! I was getting the shot, man!” He gestured at Naomas with a less than pleased and appropriate reaction to the detective’s approach to the apparent danger. “What the actual hell, man?” 

Naomasa frowned and lightly shoved the boy away from the other trees that were aflame–dear God was this kid an idiot?--and merely shook his head. 

“Head detective, kid,” He retorted, “and if you don’t want to get your happy ass arrested then you’ll walk your happy ass away from this crime scene, understood?” 

And maybe it was just the generation. Or maybe it was the fact that Naomasa himself wasn’t as serious sounding as he could be in the moment–more concerned than anything, but the boy only blinked a few times at the head detective before shrugging his shoulders and snatching his damned phone back from the Naomasa’s grip and scuttling away. 

“Whatever, man. Just wanted the best shot. But I hear ya. Yeah.” 

And really? 

Really? 

“Moe!” 

The detective jerked back towards the flames and the crashing of branches overhead as the two fire-branded heroes clashed with one another, both sparring using their signature heat and brand of fire-style fighting techniques to keep the other at bay. Endeavor launched a few melee strikes to off-set his subordinate while Burnin’ countered and launched several strikes of her own, catapaulting more flamed fireballs towards her minder, her mentor, her superior. 

The one using her personal name even here in public. 

Showing just how damned strange this moment was, and how…uncertain he seemed to feel about it all. At least, that’s how it seemed to Naomasa, who watched Endeavor twist out of the way, baring his teeth as he glowered towards his support worker. 

Or, what used to be her. 

“What did that damned brat do to you?” The man ground out, “What’s wrong with you? Stand down, dammit! I’m not the enemy here.” 

“You’re not the hero either, Endeavor,” The woman retorted, “And you’re just as scared as I am. Scared that you can’t make a difference. That you’ll be found out. That you’ll forget how to care. Pity really that someone so strong could doubt themselves so much.” 

The smile slithered across the woman’s face as she launched forward, using her hair again, to create tension and resistance to propel her forward. 

“Seems that you were the one that had more to hide. And I sensed it even then. Before I was released,” The woman reached out to grasp at Endeavor, eyes, flashing bright crimson, unnaturally brilliant, almost feverish as her hands shook. Endeavor blocked and threw the woman back as she tumbled through the air and laughed, righting herself. 

“Here I thought the boy was just foolish for running but he was stupidly wise for getting away from you! Because you? You were probably the stronger target.” 

Again the woman ignited a pull from her hair, using the stringing strength of flames to work as a slingshot to rocket her forward, as a grin tore across her face, “Better alignment with the power. And the fear. The worry. The skeletons lurking in shadows of unspoken things, eh?  Wonder what I could do with you in my grasp!” 

Naomasa wasn’t torn in the need to act as he rushed forward, preparing his gun to at least create a distraction with the taser, moving to aim the metal piece as his hair flew from his head, the rushing of power and flame and wind dusting up ash and choking his vision as he blinked blearily into the fray. 

Endeavor looked momentarily disoriented by the accusations and the fevered attack from his one-time partner and ally, as she launched forward again, a flame of green striking his shoulder as she barrelled into his chest, fists, and flames colliding as the pair knocked into the one another, before crashing into the trees that were already ablaze. 

Naomasa let the taser ignite upward, shooting for the woman’s foot that was barely visible through the branches, but just wide enough of a shot for him to get to as the sparks shot through the heated mire, tendrils latching onto the woman’s leg. 

There was a brief, startled grunt as the woman jerked back in surprise and glared down at Naomasa, before she was struck back by Endeavor, who sent a brief, side-glance towards the detective, a flick of a nod in acknowledgment the only indication that he understood what the detective was doing before Naomasa turned the dial up higher to ignite a stronger pulse of shock power to subdue the woman who continued to claw and fight against her one-time boss and superior. 

“You know you can’t escape the doubt once it’s latched!” She chortled, eyes wide, fierce and angry, as she tried to reach out for Endeavor’s face, flame and fist attempting to strike. “You know it’s always there, taunting you! Laughing at your weakness. Your failure!” 

