Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Shouta had, in the past, had worse days. The USJ came to mind. And the first-year training camp of his most recent batch of problem children. A mission he’d gone on early in his Hero career that had ended with him getting kidnapped and tortured for a few hours. The day Oboro died.

Despite everything that had happened to him, he’d never had a day be this particular sort of bad.

Shouta was used to strange Quirk backfires. He was called in a lot to help panicking children with dangerous Quirks that had just developed, since Erasure could easily deal with pretty much anything. Shouta had been de-aged, turned to stone, stuck in a time loop, and – on one memorable location – turned solid, florescent pink for a day. Even the body swap he’d had to deal with a few years ago didn’t hold a candle to this.

On the one hand, the transformation had happened overnight. Shouta had experience with Quirks that changed someone’s physical form, and it was rarely pleasant to be transformed. On the other hand… well, everything else.

Not only had his dream been a haunting mixture of terrifying memories, but he’d woken up practically drowning in his blanket, had a minor claustrophobia-induced panic attack, and then squirmed out into the light to find that he was about a tenth the size he was supposed to be. Everything smelled far too strongly, his limbs weren’t built like he was used to, and he could hardly see anything.

Just getting down from his futon was a nerve-wracking endeavor that almost ended up with him kissing the floorboards. Apparently this new form came with some built-in instincts, though, since he managed to land on his feet with pretty much no conscious input from the human parts of his brain. After a bit of an argument with his own instincts – walking on four legs was not at all like crawling as a human – Shouta managed to make it to the full-length mirror in Hizashi’s closet.

His suspicions were proven correct, and for a minute all Shouta could do was stare. A cat. He was a cat. In any other circumstance, he would be thrilled. He was a cat! Last year, when he’d expelled his entire class, he would have accepted the change of form with delight. A cat!

Except it was not last year. It was today, and today he was supposed to be preparing his students for the upcoming provisional licensing exam. Instead, he was a cat.

At the very least, he was a good-looking cat. He had long fur, black all over but with a few thinner, rougher patches over the places Shouta knew he had some of his worse scars. His eyes were very strange, and for a moment Shouta thought he didn’t have any in this form. They were there, but they were unnaturally dark, and further inspection revealed that they were actually almost solid black, his pupils blending into his irises. That was normal for him, but it looked bizarre in a cat, like he had no eyes at all. His tail was also unusuall, but only in that it was very long for his size. Exactly how long, Shouta couldn’t tell, since it was constantly moving no matter how hard he tried to keep it still.

Shouta sighed, finally giving up on getting his tail to hold still. His head drooped, and in the mirror, his reflection flattened its ears to the side.

He had a few options from here, and none of them would be fun. He could try to track down the kid whose Quirk had affected him like this, though that would be pretty tricky in this tiny form. He could head for UA and hope either Nedzu or Koda could understand him in this form, but UA was clear on the other side of the city, and it would be a risky trek for a housecat to make solo. Even a housecat with human intelligence and Shouta’s knowledge of rooftops, subway lines, and shortcuts. He could also hang around and wait for Hizashi to return and hopefully recognize that Shouta was no ordinary cat.

The last, while the most tempting, was also the least likely to succeed, and pretty risky if it failed. Shouta had a tendency to bring home strays he found outside, and he was always bringing home some feline or another. If Hizashi found him like this, he would probably assume Shouta had brought the unknown black cat home and would take him to the shelter.

Just what Shouta didn’t need.

So, he either had to find his way clear across the city in this pint-sized form, or he had to somehow track down one of the dozen kids with unstable or mysterious Quirks he’d met yesterday.

Shouta sighed again, turning away from the mirror with a lash of his tail. Fortunately, the bedroom door was hanging slightly ajar, and with a bit of careful batting at it, Shouta managed to pull it open enough to slip through. His laptop was still on the floor, propped up against the couch from where he’d left it the night before. Shouta stared at it for a moment, only just now realizing the sheer scope of the conundrum he was in. Could he even open a laptop in this form?

After a lot of struggling, several scratches on the plastic casing, and accidentally dropping the thing on his paw, he managed to wedge his bottom teeth into the gap between screen and keyboard and lever the thing open a few centimeters. Once it was wedged open, he could stand behind it and hook his paw around the screen. He pulled it the rest of the way open like that and circled around to sit in front of it again.

If just opening his laptop had been such a struggle, did he even want to try leaving his house?

Well, if the other option was getting delivered to a shelter to be neutered…

With renewed determination, Shouta carefully input his password. His paws were just the wrong size to press just one key, and it took him four tries to put it in correctly, and to do it he had to carefully tilt his paw so that only the tip of one toe was touching the key. Fortunately, his toe beans worked on the trackpad, and doubly fortunately, the files from the night before were still up on the screen.

It took far longer than it should have to sort through the files, especially since he couldn’t press any more than one key at a time. By the time he was done, Shouta’s paw ached with the unusual strain, his eyes hurt from the light of the screen, and it was well past the time he should have been terrifying his students into training. But he’d found the file he was looking for.

Omousueru Henshin, Quirk: Soul Form. There wasn’t a lot of information on his Quirk – of course there wasn’t, they’d come to Shouta, after all – but it was definitely a transformation Quirk of some kind. Shouta had been called in because everyone who got anywhere near the kid turned into an animal.

It had ended up being a one-off style emitter – once they were transformed, only Omousueru could remove the transfiguration. His dad had a powerful empathy quirk that was only a few steps shy of mind reading and his mom could imbue herself and others with a huge variety of traits, anything from calmness to essentially being made of rubber. Once Shouta had learned that, he’d tracked down the kid’s mom – who had ended up in a tree in the form of a parrot – and coaxed her back into her proper mind. She’d promptly winged her way back to her son, settled a calming aura over the whole menagerie, and neatly wrapped up the whole problem.

Unfortunately, nobody had figured out why the people around Omousueru were getting caught in his Quirk. They hadn’t touched him, and he hadn’t even looked at half of them. They were at one moment human and the next running around as a racoon dog or a swan or in one case a bear.

There was definitely no reason for Shouta, over twelve hours later, to only now be a cat. But Omousueru’s was the only file even tangentially related to animal transformation, and it wasn’t like Shouta spent a lot of his free time with kids who hadn’t gotten a handle on their Quirk.

Once again, Shouta was faced with an exhausting decision. Try to make it to UA, or try to track down Omousueru?

UA would be easier – after so long attending and then teaching there, Shouta could get to UA campus from anywhere in the city blindfolded – but finding Omousueru had a much higher possibility of getting immediate help.

On the other hand, he’d only get that help if he ever made it to Omousueru.

With a heavy sigh, Shouta cast his gaze around the house, looking for anything he should bother to take with him, or any excuse that could postpone his leaving time. All he found was the empty cat tree standing in the corner of the room. Where were his own cats?

There were a few scents which the cat-brain that came with the physical form had filed under ‘other friendly cat smells’, but Shouta hadn’t actually seen either of his cats. Bakugowo – a name which had initially been ‘Little Bastard’ but had… developed, in the past few months – was usually lying directly on top of Shouta’s chest when he woke up. Shouta had been so startled by his unexpected physical transformation that he hadn’t even noticed the cat’s absence. Sloppy work on his part; that was definitely the sort of thing he’d scold his students for.

Shouta lifted his head and, for the first time since he’d turned into a cat, tried to say something.

His call of “hello?” came out as a loud mew. Shouta paused, startled by his own feline voice. He sounded like a cat. Which, of course, he was a cat, but it was still surprising. He could mimic a cat pretty well – not that he was ever admitting that to literally anyone – but it was still weird. He sounded like a cat.

“Bakugowo?” Shouta tried, and another loud meow came out of his mouth. After a short pause, there was an answering mew. It didn’t sound like words, thank goodness, but it was undoubtedly Bakugowo’s ‘oh thank Kami you’re here I thought you had left me forever’ yowl that she greeted them with whenever they were gone for more than, oh, about ten minutes.

Bakugowo, like her namesake, never did anything slowly or quietly. This included but was not limited to: eating, sleeping, snuggling, and running across the house to greet her owner who had been inexplicably turned into a cat.

Caterwauling the whole way, Bakugowo shot out of the linen closet, bounded down the hallway, bolted across the living room, and slammed into Shouta like a fluffy orange battering ram.

It was a lot cuter, Shouta realized as he tried to catch his breath, when she was a tenth his size.

Bakuowo was frantically licking his face, making frantic cheeping noises all the while.

“What are you doing,” Shouta demanded flatly. “Why. Why are you doing this.”

Bakugowo made even more frantic cheeping noises, her rough tongue pulling at the fur on Shouta’s ears. That was a bizarre feeling, and Shouta quickly extracted himself from her hold, ignoring the mournful mew as he backed away.

“Where’s Missy?” Shouta tried to ask. It came out as a curious chirp.

Bakugowo wailed another worried ‘maaaaw!’ and tried to lick Shouta’s face again.

Shouta sighed, and found that his tail was twitching with irritation. Or maybe that was from stress. He wasn’t sure.

Fortunately, Shouta didn’t have to go looking for Missy, as he appeared from around the edge of the archway with a disgruntled look. Missy opened his mouth in a yawn, then held it there. Shouta stared at him for a moment. With his messed-up cat vision, it took him several seconds to see the bright light building up in Missy’s throat, and by then it was almost too late.

Very few shelters would willingly take in animals with Quirks, especially potentially dangerous or destructive ones. Both Missy and Bakugowo had ended up in Shouta and Hizashi’s care after being rejected by the shelter. Bakugowo’s Quirk factor was damaged in the same attack that damaged her hearing, so she rarely used it, but Missy was incredibly territorial and prone to shooting at anyone or anything that upset him.

Without even thinking about it, Shouta activated Erasure.

He wasn’t really expecting anything in particular. He was more focused on making sure Missy didn’t disintegrate him. If he’d had the time to think about it, he probably would have expected all his fur everywhere to poof up, or maybe just the fur on his head. Instead, his back arched and his hackles stood up, fur bristling over his shoulders and spine and even his tail poofing up like a pinecone.

The light in Missy’s throat died, and he shut his mouth with a satisfied ‘mrp’.

Shouta’s eyes didn’t hurt. He had activated Erasure pretty much right after waking up, without his eyedrops or anything, and his eyes didn’t hurt. Erasure was still activated, and his eyes didn’t even feel strained.

…Had Shouta blinked once this morning?

For the first time since he could remember, Shouta deactivated Erasure without blinking. Just… turned it off. His fur laid back down, and his tail settled, swaying thoughtfully.

Cats blinked. Shouta knew that cats could blink. He had seen cats blink before, and slow-blinked back at them. He was pretty sure cats didn’t need to blink nearly as often as humans did, though. Which meant Erasure was a lot more powerful in this form.

Hopefully, that would be enough to get Shouta safely to either UA or the Omousueru residence.

UA, he decided, was the right call. He knew the route better, and he suspected being in this form – with weird eyesight, a huge difference in perspective, and a much stronger sense of smell – would make everything way harder than it should be.

“I’m leaving,” Shouta said aloud, mostly to convince himself. “Definitely leaving.”

Missy grumbled, sidling forward to set his paw on Shouta’s forehead.

“What?” Shouta demanded. Missy mrrped at him, turning to press his side against Shouta’s.

“I need to go, Missy.”

Bakugowo chose then to join in, plastering herself to Shouta’s other side. Since Bakugowo was a lanky giant of a cat and Missy was a short-legged skookum, it didn’t go super well.

“Guys,” Shouta growled as Bakugowo almost tipped them both over. He squirmed, trying to wriggle out from between the two of them, but Bakugowo slumped directly on top of Shouta, practically crushing him under her weight. Shouta knew animals with Quirks tended to be smarter than usual, even without a Quirk like High Spec. Maybe Bakugowo and Missy knew something Shouta didn’t. Since they were all cats with the same observation abilities, Shouta couldn’t think of any way they could.

But Missy had been far more cuddly than was his usual on the morning of the USJ attack, and Bakugowo had been the first to tip them off in their old apartment when the upstairs neighbors had started melting the floor. She hadn’t even been able to hear the tiny crackling sounds of wood panes slowly turning to a liquid, but she’d known it was happening before either of the humans in the apartment.

Shouta sighed, letting his paws slide out from underneath him. Bakugowo made a triumphant noise, and Missy appeared by Shouta’s head to lick his face a few times. He had been captured by a pair of cats. He couldn’t even understand what they were saying!

…Could Officer Sansa understand Shouta, if he tried to talk to him in this form?

The police station was much closer than either UA or the Omousueru residence. Easier to find, too.

Shouta propped himself up on his elbows, shaking Missy off of him. With a bit off wriggling and digging his claws into the carpet, he managed to pull himself out from underneath Bakugowo, who slumped to the ground with a mournful mew.

Instantly, Missy was on him, jaw locked and light building in his throat.

Shouta canceled his Quirk for a split second, resetting his buildup time, then bolted for the front door. It was a difference that Shouta hadn’t noticed as a human, but Missy was a lot slower than other cats. His short munchkin legs were no match for Shouta’s stride. Bakugowo would have been, but she was busy drooling sadly on the floor, so Shouta made it to the cat door before either of them caught up to him.

The cat door itself almost tripped him up, but Shouta relied on the cat-brain’s instinct and barely even stumbled as he shot through the swinging gate and out onto the sidewalk.

It was later than he’d expected, the sun already high in the sky, and beastly hot. The pavement burned on his paw pads, though not to the extent that Shouta would have expected if he were walking around barefoot in his usual form. It wasn’t actually as terrible as he thought it should be. For some reason, he felt cooler in his black fur coat than he would have expected. He did get a strange urge to start grooming himself, which he was chalking up to ‘inexplicable feline instincts’.

The bus stop was only a few streets down, and Shouta was glad that he had picked the police station instead of either of his other potential destinations. Just walking those three blocks took forever, and crossing the street was one of the most nerve-wracking things he’d ever done. At least it was daytime, and he wasn’t a black cat on the black road in the middle of the night.

While he waited for the bus, Shouta practiced jumping up onto and down off of the bench at the bus stop. He found, after much trial and error, that it all came down to letting the cat instincts take over. If he thought about it too hard, he would inevitably trip over himself and either not get enough height to land on the bench or fail to keep his feet under him when he landed.

Unfortunately, he found out a bit later that if he leaned on his cat instincts too much, he’d end up grooming himself. Which was certainly… an experience.

Shouta paused, his tongue still sticking out of his mouth, as he realized what he was doing. Maybe he should try to figure out how to jump properly without the cat brain getting involved.

That ended in several more bruises, but Shouta managed to judge the distance and strength required to get onto the bench, the ledge around the bus stop, and the edge of the plant pots on either side. He then promptly fell off said ledge about a dozen times, and by the time the bus finally came, Shouta was even more tired than usual and sore all over. But he did manage to get up the bus stairs first try.

Several people glanced at him curiously, but nobody gave him a second glance except a middle-aged woman with curious gold eyes. She caught the attention of the little girl sitting next to her – with the same choppy pink hair, so likely her daughter – and pointed at Shouta, murmuring something that sounded like ‘good luck’.

Shouta had almost forgotten that solid black cats were good luck. At least he wasn’t in one of the places where black cats were bad luck. The last thing he wanted was someone coming after him for being ‘cursed’ or whatever. He had enough problems already, thanks.

“What’s it doing here?” the little girl asked.

“Looking for help,” the mother answered, and Shouta’s attention snapped back to them. How could she possibly know…? That was a stupid question. In this day and age, there was always one easy answer. Her Quirk told her somehow.

“Not ours?” the little girl asked.

“No, it doesn’t need our help,” the mother laughed. “What do you see?”

“Other people are looking for it,” the little girl said confidently, “people that care about it.”

“Well, there you go,” the mother said, clearly approving, “It’ll find its owners again, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” the little girl agreed.

The fur on Shouta’s spine prickled, and he looked away from the too-knowing golden eyes. A Quirk like that was subtly powerful. Terrifying in the wrong hands, but equally incredible in the right person.

Shouta busied himself with trying to read the destination display at the front of the bus. It was much more difficult with his feline eyes, as everything looked about the same color, but he was pretty sure he knew what was going on. Since it was around the middle of the day, the bus was mostly empty. The gold-eyed woman seemed relatively sympathetic, or at least unlikely to intentionally harm what she perceived as a lucky animal. Shouta jumped up onto the seat next to her, only scrambled a little bit as he just slightly misjudged the strength of jump required to get up to it, then settled instinctively into an easy loaf.

One paw stuck out to dangle over the edge of the seat, and Shouta rested his head on his foreleg and drifted into a vague half-sleep. He found that he could close his eyes, though it didn’t feel like closing his eyes as a human. Not that he really cared. He was exhausted, and sleeping was his usual transit activity, anyway.

After almost twenty minutes of dozing, Shouta was roused by a finger tapping at his spine. He snapped at it automatically and almost fell off the seat as he twisted around to reach the intruding finger.

“Your stop is coming up,” the gold-eyed woman said crisply, and Shouta stared at her for a moment. Was she talking to a cat?

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” the woman said. “No ordinary cat has goals like ‘get off the bus at this specific stop’ or ‘make it to the police station to talk to this officer’. I don’t care what your Quirk is, but I suspected you could understand us the second you stepped onto the bus.”

“Thanks,” Shouta admitted begrudgingly. He knew she wouldn’t understand him, but maybe he’d get his point across. His stop was coming up, anyway. He could immediately run away from the social interaction that was somehow even more awkward as a cat.

He did just that, leaping down the stairs as easily as he’d gone up them. Then, he ran facefirst into his next issue. The bus stop by his house was mostly abandoned at this time of day. It was a residential area only, full of endless neighborhoods of tiny homes. The bus stop nearest the police station was in the middle of the city, and the lunch rush was in full swing.

The sidewalks were swarmed with people, each one easily six times Shouta’s height and none of them looking down. With all the people around, it would be a miracle if Shouta made it to the police station without getting stepped on, kicked, run over by a car or bicycle, or even intentionally attacked for fun. He’d seen some pretty terrible things people were willing to do to animals, and he wasn’t eager to experience it himself.

Shouta took a deep breath and started down the sidewalk. His cat eyes, he discovered, were designed to see movement. Everything was mostly the same color, but he could still easily tell where people were and what was moving. It was like the naturally more attentive vision that came with his Quirk dialed up to eleven. With the help of his whiskers and his ears swiveling in every direction, Shouta found that it wasn’t actually very hard to avoid the proportionally huge feet of the crowds of people hurrying down the street.

There were a lot of exclamations as he passed, shouts of ‘kitty!’ or gasps of ‘cute!’, but nobody tried to stop him. He was making good progress towards the police station. He was about ninety-eight percent sure that, despite his size and messed-up vision, he was still on the right track, and soon this whole fiasco would be over and Shouta could go back to tormenting his students into being better heroes.

And then, of course, everything went wrong.

Chapter Text

The world fell apart with a sound like a hundred windows shattering simultaneously. This was a sound that Shouta knew intimately. He had discovered in his second year at UA that when Hizashi was sufficiently startled – or sufficiently petty – he could make a sound that humans couldn’t hear but that was at the exact right frequency to shatter UA’s shatter-proof windows.

Shouta paused for an instant to lament that, with the proper training, Jirou could probably do the same, and since he now knew that, he’d have to tell her that. Then he bolted towards the disturbance.

Instinct fully took over, and Shouta balanced on ledges he never would have dared and took leaps that he knew he would have botched if he thought about them. He bounded from one thin rail to another, jumping from bike rack to windowsill to a pavilion protruding over a storefront. The pavilion was at a steep angle, but Shouta dashed across it so fast he barely even touched ground, and from there he leaped across a line of stopped traffic before racing down the sidewalk at full tilt.

Shouta had to quickly change course as the sidewalk in front of him was suddenly covered in broken glass. The broken glass sent him to the tops of signs, the edges of trashcans, and even across the seat of an abandoned bicycle, but it meant he was getting close. It was only as he neared the epicenter of the damage that Shouta realized what he was doing.

He was a cat. What chance did he have against any human? Even if the human relied entirely on their Quirk – which Shouta could erase for pretty much as long as he wanted – they were still ten times his size. He was pulling off jumps he was sure even a regular cat would struggle with, so likely his parkour skills had translated into cat form, but even if his fighting skills had done the same, Shouta was still only a four-kilogram housecat.

On the other hand, if there was literally any other hero on scene, with Shouta there to erase the villain’s Quirk, their job would get immeasurably easier.

Mind made up, Shouta continued around the corner that had given him pause, slinking along the ledge on the side of the building. How he’d gotten onto that ledge was a bit of a blur, and he was sure if he wasn’t used to jumping off of roofs, he would have fallen off already, but it served his purpose for now.

There was a trio of people standing in front of a storefront, the only three people on the street. They all looked very similar, with the same face shape and body structure along with their nearly identical spiky hair that Shouta was pretty sure was green. The one in front was swearing up a blue streak, his closed fist still pressed against what appeared to be the sole surviving window in at least a block. There were shards of broken glass whirling around him, seething and flashing like a living thing.

Shouta mentally dubbed him Glass-breaker.

“Are you done?” the only woman of the group drawled. She was wearing the combined half-and-half gloves usually used by people with five-point activation Quirks, and when she brushed a strand of hair from her face, it crackled like warming ice.

“No,” Glass-breaker said fiercely, kicking the wall and then swearing as he jammed his toe.

“Would you just let me turn it into glass?” Five-point said, exasperated.

“I thought your Quirk didn’t work on composite materials,” the last one said tentatively. His skin was glossy and reflective, and he was partly translucent, as though he was made entirely of stained glass.

“It’s just plexiglass.” Five-point rolled her eyes, already peeling off a glove. “It works fine on plexiglass.”

“But-” Windowpane was silenced by Five-point waving her now bare hand at him pointedly.

“Hush.” She turned her attention to Glass-breaker, who was now cursing in a lower voice. “Would you get out of the way?”

Glass-breaker grumbled, but moved aside. Five-point reached towards the window, and Shouta activated Erasure. All five fingers made contact. Nothing happened.

Five-point pulled her hand back, frowning at the window.

“Told you,” Windowpane muttered.

“No, it should have worked!” Five-point snapped. “It’s definitely just plexiglass. Why didn’t it work!?”

“Did you check your hair?” Glass-breaker drawled. Five-point’s gloved hand flew to her hair, which crackled and crunched as she carded her hand through it. She frowned harder.

“What the-?”

“Try again?” Windowpane suggested, rocking on his heels and subtly tapping the window they were so interested in.

Five-point touched the window again, then flattened her hand on it. Whatever she was expecting to happen completely failed. She let out a frustrated snarl and slammed the side of her fist against the window. It barely even shuddered.

“Hey!”

Shouta had, of course, heard the footsteps approaching, but he’d hoped whoever it was had the sense to sneak up on the villains properly. Alas, as with most daylight heroes, this one had no grasp of the element of surprise.

