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The class didn’t notice immediately.
Everyone had different routines, and they often weren’t the most social early in the morning, so although Iida found it a little strange that he didn’t pass him on his morning run, Todoroki was surprised that they didn’t cross paths in the shower room, and Uraraka found it odd that Izuku didn’t appear as she was about to head off to change to grab his usual morning coffee that was more milk and sugar than coffee.
It wasn’t until five minutes before homeroom, when most of the class was in the classroom and at least ten minutes after Midoriya was usually there, even on his latest days, that a low level of concern rippled across the class in quiet questions and unsure answers.
When he was still gone five minutes after the bell rang, everyone started to get really concerned.
Aizawa-sensei asked Iida to go and make sure Midoriya wasn’t just asleep or ill in his own room, telling him to ‘make it quick’ and pointedly looking at his legs, and so by the time homeroom ended, Iida had returned and the unease cranked up to low-level panic, because Midoriya was nowhere to be found.
Aizawa-sensei told them to stay in class, and to carry on as normal, and left to alert Nedzu and the other teachers, despite the class’ protests and Mic’s long-suffering sigh and edge of anxiety as he lead a very distracted english class, where everyone was much quieter than usual, but also much more fidgety.
By the time first period was over, Aizawa-sensei appeared to update Present Mic with a furrowed brow and edge of tenseness to his posture, and everyone knew that Midoriya had still not been found, and that things were getting worrying.
Dedication to school and general punctuality aside, Midoriya was a trouble magnet, always drawn to villains and left injured despite everyone’s best efforts, and so with his relative fame and involvement in all the madness they had been going through since the star of their time at UA, him being gone was concerning at best.
Normally if he wanted to go out, or to visit his mom, he would tell someone, or even several someones, and check in regularly, and yet there was nothing. No word, no note, now text.
By the time lunch rolled around, class 1-A was not paying attention to anything at all, and they descended on the teacher’s lounge demanding answers. Aizawa knew that leaving them in the dark would only make things worse, and so he told them all they knew so far. They were heroes, after all.
Upon further inspection and a search of the entire dorm building and campus, the teachers had concluded that Izuku was not on site, and hadn’t been for some time.
Nedzu had gone over the camera footage, and while nothing had been immediately obvious, he had noticed a slight distortion over a series of shots on cameras leading from the 1-A dorms to a lower section of wall where a broken branch and recent scuff marks had been found.
His room had been relatively untouched, and so it had been concluded that Midoriya had either been lured outside, or someone had snatched him when he left for his routine workouts. They had left remarkable few clues and traces, and Nedzu was theorising some sort of ‘untraceable’ quirk being involved.
The whole class immediately demanded to help, wanting to be out there and search, to follow the trail of camera distortion and find their stolen friend, but were told no. That they only slow down the process at this point, but that they would be recruited as soon as they could.
The day continued as usual, but nothing felt the same. There was a sense of unease that had settled over the whole school, news of a missing or kidnapped student spreading like wildfire, and no-one really focusing on their studies.
The hero course found themselves much more agitated during heroics classes, taking their frustrations at not being allowed to help into their drills, focused and hitting extra hard, imagining a faceless, nameless criminal in place of their classmates.
By the end of the day, there were still no updates, and the class found themselves mechanically going through the motions of their routine, ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice, and thrown off by the unexpected absence of their classmate, their friend.
All they could do was wait.
—
Izuku woke up to a pounding headache, a dry mouth and a throbbing pain in his shoulders and hips.
The first was from the hit to the head he remembered taking just before he blacked out, the dry mouth was caused by the rag stuffed in there, and the pain in his shoulders and hips was from the zip ties digging into his wrists and ankles, holding them at an awkward angle where he had been dumped onto the cold, damp floor. He could also feel a pressure around his neck, not so tight as to prevent him from breathing, but just enough to feel like he might choke if he moved too much, a reminder that he was caught.
He remembered hearing something outside the dorms, something that wasn’t one of his classmates or a wild animal, but another person who seemed distressed, and remembered going out to investigate, leaving a note on the fridge and cautiously investigating, keeping to well-lit areas and well within sight of the dorm’s front doors.