“Stand down, dammit! You’re out of your damned senses, Burnin’” Naomasa almost regretted turning the dial up to hopefully subdue the wayward hero sidekick who was frenzied and struggling, eyes wide and wild as she stared back at the hero, her gaze inquiring, assessing, over-bright. 

The unnatural smile remained stretched too-wide. 

“Oh but I won’t the woman intoned even, emotion dripped bright, as the world seemed to darken around her. “I can’t. The darkness can’t be forgotten and I can’t step away from it now. Not ever. It was his fault. It was yours too. You deserve to have this darkness as much as I do.” 

Izuku was dizzy, blinking a few times as his legs wobbled and the world took a blurrish sort of hesitation to right itself as they landed with an oomph through their pop in time and space. 

“Space popper…or hopper…that’s what I ought to…call it…” The boy muttered, squinting his eyes towards his wrist with a frown as his limbs shook unsteadily. He forced more blinks through unfocused gaze, listening to the snapping of tree branches as heat licked at his cheeks and shoulders, a clear signal–confirmed when he looked up–that they were closer to the fight again, as he peered up and around at the destruction of the park, where flames consumed trees, and ash fell like cherry blossom petals. 

And well…

“Huh…”

The boy hummed in disapproval as he stared at the firelight, peering around for a moment with a frown as the world aflame seemed to drag his attention to the mistake he’d made. His hand reached for his pocket where the stone lay. 

The one that had released the entity that’d taken over Burnin’. The not stone…stone…

That still didn’t make sense, in his estimation, particularly given what he knew about his enemy. 

Fearmonger. 

The one that was fighting two hundred yards away with Endeavor, their booming crashes echoing through the air, as more flames shot upward and outward, a brilliant cascade of oranges and greens, igniting the sky. 

The boy let out a soft chuckle. 

“Ah, well I certainly misjudged the distance,” He seemed to bemoan their closeness to the fight. “I meant to get us closer to the city, not the entity. Must not have been thinking clear enough. Bebother it all.”  

The boy was muttering again, peering down at his wrist briefly before staring off towards the fight one more time to assess how far this would set him–or them? Back. 

He hesitantly–or covertly, if you wanted to call it that–looked towards the human, grubby gruffagin that was now somehow attached at being his–his!--minder (though he wasn’t Izuku’s minder, thank you) and noted that the Teacher Man seemed somewhat green around the gills…almost ready to toss cookies and get right sick. 

Though that was to be expected with one’s first bout of inter-space travel or rather first bout of space-travel when one acknowledged the possibility of it being space travel. 

Even if it was a small puddle hop like they’d just done. 

Still…the thought was somewhat amusing and reassuring…if that’s what he wanted to call it. 

The boy cast a wry smile, as he turned back to his wrist. 

“That’ll never do though. We’ll be right back at square one!” 

The Doctor quirked a brow considering his options, humming and speculating, the nervous–anxious–excited habit he always exhibited when he was dealing with possibilities and prospects for doom or success with very little concrete understanding just yet of what he was dealing with or how to get there. 

“Right we need metal!” He crowed, eyes searching as he tried to find the right proportions and weight nearby. 

Something easy to transport. 

“Something we’d be able to get up to the higher location without too much fuss too. So there’d be some sort of…modifications there.” 

Fearmonger couldn’t stand metal. So they’d have to make some sort of cage with that. It’d have to work somehow. 

But, really where to look? 

“Get out of the way. You have to vacate!” 

A support hero’s voice reverberated along the perimeter’s edge as the child turned his attention towards the large megaphone and the hat and visor the orange-faced man bellowed from. His maroon hair flared out from beneath his rounded dome hat. “Vacate the premises if you’re note active hero personnel!” 

Shouta chose to politely ignore that call to vacate as he spied the fight with the heroes a little ways down the hill from where they stood, the reverberations of raw power echoing through the air as the two fought. 

Light against dark. Flame against fire. 