Five-point cursed, whirling to face the Hero as she ripped her other glove off. Glass-breaker turned with her, more broken glass flying to join his cloud from the nearby street and sidewalks. Even Windowpane moved towards him, likely against his will, as it was more of a stumble than a step.

Windowpane was actually made of glass, then. Interesting. It seemed like a Quirk that would make him very fragile without some other augmentation, especially around the joints, where there were likely tiny fractures whenever he moved.

“What are you three doing here?” the Hero asked, almost bouncing as she approached the trio. “Haven’t you heard? There’s an active villain threat in this area!”

For a moment of eternal exhaustion, Shouta thought she was being serious.

Then he finally released Erasure and turned towards the Hero, and he recognized her in a moment. Rebound, a Hero with a personality similar to Ms. Joke. Her Quirk, Barricade, let her form barriers that acted as immovable walls wherever she placed them. She was lower on the rankings, one of the rank-and-file Heroes, rather than the hotshots at the top, but Shouta made it his business to know every Hero active in Shizuoka, daylight or underground.

The trio of villains – caught in the act of, at the very least, mass vandalization and destruction of private and government property – shared confused looks. Their expressions practically screamed ‘is she for real?’.

She was, in fact, for real.

Shouta watched as Rebound stepped closer to the villains, waving her hands in a way that would look like exuberance to most, but Shouta recognized as the almost tossing motions she used to set up her Quirk. The barriers – usually nigh invisible, even to Shouta – seemed almost painfully evident now. They glimmered faintly with subtle perpetual motion, like a heat shimmer in the air.

“It could be dangerous out here!” Rebound said, her voice full of false concern, “We haven’t pinned down the villain’s exact locations yet, but they’re likely to be somewhere very near here!”

Glass-breaker opened his mouth – probably to say something insulting, scornful, or both – but stopped short as he took a step forward and ran directly into a barely-visible barrier.

“Hey! What did you do!?”

Rebound hastily made several more tossing motions, and Shouta saw more barriers snap into place behind the villains.

“Didn’t you hear?” Rebound said, still with her false innocent air, “there’s a group of villains in this area, right around here!”

“You think you’re so clever, don’t you,” Five-point sneered, stalking forward to stand beside Glass-breaker. She slammed her hand against the barrier, and Shouta was too slow to activate Erasure.

Thin cracks spread over the barrier like a spiderweb fracture, creeping all the way to the edge of the barrier. The cracks thickened, turning into shiny copper soldering, and the shimmering, almost invisible material of the barrier turned into glossy frosted glass. Shouta couldn’t tell what color it was, but it was at least several different shades, each piece different from the ones next to it.

Glass-breaker lifted his hand, but this time, Shouta beat him to it. The swarm of broken glass swirling around him all dropped to the ground at once, a cacophony of glass clattering against itself, and the stained-glass wall remained obstinately intact.

All three of the Glass siblings were clearly thrown for a loop, and Five-point sneered at Glass-breaker like it was his fault his Quirk had up and stopped working. Shouta might have grinned, if he’d been in his usual human shape. Glass-breaker snarled back and put a fist through the stained-glass wall. He was wearing thick gloves, likely for the express purpose of handling broken glass, and he barely even faltered as the stained glass rained down around him.

“Well, that’s usually not supposed to happen,” Rebound said chipperly, “I don’t suppose you could be convinced to step back a bit?” she made a vague shooing gesture that Shouta could only barely see from the corner of his eye.

“Yeah, sure,” Windowpane took a step back, directly onto the pile of broken glass Glass-breaker had dumped on the ground when his Quirk was erased. As he stepped on the pile, it vanished. And he got bigger. Much bigger.

Shouta transferred his Erasure-enhanced glare to Windowpane, but it appeared the damage was already done. Windowpane was now easily twice the size of an average human, built like All Might with long serrated claws of glass instead of fingers. He stepped forward again, moving past Glass-breaker and Five-point, who were both smirking at Rebound now.

“Hm, methinks that may be not ideal,” Rebound tapped her cheek thoughtfully, gesturing vaguely at Windowpane. A barrier snapped into existence in front of him, but Windowpane went right around it, almost like he could see exactly where it was.

Rebound tossed another barrier, this one horizontal, right in front of Windowpane, and it neatly clotheslined him before he could even react. Dark fractures cracked into existence in Windowpane’s neck, and he stumbled back, shaking his head.

Five-point and Glass-breaker were moving again, and with no other Hero appearing to help Rebound, that job fell on Shouta.

He couldn’t cancel both Quirks at once, so he had to go one at a time. Shouta leaped down from the ledge in two huge jumps, all the way down to the now-empty asphalt. He took off across the empty street, bee-lining straight for Five-point.

A five-point activation Quirk, by definition, required five points of contact to activate. Shouta wasn’t going to bite any fingers off – even if he could, Five-point hadn’t yet done anything that merited such an extreme response – but that didn’t stop him from biting.

Five-point yelped, pointing at him as Shouta bolted towards her, and Glass-breaker scrambled away with a frantic curse. Shouta ignored Glass-breaker entirely, leaping up towards Five-point’s hand. Erasure flared behind his eyes, and he instinctively wrapped his legs around Five-point’s wrist and arm, biting down hard on her extended pointer finger.

The world turned into a nauseating blur as Five-point started shrieking and flailing wildly, shouting and swearing and even jumping up and down. Shouta flattened his ears and dug his teeth in deeper.

“Help me!” Five-point shrieked, and a pair of hands dug at Shouta’s side, ripping him off Five-point and dropping him hastily on the ground. Shouta landed on his feet and whirled on Glass-breaker, who was already- sneezing. He was sneezing, huge gasping sneezes that left his eyes watering and sounded like he was trying to expel one of his lungs.

Well, that made everything a lot easier for Shouta.

He went for Five-point’s other hand.

He got a worse grip this time, and could only sink his teeth into the webbing between her thumb and pointer finger, but the shaking and screaming and swearing it elicited was the same.

“Get it off yourself!” Glass-breaker shouted over Five-point’s squalling. His voice sounded rough and congested, but not like he was in danger of asphyxiation. “I’m not touching that thing!”

Shouta squirmed forward a bit on Five-point’s next swing and viciously bit the tip of her thumb.

She shrieked again and started frantically repeating, “Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!”

“Let me help you with that.” The world abruptly stopped shaking, and Shouta found Rebound standing over him, smiling innocently at Five-point as she gripped the villain’s wrist with one hand.

Shouta let go of Five-point’s thumb, looking around warily. Windowpane looked a lot smaller, almost child-sized, and he was trapped in a small box made of Rebound’s barriers. Glass-breaker was still sneezing, his eyes watering ferociously, but he’d been fitted with a pair of Quirk-canceling handcuffs that were looped around a thin, pole-like barrier anchored to the asphalt.

Shouta tried to let go of Five-point’s wrist, but found that his cat-brain wouldn’t let him, only gripping harder. He pushed down his feline instinct and manually pried his paws away, dropping heavily to the ground.

“Why don’t you take a trip with me,” Rebound said, and Shouta found himself scooped up into her arms. “Don’t want you to step on any glass, huh, kitty?”

As Eraserhead, Shouta had interacted with Rebound exactly twice. The first had been from a distance, when they’d both been on the same bust, and she’d struck him as obnoxiously cheerful and far too awake for the six o’clock action. The second had been more direct, when one of Shouta’s longer, more involved cases had spilled into an immediate daylight threat. He didn’t know a whole lot about Rebound, but from that he’d gathered from those two interactions, he’d got the impression of a Present Mic-like persona; she was cheerful and bubbly, but she played it up and overemphasized to get people to underestimate her.

“Fortunate that the police station is so nearby,” Rebound mused aloud as a patrol car pulled up several meters away.

“The barriers are only around him,” Rebound waved at Windowpane, who was pressing a hand against the barrier above him, “and there’s a pole there.”

The officer nodded, moving towards Glass-breaker.

“I’m going to go ahead to the station,” Rebound reported. The officer’s partner gave Shouta a strange look, but offered Rebound an parting nod.

Shouta squirmed out of her arms as soon as she started walking, clawing out of her grip. He didn’t want to step on any broken glass, and now he wasn’t driving exclusively with his Hero muscle memory, he doubted he could make half the jumps he’d taken without even thinking on his way to the scene of the crime. He also didn’t want to be carried around like a baby, though, and Rebound’s costume was tough enough that Shouta could claw his way onto her shoulder. Balancing was a bit tricky, but Shouta could balance on a lot of precarious perches even as a human. Once he had a feel for his balance and the way Rebound moved, the extra grip his claws gave him made it practically child’s play.

The two blocks to the police station practically flew by. After spending most of the day as a cat, human walking speed was actually an upgrade.

“Rebound,” an officer greeted the moment she walked through the lobby.

“I’m just here to drop off this cat!” Rebound said cheerfully, slipping into the bullpen, “It’s clearly a hero in training.”

“Rebound,” Naomasa sighed. He was sitting at his desk, and it looked like he’d been there for a while. It may have been hypocritical of Shouta to think, but did that man even sleep? He’d been showing no signs of stopping when Shouta had left around two in the morning, and here he was, at his desk again. Or maybe at his desk still. Judging by the tired exasperation and the heavy bags under his eyes, Shouta suspected it was ‘still’.

“I’m not kidding!” Rebound objected, “It took down two villains singlehanded!”

That gave Naomasa pause, and Shouta was sure it had rung truthful to his Quirk.

“Or would that be single-pawed?” Rebound mused, tapping her chin thoughtfully.

“Rebound,” Naomasa sighed again, somehow even more exhausted this time.

“I think it’s probably single-pawed,” Shouta said. Or, rather, he let out a thoughtful ‘nyaa’ that made Naomasa look at him like he’d sprouted a second head.

“That cat just told the truth.”

Rebound blinked, startled, before recovering a split second later and beaming at Naomasa. “Told you!”

“Is Sansa in?” Naomasa asked his palms, which he’d buried his face in.

“Dunno,” Rebound said, “Should I go look for him?”

“No, just- just leave the cat here,” Naomasa said. “Head back to your route. I’ll send someone else.”

Shouta jumped down from Rebound’s shoulder as she gave her chipper agreement, managing to land perfectly between a manila folder labeled with a case number and Naomasa’s cup of cold coffee. He tracked Rebound’s footsteps with one ear as she wandered away, but he didn’t break eye contact with Naomasa.

“You’re not an ordinary cat.” Naomasa said finally.

Shouta nodded.

“…you can understand me, can’t you.”

Shouta nodded again. He was sure he was smiling now, likely just as unsettling on a cat’s face as it was on his usual human face.

“Juuust what I needed,” Naomasa despaired.

Oh, how Shouta wished he could imitate Nedzu’s signature cackle. He could get close as a human, but he was about nintey-nine percent sure a cat’s throat couldn’t even make that noise.

“Sir?”

“Officer Sansa!” Instantly, Naomasa was straight-backed and professional, sorting his papers with an absentminded tap. He looked up at Sansa, then visibly hesitated, apparently bracing himself for the bizarreness of the question he was about to ask.

“…can you talk to cats?”

Officer Sansa stared at Naomasa unblinkingly. He slowly turned to look at Shouta.

“Well, can you?” Shouta asked.

Sansa’s ears flattened sideways. “Not usually?”

“Well, usually cats don’t tell the truth, either,” Naomasa sighed.

“I feel like I should be able to understand him,” Sansa said slowly, “But only on an instinctual level.”

“Enough to answer yes or no questions?” Naomasa asked.

“Probably.”

“Okay.” Naomasa briefly pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Okay. Do you want to… interview the cat?”

“Sir?”

“I need to…” Naomasa waved vaguely at the folder Shouta was sitting next to, and Sansa’s whiskers drooped. He looked conflicted, his gaze darting between Shouta, the folder, and Naomasa.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t get some outside help on that, sir?” Sansa asked cautiously. “I’d be willing to look it over with you.”

Naomasa rubbed his eyes, staring at the folder like it might at any second turn into an obituary. His tired gaze turned to Sansa. Shouta had seen that look before. That was Naomasa’s Look of Judgement. It was a bit like Nedzu’s Appraisal of Usefulness, and Shouta had been reliably informed that he had a similar expression. It was the Look that meant ‘can I trust you with this?’ and ‘how can I use you to my benefit?’ and ‘will you get in my way?’. Clearly, Sansa recognized it, too, as he straightened under Naomasa’s inspection.

“…Fine,” Naomasa agreed finally.

Sansa hid his relief well, but Shouta noticed his ears relax from their stiffly alert posture.

“Why don’t we reach out to someone who can actually talk to cats?” Sansa suggested carefully, “There’s that kid from UA?”

Naomasa stared at Sansa blankly. The look on his face very clearly showed that he hadn’t even considered that. Now Shouta was actually getting concerned. Just how long had Naomasa been working? He was usually a hard worker, but this was getting extreme, even for him. He only got this invested when it was personal, important, or both.

“Good idea,” Naomasa said after a worrying pause. “Good idea. I’ll call Nedzu. You can take this folder,” Naomasa slid the folder off the desk and handed it to Sansa. “And follow me to get the rest. Remember this is a need-to-know case, Officer Sansa.”

“Yes Sir,” Sansa agreed, accepting the folder from Naomasa and falling in behind him.

“Cat,” Naomasa looked like he was dying a little bit inside, “stay here. We’ll be back in a minute.”

Shouta nodded, settling onto his stomach to wait as Naomasa stepped out of the room, Sansa hot on his heels. They had been gone for less than a minute when a pair of officers entered the bullpen. Shouta glanced at them briefly, then set his head back down. He’d never entirely understood a cat’s urge to lie in a sunbeam before, but the slice of light falling over Naomasa’s desk made him feel like he could sleep for a year.

“Hey, what’s that cat doing in here?”

Shouta had lifted his head and even opened his eyes, excited to see the cat, before being forcibly reminded by the muzzle in his vision that he was the cat.

“It probably shouldn’t be here,” one of the officers said dubiously.

“It’s lying on Tsukauchi’s desk,” the other one pointed out. “He’s got the folders and stuff.”

“The classified stuff, with All Might?”

“Yeah.”

Shouta tipped his head at the two officers, who were both staring at him with nervous expressions.

“I feel like the cat shouldn’t be here.”

“Should we… try to get rid of it?”

The officers shared a look, then started towards Shouta.

Immediately, Shouta was on his feet, shaking off the warm lethargy from the sunbeam.

“What do you think the odds are that it’s a law-abiding cat?” the officer on the left asked. His eyes shone dark blue as he spoke, and Shouta arched his spine, ready to activate Erasure at a moment’s notice, but unwilling to give away his ace in the hole before they did something actually threatening.

“A cat.” The other officer said flatly. “Law-abiding.”

“Yes, definitely,” the first one replied, his eyes flooding solid blue. Shouta activated Erasure, but he picked the wrong target.

“Stop.” The officer without the blue eyes ordered, and Shouta’s fur flattened, spine straightening and Erasure releasing without any conscious input.

“Get off the desk and leave the way you came. Don’t come back.” Shouta’s body moved without his input. It felt sort of like when Hitoshi controlled him, but not exactly. With Hitoshi, it was like he was looking at his own body from far away. This was more like there was a glass wall between his mind and his body. Because that was just what he needed, on top of being a cat.

Blue-eyes even held the door open for him, letting Shouta slink out towards the front door, the way he’d come in.

“You think that’ll work?” Commanding-voice asked.

“Ask again later.”

And then the door slid shut, and Shouta was still moving, all the way out onto the street.

Chapter Text

 The invisible wall between him and his actions showed up every time he tried to get back into the station, no matter which route he took. Crouched behind a sign at the edge of the street – about the closest he could get before the officer’s lingering Quirk took over – Shouta glared at the door to the police station. He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this.

Hopefully, the officer’s Quirk would wear off with time. If not, Shouta could find the officer in question once he’d been turned back into his proper form. But with Naomasa and Sansa out of the equation, it was unlikely anyone else would be willing to help him. Better to go directly to the source: UA.

He could probably find the Omousueru’s residence if he tried, but there was always the chance he’d misremember their address. Even if he made it there, there wasn’t any assurance that the kid would even realize there was something up. Koda would know, though.

So, that meant he had to get back to the bus stop. There was no way he could make it over the roofs in his current form, especially with how physically exhausting his day had been. He’d have to take the bus to the train station, then the bus again, then switch routes about halfway through.

Which meant, first and foremost, getting back to the bus stop.

The streets had been halfheartedly swept, but they wouldn’t be properly cleaned until after nightfall, so Shouta still had to be very careful where he stepped. He couldn’t see the remaining glass shards nearly as well in this form, but on the bright side, he was a lot closer to the ground. Scanning the ground like he was doing a hero patrol, Shouta slowly picked his way back to the bus stop. Even that short walk, in such a small form and being so careful, took him over an hour.

Shouta turned the corner and saw the bus idling at the stop as the last person got into it. He broke into a sprint, but unlike when a person was making tracks to get to the bus in time, the bus driver didn’t bother to stop for a running cat. The doors closed, and the bus pulled away right as Shouta made it to the awning.

The next bus taking the route he wanted would be another hour and fifteen minutes.

For a long, contemplative moment, Shouta considered the merits of giving up now and living the rest of his life as a cat, unremarkable and without a care in the world. And then he remembered his class of hellions, his own cats, and, most importantly, Hizashi. Also, cats didn’t have thumbs. It had been less than a day, and Shouta already missed his thumbs. And, rarely as he used it, his voice. He wanted to talk to someone.

So, Shouta retreated under the awning and settled onto one of the bus stop’s benches to wait. He knew better, now, than to let the sunlight and the unfamiliar body ease him into a deeper sleep than he wanted. He kept to his usual shallow cat naps, waking every few minutes or when a particularly noticeable noise dragged him out of his dozing. It was harder to sleep lightly as a cat – everything seemed noteworthy with such sensitive ears, and the warmth made him want to slow down and really sleep – but he managed.

He noticed the bus himself this time, and managed to be out of his seat and on the bus almost before the driver had opened the door all the way. Then he immediately ran into another problem.

Shouta didn’t have a problem with heteromorphic Quirks. He knew there were a lot of people who considered those with heteromorphic Quirks to be unnatural or subhuman, but Shouta worked for a literal biological rat who happened to get a Quirk that made him a genius. The only gripe he had with mutations was that his Quirk didn’t work on them, which made it a lot harder to fight heteromorphic-Quirked villains. Other than that, though? He didn’t particularly care.

Nor did Shouta particularly dislike snakes. He thought they were interesting creatures, and he firmly believed but would never admit out loud that he thought their faces were cute. Other than the risk of potential venom, there wasn’t any logical reason to avoid snakes, and as long as you could identify which ones were toxic, that was a nonissue.

Most cats, on the other hand, hated snakes. Shouta had once presented Missy with a cucumber, just to see what happened. What had happened was that Shouta had needed to cancel her Quirk very quickly before she exploded a cucumber all over the kitchen. Bakugowo had puffed up like a very loud pine tree and bolted as soon as the coast was clear.

Shouta was so busy dodging feet and a few tails, tentacles, or other such limbs that he didn’t realize there was a snake in the bus until he practically tripped over it.

“MROWW!” Shouta screeched, springing away before a single conscious thought could pass through his head.

Immediately, the bus was in chaos. People were shouting and scrambling away, others shouting and hastening towards the snake, quirks going off in their shock and confusion.

Shouta stared around himself in confusion, momentarily disoriented by his unexpectedly high vantage point. It took him a moment to realize that in his instinctual panic he had scaled a living person. He was balanced across their shoulders, claws dug through the fabric of their vest, their dress shirt, and likely into their skin as well.

“Hey, nii-san…” the young man standing beside Shouta – or, rather, beside the man Shouta was standing on – started, clearly stifling his laughter. “You’ve got, uh. Something on your shirt.”

“Thank you, Nisekao-kun,” the man said easily, “I hadn’t noticed.”

“I’m so sorry!” Their exchange was interrupted from the middle of the bus. One of the two women who hadn’t run from the snake was bowing at nearly ninety degrees, long green hair falling into her face. “My Quirk is similar to the Snake Hero: Uwabami’s, and I had not noticed one of my snakes was missing from my headdress!”

There was a snake wrapped around her arm. Even just looking at it made Shouta dig his claws deeper into the man’s shoulders, his fur puffing up completely against his will.

“I didn’t mean to disrupt anyone!” the woman said, and then repeated, “I’m so sorry!”

The man that Shouta was standing on jerked his head towards the woman, and the kid – Nisekao – hurried towards her.

“That’s perfectly alright, madame,” Nisekao said gently, holding out his hand. “We don’t begrudge you the mistake. Everyone’s lost control of their Quirk a time or two.”

The whole bus started to murmur in agreement, and the woman hesitantly lifted her head. Shouta caught sight of tears still glimmering in her eyes.

Well, now he felt like a terrible person, especially since he physically couldn’t relax with the snake still in sight. It was a miracle his Quirk hadn’t activated automatically and tipped off everyone in the bus that he was, at the very least, a Quirked animal.

Slowly, people started filtering back to their seats. The snake woman had as wide a circle around her as a crowded bus could get, but that was pretty small. Fortunately, the snake vanished up her sleeve, and Shouta could finally relax his tense, hackle-raising muscles.

“You want some help with that, nii-san?” Nisekao offered cheekily.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” the man agreed.

Shouta forced himself to retract his claws, wincing as one paw caught on the fabric of the man’s expensive-looking vest. He tried to jump down to the floor of the bus, but he couldn’t find a clear spot before Nisekao plucked him off the man’s shoulders.

“Where’d the kitty come from, anyway?” Nisekao wondered, cradling Shouta like a baby. “It’s sooo cute, don’t you think, Kamen-nii?”

“It is quite a handsome specimen,” Kamen agreed. “All black. That’s good luck, you know.”

“You’re just upset it’s not a tuxedo,” Nisekao pouted at him. “You hate every cat that’s not a tuxedo, is that it?”

“I don’t hate cats that aren’t tuxedo’s,” Kamen sighed. “No matter how many times you ask, I still will not hate cats that aren’t tuxedo.”

“You hated Toto.”

“Toto was a loathsome creature, regardless of his color,” Kamen said firmly.

“Well, can we keep this one, then?” Nisekao shifted his grip, and before Shouta had a chance to do anything but yelp in protest, he was being dangled by his armpits in front of the unimpressed Kamen.

It didn’t necessarily hurt, but it was certainly uncomfortable. Shouta squirmed, barely even catching Kamen’s response – “Your dad brings home enough cats for the whole house, Nisekao” – before he wriggled right out of Nisekao’s grip and fell unceremoniously to the floor.