(He hadn’t noticed when the sticky note fell to the floor, sliding under the fridge where it wouldn’t be seen or found until much, much later, but he wished he had. At least then he might have left more of a clue.)
He tried to take stock of his surroundings, eyes darting from the door to the boarded over windows, to the stacks of wooden crates surrounding him, to the concrete floor and high, metal ceiling, and came to the conclusion that he must be in some kind of warehouse.
He tested his bindings, feeling as they dug into his skin and chafed against his joints, trying to call up One For All, any aspect he could, but instead feeling it flicker out before it could gather any force, flickering out like a candle in a storm.
He felt a moment of intense panic, and then forced himself to calm down. He needed to keep his head on straight, because his situation right now was bad.
He was injured (his ears were still ringing, and his whole body felt like he had cleaned a whole beach in a week), bound, alone and powerless, he had no idea where he was, and he didn’t even know who had taken him, let alone what their motives were.
All he could do but wait.
—
Nedzu’s hunch about the ‘untraceable’ quirk had been right.
Despite the only conclusion they could come to being a kidnapping, they had found no evidence, no trace, and couldn’t even properly take the case to the police, because as far as they could prove, Midoriya could have simply decided to leave.
That was, until the note.
It came in the form of a post-it, taped to the inside of the now locked-down main gates, plain as day, like someone had just walked up and put it there. Apparently, that is what had happened, because the alarms hadn’t gone off, the camera on the gates had that same distortion, and there were nearly invisible scuff marks on the top of the wall nearby.
It read:
Dearest UA,
As you can probably see by now, I've decided to take one of your students. Didn’t really target anyone in particular, but I know it’s one of your prized 1-A brats, so I’d hope you care about him. He took a lot more to take out than I thought he would but blunt force will get anyone if you get 'em in the right place.
I’ve put a photo of the guy under a rock next to the gate so you can tell I’m not just fucking around, and so you can see that I really don’t care about being nice.
If you want him back, you’ll have to send ¥20,000,000 to the address on the back of the photo, and don’t even THINK of trying anything. Even if you do it won’t work. I’ve never lost a game of hide and seek.
Thanks in advance!
Figment
The photo was taken on some sort of polaroid, and showed Midoriya, unconscious and tied up on a dirty, crumbling concrete floor with a quirk-suppressing collar around hi neck.
It really wasn’t much to go on, but Nedzu would be damned if he lost one of the children under his care.
—
Izuku didn’t know how long he'd been there, but he was getting really stiff lying on the floor, and would have liked to at least been propped up against a wall or something.
In the time since he had first come to, he had felt sleep trying to take him again and resisting, knowing he would need to know what was going on a round him, and that he probably had some kind of concussion and should really try and stay awake until he could get checked out.
He took the opportunity to shuffle himself into a better position where he could see more of the room, and stayed quiet and still, breathing deeply, hoping his captors would think he was still knocked out.
He watched as about three different people shuffled in and out, at least one always keeping a rough line of sight with him and his possible escape routes.
The first one he had seen, a short man with grey lines running under his eyes, hadn’t left the entire time he had been watching, and was clearly the main guard for him. If Izuku had to guess, he probably would have said he had some kind of quirk relating to his eyes, given the line, and that it made guarding him easier.
The second villain, a tall, slender person with pointy ears and flame-like red hair, kept on flitting in and out, always in motion, and always talking quickly with the first man, arguing or just planning or updating him, and Izuku had no idea what their deal was. They seemed to be something like the leader, handing things out and taking things away, but he couldn’t say for sure. They were the most unknown factor, and therefore the most dangerous.
The last one was a small, thin girl with pale skin and grey hair, wearing a grey hooded cloak and face mask. Izuku couldn’t see their face, but they had appeared as if from nowhere, and then disappeared into thin air again, so they had either an invisibility or presence-erasing quirk, and might be a tricky one to escape.
All in all, a pretty good team, and one that would be hard to track or escape from.
Izuku decided to keep on trying his bonds and his quirks, and hoped that sooner or later, something would snap, or someone would find him.