The boy gripped at the stone–which had to have metal properties to it, he was sure of it, as he stared and searched among the sea of sprinters darting for their lives, waiting to see what would happen, and if there was an open–aha!  

“I suppose we’ll have to go old school, as it were,” He retorted pointing, almost smug. “Isn’t that what the kids are calling it these days?” 

And then he was off like a shot, tearing through the crowd to get down the hill, not really caring if the man was behind him or could keep up…

Though he was amused at hearing several voices repeat the same notions. 

“Eraserhead?!” 

“Holy shit it is him!” 

“Heard he was fighting against the heroes!” 

“The kid must be the vigilante then! He’s wanted!” 

“Dude, that's why they’re fighting!” 

The boy kept running, making to leap onto a wall, his toes scraping the ledge as he pulled himself upright and shifted to running along the highest point of the wall and move downward towards the main destination. 

“Someone stop him!” 

“No fucking way.” 

Katsuki Bakugou nearly shattered the glass of the car window, listening to the angry horn blaring as tires squealed, skittering against dry pavement to avoid hitting the boy, which was inevitably not going to happen. 

Normal people would care whether they were about to get hit by a damned car. But for Katsuki? 

It was just fucking annoying. And really it was bound to happen in this fucking intersection. No one knew how to fucking drive. 

Katuski didn’t give two shits about the fucking car coming at him as he slammed a fist against the cherry glinting hood as the metal scraped against his forearm, definitely taking a scratch to his skin as the stupid, fucking driver tried to brake. 

The boy barely narrowed his eyes towards the driver who stared, wide-eyed back at the kid who stood in the crosswalk, bag slung over his shoulder and a sense of complete, infuriated disbelief in his veins before he frowned with a ‘tch’ before turning away from the intersection and away from the oncoming traffic.

The extra annoyances he didn’t really give a shit about right now because... 

The boy’s sharp gaze traveled upward, narrowing into a critical glower as he stared across the way towards the *bigger* issue. The bigger distraction and source of annoyance.  

“You’ve got to be fucking *kidding* me,” the kid repeated to himself.

Katsuki’s frown turned into a near snarl, startled again by the image shooting across the giant screen at the plaza ahead of him, as brilliant flashes of green and gold and crimson lit up his vision, pixels dancing across the screen. 

It couldn’t be. Could it? 

There was no way that was possible. What he was seeing couldn’t be what he thought. 

Could it? 

There was a tense and tender pause as crimson eyes narrowed on the screen, watching the footage play on a loop. 

Fire. Explosions. 

And then he heard that same, shitty laugh.

The blonde’s hands clenched into tighter fists. 

How the actual hell? 

“Hey, kid! Move it! Get out of the way!” 

That same fucking annoying car horn chirped at Katsuki again, repeatedly echoing as the angry boy stared at the screen for, pissed and confused. 

“Can you even hear me, you fucking moron?!” 

Katsuki cast a brief, flicker towards the man who was leaning out his window at the kid, before he let a few sparks of flame ignite between his fingers, scorching the paint job, and bubbling the crimson red off the metal frame of the car. 

Again there was that moment of shocked silence from the driver. Lavender eyes widened as the man’s bald head glinted, mouth falling open in a slight gape before he sputtered out an infuriated reprimand. 

“What the hell! You damned brat! You fucking…you better be ready to pay for this damned mess–”

Katsuki made to turn towards the screen again and move closer, ignoring the nuisance he just didn’t fucking care about or have time for. 

A sharp, brief tingle of pain erupted along the boy’s fingertips, moving like an uncomfortable shock as it traveled up the boy’s arm that was still connected to the car’s metal. 

“I said listen, boy.” 

‘Clearly a side-effect of this asshole’s quirk,’ Katsuki’s thoughts flicked through a brief assessment as he turned more fully to face the man who was stepping out of his car. The sheen of the tall man’s bald head caught the sunlight as he made to slam his car door shut, blocking traffic and causing more than one car horn to blare around them.

“Get out of the way!” 

“Move!” 

‘How stupid looking,’ Katsuki thought, giving the man a once-over. 