Immediately, Shouta was moving. Away from Nisekao and Kamen, past the green-haired snake lady and her scaly friend, and all the way to the back of the bus. There were no snakes at the back of the bus, fortunately, nor was there anyone who wanted to take him home with them. Shouta slipped under the seat and closely watched the sign displaying the next stop. It was only a twenty-minute ride the rest of the way, and then Shouta hurriedly got off the bus.

Nobody stopped him. Nisekao made kissy noises, but Kamen pulled him away before he could try to go after Shouta.

Shouta had to run from the bus stop to the train station to make it in time, the arrival and departure times not coordinated for a creature as small as him. He made it through the turnstile just in time, sprinting to board the train before it pulled away.

“Kitty!”

Shouta vowed to never again in his life pester a cat that wanted to be left alone. At least Nisekao had clean hands. This child – most likely a boy, but Shouta hadn’t gotten a good look and all children’s voices sounded the same – had something staining his pudgy five-year-old fingers.

Shouta snarled and bit him hard, glad that a cat’s sense of smell didn’t translate to a better sense of taste. Whatever was on his fingers smelled like chemicals and rot, and Shouta didn’t care to taste it.

“Leave it!” a middle-aged woman who was hopefully the kid’s mom snapped, grabbing his wrist as he reached for Shouta again. Of course, the boy immediately started crying, and Shouta pinned his ears to his skull and moved to the other side of the train, retreating under an unoccupied seat. It had been a long day.

Shouta had been suppressing the urge to groom himself all day, but now the rotting, chemical scent was clinging to his fur, and all he wanted was for it to be gone. He let the cat instinct take over, and the scraping of his rough cat tongue over his fur was surprisingly soothing. He was fine. Everything would be fine.

Finally, he didn’t smell like rot anymore, and Shouta settled heavily on his side, peering out from underneath the seat. He didn’t dare try to take a nap, not with the sticky-fingered kid still somewhere in the same car as him. There was a teenager sitting across from him with shifting geometric patterns on her skin, and Shouta watched idly as they split and joined again, constantly moving and never repeating. He wondered what her Quirk was.

The steady shifting was almost mesmerizing, and Shouta had to look away before it lulled him to sleep. The cat vision kept surprising him with how bad it was. The far side of the train was a vague grayish blob, only sudden motions standing out to Shouta.

After what felt like years, the speakers finally announced Shouta’s stop next. It felt like he was wearing training weights again as Shouta dragged himself upright, staggering off the train. He slipped out the gate by following a businesswoman through, then stopped at the base of the stairs up out of the subway tunnels.

It was raining.

In fact, it was pouring, water running in rivulets down the stairs despite the deep storm drains on either side. Shouta’s heart sank, but he forced himself up the stairs.

Instantly, he was soaked to the bone. His fur clung to him like a second skin, and it made him feel like he’d gained twenty kilograms. Seeing in the middle of a rainstorm was also exponentially more difficult as a cat. The constant motion of the rain blended everything into a muddy blur. Shouta could see about a meter in front of him, and that only dimly.

He soldiered on, though, forging towards his next bus stop. He walked right past his first turn, going three blocks in the wrong direction before he realized. Then he had to double back and carefully inspect every street sign, squinting through the pouring rain.

He managed to just barely catch his second turn in time, only realizing it even was his turn because of a particularly noticeable flashing neon sign for the ramen shop on the corner. Shouta almost got hit by a car less than a minute later, and he retreated to the meagre shelter of a restaurant awning with his soaked fur puffed up and spiky from terror.

It took several minutes for his heartrate to slow down, and then several more for him to dare venturing out into the street again. He stuck to the sidewalks as much as physically possible this time. He almost got stepped on twice, and a bicycle zipped by less than half a meter from him, spraying him with a wide arc of muddy water.

Every step felt like it was dragging through thick mud, or like he was trying to shove off the Nomu in the USJ again. The tip of his tail was numb and tingly, which Shouta was pretty sure was bad, but he was just glad it was a warm summer rainstorm instead of a freezing typhoon.

Shouta took a moment to duck under a covered patio for a moment, shaking the worst of the water out of his fur. He flicked each paw individually, lashing his tail and spraying droplets all around him. He almost jumped out of his skin when something hit the ground less than a meter from him, shattering in a spray of glass and alcohol.

A shrill voice guffawed with laughter, and Shouta turned to see a group of older teenagers sitting around one of the tables closest to the door. Their table was stacked with convenience store food, onigiri and cup ramen and yakitori skewers. There were also several bottles of sake. Shouta didn’t recognize the labels, but he suspected they were of a cheaper variety. The sort of thing you might be able to buy without a valid ID.

“Manriki, give me your bottle,” the girl with the shrill, obnoxious voice said, “I wanna see if I can hit it.”

“No!” The guy who looked like he had more muscle than his skin could hold cradled one of the bottles closer to him, “I’m not done with it!”

“Ah, leave the cat alone.” The skinny girl who looked like she was literally made of plastic rolled her eyes more than was actually physically possible without a Quirk allowing it.

“Oh, come on, Ningyo,” the shrill one sighed, “It’s funny.”

“I don’t care, Himei,” Ningyo grumbled, burying her nose farther in her phone, “Just leave it.”

“You can use mine,” the last guy, who had spiky hair that was so bright that Shouta could tell it was orange even through his cat eyes, slid his bottle towards Himei.

“Thank you, Ato,” Himei snapped. She hefted the bottle, and Shouta braced himself to head back into the rain, and then Himei paused.

“Actually, why don’t you do it.” She slid the bottle back to Ato, grinning at him sharply.

He blinked, glancing around cautiously, then whispered – not nearly quietly enough – “You know unlicensed Quirk use is illegal, Himei.”

Shouta’s ears pricked against his will. He did not need another problem like this. The glass siblings were bad enough, and Rebound had been around for that. There was no way Shouta could take on four unknowns at the same time while he was a cat.

“Everything’s legal if there’re no cops around,” Manriki grumbled, chewing on his stripped-clean yakitori stick.

“Exactly,” Himei patted Ato on the back, “It’ll be fine.”

Ato shrugged and hefted the bottle, and Shouta braced himself to bolt again. He really didn’t want to go back into the rain, but it beat getting hit by flying glass. Because just what he needed today was another altercation with more broken glass.

Ato hurled the bottle at him and Shouta leaped away, bolting back into the downpour. It was just as terrible as he’d expected, instantly soaking him through again. Despite the heaviness of his step, Shouta forced himself to run the length of the block before slowing down to a walk again. He’d barely taken two steps when a hand closed around his tail.

The hand yanked hard, and Shouta yowled with pain as his whole spine jolted, nerves tingling.

“Not so fast, kitty!” Himei sing-songed. Shouta wanted to put his claws through her eyes.

“He’s not as fast as I’d hoped,” Manriki said sadly, and the hand on his tail shifted, moving up his spine. Shouta tried to bolt, but he found that he couldn’t move away from the touch. The hand clenched tight around his neck and dragged him up, and all Shouta could do was dangle limply in the grip.

“Oh, put him down Manriki,” Ato said, “I want to chase him down again.”

Shouta was unceremoniously dropped on his feet, and he was instantly running again, sprinting blindly through the rain. Now that he was paying attention, he could hear the strange patch of silence behind him, the hum of raindrops completely replaced by the pounding of footsteps. Every step Shouta took felt like an immeasurable effort, and despite the natural speed and grace of a feline form, the day was taking its toll on him. His last hope was to get up high somewhere a human couldn’t follow.

“Nope!” Manriki’s hand closed on his scruff again mid-air, and Shouta let out a strangled chirp.

“Aw, he almost made it that time,” Himei giggled. “Should we see how far he can get if we let him go?”

“Can we stop running places?” Ningyo grumbled. Shouta tried to force an agreement out past Manriki’s grip around his throat. He’d like to stop running too. At least one of the people in this group had some kind of water-control Quirk, so he wasn’t getting rained on right at this very instant.

It was a cold comfort.

Shouta was supposed to be Eraserhead. He was a pro hero, the scourge of the underground, terror of villains and hero students alike. He was not supposed to be a housecat chased down and tormented by a group of teenage delinquents.

The whole world was a hazy smudge of gray now, Shouta’s vision swimming as he ran out of oxygen. By the time Manriki dropped him again, Shouta was almost too exhausted to even land on his feet. He hit the ground with a wet splat, standing there and shivering for a long moment.

“It’s not even doing anything,” Himei huffed, her voice grating on Shouta’s oversensitive ears.

“Give it a minute,” Ato scolded, and something cold and hard jammed painfully into Shouta’s ribs. The world swam around him when he tried to see what it was, everything swirling and blending together. Had he been drugged? This didn’t feel like just asphyxiation. It felt like something external was messing with his senses.

But it couldn’t have been Manriki, not that fast, and nothing else had touched him. Except… the kid on the subway. Five years old but not in school during school hours, despite wearing the uniform. Traveling with his hypersensitive mother, sticky hands that smelled like chemicals, the chemicals getting in Shouta’s fur… Shouta had been drugged, yes, but most likely completely by accident by a kid with a newly developed Quirk.

“Come on, do something,” Ato sounded impatient now, and the blunt object came back, this time shoving him so hard it almost flung Shouta off his feet. It was Ato’s boot, he realized. Ato was kicking him.

Shouta wobbled on his feet, trying to take a step forward. His human muscle memory clashed with feline instincts, and he went sprawling onto his nose in the mud, his fur immediately plastering to his skin again.

With his claws bared and digging into the mud, Shouta dragged himself forward. Wild laughter echoed behind him, grating on his nerves and making his chest burn with humiliation.

“It’s not a cat, it’s a worm,” Himei shrieked with laughter.

Had Shouta been human, he would have punched her. Several times. Just for doing this to any cat, Shouta would have found a way to charge them with something. Illegal Quirk use, at the very least.

Shouta’s limbs felt like lead, and he finally slumped completely into the rippling mud puddle he was lying in. He barely kept his nose above water, hardly able to breathe with the world dipping and spinning around him.

“Come on, get up.” Ato nudged Shouta’s side with his toe again, and Shouta braced himself to be kicked. He knew it was coming. He could barely even see, let alone stand up, and he was certain that at least one of the people in this miserable group was the sort that would impart one last kick to the cat they’d been tormenting.

“I wouldn’t do such a thing if I were you.”

Shouta felt like he should recognize that voice, but with the rainfall and the drug in his system and Himei’s shrill cackling, it all blurred together in his mind. All Shouta could think about was that he had to stay awake. At least until they left him alone, and he could drag himself to some meagre shelter to sleep off the drug and wait out the rain.

“Who are you?” a shrill, obnoxious voice demanded.

“Irrelevant.”

The rain came back, pelting Shouta with heavy raindrops, and he groaned low in his chest. The teens had probably left, if the rain was back. Shouta just had to make it to shelter. That was all.

“You’re a very determined kitty, aren’t you.” Cold hands wrapped around Shouta’s sides, lifting him up out of the puddle and into the air again. Everything tipped and spun around him, and Shouta tried to breathe while he still could.

“Don’t worry,” the newcomer said, “I’ll get you somewhere warm and safe.”

The world flipped inside out. One instant Shouta was in a grimy alley in the middle of a summer rainstorm, and the next he was somewhere warm and golden, dripping water onto a smooth hardwood floor.

“What took you so long?” a whiny voice demanded.

“I was slightly delayed,” said the voice holding Shouta.

“Is that another cat?”

There was the sound of chair legs scraping on wood and heavy footsteps, and then a finger poked Shouta between the eyes.

“Why did you bring home another cat?”

Shouta forced his eyes open, trying to focus his gaze on the person standing over him. Their words and tone reminded him of Hizashi, but their voice made his skin crawl with anxiety. He still couldn’t place exactly who they were, who anyone was, but he needed to see.

He finally managed to get his eyes to focus, and was met with shaggy hair, pale skin, and narrow eyes with shrunken irises. What he really recognized was the hand, still stretched out from where it had poked him. And finally, the voices clicked in his head. The deep, eloquent voice holding him, the raspy, whiny voice of the man in front of him, and even the drawl from someone Shouta couldn’t see, his vision a vague haze beyond the hand looming in front of him.

There was no way Shouta was getting out of this. Not as a cat, and probably not even if he’d been in his true form with all his gear and backup already on the way. Blessedly, before Shouta could do more than gasp in surprise, he finally, mercifully, passed out.

Chapter Text

Shouta had endured some pretty terrible fevers in his time. From overwork, from grief, and even Quirk-enhanced sicknesses. He knew what a fever dream felt like, and the previous day certainly hadn’t. Maybe, though, if he was very lucky, it would turn out to have been a Quirk-induced hallucination instead of a Quirk-induced transformation.

Alas, when Shouta pried his eyes open and lifted his head, he found that he was still in the form of a cat, still slightly woozy from the drug or the rain or both, and still in an unfamiliar place with no windows.

Shouta was lying on his side, a soft surface beneath him. His back was pressed against something warm, and there was a warm weight resting on his side, heavy and grounding. He almost slipped away into sleep again, exhaustion still lapping at his limbs.

But he remembered Shigaraki’s hand looming over him, Kurogiri’s voice dragging him out of the rain, and he forced himself to stay awake.

“The cat’s awake,” Dabi’s voice said from somewhere above him.

“Thank you, Dabi.” Kurogiri appeared in front of Shouta, and he couldn’t help the instinctive flinch. Sure, the mist villain had managed to contain himself in a dress shirt and slacks, but his head and hands were still clouds of roiling smoke, and it made Shouta’s arms ache where the Nomu had shattered his bones.

Dabi snorted, and the weight on Shouta’s side shifted, stroking down his fur. “He’s scared of you.”

“A great deal of creatures are scared of me,” Kurogiri informed him blandly, reaching a misty hand towards Shouta. “It rarely lasts long.”

The fur along Shouta’s spine prickled, and he pressed himself against the wall at his back. His heart raced and his ears flattened to his skull. A hiss built up in his throat, and he bared his teeth at the mist man.

“Careful, old man,” Dabi snapped, and a scarred hand batted at Kurogiri’s. “You can’t force him to like you.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Kurogiri said, ducking his hand under Dabi’s to settle what amounted for his fingers under Shouta’s nose.

He smelled like rain. If Shouta had tear ducts, he might have been crying. Kurogiri smelled like rain and springtime and the crisp, clean thunder scent of Oboro’s hair. It had been years since Oboro’s death, but Shouta would never forget. There was nothing at all that smelled like it, except now, this villain that had threatened his students time and time again, and the scent was multiplied a dozen times by a cat’s strong sense of smell, and Shouta couldn’t breathe.

“You see,” Kurogiri said, and his voice was so wrong attached to this familiar scent that it ripped Shouta away from his memories, leaving him reeling.

The first thing that he noticed was that he’d managed to shove his whole head into Kurogiri’s mist, so far that the vague shape of fingers was visible. Shouta quickly pulled away with a sharp sneeze, shaking his head so hard his ears flapped.

“Okay, that’s actually a little spooky,” Dabi said, “and I think I need to text Toga.”

The weight on Shouta’s side lifted away, and Shouta pulled himself to his feet and turned to see what it was. The weight was attached to Dabi, because it was his hand, because Shouta had been sleeping next to him. Shouta vowed then and there to never, ever, no matter who asked or why, tell anyone that this had occurred. Ever.

Unaware of Shouta’s internal crisis, Dabi had pulled out a cracked smartphone and was typing away at the speed of light.

“It doesn’t appear that there are any lasting effects of the cat’s time outside,” Kurogiri said, and Shouta found the mist villain’s head tilted down towards him. The man’s eyes, while obvious to a human, were almost invisible in cat vision. Just two tiny patches of paler mist that weren’t moving.

“You’re welcome,” Dabi grunted distractedly as his phone ‘vwoop’ed with an incoming text.

“Your service is much appreciated,” Kurogiri told him. Before Shouta even had a chance to brace himself, he was being swept up into Kurogiri’s arms. Shouta would actually appreciate if nobody ever picked him up again.

For a moment, Shouta considered. The League didn’t know that he was the cat. Or that the cat was him? They thought he was just an ordinary cat, nothing special about him. And Kurogiri, at least, was unlikely to kill a random cat for doing cat things. He was the one who had scared off the hoodlums and picked Shouta up out of the alley, after all. …He had picked up a stray cat with no collar and not even an indent in his fur where he’d slipped one, picked him up straight off the street, and expected him to just be fine with that? He couldn’t get away with everything just because he smelled like Oboro.

Shouta twisted abruptly in Kurogiri’s arm, sinking his teeth into the man’s sleeve. To his surprise, he hit skin underneath, and Kurogiri dropped him with an undignified yelp.

“Ha!” Dabi let out a bark of laughter. “What was that about cats liking you?”

Kurogiri reached down, but Shouta quickly shook off his surprise from being dropped and was already moving, dodging the man’s hands and making for the edge of the couch.

Of course, Kurogiri wasn’t going to chase him like a regular person.

Shouta saw the portal before it even opened. The air twisted in front of him, scrunching in on itself. By the time it bloomed into curls of black smoke, and he realized it was a portal, though, it was too late. Instead of trying to dodge, he flattened his ears to his skull and dove straight through the opening.

He found himself dropping out of the air right into Kurogiri’s arms again. Well, Shouta knew how to deal with that already. With nothing in convenient biting range, he dug his claws into the villain’s vest and clambered straight up him, squeezing out from under Kurogiri’s grasping hands like a furry snake. Shouta leaped off from his living perch and onto the scratched coffee table in the middle of the room. From there, Shouta jumped to the floor and was off like a shot again, bolting for the edge of the couch.

Another portal twisted the air, but this time Shouta knew what was coming. He skidded around it, and the one that popped up a few seconds later, and again until he rounded the couch.

The room was split neatly in half, and the higher part was a combination of breakfast nook and taproom. Shouta had a split second to take it in before he was hurriedly dodging another portal, and he immediately bolted up the short two steps to the taproom area and made for the collection of expensive-looking bottles lined up along the back counter, dodging portals left and right. The second he jumped onto the counter, the portals stopped.

Dabi, Shouta noted, was laughing like a hyena.

“Oh, he’s got you pegged, ‘giri!” Dabi cackled, “Going for your fancy alcohol; it’s like he knows you!”

“It appears this may be no ordinary feline,” Kurogiri said, and Shouta pinned his ears back and hissed furiously at the approaching villain. There wasn’t a lot he could do against the League of Villains as a cat, but that didn’t mean he was going to just give up.

“What do you mean by that?”

Shouta froze at the familiar voice, his tail puffing up as Shigaraki stepped into the room. He looked like any other teenager, dressed in a loose hoodie and too-short black jeans, wearing only one sock and no shoes. He also looked severely dehydrated, with chapped lips and dry wrinkles around his eyes.

“Shigaraki Tomura,” Kurogiri greeted, tucking his arms behind his back. The image of a proper gentleman’s butler was marred by the claw marks torn into his vest, but Shouta was not even a little bit sorry. It was the least he could do.

“It appears the cat I brought in from the rain last night is far more clever than a standard animal. I suspect it has a Quirk of some sort.”

“Why?” Shigaraki scowled, idly scratching his neck.

“Animals with Quirks tend to be smarter and more capable of cohabiting with humans than otherwise,” Kurogiri explained, and if Shouta had eyebrows, he would have raised them in surprise. Just how sheltered was Shigaraki, if he didn’t know simple facts like that?

“Like Nedzu,” Shigaraki grumbled, and wandered over to fling himself into the recliner opposite Dabi.

“Quite so,” Kurogiri agreed. “Although Nedzu is an extreme example, as his Quirk includes an innate cognitive enhancement.”

Shigaraki muttered something under his breath, then dug a handheld gaming console out of the pocket on the side of the recliner. “Keep the thing around, I guess. Maybe Sensei wants it.”

Shouta suspected ‘Sensei’ meant All For One. The way everyone in the room flicked a glance at the TV stand shoved into the corner at the far back of the breakfast nook only confirmed his suspicion. It came as no surprise to Shouta that they were planning to break All For One out of Tartarus, nor that they were collecting Quirks for the man to steal.

Kurogiri turned back to Shouta, who immediately started hissing at him again. Shouta wouldn’t have expected that a person made of living mist could sigh, but Kurogiri somehow managed.

“Would you please get off that counter?” Kurogiri asked. Shouta backed up a step, so he was standing farther from the edge of the counter.

“He’ll fit right in with the rest of us,” Dabi drawled, despite not even looking up from his phone.

With one eye still on Kurogiri, Shouta started carefully eyeing the fancy alcohol bottles arrayed around him. Oboro’s dad had owned a bar, and all four of them – Oboro, Hizashi, Shouta, and even Tensei – had worked summer jobs there before Oboro’s death, so Shouta knew quite a bit about alcohol. Most helpful at the moment, he knew which of these bottles were actually high-end alcohol, and which ones were cordials in fancy bottles.

There was a raspberry cordial that was mostly empty, sitting right next to the edge of the counter, and Shouta put one paw on the cap. Then, he made direct eye contact with Kurogiri.

“Please do not,” Kurogiri said. Channeling the energy of every unruly cat he’d ever met, Shouta patted at the side of the cordial bottle, nudging it a centimeter closer to the edge.

“Don’t,” Kurogiri said sternly. Shouta hadn’t listened to anyone’s ‘stern voice’ since he’d moved out of his mom’s house.

He pushed the bottle off the edge.

The bottle hit the floor with an almighty crash. Glass shards exploded out from the impact and concentrated fruit juice splattered every surface, coating the floor, cupboards, and even getting up onto the counter and bar. Shouta ignored the droplets of cordial that landed in his fur to stare Kurogiri down with a dead-eyed gaze.

Dabi was cackling again, and he’d finally set his phone aside to drape himself over the back of the couch, resting his chin on his hands and watching Kurogiri slowly lose control of his physical form. Even Shigaraki looked mildly interested, glancing up from his game.

“You sure about this one, ‘giri?” Dabi snickered, “You might just want to throw him back onto the street.”

“Indeed,” Kurogiri agreed darkly. Shouta’s ears pricked. There was an idea. If he made himself enough of a nuisance, he’d likely get dumped back out onto the street somewhere. He just had to make sure to not be too much of a nuisance, or they might just kill him from frustration.

Shouta threaded his way through the bottles and decanters, setting several of them rocking or rattling as he passed. He was careful to stay in the thick of the bottles, not willing to give Kurogiri the chance to grab him, but he was equally careful not to actually tip anything over. He wasn’t here to cause wanton destruction, just to get his point across.

“What’s going on down here?” A reptilian head poked through the doorway, “I heard a crash?”

“Kurogiri’s trying to tame that feral cat he picked up last night,” Dabi drawled, and Shouta quickly shook off the instinctive shot of adrenaline that pulsed through his feline body at the reptilian features. He was undoubtedly Spinner, who had a gecko Quirk, and was not a snake, and so his cat instincts definitely didn’t have a problem with him. And if they did, Shouta was going to make them not have a problem.