—
Somehow, they had found a clue.
Nedzu and Power Loader had been trawling through endless security footage, following distortions and inconsistencies, and finally found something.
On a camera outside a convenience store near the docks, Power Loader had watched as two people materialised out of seemingly nowhere, shaking off distortion. Both were wearing what looked like dusty grey cloaks, one wearing a mask, and the other wearing Midoriya’s signature red shoes.
Once they had the lead, it was easy enough to trace where the two had gone, and track them to a currently vacant warehouse only a few streets away from the convenience store.
They watched as the person in the mask re-emerged half an hour later and made their way back towards UA, and lined up the distortion with the sudden appearance of the sticky note and movement of the rock where the photo was put.
Finally, it was time to act.
—
Izuku kept on flaring One For All for what felt like hours.
He would keep half his attention on the world around him, on the comings and goings of the three villains, and the other half turned firmly inward, focused on the ebb and flow of the quirk in his veins, his nerves, his muscles, on the way it surged and then fizzled out, kept contained by something.
He figured out pretty quickly that the thing around his neck was what was causing it, recognising the feel of quirk suppressant cuffs from training, and not feeling a thick band anywhere but his throat.
As he breathed deep and even, flexing his control over his power, he fell into something almost like a meditative state, simultaneously at one with and apart from his body, feeling every breath flow through him.
As he sank deeper and deeper, he felt like the waves of One For All were gaining momentum, slowly chipping away at the barrier centred on his neck, closer and closer to steadying and flowing freely once more.
He kept on breathing, he kept on feeling, and kept on working away at his chains.
—
While all of class 1-A and a great deal more of the UA population was ready and raring to go, to bring their friend and classmate back, they couldn't all go. They would just end up getting in the way of each other, and speed and efficiency would be key to capturing these villains, especially if Nedzu’s conjecture about the ‘untraceable’ quirk was correct.
Jirou, Todoroki and Yaoyorozu were assigned to join the team of teachers, with everyone else on standby, much to some people’s (Bakugou’s) chagrin.
The operation would require stealth, and so the heroes all gathered in their street clothes, making their way as nonchalantly to the warehouse as they could, loitering in their assigned spots and waiting for the signal.
Jirou found herself leaning casually against a wall near the entrance to the dockyard, plugged in and listening, relaying information to the rest of the heroes through a pair of earphones with a microphone that she held to her mouth like she was simply talking on the phone.
3 suspected villains. Midoriya breathing and seemingly conscious. No potentially fatal traps or fail safes that she could hear. Green for start.
Todoroki found himself accompanying a teacher in the vanguard. He was to provide support and freeze anyone who tried to escape to the floor, making sure that those responsible would not slip away, even if they could disappear.
Yaoyorozu was with the backup team, ready to step in with any equipment or other support she could, and there to assist in extracting Midoriya and treating any minor injuries.
With everything ready, Nedzu, sitting nearby in a temporary HQ, gave the cue to start, and the vanguard knocked down the doors.
—
Izuku could tell something was happening.
All three of the villains were in the warehouse, speaking furiously under their breath and gesturing wildly at a piece of paper.
Izuku kept on going with his breathing, One For All feeling much more stable now, ready to go as soon as he was freed, but let his body tense up, warming up his muscles for if he had to fight.
There was a moment of quiet, like the calm before the storm, and then the warehouse was full of noise.
He heard the BANG of metal doors being kicked in, and yelling for people to surrender, before the temperature dropped suddenly, the way it did when Todoroki used his ice, and then there was a flurry of footsteps and everything was calm again.
It was over before it had really started, and Izuku felt his heart pounding in his chest, One For All straining against its restraints, like he would explode if he moved wrong, and then a familiar face was leaning down in front of him.
“We’re here, Midoriya.”
Todoroki knelt down next to him, placing a cool hand against the bruise on his temple, and relief flooded through him as he saw Yaoyorozu rush in with the medical crew, and various teachers cuffing and dealing with the three villains now trapped in ice.
He breathed out a sigh of relief, let One For All settle, and finally, finally, relaxed.
His friends had found him, and he was safe.