“You damned punk,” The man bit out, narrowing his eyes, baring his own teeth into a wide snarl, “You ruined my paint!”

The boy sent a short, furious and biting sniff in reply to the man’s comment. 

“And you almost fucking hit me with your shitty car and its shitty paint job, you bastard,” The boy retorted. Another flash of anger flickered across his face, traveling through his fingers and coursing along the flames that danced through his palm, as he narrowed his stare briefly before stepping past the man’s car, retracting his hand with a hard ‘snap’ before slamming it down again onto the man’s hood.

There was a firm ‘wham’ before a scorched dent burrowed into the top of the cars hood, as the boy lifted his chin towards the man, “I’d say we’re fucking even.”  

A familiar searing sting of annoyance flinched across his shoulders before striking down his spine as he downright glowered at the screen. Mixtures of fury and concern shrank against his confusion, igniting that agitation, that sense of confusion.  

He let out a scoff, a soft “tch,” puffing into the air as shoulders hunched before he was fishing out his damned phone. 

The memory of those damned eyes pierced through his as he felt the rush of air behind him, as cars continued to push down the street, traffic moving beyond the crosswalk and reality continued to move, even as Katsuki continued to glare at the large screen that replayed the same footage over again.

A small crowd had gathered now and the boy felt a twinge of annoyance at all the…people around him as they just…talked about what they were seeing. Completely, fucking unaware of the fact that *he* knew what was actually going on.  

“You fucking bastard.”

He was going to kill the shitty nerd when he got his hands on him. 

“Pardon me!”

The head detective turned at the call and stared at the blur that zipped past him.

“You!” The woman’s call was accusatory as she growled in pain and scrambled to move towards the voice…

“I’m going to pilfer this, my good policeman! Yes, thanks so much!” The boy’s voice rang like a chime through the air, as the lithe movements blurred like a gangly whirlwind of limbs and curly hair as the boy whipped past the detective and made his way towards the man’s…car completely ignoring the fight that Naomasa was embroiled in as he fought the tension the woman forced against the taser as Endeavor and Burnin’ both were momentarily distracted by the boy’s call.

“Vigilante!” 

“You damned terror! It’s your fault.”  

The hell. 

Naomasa blinked a few times, registering what was happening and…what was off about the whole damned thing. And who he was actually seeing. 

Shock registered first as he held firm on his taser, feeling the tension with the pulse singing through the line as Burnin’ and Endeavor’s fight continued above them, their snarls and flame-throwing singing the air, and crackling through the trees. 

“Kid!” 

Another shock registered as a darker blur sailed through the field, and down past Naomasa, straight to the car and the boy. 

The detective felt his chest tighten, stomach drop to his soles as relief and panic ignited as Endeavor moved towards the duo. 

“Vigilante! Stop! Now, boy!” 

No. 

The boy only laughed at the call, and shook his head.

“We’re not doing this again, Endeavor, we already talked about that!” He retorted lightly, flashing a smile, and sending a burst of energy outward towards the pair above Naomasta, the pen-like object in his hand pulsing brilliantly bright green, as a ‘boom’ sent ricochets of power waving outward, the pair sprawling backwards into somersaults through the air. Naomasa’s taser was pulled clean from his grip. 

Not far enough though, as the pair easily maneuvered through the pulse, and righted themselves, both angling towards the child again, as the detective caught a clearer glimpse of the boy. Realization dawned. Denial remained. 

It couldn’t be. 

“Izuku–” 

The name slipped out easily, familiar as it always had been on his lips. Yet, as he spoke the name, the boy stilled, almost going rigid as he cast a brief, curious and confused glance towards the man, his face aglow with a brilliant hue of light that enrobed every inch of his expression and form. 

Deep bottle-green orbs assessed the man for a moment, as lips pursed in wonder, considering Naomasa’s call, as the child hummed thoughtfully for a moment. 

“...You know that name too?” He queried after a moment, fingers still curled around the strange glowing object in his hand that buzzed lightly, blue light whirring out of the top. “...how odd that is.” 