“It doesn’t look like it’s going very well,” Spinner said cautiously.

“The best part,” Dabi said eagerly, “is that he was all like ‘oh, all animals love me, I’m a Disney princess’ right before the cat bit him.”

“I suspect this particular cat might know more about me than most others.”

“Oh yeah?” Spinner came all the way into the room, peering at Shouta over the bartop. Shouta glared at him, pinning his ears back and puffing up his hackles again.

“I believe it may have a Quirk of some sort,” Kurogiri said. “Until the nature of its Quirk is revealed, it would be prudent to keep it around.”

Shouta’s heart skipped a beat. If they were waiting for him to reveal his Quirk, they’d be waiting a long time. Revealing Erasure would be a death sentence, especially if anyone made the – not at all unbelievable – leap from ‘black cat with Erasure Quirk’ to ‘shapeshifted Eraserhead’.

“What for?” Spinner asked, and Shouta narrowed his eyes at Kurogiri.

“Quirked animals tend to have more raw power, less skill-based Quirks than people,” Kurogiri said, “and it is much easier to reclaim the Quirk of a feral cat than a person.”

Shouta hissed at him, sinking lower into the bottles of alcohol. This time he forewent the cordials entirely, instead targeting a pricy vermouth that someone had left just a little too close to the edge. He nudged it closer, ears pinned.

“Do you think it understands us?” Spinner asked cautiously.

Shouta pushed the vermouth closer, until the corner of the bottle peeked over the edge of the counter.

“I suspect that may be likely, yes,” Kurogiri said, sounding resigned. Bracing himself for the crash, Shouta pushed the vermouth over the edge.

There was no crash.

From his vantage point on top of the counter, Shouta hadn’t seen the portal twist into existence until after the vermouth had already vanished through it. Kurogiri caught the bottle with ease, and the portal winked out of existence.

“If I stop trying to pick you up, will you leave my bar alone?” Kurogiri asked.

Shouta lashed his tail, narrowing his eyes at Kurogiri.

“You can always go back to breaking things later,” Dabi offered. “I’ll even help!”

The worst part was, Shouta actually believed him. Then again, Dabi did seem like the sort of person who enjoyed wanton destruction. He at least set things on fire a lot.

Although Dabi was actually right. So long as Shouta didn’t let anyone close a door behind him, he could get to the counter again. And he’d already demonstrated that he could dodge Kurogiri’s portals.

With as much dignity as he could muster, Shouta jumped off the counter. Not onto the ground, of course. The floor was still covered in a sticky mess of cordial. Shouta wouldn’t want to walk over that even if he was wearing his boots. It would be a nightmare to get out of fur. Shouta leaped from the counter to the bartop, to a barstool, and finally down to the clean ground beyond the bar.

“Are you negotiating with a cat?” Shigaraki snorted.

“I am negotiating with an asset,” Kurogiri clarified, giving Shouta a wide berth as he went to fetch a towel for the floor. “Just as you have, in the past.”

Shouta might have been offended by that, but it looked like Dabi was going to take enough offense for the both of them, so he let it be. Sure enough, Dabi and Shigaraki very quickly devolved into a loud argument, leaving Shouta to explore the room.

It looked a lot like the descriptions he’d heard of their old hideout, the one Bakugou was taken to. The layout was different, of course, but the general vibes were still there. The room was divided by two short steps running the length. The counter of bottles was against the back wall on the higher side of the room, and there was a large TV against the same wall on the lower side. Beyond the bar, there was a scuffed kitchen table that looked – and slightly smelled – like it had been dragged out of a dumpster, complete with an eclectic mishmash of unmatched chairs.

There were three doors in the room, each in different walls. The one that Spinner and Shigaraki had come through was in the lower section of the room, directly opposite the TV. Between the table and the bartop, where most breakfast nooks should have a window of some sort, there was a door built into the wall. It was mismatched with the wall, made of buffed steel that looked out of place in the domestic setting. It smelled very faintly of ash and blood. Finally, on the living room side, there was another door squeezed between a loveseat and Shigaraki’s recliner. It held the sole window in the room, and from the scuff marks in front of it, Shouta suspected it led to a mudroom/genkan hybrid. For the moment, that would be his goal.

“The cat found the door,” Shigaraki grumbled, and Shouta dodged a halfhearted kick from his socked foot.

“Just don’t let him out,” Kurogiri said, finally finished cleaning up the mess Shouta had made. At least, the mess on the floor and cabinets. He’d moved on to wiping down each remaining bottle one by one, a task Shouta suspected would take him longer than it was worth.

Pretty much the exact second Kurogiri finished his sentence, the door flew open.

Shouta was off like a shot, bolting for the opening.

The young man standing in the door let out a shrill squawk and scrambled out of the way. Shouta was right that the door led to a mudroom, and there was another man behind the first, working on unlacing his boots while the door was still hanging slightly open.

Shouta lunged for the open door, claws scraping over the concrete genkan floor.

“Shut the door!” three different people shouted. The man was too slow to respond, but the door afforded Shouta only one single path to freedom. He saw the air twist, knew a portal was forming right outside the door, but there was nowhere he could dodge to. In an instant that smelled like Oboro’s clouds, Shouta was at the other end of the room again. There was a heavy thud, and the door had closed.

“Kitty!” the young man Shouta had bolted past squealed like a schoolgirl, clapping his hands and bouncing on his toes. Now that he wasn’t racing for his freedom, Shouta actually had a chance to look at the newcomers. They looked suspiciously familiar.

The young man with the combed-flat white hair and the older man with elaborate swirling markings spiraling out from around his eyes… Shouta couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen these two before.

“Is that the same cat we saw on the train?” the older one asked, and realization dawned on Shouta like the day of the first end-of-term paper. Nisekao and Kamen, the two from the train. They were villains?

“Of course it is!” Nisekao squealed, “aw, look at his cute widdle yellow eyes.”

Shouta tilted his head, curious. He was almost positive his eyes had been black when he’d checked the mirror this morning. But it had been his first experience with cat eyes, so it made sense he’d got some colors wrong. To think yellow eyes were black, though… that was pretty extreme.

“Toga,” Shigaraki interrupted, peering out between his bangs, “inside the mudroom.”

“Sorry, Shiggy,” Nisekao – or Toga? – chirped, vanishing back into the mudroom and quickly closing the door before Shouta could even move towards it. It opened again a moment later, and Toga waltzed through, a few blobs of gray ooze still clinging to her hair from the transformation.

“Kitty~!” Toga sing-songed, bouncing forward with glee. Shouta hissed at her, lashing his tail furiously.

“Don’t-” Kurogiri started, but Toga was not dissuaded. In one swift motion, she leaned down and scooped Shouta up into her arms. Well, Shouta knew what to do from here. She was cradling him on his back like a baby, so he couldn’t get the leverage to claw himself out of her hold, but it put Toga’s face right over him.

He went for her eyes.

Shouta was dropped abruptly, hitting the ground to the cathartic sound of Toga shrieking. By now, he’d been dropped so many times that he landed on his feet automatically and was moving before he needed to think about it, bounding away from Toga and slipping under the couch.

The room was silent for a beat. Then, Kamen – who was likely not named Kamen at all – cleared his throat. “I’m going to fix my makeup.”

A door shut, and Shouta heard muffled footsteps retreating on the other side.

“Hey, Dabi, you should tell Twice we have a new cat!”

“We do not have a new cat!” Shigaraki snapped, and then started cursing vociferously. Shouta crept to the edge of the couch, peering out at Shigaraki. There was a pile of dust in his lap, and Shouta noted the suspicious lack of his handheld gaming console. Shouta had seen enough antigravity incidents to infer what had happened.

“This is your fault, bloodsucker!” Shigaraki howled, scratching viciously at his neck.

Dabi snorted, and had it been anyone else, Shouta might have agreed. He had to disagree on principal, unfortunately. And then Shigaraki pulled an identical gaming console from the same pocket of his chair, and Shouta couldn’t resist a feline snicker. It wasn’t like anyone would hear him, anyway.

Chapter Text

Cat food was not nearly as objectionable as Shouta had expected. As far as he could tell, he didn’t really have taste buds as a cat. At least, not nearly as sensitive as even his mostly-burned-out human taste buds. The dry cat food had a nice crunch and didn’t have a notable temperature, and that was good enough for the cat version of him. He would be fine with eating this for a while. Then again, he was the sort of person who would gladly subsist on nothing but mostly-flavorless jelly pouches.

While Shouta crunched his way through a bowl of cat food and tried to drink water with nothing but his tongue, the Leage of Villains was shouting at each other about video games. No, he was not kidding. He desperately wished he was.

“Killstealer!” Shigaraki hissed, “he was mine.”

“He demonstrably was not,” Dabi drawled, and then there was a flurry of rapid button pushing and several choice swear words. Shouta rolled his eyes and crunched another dry pellet. He hadn’t even brought into question the humanity of Toga’s mother. Bakugou cursed worse than that in his sleep.

“Got it!” Toga crowed, and there was a brief scuffle.

“How?!” Spinner demanded, “That’s not even how the game works!”

“Hacks,” Shigaraki snapped.

“Not hacks,” Toga pouted, “glitches. Get rekt, Shiggy. Bleehhh!”

Shouta glanced halfheartedly at the loveseat and sure enough, Toga had her tongue sticking out and one finger pulling down her eye. It was a gesture that looked a lot more impressive on someone with a long, oral-Quirk tongue, but it was still the sort of thing he’d expect from a middle school girl.

Standing beside Shouta with one hand resting on the bartop, Kurogiri let out a long sigh. Despite himself, Shouta reached out to pat the man’s dress shoe sympathetically. Shouta knew a great deal about problem children. As the only apparent voice of reason in the group, Kurogiri deserved as much sympathy as Shouta could muster.

“Rematch!” Spinner snapped, “I demand a rematch!”

“I’m done,” Toga said immediately, dropping her controller on the cushion, “’giri, can I have some lemonade?”

“Of course, miss Toga,” Kurogiri said, ignoring the outraged shouts from the couch as he stepped away to get the supplies.

Shouta turned away from his half-empty bowl of cat food – or completely empty, if you consulted an actual cat – and eyed the distance up to the bartop. Toga had claimed one of the barstools, but there were still two and a half that were standing empty. A half because literally half the barstool had been burned away, the low back now a mess of melted metal and the cushion charred.

Shouta jumped up onto that one, and from there up onto the bartop.

Kurogiri turned around with a lemon in one hand and a glass in the other, and Shouta could practically see the man’s exhaustion settle on his shoulders.

“Kitty!” Toga chirped, and shoved her hand in Shouta’s face. Shouta flattened his ears at her, pulling his head back and lashing his tail.

“Perhaps,” Kurogiri suggested, “you can leave the kitty alone until he approaches you.”

“Aww,” Toga visibly deflated, draping herself across the bartop, “but I want to pet him! He looks so soft…” She made grabby hands at Shouta, but thankfully didn’t actually try to touch him.

“He is,” Dabi said smugly, slumping in the half-melted barstool. “Very soft. The softest cat I’ve ever pet. Even softer than Toto.”

Toga whipped her head around, staring at Dabi like he’d personally set her puppy on fire. “He let you touch him?”

“When he was asleep,” Dabi shrugged. “I’m warm.”

“No fair!” Toga said, sitting upright and radiating righteous fury.

“But didn’t you hold him on the train, Toga-chan?” Mr. Compress asked, slipping into the barstool on the other side of Toga.

“That’s true!” Toga visibly brightened, “oh, I remember now! He is soft. I wanna pet him again!” And she was immediately back to pouting.

Shouta flicked his tail irritably, looking away from Toga to track Kurogiri. The mist man had finished juicing the lemon – by hand – and was mixing several different sugar waters together. Shouta mentally recited the fancy lemonade recipe that Oboro had taught him, Kurogiri following the exact same steps as the Oboro from his memory.

A single lemon, juiced and zested. A dash of soda for fizz, simple syrup for sweetness, and a scoop of ice for crunch. Finally top it all up with-

Kurogiri reached for a spot on the countertop that held only air. He hesitated for a moment, then retrieved a bottle of strawberry syrup from the back of the counter.

-raspberry cordial for color, Oboro’s voice finished cheerfully in Shouta’s head as Kurogiri drizzled strawberry syrup over the layer of ice at the top of the cup. It seeped through the ice to billow and swirl beneath it, mixing into the lemonade like blood in seawater.

“Thanks, ‘giri!” Toga grasped her cup with both hands, pulling it towards her across the bartop.

“Sako?” Kurogiri asked, “Dabi? Can I get you anything?”

Mr. Compress shrugged elegantly, but Dabi requested a cup of coffee, which Kurogiri readily provided. Shouta watched the exchange longingly. He’d done some research when Missy kept trying to get into his coffee, and he’d learned that cats could handle barely twenty milligrams of caffeine per kilogram of body weight. At his meagre four kilograms – approximately – that left Shouta with eighty milligrams of caffeine being potentially deadly. Unless his human caffeine resistance carried over to cat form, but Shouta wasn’t willing to stake his life on that.

“And a saucer of cantaloupe water for the kitty,” Kurogiri added, setting a saucer on the bartop. Shouta stared at it, then at Kurogiri.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Kurogiri told him, “most cats suffer from dehydration, and cantaloupe water, in moderation, won’t do you any harm.”

“Aww,” Toga cooed, “he has his own drink!”

Shouta reluctantly stuck his tongue in the saucer, carefully lapping up the cantaloupe water. It tasted almost like a jelly packet with his muted feline flavor receptors.

Something moved in his peripheral vision, and Shouta’s head snapped up. His teeth were bared and his back arched before he even bothered to think about it, and he swiped at the hand reaching for him with unsheathed claws.

“Stop trying to touch the cat,” Dabi groaned, staring into his coffee cup as he slowly swirled it in tiny circles.

“I’m bleeding!” Toga gasped, sounding absolutely delighted by that fact. Shouta watched her cautiously as she licked the blood from the tiny scratches on her hand. He knew she had a thing for blood, and she’d mentioned that she found it cute when things were covered in blood. She’d also mentioned that she thought he was cute in this form. Generally, Shouta preferred to not be covered in blood.

“That’s what happens when you try to touch feral cats,” Dabi sighed.

“Usually, fleas is what happens when you touch feral cats,” Mr. Compress put in coolly.

There was a beat of silence, and then everyone turned to Shouta.

“He will certainly need a bath,” Kurogiri said, and Shouta was proud of the dubious, almost cautious tone in the mist villain’s voice. Less than an hour of being awake in the villains’ hideout, and they were already scared of him. As a housecat.

“And a collar,” Mr. Compress put in, even more dubious.

Shouta hissed at him.

“Technically,” Kurogiri said, “a collar isn’t necessary for an indoor cat.”

“Unless he gets outdoors,” Mr. Compress said, “In which case we’ll never find him again without a collar.”

“I’ll slip any collar you put on me,” Shouta told them bluntly, his ears still flattened in irritation. None of them understood him, of course, but hopefully he got his point across.

“Before anything else, he’ll need a bath,” Kurogiri said firmly, and since Shouta actually agreed with him – who knew what residues that kid’s Quirk had left on his fur – he let it slide for the moment.

“Ooh!” Toga gasped, bolting upright and almost splashing lemonade over the bartop, “he needs a nameI!”

“No!” Shigaraki snapped from the other side of the room, “You can’t name it, you’ll get attached!”

“Didn’t you name your videogame disposable dog sidekick?” Dabi asked.

“Yeah, and then I had to finish the campaign with the tutorial sidekick!” Shigaraki returned. “No naming the cat!”

“I’m gonna call him Dracula,” Toga giggled, ‘subtly’ sliding one hand across the bartop, closer to Shouta.

“I’m partial to Mistoffelees,” Mr. Compress put in, “Or perhaps Macavity.”

If Shouta hadn’t been desperately pining for Hizashi in high school, he wouldn’t have recognized either of those names. But he had, and Hizashi had always had a thing for old English media, especially musicals, so Shouta had dug up old videos of the original New London Theatre performance of Cats and never, ever spoken of it to anyone except Hizashi.

But Macavity was ginger.

It was literally in the song that Macavity was ginger. And Mistoffelees, while black, was supposed to be small. So help him, if anyone brought up Skimbleshanks – who may well have had a long tail, but was brown and had green eyes – Shouta was going to riot.

“We could call him Charcoal,” Dabi suggested. “Coal, for short.”

“That’s a stupid name!” Twice called from the couch, followed immediately by, “I like it!”

“I believe we should let the cat have some hand in his own naming,” Kurogiri said neutrally. Shouta nodded, jabbing his tail in Kurogiri’s direction. Then he paused. Since when could he point at people with his tail?

Well, presumably since he had a tail. But he was getting better at controlling this form.

“In the meantime,” Kurogiri said slowly, “I suppose I’ll have to give him a bath.”

Shouta flicked his tail and considered how obstinate he was going to be about this. On the one hand, he desperately wanted a bath. On the other hand, he wanted to be as difficult as humanly possible in every conceivable way.

“If you’ll follow me to the bathroom, kitty,” Kurogiri suggested tentatively.

Shouta considered the mist man, the door he was gesturing at, and the counter of valuable alcohol behind him. And the sink built into the counter.

In less than a blink, Shouta had leapt across the gap and was sitting in the sink, coolly licking a paw as if nothing had even happened.

“Or we could do it here,” Kurogiri sighed.

“This kitty’s got more of an attitude than Shigaraki does,” Dabi snorted, downing the rest of his coffee.

“Would you like to step out while I fill up the sink?” Kurogiri asked, defeated. Shouta elegant leaped up out of the sink, lingering beside the fancy crystal glasses lined up on the counter while Kurogiri stopped the sink and started the water running.

“Can you use regular shampoo on cats?” Toga asked idly.

“Baby shampoo is recommended if you don’t have cat shampoo,” Kurogiri said, “Barring that, Dawn dish soap.”

“Like we’ve got the budget for name-brand,” Dabi scoffed.

“I can get you Shiggy’s shampoo!” Toga volunteered, already sliding off her stool.

“Don’t touch my shampoo!”

“Thank you, Toga,” Kurogiri said, waving her on.

Toga bounced out of the room, and Dabi snorted. “Shigaraki uses baby shampoo?”

“It’s for dry skin, bonehead,” Shigaraki snapped. “Don’t you use gentle shampoo for your crummy hair dye?”

Kurogiri sighed, and Shouta found himself once again sympathizing with the mist villain. Children were trying. Superpowered, somewhat entitled children only more so.

Dabi and Shigaraki devolved into another row that had a remarkable resemblance to the shouting matches Bakugou got in with, well… everyone.

While they were arguing, Toga slipped back into the room wielding a bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo. She passed it off to Kurogiri, who gladly accepted it.

“The sink is ready,” Kurogiri said calmly, completely ignoring the altercation that was now getting physical. Blue sparks were racing over the edges of Dabi’s scars, and Shigaraki had set his controller aside to curl his hands into fists. Shouta followed Kurogiri’s lead, ignoring the two infamous villains now squabbling with active Quirks to gently test the water in the sink with one paw.

It wasn’t too hot or cold, so Shouta jumped down into the water. It was about fifteen centimeters deep, only barely brushing the softer fur on his belly, and it actually felt kind of nice. Like the swirling, drifty feeling that came from putting your hair underwater, but it was all over him.

Shouta lowered himself deeper into the water, soaking his fur all the way up to his ears. The water was almost hot around his whiskers, but it was calming. Pleasant. Like sitting in an onsen and letting the warm water whisk away the perpetual aches and pains and lingering nerve damage sustained in years of hero work.

“Never seen a cat that liked water quite that much,” Mr. Compress observed. Shouta spared him barely a flick of one ear, taking a deep breath in so that he’d float.

“It is rare,” Kurogiri agreed, “perhaps he has some Maine Coon blood.”

“With how short his fur is?” Mr. Compress said doubtfully.

Kurogiri only hummed.

“Mister Kitty, I’m going to need to touch you for this.”

That caught Shouta’s attention, and he bared his teeth automatically, raising his wet fur into spiky clumps.

“I need to wash your back and sides,” Kurogiri said, endlessly patient, “but I won’t need to go farther than that if you’ll consent to wearing a flea collar.”

Shouta actually stopped to consider that. As terrible as it sounded to have to wear a collar of any sort, it was better than getting fleas. It was also better than a villain bathing him. That was just wrong on so many levels.

With a reluctant flick of his ears, Shouta flattened his fur again, turning so Kurogiri could have better access. Kurogiri did exactly what he’d promised, lathering baby shampoo into Shouta’s fur until he looked white instead of black. Shouta willingly dunked himself under again, shaking vigorously to rinse all the mud and suds into the clear water. The water that quickly became cloudy with soap and dirt, and Shouta was almost shocked that it had all fit in his fur.

Kurogiri pulled the plug on the sink, and the water tugged at Shouta’s fur as it swirled down the drain. Then the sink’s sprayer nozzle came out, and Shouta relented to being essentially hosed down, twisting and turning so that it got all the bubbles off.

Finally, he was relatively clean, and Kurogiri set out a towel on the counter beside the sink. Shouta completely ignored it, jumping up onto the other side of the counter to shake a spray of water all over Kurogiri’s just-cleaned bottles of alcohol.

Kurogiri only sighed and held up another towel. Channeling every imperiously self-satisfied feline Shouta had ever witnessed, he graciously allowed Kurogiri to towel him dry.

“We’ll need to get you a flea collar,” Kurogiri said as Shouta rubbed his chin against the towel to dry the bristly fur there. “And likely a litter box.”

Shouta couldn’t help the way his nose wrinkled at that, but he honestly should have been expecting it. If he was quick, he could escape before they needed to bother. Save everyone some time and money.

“Is he even housetrained?” Mr. Compress asked. Shouta angled his ears sideways and shot Mr. Compress a positively scathing look.

“I suspect he can figure it out,” Kurogiri said neutrally.

Now sufficiently dry, Shouta slipped out from under the towel and bounded to the ground. Old habits died hard, and despite what he told himself, he hadn’t actually been ignoring the fight between Dabi and Shigaraki. They were still going at it even now, but the recliner Shigaraki was in had been vacated so the villain could make full use of his feral gremlin intimidation factor.

Shouta considered for a second, scanning the couch cushions, the seats in the kitchen nook, and the barstools. He glanced at Shigaraki, who was baring his teeth at a Dabi who looked entirely unimpressed, and then back at the recliner.

In a single smooth motion, Shouta jumped up onto the recliner.

The seat was still warm, and Shigaraki’s gaming console had been set on the end table beside the recliner, so Shouta had room to stretch out and take up the entire space. He did just that, sprawling lazily over the cushion. He let himself relax enough to doze, but he stayed aware enough that he could spring away at a moment’s notice.