A flame-burst ignited overhead, snapping into the tree near Naomasa’s car, as shards of branches and bark shattered around them in a fiery spray.

The trio ducked as a smile ghosted the child’s lips, “Though that doesn’t explain how you know that name…Izuku...how odd…that we both know it.” 

The boy narrowed his eyes further for a moment before snorting and shaking his head. 

“But whose to say that I’m not spouting nonsense!” He waved dismissing the thought and grinned wider at the man, his critical and darker expression dissipating as quickly as it had erupted. “I’ve been rather bonkers this entire time really. Can’t rightly place my thoughts at the moment. They’re all a bit jumbled up in this regeneration and I’ve got to get them sorted as I’ve got some hazy bits and…unfamiliar ones too. Can’t rightly sort them all!” 

There was another soft snort at the thought–at least for the boy–as he turned back to his task of stealing, stealing Naomsa’s car as another flame-burst erupted. 

“And it’s really moot to try to parse through it all now!” He quipped cheerfully. “If we live we might chat about it later on though, Mr. Policeman! But as of right now? I’ve got a Fearmonger to un-attach and things to set right. So, off I pop!” 

“Now hold on, kid, you can’t just take that–” 

Aizawa shared an almost apologetic–more exasperated look–with Naomasa as he dove after the boy, no doubt to keep tabs on the child as he leaned into the driver’s seat and started the engine, letting the vehicle roar to life. 

Yet if the boy had wanted to simply steal the car he could have done it without so much of the…flourish he’d exhibited with his little mechanism. Oddly enough Toshinori had taught him to do that. 

The boy continued to chatter somewhat gleefully to himself as he pressed the device to his wrist and then to the button on the ignition, before turning a few dials on the device around his arm. 

“Let’s see if I can simply turn this and rework the calibration just a hair then I can hopefully sync up the locator device in the car to hinge onto the transporter mechanism in the wrist band and then–hold on just a moment–one more time with he connection,” The boy pressed the band closer to the ignition switch itself and the brought the device buzzing along the two, blue light turning green now, as it ‘whirred’ and ‘whoomed’ with noise, buzzing in Naomasa’s ears. 

Ash continued to fall around them, landing among haphazard green curls, as eyes lit up manically. 

“Aha! That should do it! That’s lovely that is! Should almost sort of get us to where we need to go in a quicker fashion than with just the wristband!” 

The boy looked towards Naomasa again with a smile, almost as childlike as he used to be, the wonder glinting in his gaze as he peered towards the detective, with a sense of accomplishment shining in his look. 

The man recognized that look. 

He’d seen that look. 

“I could take you with me too, you know!” He chortled out towards the Head Detective as the world continued to erupt around them. Flames igniting and a boom for the child to “Stop!” resounding behind. 

“Much better than here anyway, with all the blasty bits going on and about. And you might enjoy the modifications!” 

“Vigilante!” 

Izuku’s eyes lit up a little brighter, widening in surprise and some flicker of anxiety as he assessed the fight behind Naomasa. 

“If you make up your mind now, that is,” he remarked with a firm tone. “I haven’t got all day to be pleasant ‘bout it, I’m afraid. Time travel waits for no man…er human!”

Naomasa only watched in confusion for a moment as another blast ignited the ground near the wheels, forcing them to hiss and begin to burst, as the man was thrown back by the force, green flames launching into a ball of heat that licked at the detective’s shoes, and nibbled the grass. 

“Not the civilian!” 

Endeavor’s voice–and his command to avoid hitting Naomasa was a new one for the detective as Burnin’ seemed to rebuff the command and charged forward, Naomasa turning in time to see the woman pulling at the flames in her hair again. 

“You destroy worlds, Doctor!” She rebuked, “You suck them dry. Do they know? Will you tell them the truth?” 

The boy frowned as another flame launched forward, he caught the detective’s gaze, with a brief, deft nod, before starting the ignition and revving the engine. 