The argument abruptly cut off, and Shouta twitched his ears, slitting his eyes open to investigate the sudden silence. Everyone in the room was staring at him, Toga with adoring heart eyes, Mr. Compress vaguely surprised, Kurogiri a perpetually unreadable bank of fog, and Dabi looking smug and amused in equal measures. Shigaraki looked mildly constipated, or maybe like he’d been slapped in the face by a six-year-old.

“That is my chair,” Shigaraki hissed.

Shouta made a show of stretching luxuriously, yawning widely and flicking his tail with as much devil-may-care self-confidence as he could muster.

“This cat’s too smart for his own good,” Dabi said, visibly holding back laughter. “first ‘giri’s alcohol, now Shiggy’s chair. What’s he gonna go for next, Toga’s knives?”

“Your hair dye,” Shigaraki snarled, his hands curling into claws.

“Nah,” Toga chirped, “I think it’ll be his mints!”

“Hey!” Dabi scowled at them, and Shouta watched with interest as he slid the glass bowl of cellophane-wrapped mint candies – which Shouta hadn’t even registered as worth taking note of – across the bartop towards him. “That is not the same at all.”

“The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, Dabi,” Toga intoned, so solemn and serious that Shouta had to do a double take.

“I do not have an addiction,” Dabi grumbled, then immediately belied his words by shoving three mints in his mouth at once. “I just like mint, okay?!” he insisted around the candies.

“The cat is sitting in my chair,” Shigaraki said bluntly, as if to remind everyone that he was upset.

Toga shrugged, chewing loudly on the ice left in her glass. “Sit somewhere else.”

Shigaraki growled – like actually growled, despite having no mutation Quirk – and started viciously scratching at his neck. Blood beaded up under his fingernails, but Shouta refused to be sympathetic.

If Shouta didn’t get to keep his bones, Shigaraki didn’t get to keep his chair.

Chapter Text

A soft sound roused Shouta from his sleep. Despite his insistence on inconveniencing Shigaraki, he hadn’t been willing to get proper sleep somewhere so exposed. He’d retreated under the couch when he’d been unable to hold his eyes open for long. He could hear the living room door click shut and soft footsteps enter the room, but he couldn’t see anything.

Tasting the air automatically, Shouta found that it smelled mostly of cleaning solution and dust, but also very faintly of bitter woodfire. Dabi?

Shouta squirmed to the edge of the couch, peering out at the room. Nothing much had changed since Shouta had slipped under the couch. The lights were still out, the front door closed, and the room empty. Behind the bar, out of Shouta’s sight, someone was creeping around barefoot. Glass scraped against wood, and a magnetized cupboard clicked shut.

Ice clinked on glass, and Shouta wriggled all the way out from under the couch, padding silently towards the bar. He peeked around the edge.

The open freezer cast a long slice of cold blue light over the hardwood, eerily illuminating the villain crouched in the center of the light. It was only a few shades away from the furious blue glow of Dabi’s own fire, and for a moment, Shouta couldn’t breathe.

Dabi turned slightly, and the freezer’s light reflected in a steady rectangle on his ice-blue eyes. Shouta forced his lungs to work again. His heart was racing, adrenaline coursing through him. But nothing bad was happening, so Shouta fell into a well-practiced breathing technique, forcing his heartbeat to slow and the rush of adrenaline to subside.

As Shouta calmed himself, Dabi quietly – so quietly it must have been practiced – filled the cup he’d snatched with ice from the freezer. He eased the freezer shut, then stood with his cup of ice, his gaze flickering around the room. Shouta jumped up onto the bartop while Dabi was looking the other way, and he was sitting judgmentally next to the bowl of mints when Dabi reached for one.

“Holy-!” Dabi hissed, jolting so hard the ice in his cup rattled. He snatched his hand back, pressing it to his chest and panting like he’d just run a mile.

“What are you doing?” Dabi whispered, glancing furtively around the room. There was no one else in it. Shouta knew there was no one in it, because he had actually been paying attention to the door.

“Eating ice is not a sustainable solution to Quirk-induced overheating,” Shouta said flatly. Of course, it came out as an unhappy grumbling noise, but at least Shouta knew what he’d said.

“I’m not going to feed you anything,” Dabi said, carefully moving his hand closer to the bowl.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Shouta observed, watching Dabi tentatively snatch two mints from the bowl. “Menthol and ice is not going to solve your overheating problem.”

“Shhh!” Dabi hissed, pressing a finger to his lips. “Would you be quiet!?”

“No,” Shouta said pettily, but did actually stop talking. It wasn’t like his warning would do Dabi any good, anyway. The man couldn’t even understand him.

“Thank you,” Dabi grumbled after a moment of Shouta’s silence. He swiped one more mint and silently stalked away to flop on the couch.

Shouta rolled his eyes practically into the back of his skull, then jumped down from the counter and padded back to the couch he’d been sleeping under. Unfortunately, Shouta was now wide awake, and would definitely not be able to fall asleep again. Not that he really wanted to.

What Shouta really wanted was for Dabi to leave so Shouta could try to open the door – which had a lever handle that he might be able to manage, even as a cat.

Dabi was wearing a traditional jinbei, with short sleeves and knee-length pants. His scars were on full display, mostly-healthy skin connected via medical staples to the rough burned patches that Shouta knew looked almost purple with proper lighting and color vision.

“What do you want?” Dabi whispered harshly, lighting a tiny azure flame in his palm.

Shouta hissed at the fire, only barely resisting the urge to activate his Quirk. Instead, he swiped at Dabi’s leg, digging his claws into the rough scars. Dabi winced, and the fire vanished.

“Fine!” Dabi snapped, voice still lowered, “I’ll turn the fire off. What do you want?”

Shouta rested a paw on Dabi’s leg and stared at him with immeasurable judgment. What part of ‘Shouta was a cat’ did he not understand?

“What?” Dabi asked. “Don’t just look at me! I don’t speak cat!”

Shouta sighed, wishing he could pinch the bridge of his nose. He rubbed a paw over his face instead, but it wasn’t nearly as helpful.

“You are going to explode,” Shouta grumbled. “Didn’t anyone tell you anything about fire Quirks?”

“Leave me alone,” Dabi said, voice still hushed, “I’m not going to pet you right now, or feed you, or whatever else you want.”

“I want you to not kill me when you eventually have a Quirk-induced meltdown and set everything on fire,” Shouta sighed, but he knew it was useless. Dabi couldn’t understand him. He’d either have to figure out how to mime the fact that Dabi needed to cool down his core – not just chew on ice and mints – or he’d have to live with a ticking time bomb. Since Shouta wasn’t planning to stick around for long, he was fine with very briefly living with a ticking time bomb. Besides, with Erasure so much easier to use in this form, it probably wouldn’t be too bad even if Dabi did meltdown.

Shouta waited impatiently for Dabi to finish his self-destructive self-medication, resisting the urge to facepalm hard several times a minute. Dabi was still clearly overheating by the time his cup of ice was empty. From where he’d hopped up to sit on the couch about half a meter from Dabi, Shouta could practically feel the heat radiating from him.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Dabi whispered furiously. “You’re a cat. What do you know?”

Shouta added ‘irrationally angry and defensive’ to his list of symptoms and merely flicked his tail in response to Dabi’s furious demand. A perpetual, badly self-treated fire Quirk pre-meltdown would explain a lot of Dabi’s manic energy. An increased tendency for Quirk-induced self-harm, a lowered sense of self-preservation, and a quicker, more violent temper were all pre-meltdown symptoms of a variety of different Quirks and doubly so for fire Quirks.

The question was, how much of Dabi’s attitude was from his pre-meltdown, and how much was just him?

Dabi chugged the ice-melt water in the bottom of his cup, then stood abruptly. He offered Shouta a middle finger as he stalked silently back to the kitchen, setting his cup in the drying rack on the counter and discarding the mint wrappers in the trash can. Shouta bounded up onto the back of the couch to watch Dabi vanish back through the door, shutting it without a sound.

Shouta tilted his head, eyes lingering on the door Dabi had just closed. If Endeavor or some other Hero capable of causing fire or even heat could target Dabi’s Quirk factor at the right time, they could artificially induce a meltdown. With the first aid that was always on call for a villain attack of the caliber of the League of Villains, there was little to no chance of the meltdown having any serious repercussions. Not to Dabi, and not to the surroundings.

Shouta’s tail swished thoughtfully, and then he dropped off the couch to scan the room again. He might be able to move the chairs or stools in the kitchen, but there would be no quiet way to get them down the steps. Everything in the living room area would be too heavy or awkward for him to move as a cat. Shouta sighed and resignedly returned to the front door.

Unfortunately, there was no cat instinct for ‘open door’, so Shouta had to figure that out himself.

It took several tries just to get at the right angle to end up anywhere near the doorhandle. He misjudged his next jump and slammed his left ear into the handle itself, leaving it smarting as he gathered himself for another jump.

He managed to hook his paw around the door handle, but with the other three still dangling and nothing for his claws to grab onto, his own weight pulled him back down. He tried again.

What Shouta wouldn’t give for a usable capture weapon…

On his next jump, one of his rear paws managed to get caught on the handle, sending Shouta flipping awkwardly in the air. He ended up sprawling inelegantly on the floor, his hip twinging and his shoulder aching from where it had hit the ground. He picked himself up off the floor and tried again.

After a dozen attempts and a dozen more failures – some more painful than others – Shouta finally managed to get both front paws hooked over the post of the door handle. He awkwardly gripped the handle itself between his teeth, straining his neck to drag it downward. The latch clicked.

Nothing happened.

Forearms burning with the strain, Shouta was forced to let go of the handle and drop back to the floor. He stared up at the door, tail lashing furiously. It wasn’t locked. He’d checked that first, before even trying to open it. The doorhandle was lodged in the downward position now, so clearly it wasn’t latched anymore. But it also wasn’t opening.

With a deep breath so he wouldn’t scream, Shouta gathered his haunches and  jumped for the door handle again. He ran face first into the door itself. He tried again.

He hooked a paw over the handle, but his grip was backwards and he was barely holding it before he slipped off.

He tried again.

This time he undershot it, his outstretched paw only barely touching the handle, slipping off before he could even try to hook it over.

Again.

His hips ached with how many times he’d hit the floor, too focused on the doorhandle to bother landing on his feet half the time.

Again.

The door handle jammed painfully into his chest, and Shouta scrabbled frantically at the whole mechanism, trying to get a grip on something, anything. He failed, and landing on the ground again made his ribs twinge.

Again.

The tendons that controlled his claws were faltering, and there were burning muscles in his forelegs that Shouta hadn’t even known could hurt. Maybe humans didn’t even have them, he didn’t know.

He tried again.

Shouta hadn’t learned to use his capture weapon by giving up when his hands were bleeding from friction burn. He hadn’t become the Hero teacher with the lowest graduate fatality rate in the country by giving up when the school board came after him for expelling his entire class. He hadn’t become a hero by giving up and joining Oboro. Shouta wasn’t the sort of person who just gave up, not until he knew there was nothing he could do. And there was certainly something he could do.

Shouta jumped, and he hooked his right paw over the post of the handle and his left around the handle itself. With his back paws braced against the wall, he shoved hard, straining his spine and hips. The wood of the door scraped stubbornly against the floor, and then the door finally squeaked open.

He dropped to the floor with a rough breath.

The door was cracked open only a few centimeters, but it was easy to hook his paw into the gap and pull it open more. Shouta slipped through the gap and was faced with his second challenge.

Since it was street-facing, the outer door of the mudroom had been locked.

It was a latch lock, the sort of thing that Shouta might be able to open in this form. There was even a shelf sitting next to the door, at just the right height that Shouta might be able to reach the doorhandle while standing on the shoe shelf. With a fortifying breath, he gathered his haunches underneath him to jump.

In another room, a door shut.

Instantly, Shouta was back inside the living room, ears pricked and whiskers quivering. Footsteps made their way towards the doorway to the living room. He didn’t know enough to pinpoint whose footsteps they were, but there was no good possibility. Shouta glanced at the door behind him, his time ticking away to the beat of footsteps on hardwood. He’d just spent so long trying to open this door, but if the League knew he could open it, then it would undoubtedly be locked in the future.

With barely a moment of hesitation, Shouta pushed the door shut with a back paw and darted for the couch, slipping underneath it right as the living room door swung open.

Kurogiri stepped through, already dressed in his full suit. Shouta scowled at him from under the couch, his tail lashing.

“Good morning, kitty,” Kurogiri said quietly, retrieving several assorted jars, bottles, and rectangular dry goods containers from various cupboards in the kitchen. A cupboard appeared on the counter a moment later, and Kurogiri got to work mixing things.

Shouta watched the villain work for several minutes before he glanced at the digital clock over the oven. It was five in the morning. Five in the morning. Shouta was awake because his sleep schedule was intentionally staggered. He had two sleeping periods and two waking periods, one to teach and grade, the other to patrol. Also, he’d been turned into a cat, and that had clearly wildly thrown off his sleep schedule. So, Shouta had a good reason for being awake at this unholy hour of the morning. What was Kurogiri’s excuse?

Well, he wouldn’t get an answer while huddling under the couch. He probably wouldn’t get an answer either way, but it was more likely if he went to the problem directly. The problem, of course, meaning the villain who had decided to wake up far too early in the morning.

Shouta squirmed out from under the couch, slinking towards the kitchen area and hopping up onto the bartop. It smelled even stronger of yeast this close, and Shouta suspected the pale frothy liquid in the mixing bowl was nothing but yeast and milk.

“Come to join me?” Kurogiri said. “I’m making milk bread.”

That certainly explained the yeast. It also might have explained why Kurogiri was awake this early in the morning, since it took four or five hours to rise properly. Now, though, Shouta just had more questions.

Most notably, what were the raspberries for?

Shouta settled onto his stomach right on the counter, directly next to Dabi’s bowl of mints. He watched Kurogiri mix and knead and mix and knead some more, then set the dough aside to rise.

Then Kurogiri moved to the raspberries, rinsing them in the sink and cutting each one in half. Cutting raspberries. In half. The more Shouta saw of Kurogiri, the more he suspected the man had some kind of autism. He zested and juiced a lemon by hand again, then dumped water and sugar and some kind of dry white powder from an unlabeled jar into a saucepan. The lemon zest and juice went in a moment later, and then the bowl of halved raspberries.

Shouta was still upset that Kurogiri had interrupted his potential escape, but he had to admit it was strangely calming to watch the man cook. Kurogiri was perfectly efficient. Every motion he made had exactly the right amount of force to do what he needed and no more. It was a lot like how Shouta himself cooked, when Shouta ever cooked, doing only the bare minimum required to get the food made.

Kurogiri boiled the raspberries for several minutes, reducing them to a reddish goop. What had been the point of cutting the raspberries? That was the thing Shouta didn’t understand. Everything else Kurogiri did had a purpose. He knew where everything in the kitchen was and didn’t waste time or motion looking for something. He didn’t need to consult any recipes, only measured directly from the jar. But he’d spent the time to individually cut each raspberry precisely in half.

Shouta pondered it idly as Kurogiri set his raspberry goop to strain through a fine mesh strainer.

The kitchen was silent for a moment as Kurogiri stopped moving. The only sound was the quiet ‘thump’ of Shouta’s tail on the bartop.

Then Kurogiri reached under the counter, and something out of sight made a soft click-click-clicking sound.

A radio.

Kurogiri had turned on a radio.

The quality was terrible, staticky and garbled, and the volume was probably as low as it could go, but Shouta would recognize the opening jingle to the ‘Put Your Hands Up!’ radio station if he was dead asleep and half deaf.

“Welcome back to ‘Put Your Hands Up!’ radio,” Hizashi’s voice spilled out of the radio, “That was ‘Another Cat’s Paw’, by Twenty-Seventh Chorus, and the last of our music section for the morning.”

Shouta was vaguely aware that he’d gone completely still, both ears angled towards the radio. He didn’t care. That was Hizashi. It felt like he hadn’t heard Hizashi’s voice in years.

“This is everybody’s favorite section of the show, ‘What’s Up with That Guy?’, can I get a wahoo!” Of course, there was no one to respond to Hizashi in the studio. That did nothing to dissuade Hizashi’s endless enthusiasm. Shouta let out a quiet ‘maooow’, lashing his tail with inexplicable delight.

“Our inbox is noooow oooopen!” Hizashi cheered. “I’ll take questions on anyone and everyone, and I’ll give you my honest opinion, cross my heart!”

A boppy, cheerful jingle played from the speakers, and Hizashi gasped overdramatically.

“Weee have our first name of the morning. Let’s see… ‘Tell us your feelings about Endeavor’.” Hizashi overplayed his disappointed sigh to epic proportions. “Come on, guys, you don’t need to ask this every morning. I’ve told you before, I’ll tell you again. Endeavor is a walking dumpster fire unless it’s his legal team asking. Those guys scare me.”

“Ooh, another name,” Hizashi said. “Hmm. This one says ‘What about Miruko/Hawks?’.”

“Just because I like you, I’ll answer both of these,” Hizashi said, “Miruko is adorable but don’t tell her I said that because she scares me more than Endeavor’s legal team, and I desperately want to offer Hawks a dead mouse. Just to see what happens.”

“Alright, let’s see… these are really pouring in now. ‘Shogyo from the corner store’. Okay, listen here. I have nothing against Shogyo from the corner store. But please, does he have to enter my card number by hand every time? Every time. No matter what I’m buying. When I tell you how many times I’ve checked to make sure he isn’t stealing from me…”

“Ah, another less well-known one,” Hizashi said, tone practically oozing lighthearted sarcasm, “Mandalay. If I said anything negative about Mandalay, I think my husband would lynch me. I’m going to say I find her Quirk incredibly helpful, especially when Present Mic is on the scene and nobody can hear.”

“Okay, who’s the joker who put in Present Mic?” Hizashi asked a moment later. “You know we can neither confirm nor deny who does the ‘What’s Up with That Guy?’ section of the show. I’m moving on.”

After a brief pause, Hizashi made a show of sighing disappointedly. “This one just says ‘Your husband’.” It would have been unnoticeable to the casual listener, but Shouta had known Hizashi for the majority of his life. He knew everything about Hizashi, including the personas he used to mask his true feelings. There was a deep, terrified concern in his voice that even Hizashi couldn’t completely disguise. Shouta’s disappearance had been noticed.

Hizashi – or, rather, Present Mic now – continued as lightheartedly as his persona required. “Guys. Guys, come on. I’ve told you this before. I can’t tell you anything about him. That’s, like, a privacy issue. I love him with all of my heart, if only he would come home on time and stop adopting stray cats, I would have no gripes whatsoever.”

That, Shouta knew for a fact, was a lie. Just the other day he’d come home on time – early, in fact – with no cats, and Hizashi had still gotten on his case for getting blood on the couch. According to Hizashi, though, it was his duty as a good husband to constantly hype Shouta up.

‘What’s Up with That Guy?’ continued for quite a while, and Shouta listened to Hizashi’s split-second judgments of everyone from All Might’s shrunken form – ‘that man needs to get some meat on his bones, my goodness. He looks like a strong wind would snap him in half’ – to the blonde who shares a commute with him every day – ‘honestly, such a mood. She’s got a ‘Put Your Hands Up!’ pin on her backpack now!’ – to a new j-pop idol on the scene – ‘her hair? To die for. Literally, I might be willing’.

Despite Hizashi’s boundless, sometimes overwhelming energy, it was… calming. It stabilized Shouta, grounded him in reality and reinvigorated his determination to get out of here.

Most external transformation Quirks had simple one-, twelve-, or twenty-four-hour time limits. Ones that had an intentional reversal aspect – like Omousueru had demonstrated when he turned all those affected back into humans – tended to either end on the one-day mark, or last until they were reversed. That meant that hopefully, Shouta didn’t have to worry about spontaneously transforming back into a human in the middle of the League of Villain’s base.

Hopefully.

There was also the possibility that Omousueru’s Quirk had a three-day or one-week transformation, which were the other two most common time periods. Shouta would have to be very careful the day after tomorrow, but it wouldn’t be too terrible. The Quirk had taken effect very late at night, so if it wore off, it would probably wear off in the middle of the night, too.

Kurogiri turned the radio off the second footsteps sounded from the hallway beyond the living room door. It left the room in hazy, unmoored silence even after Spinner entered, but Hizashi had already given Shouta the boost he needed. All he had to do was bide his time and wait for an opportunity to get out. Hopefully, before he turned back into a human and was immediately captured by the League of Villains.

Chapter Text

Every single part of Shouta ached. He’d retreated to sleep under the couch again after Kurogiri had turned off the radio, trying to catch up on the sleep he’d missed by being turned into a cat. That had been a mistake. Three hours later, around when he was normally expected to appear in class, he woke up aching and sore everywhere that it was possible to be aching and sore and a few places besides.

There was no doubt that Shouta was covered in bruises under his fur. The muscles in his left ear twinged with every twitch, his back claws screamed at him when he tried to flex them, and even his tail felt stiff and sore. It was about on par with how he felt after a rough patrol. At least, a rough patrol that didn’t leave him with anything more serious than bruises.

Shouta wriggled out from under the couch and paused to stretch. Every single muscle he had cried out in dismay at the motion, but Shouta was used to it.

In the time he’d been asleep, Mr. Compress had shown up and apparently someone had gone shopping. Kurogiri was working on unpacking the grocery bags that were now laid out on the kitchen table, Mr. Compress sitting at the sole empty section of table with a laptop.

“Ah, good morning again, kitty,” Kurogiri greeted properly. Shouta didn’t even offer him an acknowledgement. ‘Put Your Hands Up’ was over and Shouta was going back to being as frustrating and uncooperative as possible.

“I have something for you,” Kurogiri said, tone tentative. Shouta suspected it was something he didn’t actually want. Sure enough, when he shot a dark glance at Kurogiri, he saw the mist villain proffering a thick rubber flea collar.

Shouta peeled his ears back and bared his teeth with a hiss.

“You did agree to wear it,” Kurogiri said, almost desperate.

Shouta snarled low in his throat, his hackles creeping up.

“How silly of you to trust a cat’s word,” Mr. Compress said airily.

“I had hoped that a cat as intelligent as this one would know the benefits of a flea collar,” Kurogiri said, sounding defeated. Good. That was the tone Shouta wanted associated with everything he did. Defeat and despair.

“Cats know a great deal,” Mr. Compress said wisely, “often much more than we give them credit for. Very rarely does this impact their actions.”

“Mood,” Spinner said from where he was lying lengthwise on the loveseat, his feet dangling over the arm.

“He does need to wear a flea collar,” Kurogiri said firmly, probably the most confident he’d sounded since Shouta had bit him the first time.

“I am certainly not going to be the one to put it on him,” Mr. Compress established, looking down at the screen of his laptop.

Shouta narrowed his eyes, considering the remaining villains in the room. Kurogiri wasn’t a hands-on attacker, and Shouta didn’t expect him to be incredibly interested in chasing a cat around the room. Spinner, on the other hand… That was a potential threat. Shouta didn’t know how much extra speed or agility Gecko gave Spinner, or how much training he had. Then again, there was very little that could catch a cat that didn’t want to be caught. Especially, Shouta was sure, a cat with all of Eraserhead’s training and experience.

“If you wouldn’t mind, Spinner?” Kurogiri asked.

Spinner huffed an angsty teenager sigh, his hand – still holding his phone – drooping to dangle over the edge of the couch.

“Is this cat even worth the effort?”

Shouta hissed loudly, lifting his hackles and flexing his claws. There was still the chance they’d just kick him out, and then he’d be home free.

Kurogiri hesitated for a long moment, staring at Shouta. “Something is noteworthy about this cat,” he said finally, “He feels… familiar.”

Shouta really, desperately hoped that Kurogiri hadn’t realized that Shouta was not, in fact, a cat. If anyone pegged him as a transfigured person – even if they didn’t realize exactly who – then he was as good as dead.

“If you say so,” Spinner grumbled, rolling off the couch with a low ‘oof’. “But I want the nice controller tonight.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged,” Kurogiri said. Shouta caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye, which he tracked with one ear, but the majority of his attention was fixed on Spinner.

It was a good thing, too.

Gecko may have been a relatively weak Quirk, but it gave Spinner the advantage of being able to walk on all fours, and he was shockingly fast on four legs. From his position on the floor, he took off like a bullet.

Shouta bolted the second Spinner started moving, sprinting for the kitchen table.

The trick, as a cat running from a creature much larger and likely faster than you, was to make sure there were no open straightaways they could use to gain speed. Shouta wove through the legs of chairs and barstools, even dodging directly through Kurogiri’s legs. He couldn’t stay in one place – not if he wanted to avoid Kurogiri’s portals – but he could shortcut under the couch where Spinner couldn’t follow and take a brief refuge under the table.

Shouta moved to round the counter, trying to make a break for Kurogiri’s bottles of alcohol, but the whole stretch of open air between the counter and the bartop twisted with an opening portal, and Shouta was forced to skid into a sharp turn. Spinner was too slow to turn, and ended up sliding directly through the portal.

The portal took him to the other side of the counter, giving Shouta the grace period he needed to recover from his redirection. Spinner made a wild grab for him as Shouta zipped around the corner of the bar, but Shouta slipped smoothly out of his range and used the villain’s shoulder as a springboard, jumping up onto the bartop. Shouta leaped across the gap to the counter and only realized his error mid-air.

The air twisted in front of him, and there was no way for Shouta to change direction.

The portal still smelled like Oboro, and Shouta hated it.

Shouta fell out of the portal with his claws bared, furious as a proverbial wet cat. Shouta knew that some people with animal-based mutant Quirks could get tougher skin, thicker fur, or stronger scales than the animal their Quirk ostensibly developed from. Spinner’s scales were certainly harder than actual gecko skin, but not by a whole lot.

Shouta’s claws shredded him.

Spinner squawked, flailing wildly as he tried to restrain Shouta and stay away from his claws at the same time. Shouta bit any fingers that came anywhere near to his face and clawed everything else.

A wild flurry of claws and scales later, Shouta was unceremoniously dropped on the floor yet again.

Shouta landed neatly on his feet, flicking his tail as Spinner scrambled away from him. Two down. Maybe three, he wasn’t entirely sure on Mr. Compress. He’d call it two and a half for now. With any luck, he’d have the entirety of the League of Villains convinced to never come near him before he had to worry about spontaneously transforming back into a human.

“What is going on in here?”

Shouta turned towards the voice, tucking his tail around his paws. There was a tall, muscular man standing in the doorway, bracing himself against the doorframe. He was taking in the room with a slightly baffled look, his gaze darting from Shouta to Spinner to the portals still lingering over Kurogiri’s counter. Shouta made a show of swiping his paw over his ear, blatantly broadcasting how nonchalant and unbothered he was.

“The cat needs a collar,” Kurogiri said.

“Yeah, that looks like it’s going really well,” The man said.

“Do you want to help?” Spinner grumbled, gingerly rubbing his worst scratches. Shouta eyed his handiwork and was glad to see at least half a dozen of the claw marks were deep enough to be slowly beading with blood.

“Why do we have this feisty kitty?” the man asked with a frown.

“Kurogiri thinks he’s special,” Spinner hissed. Shouta hissed back at him, and Spinner flinched.

The man turned his look to Kurogiri.

“He is a Quirked animal,” Kurogiri said. “and something about him is familiar to me.”

“You think he’s got a helpful Quirk?” the man asked, now more curious than doubtful.

“Perhaps... a Quirk we share,” Kurogiri allowed. If Shouta had eyebrows, he would have raised them. A Quirk they shared? The phrasing there implied that Kurogiri had more than one, which wasn’t unheard of – just look at Todoroki, there was no way that was one Quirk, no matter the name – but it certainly wasn’t common. Shouta flicked his ear at Kurogiri, considering. He’d have to keep a close eye on the man to try and figure out what his secondary Quirk was.

“That would be useful,” the man mused. Then he sighed, pulling a pair of pink-tinted sunglasses out of his pocket. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Gravity changed direction.

Well, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Shouta had experienced a change in gravity before. Gravity-shifting Quirks weren’t unheard of, and Eraserhead was particularly useful against them. The look on a gravity-manipulator’s face when their opponent just kept running at them on flat ground was a beautiful thing to behold.

So, Shouta knew what gravity manipulation felt like, and it wasn’t this. The effects were very similar, though.

The world spun around him, his paws torn from the floor as he was flung straight towards the largest ferromagnetic thing in the room. Shouta twisted mid-air, landing on his feet on the side of the freezer door.

He was glowing, Shouta realized. A staticky blue aura thrummed around him like water in a glass placed too close to a bass speaker.

“He’s male,” the man informed them blandly.

Shouta flicked his tail irritably, trying to pry his paws off the freezer door. They wouldn’t come up. Almost like they were glued down. Or magnetized.

Shouta looked over the man again, taking in his big lips and shoulder-length red hair. Was he wearing lip gloss?

…or should that be ‘she’?

Shouta remembered reports of the training camp that included the attack on  Mandalay that Tiger had headed off. That battle had included Spinner and a villain with a magnetism Quirk who looked like a man, but Spinner had referred to as ‘Magne-nee-chan. Other reports of Magne – sparse as they were – also noted that everyone associated with the villain referred to them as a woman.

Tentatively, until he was corrected, Shouta was going to deem the newcomer Magne, and therefore a woman.

“There you go,” Magne said, “He can’t move his paws now.”

Shouta hissed at her, at Spinner who was looking on with vindication, and at Kurogiri, who was approaching Shouta with the collar.

Unfortunately, Magne was correct, and Shouta couldn’t pry any of his paws from the freezer door. He tried to bite Kurogiri, but with his paws practically glued down, Shouta didn’t have the range of motion to catch Kurogiri’s fingers.

Kurogiri carefully avoided Shouta’s teeth, the world filled with the scent of Oboro, and then the collar cinched around his throat. The collar, Shouta only realized after it had been put on him, was almost the exact same white-gray as his capture weapon. Hizashi would be in tears at the irony.

As Kurogiri withdrew his fingers, he got sloppy. Shouta twisted quick as a wink and sank his teeth deep into Kurogiri’s finger. The mist villain yelped, yanking his hand out of Shouta’s mouth, and despite the man’s lack of face, Shouta was sure he had just barely resisted the urge to swear.

“He doesn’t seem like a very nice kitty~,” Magne cooed.

“He’s not,” Spinner growled, licking the last bleeding cut on his forearm.

“Why is he here again?”

“Kurogiri wanted to keep him,” Spinner said bluntly.

“I doubt myself more every moment,” Kurogiri sighed.

If Shouta’s tail wasn’t magnetized to the freezer door, he would have lashed it triumphantly. Instead, he meowed loudly, shooting Magne a positively scathing look. It would have made any of his students cower, and while it didn’t have exactly the same effect on Magne, she did remove his magnetism.

Shouta dropped to the floor with an irritated huff and found, much to his dismay, that he didn’t actually mind the collar. It was like his capture weapon, settled comfortably around his throat. Loose enough that he could very easily forget it was there. But also loose enough that if he could find something to catch on the collar, he might be able to slip out.

“Do you have cat treats?” Magne asked, walking over to inspect the haul on the table, “You might be able to win his affection.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Mr. Compress said, tone dry as a dessert. He set a bag of cat treats on the table, and Magne eyed it contemplatively. Shouta sensed his newest victim was within reach.

He bided his time, waiting for Magne to make her decision. She approached him with the bag of cat treats and hope still in her eyes. Intellectually, from his own long experience, Shouta knew the treats smelled like catnip. But in the feline form he was stuck in, the familiar scent of catnip had been elevated to the same place in his brain as the scent of coffee or fancy cocktails.

Magne held her hand out to him, cat treats resting in her flat palm. At the very least, she knew how to feed a cat.

Shouta wasn’t going to eat the cat treats, of course. He knew better than to take mind-altering substances in the middle of a potentially hostile environment. He did step forward to sniff them, though.

“You see?” Magne hummed, “Every kitty loves catnip.”

Shouta bit her. Hard.

Magne yelped and tried to pull back, but Shouta’s grip was too tight on her finger. She dragged him almost a full meter, his paws sliding on the hardwood.

For a brief moment, Shouta found himself wishing Dabi was there. Someone needed to laugh at Magne, and since Shouta was a cat, it couldn’t be him. Fortunately, before Shouta could become too horrified by that thought, Spinner started laughing.

Magne growled and Shouta growled back, digging his teeth in deeper. Magne yelped, flailing wildly. Shouta pinned his ears back and doggedly held on, waiting out the burst of panic. Finally, Magne brought her other hand into the equation, trying to pry Shouta off her. Naturally, he completely refused to let go.

There was blood on Shouta’s tongue, and it tasted like victory. The scent of Oboro’s clouds flooded around him, and Shouta hissed through the fingers in his mouth. Slender fingers poked around his muzzle, then prodded sharply at the back of his jaw. Shouta’s mouth popped open against his will, releasing Magne’s fingers.

She yanked her hand away and hastily stepped back, scowling at Shouta. Not to be dissuaded, Shouta transferred his attention to Kurogiri. The man had put his hand in direct biting range, after all. That was his mistake.

With a vindictive hiss, Shouta sank his teeth into the webbing between Kurogiri’s fingers and thumb.

Instead of screeching or yelping or cursing at him, Kurogiri just sighed.

Well now Shouta just felt kind of sad.

Shouta allowed himself to be pried off of Kurogiri and then immediately retreated under the table. He settled into a loaf a full meter away from Mr. Compress’s legs and used the open space between chair and table legs to keep an eye on everyone beyond the table.

Apparently, the morning truly began once Magne arrived.

As soon as Magne had gotten over her bitten finger, breakfast was being put together. People came and went from the kitchen, cooking, carrying, and digging things out of the fridge. Shouta watched them come and go as groceries were cleared off the table and breakfast was spread over it. It was a broad mishmash of traditional and western breakfasts, with bowls of miso soup and rice set next to plates of bacon, sausage, and scrambled eggs.

“You want to drag the boss out here?” Magne asked as she set a jug of orange juice on the table.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Kurogiri agreed, slipping out of the room.

A moment later, Kurogiri returned with not just Shigaraki, but the three remaining villains.

Shouta couldn’t see any signs of Dabi’s late-night quest for ice and mints. He looked like any normal teenager dragged out of bed with only the promise of breakfast motivating him. His dark purple scars took the place of bags under his eyes, and Shouta found himself almost concerned for the villain.

Chairs scraped against the floor as people sat down. Others made up plates to eat at the bartop. Twice was sitting at the table, legs stretched out underneath it, and Shouta would be a fool to pass up on that opportunity.

Shouta waited patiently, waited until Magne and Kurogiri had momentarily forgotten about him, until Toga had given up on spotting him coming out from under the couch and Mr. Compress had poured himself a cup of coffee. Then, he rose from his loaf and slunk towards Twice.

First, a gentle brush of his tail on the man’s leg. He shifted slightly, hooking one ankle over the other, but otherwise didn’t react. Shouta slunk under Twice’s crossed legs, nose twitching.

To his delight, the cat brain did include a built-in instinct for ‘claw the inanimate thing in front of me’.

Shouta sat back on his hind legs, flexed his claws into long, wicked points, and dug them deep into Twice’s skin.

It was quite possibly the best reaction he’d gotten from anyone.

Twice shrieked so loud and abrupt that every single person in the room jumped out of their skin. It even startled Shouta a little. Knees slammed into the bottom of the tabletop. Dabi fumbled his coffee mug, splashing what was no doubt boiling hot liquid all over his scars, and swore loud and violent. A moment later, Shigaraki’s voice joined him in seething profanities, and Shouta smelled the unmistakable earthy scent of Decay.

“That infernal cat!” Mr. Compress howled.

In a split second of sheer intuition, Shouta leaped away from Twice, diving toward the opposite side of the table. A crackling whip of blue fire snapped through the space he’d been standing seconds before, and Shouta ran for his life.

People were talking over each other. Toga and Dabi were both shouting. Shigaraki was muttering vile threats under his breath. Kurogiri was actually audibly steaming. It all faded into a cacophony of background noise as Shouta dodged deadly darts of azure fire with nothing but his intuition to guide him. He couldn’t use his Quirk, not with his vision obscured by the table and the fire flying at him. He couldn’t even see the attacks coming before they seared straight through the surface of the table. Somehow, he was still alive anyway.

Mr. Compress was a no-go. Shouta didn’t dare get near enough to let the man use his Quirk on him. Shigaraki was similarly ruled out. Spinner and Magne were at the bartop, and getting to them would require running directly at the furious villain shooting fire at Shouta. Twice had hastily retreated to the bartop next to them as soon as he’d managed to get out of his chair. Kurogiri had some way to make himself intangible, and Shouta wasn’t willing to risk it. Which left no one but Toga.

Shouta leaped around another arc of flame, his skin under his fur feeling as dry and prickly as his eyes usually were. The table was mostly a smoldering wreck by now, but it was just enough cover that Dabi couldn’t immediately tell where Shouta had gone. He needed barely half a meter to get to the chair Toga had been sitting in. It was a full meter sprint from there to Toga herself, who had stood back once fire started flying.

With his ears pinned to his skull and his fur puffed out like a terrified feather duster, Shouta bolted the deadly distance. He dug his claws into Toga’s yoga pants and practically flew up her, scaling the villain like she was a ladder.

Regardless of any emotional connections Dabi might or might not have for her, Toga was a useful agent for the League of Villains. Certainly worth more than petty revenge against an irritating housecat, even a housecat that was more intelligent than most. The only question was, would Dabi stop to think about his actions?

Shouta braced himself with his front claws on Toga’s shoulders, his back claws – still horribly sore from scrabbling at the door all night – hooked onto the pocket area of her loose sweatshirt. The whole room froze. Shouta curled his tail in close and didn’t let his head rise any higher than Toga’s shoulder.

“…he got you there,” Spinner said awkwardly. The words were overwhelmed and consumed by the broiling silence, the only sound that dared pierce it the hissing, almost steaming noise Kurogiri was making.

Shouta felt the insistent tug of magnetism jolt him away from Toga, but he clung desperately to her hoodie with all four paws and refused to be pulled away.

“Will you put your fire out, Dabi?” Toga asked, annoyance almost covering up the mixed fear and delight in her voice. That, finally, shattered the tension in the room.

The magnetism released Shouta, letting gravity reclaim him.

“Just for that, I’m not even going to bite you,” Shouta said, and refused to admit even to himself that his voice was shaking. Also, considering who Toga was, she’d probably just bite him back.

“I want that cat out,” Dabi hissed, and Shouta flicked a glance at him to find guttering spouts azure fire flaring from his wrists. It was a far more extreme reaction than spilling hot coffee on him should warrant, even combined with the mild irritation Shouta had caused during Dabi’s midnight venture for ice and mints. The clearly unintentional small uses of his Quirk added another huge tick to the ‘imminent flame-Quirk pre-meltdown’ column. Regular mood swings and bouts of strong emotion tended to be associated with sudden, huge discharges, not constant uncontrollable flickering.

Not that said information was especially helpful for Shouta at the moment. Quirk meltdown notwithstanding, Shouta was lucky to still have all his fur after Dabi’s emotional meltdown.

“I want to keep him!” Toga insisted, and she wrapped both arms around Shouta, pressing him against her chest. Shouta squirmed uncomfortably, but didn’t try to escape her hold. It wouldn’t be too hard to get out if he wanted to, but he was planning to stick close by for a while still, at least until Dabi no longer had unrestrained fire creeping up his arms.

“You keep him in here, I will set him on fire!” Dabi snarled.

“You can’t set Dracula on fire!” Toga gasped, her arms tightening around Shouta.

“We’re keeping the cat,” Shigaraki said abruptly.

Shouta wasn’t the only one shocked by his interjection. The fire on Dabi’s arms sputtered out as he turned to gape at Shigaraki, and Toga gasped with shocked delight.

“Why?” Dabi demanded, “What do you want with that demon!?”

“Well, for one thing, you hate him.” Shigaraki’s mouth peeled open into a cracking fissure on his face, and he peered through his bangs at Shouta, red eyes swirling with a manic energy as he whispered, “and I want to see what else he’ll do.”

A cold chill crept down Shouta’s spine, and he was glad his fur was already as puffed up as it could possibly be. And people said he had a creepy smile.

Chapter Text

“Do you do this every night?” Shouta demanded from his position under Shigaraki’s recliner.

Dabi, perched on the couch like a nervous pigeon with a cup of ice and a loose handful of mints, didn’t even acknowledge him.

“No wonder your temper is so bad,” Shouta grumbled, his tail lashing on the dusty floor. “If you need to get out of bed every night to eat a cup of ice like a feral raccoon, you must be hanging onto your Quirk meltdown by a thread.”

Dabi popped another mint into his mouth and relaxed slightly into the couch cushions.

“An already smoldering thread,” Shouta groaned despairingly.

Shouta sighed, resting his head on his forearm. He’d gotten to sleep earlier that day, hoping to make up for lost time last night. It had proved completely useless, since after only a few minutes of wrestling with the door, Dabi had appeared like a spirit with unfinished business to raid the freezer once again.

Which left Shouta laying under Shigaraki’s recliner, unable to fall asleep, but also unable to do literally anything useful and reduced to trying very hard not to think about what the dust in the League of Villains hideout had once been. He was pretty sure there was a decent amount of ash mixed in there, too, and if Shouta groomed himself like an actual cat, he’d be worried about eating too much ash and poisoning himself or something.

The living room door clicked softly, and Shouta resisted the urge to wail in despair as Spinner’s reptilian head poked through.

“Hey, Dabi,” Spinner whispered, slipping into the living room and closing the door silently behind him.

Dabi grunted at him, more focused on quietly breaking apart the ice that had fused together in his cup.

Spinner padded to the couch with only the faint scritching noise of claws on hardwood, settling down right next to Dabi. A dangerous move, but Shouta admired his courage.

“You cold again?” Dabi grumbled, grinding a mouthful of ice and mints.

“Cold and wired,” Spinner sighed, tipping his head back to rest on the back of the couch. For a moment, all Shouta could see was his students, Asui sinking into the couch in the dorms with Todoroki on her right and Shoji on her left. Kirishima chewing on ice with his spiky, pointed teeth. Now there was a kid with an iron deficiency. The sheer amount of iron needed to sustain his Quirk was off the charts. Shouta didn’t envy Vlad for Tetsutetsu, either. He suspected that actually being made of metal would only make that so much worse.

“Sleep is for the weak,” Dabi grunted, sounding so like Todoroki’s deadpan delivery that Shouta had to do a double take.

“I want to sleep for a week,” Spinner returned, exactly like Uraraka had when Todoroki had tried that line on her.

Shouta growled at himself, vigorously shaking his head. He needed to stop projecting his students onto these villains. He knew villains were people. He used that information to psychoanalyze them time and time again, because people, as it turned out, always acted like people. Shouta himself had walked a knife edge between villainy and heroism before he’d decided his path in life and gone on to win the Sports Festival. But people or not, they were still villains. Once Shouta got out of this situation, he’d go back to fighting them, and for all he knew, they were already planning on attacking his students again.

Shouta couldn’t afford to have sympathy for them.

“You want a mint?” Dabi offered, offering Spinner the two mints still in his hand.

“Peppermint or spearmint?”

Dabi shrugged lazily, one of the mints almost falling out of his hand with the motion. Spinner sighed and snatched one, unwrapping the mint with short, tired motions. Dabi idly crunched his ice and shucked his last mint.

Shouta pricked his ears up, eager for Dabi to finish his midnight snack and leave the room already. Maybe he’d take Spinner with him. Maybe Shouta would finally be left alone long enough to get out, he’d make it to UA with no trouble, and then the whole frustrating scenario would be over.

While he was daydreaming, maybe Kurogiri would reveal that he’d been an undercover agent this whole time, and he had discovered a way to heal All Might’s crippling injury.

Shouta knew thinking like that was illogical. He couldn’t wait for a coincidental opportunity to get out. He had to make his own.

He didn’t dare provoke Dabi too much, especially without anyone to hide behind. Fortunately, Dabi was going to leave on his own.

Shouta had experience doing stakeouts, sitting in one spot for hours in the hopes that something even mildly interesting might happen. When he wanted to, he could be patient. It took far less than an hour for Dabi to crunch his last bits of ice, drink the ice-melt in his cup, and slip out of the room again. Which left Spinner alone on the couch, staring blankly at the ceiling.

Shouta slipped out from under the recliner, shaking as much dust as he could out of his fur. His footsteps were completely silent, and Spinner didn’t even see him coming.

Spinner was wearing loose sweatpants and nothing else, his feet bare. He had long, triangular claws on each toe, though they looked somewhat overgrown to Shouta. Not that he particularly cared. He was starting to like having claws himself. They were just so versatile. Like tiny knives built into his hands. He could stab anything he wanted at the drop of a hat.

Spinner slapped a hand over his mouth to muffle his startled yelp, practically jumping out of his scales.

Shouta retracted his claws and continued to sit on the floor, staring balefully at Spinner.

“Wha-?” Spinner gaped, “What do you want?”

Shouta lifted his paw and deliberately unsheathed his claws. Spinner cursed, scrambling away. Shouta bared his teeth, hissing furiously, and Spinner sprang off the couch, hurriedly backing away.

It took only a few threatening lunges and territorial growls to send Spinner out of the living room with his tail between his legs. A full-grown man – renowned villain, in fact – scared off by a housecat.