“They know. Or soon will,” He remarked softly, as Naomasa reached for the taser hanging from the woman’s leg, pulling at the handle to ignite the pulse of electro energy again before she turned to strike out at him, as the car engine revved once more, Endeavor’s own command to ‘stop’ soaring over the motor. 

There was a bright blue light that slipped towards green, as the car shifted forward and then snapped out of reality, leaving nothing in its wake. 

Naomasa stared at the empty spot for a brief moment before feeling the sting of a strike to his jaw and cheek.  

'I have to let 'Toshi know,' He thought blearily.

"Fucking hell, kid! You can't--shit!" The man watched as the boy leapt from the window and onto the far wall's awning, bare feet skidding as deft hands grabbed nimbly for the long pipe that secured the fabric in place. 

‘Izuku.’ His thought recalled. He wasn’t just a kid anymore. He had a name. 

His name was Izuku. 

But how did ‘Masa know it?

Thoughts churned as the many felt the prickle of uncertainty grown against the boy. 

How did others know this child? 

Izuku? 

"No time to dilly and dally!" The retort erupted to Shouta’s right flames cascading around them as they maneuvered through the shitstorm of a plan. Fire nearly ignited the boy’s hair as he leapt near the burning car, their brief excursion in  the police vehicle turned into small…time hopping machine…having been set afire and forcing them to abandon the damned thing in favor of hopping from rooftop to rooftop.

Which, in Shouta’s opinion was much worse. Wide green eyes tilted upwards and a thin smile quirked the child’s mouth. "Well maybe a small dally. And then up we go! Towards the danger." The boy turned and winked at the perturbed underground hero. "But none of the dillying, if you would. I think I've right upset the wannabe hero chittering angrily back there."

Down there. 

And back there. 

The whole time he’d incited Endeavor’s fucking anger. And the whole thought that this kid wasn’t intentionally pissing someone off wasn’t wholly surprising to Shouta. 

The boy braced himself and bent his knees, pushing into a hop that sent him higher, towards the stairwell above, climbing towards the roof. "These legs are rather spry!" He chortled as Shouta shook his head and made a deft leapt after, bypassing the awning altogether, as his grip secured around the bottom rung of the ladder. The boy halted only for a moment, before turning back towards Shouta, who had closed the distance. The oversized shirt billowed, giving a peek to a long scar on the boy's stomach as his pants pooled at his ankles, even rolled to fit his legs. Curls ruffled and bobbed as the boy wrinkled his nose down at Shouta and narrowed his eyes, amusement flickering in his look

“Show off.” 

Another flare of flame and a hard slam of pressure erupted around them as the boy was knocked shaking as his grip tightened around the rungs of the ladder. Turning back upward golden glow brightening, the boy hummed and shifted into his pocket to pull out that same dilapidated pen that 'zinged' when he pressed a button. "It'll do for now," He murmured, continuing to push upward. "Stop gap until I get a new one." Another blast rocked the building as Shouta pushed closer to the boy, a wary look shifting towards the figures that hovered overhead. "Just need to get closer!" The Problem Child chimed down to Shouta. "But not to worry! It'll work...mostly." 

The man furrowed his brows and frowned as confusing and a flare of concern ignited at the carefree look the boy gave with his vague answer. The careless look. With a speed that spoke of franticness and decided stupidity, the child scurried upwards, to the roof and ducked his head in time to avoid another assault from the enemy that'd eventually spot the two of them again, as their faces were plastered on screen after screen, across billboards and digital news posters. 

Enemy... Shouta wasn't even sure these were an enemy, however, as he chased up the ladder and hoisted himself into a leaping crouch on the rooftop as the watched the oversized shirt billow behind the boy who scurried, carefully nimble, along the ledge, his footfalls too unsteady to bring the underground hero any measure of comfort because...well because why the fuck was the boy doing this? 

“Now remind me, Teacher Man,” The boy called back, as he made to leap again, his voice carrying through air, “Did you say that your capture weapon was infused with metal?” 

Shouta’s brows furrowed as he stared after the boy. 

He’d never said anything like that. 

So how did the kid?

‘Izuku.’ His mind reminded him.