Shouta pushed the living room door closed with one paw before turning his attention to the front door again. He was much better at timing his jumps now, mostly getting to the right height. The harder part was grabbing the door handle properly.

He needed to have his right paw over the post of the door handle and his left hooked around the latch itself, and then both of his back paws had to be on the wall, not the door. It was honestly a miracle he’d managed it the first time.

After what felt like hours but was only about ten minutes, the door reluctantly cracked open. Shouta dropped to the floor with a relieved huff. He grabbed the door with one paw and dragged it open a few more centimeters, then slipped through the gap. Once again, the streetside door was locked. Shouta made it up onto the shoe shelf in one smooth jump, then hunched on the very edge to paw at the door handle.

The lock was obviously old, the metal dull and worn with rust creeping from the latch. It proved incredibly stubborn when Shouta tried to turn it, sticking in place with rusted metal grinding on rusted metal. He had to reach as far as he could possibly extend to touch the lock, and had practically no leverage to speak of, and after twenty minutes of just wrestling with the lock, Shouta’s arms ached something fierce.

Shouta settled back onto his haunches with a huff, resting his strained muscles. He eyed the lock and doorhandle, trying to come up with anything that would be more effective than what he was already doing.

This door had a thumb latch with a utilitarian rectangle handle and a bulky backplate. The latch itself would be child’s play to open, even if it was twice as rusted as the lock. All it required was downward force, and Shouta just needed gravity for that. Unfortunately, he could only do that after he got the lock open.

The rectangular handle part might be useful, though. If Shouta could stand on the bottom of the handle, he might have the leverage required to open the lock.

Just as he was gauging the distance to jump, the cracked-open door to the living room flew all the way open.

Shouta whirled towards the door so fast that he almost fell off the shelf, his fur poofing out and spine arching automatically.

The moonlight from the window cast Dabi’s scars into cold relief. Shouta’s cat eyes, built for detecting motion, caught every flicker of his gaze. From Shouta, to the door handle, and back to Shouta again.

“Are you trying to get out?” Dabi asked, and there was the sharply cruel villain that had mocked Shouta at the training camp.

Shouta’s heartrate tripled, but he wasn’t an amateur. There was still a chance to salvage this. With monumental effort, Shouta flattened down his hackles, straightened his spine, and forced his ears up. As though he had nothing in the world to be concerned about, he sat down and theatrically began licking his paw.

“You’re not cute,” Dabi hissed, and blue sparks popped over his skin.

Shouta’s ears flattened to his skull for a split second before he forced them up again, sweeping his tail in deliberately slow arcs. He tilted his head at Dabi, flicking his ears slightly. ‘I have no idea how I got here, either’, Shouta said with his eyes.

Now, Shouta was not an actor. He was a pro hero. But he was a pro hero who intentionally cultivated an easy to underestimate physical appearance, and since the only memorable thing about him was his Quirk and his capture weapon, he’d done his fair share of undercover missions.

Shouta could fake loyalty. He could fake surprise, obedience, and various types of hatred. He could even fake interest, when he wanted to. Honestly, the one thing Shouta couldn’t fake was joy – that was more Hizashi’s territory. But he could certainly do innocence.

“I don’t believe that innocent face for a second,” Dabi snarled, taking a threatening step into the mudroom, reaching a hand forward in what was apparently his sign for ‘I am about to set you on fire’. The whole room got noticeably warmer, but Shouta didn’t react. Just tilted his head at Dabi and widened his eyes even more, twitching his ears curiously. Somewhere, the deep cat-instinct part of his brain said ‘ah, yes. I can work with this’. A dozen tiny muscle adjustments flowed through Shouta’s body, and he found himself leaning towards Dabi with a happy chirp, pressing his face into Dabi’s extended hand.

All the wind was immediately snatched from Dabi’s sails, and he visibly faltered. The hand on Shouta’s head shifted, and Shouta’s breath hitched for a split second. He forced his lungs to work, his eyes trained on Dabi’s torso. The instant Dabi summoned even a spark, Shouta could erase his Quirk.

Dabi’s fingers curled around Shouta’s head, and too-hot fingertips rubbed between his ears.

Dabi, Shouta noted vaguely, did not know how to pet cats. How could you not know how to pet cats?

Shouta’s heart was still racing, his human brain screaming at him, but he pushed past the Hero instincts – that would only get him killed – leaned heavily on the cat instincts. Dabi had a look of faint shock on his face as he rubbed gingerly between his ears, and Shouta latched his Hero brain onto that while letting the cat control his body. Analyze and theorize. Stop panicking and think.

Dabi had no idea how to pet a cat. He was shocked by something about the situation. Shouta deigning to allow someone to touch him? Possibly. Touching any cat at all? Also a possibility, considering how bad at it he was. The surprise of Shouta leaning towards him had snapped him out of whatever rage he’d been building himself into. Another sign of an elemental Quirk pre-meltdown. A good startle would often break someone out of an emotional spiral.

Once he’d taken all he could possibly manage, Shouta slipped away from Dabi’s touch, flowing down from the shoe shelf and into the living room like a furry liquid.

 Dabi followed him, and Shouta glanced back just in time to see the villain pull a key out of the door lock.

Well.

There went Shouta’s most promising escape route.

Dang.

“Why’d you bring it back?”

Shouta was sure that, if Spinner had human skin instead of gecko scales, he would have gone pale upon seeing Shouta slip into the room.

Dabi blinked, looking down at Shouta again. “He’s… soft.”

From the look on his face, even Spinner could tell that it was something deeper than that. Shouta used the hesitation to retreat under Shigaraki’s recliner again. Dealing with the extra dust under the recliner was worth ensuring Dabi’s increased hesitation in torching Shigaraki’s special seat.

“He let you touch him?” Spinner demanded, “for more than three seconds? And he didn’t claw your face off?!”

Dabi opened his mouth, then closed it. “…he did,” he said after a long pause, “and I didn’t set him on fire.”

“Smart cat,” Spinner muttered.

“He played me,” Dabi seethed, working himself back up into a proper rage.

“Like the cheap kazoo you are,” Shouta mumbled, then immediately smacked a paw over his mouth. He needed to stop listening to his students. If it was just Hizashi, Shouta could mostly ignore it, but with meme culture coming from both sides, even he wasn’t immune. Maybe he should expel Ashido? No, then he’d also have to expel Kaminari, and Shinsou would never forgive him.

“We already knew he was too smart to be an ordinary cat,” Spinner said cautiously. He was watching Dabi carefully from the corner of his eye, but was apparently smart enough to know better than to tell the fire villain directly that he needed to calm down.

That was an instinct Shouta would like to have pounded into little Tenya’s head a bit more back when he, Tensei, and Hizashi had gotten together to ‘babysit’. Honestly, it was an instinct that a lot of the kids in his class could do better. And, actually, most people in the world.

Despite his mounting fury, Dabi was still coherent enough to know that torching Shigaraki’s recliner was a bad idea. Shouta was going to stay underneath it and not emerge until he was sure it was safe.

It was a long and boring wait. Shouta settled into a fitful half-doze, somewhere between sleeping and meditating. He was too stressed to sleep properly, especially since it was the exact time he was usually on patrol, but meditating was usually what he did when he couldn’t sleep, and it was better than nothing.

Dabi left again after only a few minutes, but it took Spinner almost two hours to give up on his muted videogame and retreat back through the living room door. Hopefully, he was going to go to sleep.

That left Shouta alone and awake in the middle of the night again, though this time with the door locked via a key he didn’t even have.

With nothing better to do, Shouta dragged himself out from under the couch and dove into a thorough casing of the room. By now he was mostly used to the gray-washed feline vision, so it wasn’t really a surprise how easy it was to investigate even in the pitch-black room. Shouta had been trained in criminal psychology and some forensics, and he’d done a decent amount of detective work in his time as an underground hero. He knew how to search a room, even as a cat.

Every nook and cranny was inspected. It was much easier to get under shelves and into tiny crevices as a cat, though harder to test various places for hidden compartments. He managed to push up the couch cushions, open every cupboard and drawer, and even pry the fridge open. Shouta doubted any normal cat could have opened the fridge, even a Quirked one. He’d only managed because he knew how fridge seals worked, and he used that to his advantage.

In total, Shouta didn’t find anything surprising. There was a loose baseboard in the corner between the TV and loveseat, though based on the empty, dusty crevice behind it, Shouta suspected nobody had used it as a stash yet. The back of one of the cupboards was completely consumed by a huge bulk bag of individually-wrapped mints, almost halfway gone. The cupboards and drawers Shouta had managed to get into were clean and orderly, everything neatly sorted. The heavy-duty door in the kitchen was locked, which he only learned after several minutes and a dozen attempts to open it. The only thing he found in the couches were two discarded pens and a comb with more broken teeth than whole.

The notes and lists he found were almost all in the same handwriting, a bouncy, round lettering that Shouta might almost call kawaii. Shockingly cutesy for who Shouta suspected was Kurogiri, since it was mostly shopping lists and sticky-note reminders for various things, and Kurogiri seemed more like the type for that. There were a few others mixed in; Shouta found half of a note written in almost scarily perfect calligraphy that had fallen behind the trash can, a folded paper that just said ‘password:’ and a list of seemingly random characters, and an almost unintelligible request for more of ‘these’ on a pink sticky note that must have fallen off whatever they wanted more of.

What was more noteworthy than what he found was what he didn’t find.

Shouta loved junk drawers; they always provided a wonderful insight into the mind of the person cultivating them. One of his favorite investigating memories was when he’d opened a suspect’s junk drawer and found a half-empty magazine of bullets for the same make and model of gun that had killed their victim.

But the League of Villains hideout didn’t have a junk drawer. Even the most neat-freak family had a junk drawer. More or less organized, with different objects in it, but anywhere that was lived in for long enough developed a junk drawer as a necessary dumping ground for things that otherwise didn’t have a place. The hideout not having one meant that they’d only moved here recently.

Shouta had assumed the League had taken Bakugou to a dummy base or safe house, something they could burn without consequences. They still could have done that, and simply moved bases a lot regardless of such upsets – that was what Shouta would do, if he was one of the most wanted Villain groups in the country – but they didn’t live like people who were always moving. The combination of Warp Gate and Compress would make moving easier, but even then, Kurogiri’s counter of alcohols would be an insanely tedious luxury to keep through frequent moves.

Another on the list of things Shouta hadn’t found was any sort of blood supply. Not in the fridge and not in the freezer. Shouta wouldn’t say he was an expert on blood-based Quirks, but he had taken Quirk Theory classes, went to school and then worked with Kan, and three years ago he’d had a student in his class with a Quirk powered by blood consumption, so he also wasn’t ignorant.

Blood-related Quirks, even ones that didn’t rely directly on blood consumption, required a lot of iron, and sometimes other nutrients that were most often found in blood. A lot of people with blood consumption Quirks required some amount of blood intake even beyond using their Quirk. Shouta knew that Kan had helped to found and fund a food-bank style charity that collected, packaged, and distributed various choices of synthetic, animal, and some human blood, specifically for people with blood-based Quirks.

Shouta hadn’t found any. Not the glorified juice boxes designed to be stored in the fridge alongside other, less biohazardous foodstuffs. No frozen concentrate made to be mixed in large batches. Not even any of half a dozen brands of powdered synthetic blood substitute, and considering the intricacies of Toga’s Quirk – reading DNA from the blood she consumed – he doubted a synthetic would even be enough for her.

Best case scenario, Toga had her own personal minifridge of blood in her room.

Worst case scenario… she was chronically Quirk-starved.

Considering how generally manic she was – and how obsessed with blood as a concept – Shouta was unfortunately leaning towards the latter.

Surely, surely in a group of eight of the most infamous villains in the country, at least one of them had a good handle on their Quirk requirements. Right?

Spinner’s insomnia, which was most likely caused by his Quirk making him partly nocturnal, Dabi’s constant pre-meltdown, Toga’s blood deficiency, Twice’s obvious multiple personality disorder and less obvious imposter syndrome, and even Shigaraki’s dehydration – undoubtedly a Quirk drawback, though exactly how, Shouta wasn’t sure – all pointed towards the answer being ‘not likely’.

Shouta was going to tentatively pin his hopes on Kurogiri and Mr. Compress. They seemed like the most sensible, responsible members of the group, and certainly more put together and better at regulating their own emotions than everyone else. He might have extended the same courtesy to Magne, but he was about seventy percent sure that her Quirk did something to mess with her eyes, and all she was doing about it was wearing tinted sunglasses.

In his last lap of the room – setting everything he’d moved or disturbed back to rights – Shouta stopped briefly by one of the drawers under Kurogiri’s alcohol collection. There was a magnetic knife block stuck to the side of the fridge, but there was also a smaller collection of kitchen knives in the drawer. Shouta suspected they were for bartending as opposed to cooking. He managed to pull the chef’s knife out of the drawer with his teeth, and did a rough-and-ready quality test with the capabilities he had at hand.

The blade was very sharp, and seemed like high quality steel, and as far as Shouta could tell, it had a full tang all the way through the handle. The handle itself was also surprisingly sturdy, and from what he could tell as a cat, it would probably be decent for knife fighting. As decent as any kitchen knife got, that was. Shouta carried the knife to the corner with the loose baseboard, where he carefully stashed it and pushed the baseboard back in place.

Probably, nothing would come of it. In an immediate combat situation, Shouta would either go for the more accessible magnetic knife block or be forced to fight barehanded. It was good to keep his options open, though. A decent knife was always a good thing to have.

Chapter Text

Shouta was starting to struggle to sleep. He was getting used to the unfamiliarity of the cat’s physical makeup, adapting like humans did to everything, and usually that would be a good thing. It meant Shouta was better at doing things in the cat body, everything from walking to judging distances to picking out specific sounds. Unfortunately, it meant his ingrained paranoia had fully kicked in and helpfully granted him a heaping helping of insomnia.

Surrounded by villains as he was, Shouta’s Hero brain was constantly in overdrive, and with his new familiarity with his feline form, all of Shouta’s typical sleep issues had cropped up again. He struggled to sleep properly on a good day, as a human in his own bed with his husband beside him. It was practically impossible in as tense a situation as he was in now.

Which left Shouta unable to do much but doze lightly, awakened by any little noise or shift in the air. At the moment, his disturbance was Mr. Compress, who was moving quietly around the kitchen, making himself a cup of coffee.

Shouta watched him tiredly, his head propped up on the arm of Shigaraki’s recliner. It was around midnight, a time that would normally be near the tail end of Shouta’s longest sleeping period. Now that he was awake, Shouta doubted he’d be able to fall asleep again until at least five or six in the morning.

Mr. Compress seemed entirely unphased by Shouta’s disgruntled glare, sitting down at the table with his coffee sitting by his elbow. He reached into the battered black messenger bag at his feet and pulled out an equally battered laptop, and suddenly Shouta was laser-focused on the villain, watching him set the laptop on the table and flip it open.

Shouta did not particularly care what Mr. Compress was doing on the laptop. He might be planning morally reprehensible activities or ordering a new deck of cards, Shouta didn’t know, and he would likely never know. All Shouta cared about at the moment was that the laptop existed, and since it existed, Shouta might be able to get his paws on it.

Since Shouta hadn’t found the laptop or the messenger bag in his search of the living room area, that meant it was kept elsewhere in the building. Which meant Shouta would have to leave the tentative safety of Shigaraki’s recliner.

Honestly, he should have abandoned the living room ages ago at this point. The only reason he’d initially stuck around was to have ready access to Kurogiri’s counter of fancy alcohols, but that had proven no longer necessary when Shouta had made it clear that anyone trying to hold him for any length of time would definitely get their face clawed off. The biggest risk to Shouta at the moment was Dabi, who was at any given moment a single irritating action away from setting Shouta on fire and calling it a day.

Which meant there was no reason for Shouta to stay in the living room area, and he should definitely canvas the rest of the building sooner rather than later. He couldn’t get at the laptop right now, not with Mr. Compress working on it, so that would have to be a future goal. In the meantime, there was finally something somewhat useful for Shouta to spend his time on.

Never one to dawdle when there was work to do, Shouta rolled out of Shigaraki’s recliner and landed on the ground with barely a sound. He easily slipped out the living room door that Mr. Compress had left cracked open slightly, glad that the flea collar they’d forced on him didn’t have a bell on it.

The hallway beyond the door was dark, only illuminated by the faintest glow creeping in from Mr. Compress’s computer screen. Fortunately, Shouta’s cat eyes were built to see in low light, and he could barely tell the difference.

There were six doors leading off from the hallway, one of which was the one to the living room that Shouta had just come through, which left only five mysteries.

Shouta decided on a clockwise search pattern, and padded towards the door immediately to his left. It was at one end of the hallway, only a short distance away from the living room door. Of course, Shouta couldn’t get through the door. If he’d been willing to try himself against a round handle, it would undoubtedly take him many attempts, any one of which would alert Mr. Compress that Shouta was up to something he shouldn’t be.

But Shouta’s sense of smell was much better as a cat, and when he stuck his nose against the crack under the door he could smell a whole myriad of scents. Some were slightly baffling – why did it smell like laundry detergent? – but others made more sense. The scent of Shigaraki’s Quirk, earthy and almost like rain, was particularly strong. Shouta wondered briefly if Shigaraki had to wear gloves to sleep like Uraraka. He must, right? It would be far more disruptive to accidentally decay your mattress than to make your bedspread float temporarily.

The door next in line was almost directly across from the living room, and it was a sliding pocket door that looked pretty much impossible to open as a cat. There was a soft light glowing from underneath it, and the gap under the door was large enough that Shouta could look through it if he pressed his face against the floor.

It was a bathroom, with a sink directly across from the door, a curtain on the right that was probably hiding a shower, and a low half-wall on the left. Shouta didn’t have a vantage point to see anything above the sink, but he suspected that there were some kinds of beauty products on a shelf or two somewhere. The scent of cheap perfume was about a hundred times stronger with a cat’s sensitive nose.

Shouta barely pulled his head up in time to not whack his skull against the door when he sneezed. The perfume scent lingered in his nose, and he sneezed again before vigorously shaking his head so hard his ears flapped.

The bathroom was quickly abandoned for the next door, and Shouta teetered there on three legs while he batted at his own nose to tamp down on another sneeze.

Even in the dark, there was no mistaking the door for anyone but Toga’s. It looked like it might have been painted white at the base level, but it had since been plastered with paint, posters, pictures, strands of beads and tinsel, and what Shouta was pretty sure were a few locks of hair. There were hearts of all sizes scribbled on the door, some of them broken dramatically in half while others dripped like blood. There was a concerning number of pictures of Shouta’s students, Uraraka and Midoriya peering out of what looked like security camera screenshots. There were also scattered animal posters, a few movie posters depicting attractive actors covered in blood, Toga’s own wanted poster, and one lonely official piece of hero merch, a licensed poster of Mt. Lady with a dagger pinning it to the door straight through Takeyama’s chest.

Shouta mentally filed away the opening mechanism – lever style doorhandle, and the door opened inwards, so Shouta should be able to manage it if he wanted to – and moved on.

He’d reached the other end of the hallway now, and this door smelled very strongly of the incongruous combination of bitter woodfire and unfired clay. Dabi and Twice at the very least, probably at least one other person, though there could be a second floor or another bedroom behind a door Shouta couldn’t get through. The door was too low to see under, but when Shouta pressed his ear against it, he could hear low snoring coming from the room. A miracle, someone was actually sleeping.

The last door in the hallway was another bathroom, this time without the sharp scent of perfume. It smelled faintly of another strong chemical that took Shouta a moment to place. Hair dye.

The scent was unmistakable, and it brought back nostalgic memories of Shouta’s childhood. His older sister, Ikari, had inherited their dad’s silver-gray hair, and was always protesting that it made her look old. Since Ikari was Quirkless, it was hard for her to get good service pretty much anywhere doing anything, so she’d taken to dying her own hair in their shared bathroom. Since Shouta’s room was the closest to the bathroom, that meant that every time Ikari changed her hair color, Shouta smelled hair dye for hours.

They had tried to dye Shouta’s hair once; Ikari had come home with a bottle of hair bleach and a fancy GanRiki Neko pen as a bribe, and Shouta had begrudgingly allowed her to paint the stuff in his hair. It had ended up a brassy orange-ish, but that was fine with Ikari, who had promptly slathered it with red dye. Until it grew out completely, Shouta had red-orange hair that was… fine. He hadn’t particularly cared about the color either way, but the bleaching and dying wreaked havoc on his hair, making it brittle and rough, and Shouta had sworn to never dye his hair again.

Shouta remembered Shigaraki shouting something about hair dye at Dabi. If he was dying his hair black, that was probably not nearly as bad as bleaching it lighter. It did lead to some interesting questions, though. There were a lot of reasons someone would want to dye their hair. Just for fun was the most common. For one of the most wanted villains in the country, though, hiding his identity was the more likely reason.

A bottle of hair dye alone wasn’t enough to throw off someone looking for you, but if you paired that with some pretty nasty scars, it would make you pretty much unrecognizable, even with a very distinctive Quirk.

Something to look into later. Shouta filed that away in his mind and returned to the task at hand. He couldn’t get into any unexplored rooms at the moment; he’d have to wait for morning, or until someone else wandered out of their room to do who-knows-what.

Shouta had already explored the living room in its entirety, but Mr. Compress had brought a new variable into the room with his computer bag.

The man himself was so focused on his laptop that he didn’t even notice Shouta under the table. Shouta grabbed the strap of the computer bag between his teeth and carefully tipped it onto its side. The top was already unzipped, fortunately, so Shouta was free to start pulling out everything in it.

Mostly, he found standard laptop bag items. A neatly coiled computer charging cable, a half-empty pack of gum, half a dozen cellophane-wrapped mints, nail clippers, a deck and a half of playing cards, a keyring with two unlabeled keys, a half-solved keyring-sized Rubik’s cube, a handful of pens and pencils, and a worn spiral-bound notebook.

With a little difficulty, Shouta flipped the notebook open to somewhere around the middle. The page was covered in clipped, almost cramped handwriting and a few small sketches of hands. It looked like notes on a magic trick, how it was done, what he’d struggled with, and how to make it better. The sketches were neatly done, if a bit rough and unpolished. They got their point across, at least.

The other pages were similar, as far as Shouta could tell, and the notebook was about two thirds full. He carefully closed it again and returned to the laptop bag, digging out the last few items at the bottom.

Five of Mr. Compress’s marbles.

Shouta squinted at them, examining the surface of each one, trying to see if he could figure out what was inside them. He forgot himself briefly, and as he turned his head, his whiskers brushed against one of the marbles just a little too hard. It was enough to set the marble rolling, quickly picking up speed as it hit a slightly slanted tile in the floor.

Shouta cursed under his breath, leaping forward to pounce on the marble. His paws slid off the round surface, and it practically shot out from underneath him, clattering over the bumps in the hardwood floor and rolling out from underneath the table.

“What…?” Mr. Compress shifted in his chair, starting to stand. The marble continued to roll, heading almost directly towards the steps down into the living room area.

Shouta watched it go, considering the merits of catching it before it hit the stairs. It would probably make a loud noise going down the stairs, something that might disturb the others in the building. All the better, honestly.

With a quick flick of his wrist, Shota batted the rest of the marbles after the first.

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth, cat,” Mr. Compress sighed, watching the marbles all clatter down the steps and roll away under the couches.

“That’s the plan,” Shouta grumbled.

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to bring me back those marbles?” Mr. Compress asked.

“Not on your life.”

“What are you even doing down there?” Mr. Compress’s face appeared under the table a moment later, and Shouta idly flicked an ear at him. He tried to say ‘Yes, I took everything out of your bag and spread it all over the floor. What are you going to do about it?’ with his body language alone. He’d never been super great at body language, but he was pretty sure he got his point across.

Apparently, Mr. Compress was going to sigh about it.

“Is there anything still in my bag?”

“I couldn’t open the side pocket,” Shouta told him blankly, though of course Mr. Compress wouldn’t be able to understand him.

Mr. Compress just sighed again, going back to his laptop. Shouta slipped out from under the table, flicking his tail in thought.

Shouta knew Compress didn’t require actual physical contact to activate, but a lot of people without formal Quirk training relied on something like touch or eye contact to activate or focus Quirks, even when said Quirk didn’t necessarily rely on it. So, Shouta would likely be safe getting near Mr. Compress, so long as he dodged the man’s hands themselves. And if Shouta wanted access to the laptop, he’d have to get rid of Mr. Compress.

Once again, Shouta was going to do something that Hizashi would probably glare at him for. Shouta did that a lot, though.

Shouta jumped straight up onto the tabletop, padding across the scuffed wood towards Mr. Compress. The man glanced at him, but his attention was mostly focused on the screen of his laptop.

His mistake.

Mr. Compress had left his mug of coffee sitting to one side, close enough to be within reach but far enough away that he wouldn’t accidentally bump against it. Shouta didn’t need to get too close to his hands to dart in, whack the still mostly full mug hard enough to tip it over, and leap back again.

Mr. Compress surged out of his seat with a hissed curse, teeth clenched and eyes flashing. His whole right side was soaked, and a broad pool of coffee had formed around the upset mug, dribbling down from the edge of the table and splattering onto the floor.

Shouta neatly dodged Mr. Compress’s furious swipe at him, bounding to the other side of the table. Mr. Compress snarled at him, then glared down at the puddle of spilled coffee.

“I did not need this tonight,” Mr. Compress seethed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I didn’t need to be turned into a cat,” Shouta grumbled, “but here we are.”

“You shut up,” Mr. Compress snapped, storming into the kitchen area and returning with a wad of paper towels. He mopped up the spilled coffee with brusque, angry motions, deposited the dirty cup in the sink, swept the notebook on the floor up into his arms, and slammed the laptop closed with a sharp snap.

“I am going to take a shower,” Mr. Compress told Shouta stiffly, “If anything is missing or broken by the time I get back, I will give Dabi free reign over your miserable corpse!”

Shouta flicked his tail at Mr. Compress, unimpressed. He’d heard much better threats; he’d give it a four out of ten. He didn’t even threaten Shouta himself! In general, Mr. Compress was also a little too well put-together, even in loungewear and covered in spilled coffee. He was missing the deranged, mentally ill charm that was required for a proper manic threat like that.

Mr. Compress swept out of the room like a furious stormcloud, closing the living room door with a harsh click.

Shouta waited until he heard another door close, until Mr. Compress’s footsteps faded from his hearing and water rushed through the pipes in the wall. Then, he dove for the laptop.

This one was far easier to open than Shouta’s own laptop; one of the hinges was busted and the other was loose, making it practically fall open when Shouta pushed it. He was then met with a screen requesting a password. Shouta sighed and jumped down from the table, making his way back to the shelf of alcohols. In his in-depth search of the room, he’d found a note with a password written on it, folded in half and tucked between the fridge and the magnetized knife block. He pulled it out of its place again, careful to not leave any tooth marks on the paper, and read the password three times.

Shouta hurried back to the laptop, repeating the password in his head before inputting it with careful taps of his paws. He pressed return and waited with bated breath as the laptop threw up a loading screen. After a few seconds, the screen opened up, revealing a website for… a Shinto shrine? Specifically, the page on the site dedicated to the cemetery and family graves that the shrine workers upkept.

Now Shouta felt a little bad.

He didn’t even know who Mr. Compress was mourning.

Although, if it was a member of his own family, then it was likely their family name would be on this site somewhere, and since Shouta knew Mr. Compress’s full name now, he could easily look them up. Shouta committed the name of the shrine to memory to hopefully put to use later and carefully opened a new browser tab.

The quintessential website in Pro Hero work was generally called HeroNet, since it didn’t actually have an official name. The location of the HeroNet servers was a constantly-changing secret, and there was a team of at least a dozen technopaths that were relied upon to keep the website – and everything about it – a secret.

HeroNet was about as secure as a website could get, and when heroes wanted to share classified information or reach out during an undercover mission, they did it via HeroNet.

Shouta couldn’t get onto HeroNet.

Not only was his personal login twelve words, each with special capitalization and some in foreign languages – which would be a pain and a half to type in as a cat – but it also required two-factor authentication, and his authentication key was kept very safely in a pocket of his utility belt.

Fortunately, he could get onto the next best thing.

The anonymous hero report was run on the same servers as HeroNet, with all the same protections, but didn’t require a login at all. It was supposed to be for anonymous reports in potentially dangerous situations – similar to texting 119, but for contacting Heroes – but was also often used by Heroes when they didn’t have their authentication keys or Hero students who didn’t have their own HeroNet login. There was actually a protocol for it and everything.

Shouta carefully typed in his message, trying to keep it short and to the point. He had to backspace and retype a dozen times because his clunky cat paws pressed the wrong buttons, but he managed to get his message down. He stepped back and reread his message once before sending it.

‘code OA-U/C- 5.18.1.19.21.18.5, fwd msg to pres mic, midnight, nedzu. this is eraserhead. not dead, hurt, or undr thret. wrkng on gttng out. dnt need hlp rn. will try to stay in cntct.’

Shouta quickly pressed send, then exited out of the window. Thanks to the technopaths at HeroNet, it would erase itself from the browser history, leaving no trace that it had ever been there. Shouta closed the laptop again and slipped down from the table. The shower shut off in the other room, and Shouta scrambled for the knife block, hurriedly wriggling the slip of paper with the password back into place between the fridge and magnet strip.

By the time Mr. Compress returned to the room, everything was back in place and Shouta had returned to Shigaraki’s recliner, sprawling across the cushion with his chin on the armrest.

“You walk a very fine line, cat,” Mr. Compress said, surveying the mess Shouta had already made of the contents of his bookbag.

Shouta didn’t bother to respond. He watched Mr. Compress gather up everything Shouta had pulled out of his bag, stuffing everything – including the laptop – back into the bag and zipping it shut.

Despite still feeling a little sympathetic, Shouta was now vindicated. He almost managed to fall properly asleep, secure in the knowledge that at least Hizashi wouldn’t be too worried about him.

Chapter Text

Tonight marked the one-week point of Shouta being a cat, and he hadn’t turned back yet. He had managed to properly scare off every member of the League of Villains; even Toga was less enamored with him after he’d spent almost an hour painstakingly tearing every single thing off her door. He was pretty sure he still had glitter in his fur two days later, but it had been worth it to no longer have Toga eyeing him like she wanted to eat him all the time.

That also meant that Shouta had been in the League of Villains hideout for a week and was no closer to getting out. In fact, since they were now keeping the front door locked, he was actually farther from getting out than he’d started.

Shouta had been teaching high-school Hero students for years, and he had yet to find anything near as frustrating as being stopped by a locked door with the key hanging from a hook less than a meter from the lock. He’d probably cumulatively spent at least a couple hours just glaring at it by now.

With no thumbs, no access to anything useful, and unable to fall asleep, there wasn’t much else for Shouta to do. He spent a lot of time sprawled in Shigaraki’s armchair glaring at the door, walls, or ceiling, trying to force himself to sleep.

This morning, that was untenable. Because this morning, instead of quietly playing videogames, surfing the web, or doing dubiously nefarious things on a laptop, the people in the room were making noise.

So, instead of glaring at the wall, Shouta was glaring at Magne and Toga, who were rattling around the kitchen retrieving a variety of things from various cupboards and shelves. An electric kettle, a few boxes box of fancy tea – or as fancy as it got for tea that came in boxes like the ones Magne was holding – actual teacup-shaped teacups, a bottle of dish soap from under the sink, and a few other bits and bobs.

Magne left the living room door slightly open behind her, and Shouta flicked his tail idly, considering his options.

Shouta didn’t necessarily have constant headaches – not since he’d done some research into how his Quirk affected his neurology and taken steps to mitigate the negative effects – but even when he went through stretches of not using his Quirk a lot, his headaches certainly weren’t rare.

His headaches were definitely not helped by the loud swearing, overdramatized combat sounds, and occasional flinging of videogame controllers across the room. Shigaraki, Dabi, Twice, and Spinner were all playing some kind of racing game that had too many flashing colors. From what Shouta had gathered, Spinner was wiping the floor with the others, and not a single one of them was willing to take that quietly. Literally or figuratively.

Twice wailed inarticulately at the screen, his remote clattering to the ground, and Shouta decided that was enough. Even if he was just going to lie on the floor in the hallway, it would be better than being in the same room as this.

Shouta slipped through the open living room door and found that the sliding door to the girls’ bathroom was also open. He hesitated for a moment – generally, Shouta steered clear of girls’ bathrooms unless someone needed immediate assistance – but the door was open, so he sidled closer.

“Okay, okay,” Toga was saying over the soft sounds of water lapping against the side of a tub, “hmm. Tiger?”

“The Wild, Wild Pussycat?” Magne asked.

“Yeah!”

Magne hummed thoughtfully. “And we’re talking purely personal, not in his role as a Hero?”

“Right,” Toga chirped.

“Pass,” Magne decided.

“Okay, your turn,” Toga urged her.

“Alright, let’s say, uh… that blonde kid. The explodey one. Can’t remember his name. The one the boss wanted to keep.”

Shouta winced, backing away from the door. The last thing he wanted was to hear a pair of Villains play Smash or Pass with his students.

“Stab,” Toga said before Shouta could get out of earshot. “Definitely stab. Did you see the Sports Festival? When he fought Uravity? So mean…”

Did she say stab?

“My turn again,” Toga said, “On the subject of class 1A… what do you think about Uravity?”

There was a creak and a rustle of fabric, and a short pause before Magne answered. “Eh. I don’t have anything against her personally. Pass, I guess. But I agree with you on explodey boy. If I meet him again, it’s going to be on sight.”

“I’ll definitely stab Uravity,” Toga sighed dreamily, “she looks so cute covered in blood.”

“I guess I can keep with the 1A trend,” Magne said, “but I don’t really know any of the students. Thoughts on Eraserhead?”

Shouta almost jumped out of his fur. It was far, far too late to back out now. He had to hear the answer to this, and he wasn’t sure which one he preferred.

“Ohhh, that’s hard,” Toga said, “He’s too old to be cute, but Shigaraki said there was a puddle of blood when the Nomu got Eraserhead, isn’t that great?”

Shouta’s skin was crawling, phantom twinges prickling in his arms.

“If you say so,” Magne hummed, and water sloshed loudly.

Shouta had heard enough. The door to the other bathroom was hanging slightly open. Shouta was going to take a nap on the bathmat and try to forget everything he’d heard and seen in the past week.

And then, a miraculous scent drifted past him, forcing Shouta to pause and reevaluate. Over the powerful scent of artificial lavender, it smelled like hot asphalt under the summer sun with just the faintest trace of sunbaked dumpster. The scent was coming from the girls’ bathroom. It was incredibly unlikely that there would be a door to the outdoors in the bathroom, but Shouta was small enough to slip through pretty much any window that could open.

With great reluctance, Shouta stuck his head around the bathroom door.

Magne and Toga were both sitting on stools right next to the bathtub with their feet in the tub. There was a teacup set on the rim of the bathtub, along with the bottle of dish soap, electric kettle, and a few bottles of nail polish. Shouta couldn’t see exactly what the two girls were holding from his perspective, but he was pretty sure Toga had a nail polish brush and Magne was cradling the other teacup.

What he was actually here for – the open window – was a tiny slit of a thing near the ceiling, over the foot of the bathtub. In this form, Shouta could get through it. It might be a bit of a squeeze, but he could definitely get through. The problem was getting to the window.

If he jumped from the rim of tub at the right angle, he’d probably be able to get up there. He could try and wait until Toga and Magne left, but it was highly likely they’d close either the window or the door if he did. But with Toga and Magne in the room, he’d get only one chance. If that.

Shouta bided his time, watching Magne set her teacup down and reach for a bottle of nail polish. She turned to the side to do it, leaning towards where the nail polish bottles were sitting on the rim of the bathtub. At the same time, Toga reached for her own teacup on the other side of the tub. With the two of them leaning away from each other, it left a perfect gap for Shouta to jump through.

He did just that.

By then, Shouta had gotten used to his feline body enough to make the jump easily, landing on the rim of the bathtub and immediately jumping away again before all four paws could even touch the plastic. Again, leaping almost straight up from the far edge, and Shouta knocked something into the tub behind him and scraped his ear on the edge of the open window, but he managed to hook his paws over the sill.

Shouta clung to the windowsill with all his strength, scrabbling at the wall with his back paws, trying to grip the slippery, steam-slicked paint.

Magne yelped, and there was a sharp clatter of something hitting the floor, water sloshing and more clatters. Shouta scrabbled at the wall harder, trying to pull himself up. He knew that as a human, he had the upper body strength to get over a ledge like this with just a good grip, but either the strength didn’t translate properly to a cat form, or his muscles were positioned in different places that made it not as helpful.

Either way, Shouta struggled on the windowsill for just a moment too long. Only a second after he got his claws to catch on the wall, his hindquarters were tugged abruptly back. He was glowing again, Shouta realized as he desperately clung to the windowsill for all he was worth. Glowing blue with Magnetism.

His grip wasn’t at the right angle to resist the backwards force of the magnetism, and Shouta’s claws slipped off the metal windowsill with a sound like nails scraping across a chalkboard. He flew backwards less than a meter before the Magnetism cut off and Shouta dropped unceremoniously into the half-full bathtub.

The water wasn’t deep, but Shouta had been dropped from almost a meter up and the surface was thick with frothy bubbles. While Shouta spluttered and flailed, trying to keep his head above the layer of bubbles, Magne sloshed past him and shoved the window shut, tugging the latch closed. Shouta managed to find his footing in the tub and spat angrily, trying to get soap out of his mouth. The bubbles smelled painfully strongly of artificial lavender, so much that it would probably make his eyes water if it weren’t for his chronic dry eye.

Shouta waded slowly to the side of the tub, clawing his way up onto the rim.

“You want a towel?” Toga asked, pulling a rough-looking towel from under the sink. It was telling that she didn’t step towards him. Just held the towel and eyed him cautiously. Shouta was proud of what he’d managed to accomplish after only a week of living with the League of Villains. Even Toga – the least concerned with her own health and most predisposed to fanaticism – was wary of bothering him.

Shouta glanced at the towel, flicked an ear at the swell of furious shouting coming from the living room, and promptly bolted for the door.

He was positively dripping wet, his fur completely soaked through, and the short sprint from the bathroom to the living room did little to change that. What did change that was when Shouta jumped up onto the coffee table, stopped in the middle of the surface, and shook himself hard.

The room erupted into shrieks, villains squawking and spluttering and swearing at him.

“I hate that stupid cat!” Spinner screeched, and Dabi only growled in furious agreement. Shouta jumped down from the coffee table and trotted back into the bathroom, where Toga was still holding up her towel.

“You causing chaos again?” Toga giggled, kneeling down to towel Shouta off. Shouta permitted it, though he shot a furious look at Magne as she stepped out of the bathtub. If she hadn’t dropped him into the tub, he wouldn’t have been wet in the first place.

Once he was mostly dry, Shouta wriggled out of Toga’s towel and slipped out of the bathroom. There wasn’t anything useful in the bathroom anymore, and the scent of artificial lavender was getting to be too much for him.

The chaos of his initial complimentary shower had subsided, leaving only grumbling in its wake. Spinner had obtained a wet rag and was wiping bubbles off of everything while Twice dried off things that couldn’t safely air-dry. Shouta didn’t dare get too near Shigaraki – he looked downright murderous, and Shouta suspected it had more than a little to do with the high-tech game console Shouta had sprayed with water and soap – so he retreated under the loveseat instead of braving Shigaraki’s recliner.

It would take longer for his fur to dry while he was huddled under the loveseat, but Shouta didn’t particularly care. It was darker, quieter, and much more secure underneath a large piece of furniture, and it was the closest he could get to being safe.

A little voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Hizashi whispered that if he stopped trying so hard to antagonize the League, he wouldn’t need to take safety in hiding under the furniture. Shouta told the imaginary Hizashi to shut up. Even on a good day – a good day when he was a human and in his own home – Shouta struggled to sleep in the open. There was no way he was managing it in the middle of the entire League of Villains.

“Hey guys!” That was Toga’s voice, and Shouta squirmed to the edge of the loveseat to peer out into the room. Toga was standing in the doorway, her arms full of the things she and Magne had taken from the kitchen. “Our spa day is mostly over now, but we’re moving nail painting to the kitchen. Does anyone else want their nails done?”

There was a beat of silence, and then Dabi asked, “You got anything other than red?”

“Um…” Toga set her armful of stuff on the table and dug through it. Glass bottles clinked together, and then Toga said, “This one’s kinda orange, and this one is a bit purpleish!”

“I’ll take the purple one,” Dabi sighed, and slumped into a seat at the table.

Shouta flicked his tail idly, watching Toga paint Dabi’s nails. If his hair was blonde instead of black, Shouta could just picture Mina capturing Bakugou to join their spa night. Except he’d insisted on black and orange in spiky explosion shapes like the collar of his hero costume. Shouta might or might not have swiped a bright yellow from Mina’s collection to paint his own nails later that night. The nail polish didn’t last long – it never did in his line of work – but it made Hizashi’s brain stall briefly when he saw it, so it was worth it.

Shouta sighed, his tail twitching idly on the floor. He wanted to get back to his husband. And his students. And his job. He was wasting away with nothing to do but watch and seethe. Sure, he could torment the League of Villains, but there wasn’t anything actually productive he could do as a cat.

It was illogical and unproductive, but there was always a corner of his mind running a well-worn path in the back of his head. A constant repetition of ‘maybe tomorrow’. Maybe tomorrow he’d get his hands on Mr. Compress’s laptop again. Maybe tomorrow they’d forget to lock the front door and Shouta could slip out.

Maybe tomorrow he’d turn back into a human and get put out of his misery.

Shouta sighed again and laid his head on his front paws. He let the sounds of life wash over him and for the first time didn’t bother to remind himself that he wasn’t in the dorm common room listening to Bakugou drawl lighthearted insults at Kirishima while Kaminari argued with the remote and Sero and Ashido threw stale popcorn at the TV.

All that was missing was the stack of half-graded papers and the drone of some speakers – the radio, Jiro’s music system, even the TV playing something. And, you know, the knowledge that when Shouta opened his eyes, he would be human and in the dorm common room. That was also missing.

“Where’d the little demon go?”

Shouta’s eyes shot open, and he peered out at Magne, who was now standing in the living room doorway.

“I told you, it’s catching on,” Dabi said, admiring the nails on his right hand. Ever since the front door incident, Dabi had been trying to convince everyone to call Shouta ‘Demon’. Much to Shouta’s delight, Dabi was correct in that it actually was catching on. Shouta had been ‘that demon kid from General Studies’ to his peers in high school and the ‘Demon Sensei’ to his students, it only made sense that he’d be a demon cat.

“He’s under the couch,” Twice said, jerking his head at Shouta’s hiding spot. He immediately followed it up with, “Why should I tell you?”, but after only a week of living with the League, Shouta had already learned to tune out Twice’s contrary secondary opinion.

Magne stalked over to stand in front of the loveseat Shouta was under. “Get out of there.”

Shouta squirmed backwards a few centimeters. Everyone in the League knew better than to go reaching for Shouta in a tight space – that was just asking to get their hand sliced open – so unfortunately Magne didn’t try to haul Shouta out herself, just growled at him in frustration. While she was busy fuming, Shouta flipped onto his back, digging his claws into the batting on the bottom of the loveseat. He was just in time, too.

A fizzy blue glow flared into existence around Shouta, and Magnetism yanked him towards the edge of the couch. Shouta dug his claws in deeper and pulled his tail in, curling it beside his hips.

Magne cursed through her teeth, and there was an amused snort that Shouta was pretty sure came from Dabi.

“Stop magnetizing the cat towards me!” Toga squawked. Well, at least that explained why Shouta had gone flying so dramatically in the bathroom.

“What are you even trying to do?” While Spinner was talking, Shouta tugged his claws out of the batting and turned to look back at the room.

Magne sat back on her heels with a huff. “He’s got lavender-scented dish soap in his fur. It’s bad for him.”

“Since when are you an expert on cats?” Dabi drawled.

“Eating dish soap is bad for everyone.”

“He’ll live,” Dabi shrugged, then added under his breath, “unfortunately.”

“Be nice!” Toga scolded, waving her nail polish brush at him.

“Well, I’m certainly not going to hose him off if he doesn’t want it,” Magne grumbled, shooting a sharp glare at Shouta. He bared his teeth and glared back, and Magne left him alone with a huff.

Shouta was honestly surprised she had even bothered to try. None of the villains liked him. Their dislike ranged from Toga’s healthy wariness of getting too close to Shouta’s claws all the way to Dabi’s eagerness to immediately turn Shouta into ash. Magne was closer to Toga’s end, but her concern was still unexpected.

It maybe shouldn’t have been surprising, though. Shouta had met cats that hated him, and he’d still done his best for them. He had a weak spot for all cats, even the vicious feral ones, but it stood to reason that most people would care enough to not want him to die, even if he’d done nothing but inconvenience and assault them since being brought to the hideout.

Shouta flicked his tail thoughtfully, retreating farther under the loveseat. His gaze lingered on Magne, though. She had evidently given up on getting him out from the couch – likely assuming he was sufficiently warned and capable of fending for himself – and wandered away to the table to finish painting her own nails.

Finally, with the emotional outbursts of competitive videogames giving way to a steadier murmur of almost-familiar voices, Shouta managed to drift into hazy sleep. It was barely sleep at all, shallow enough that Shouta could shoot awake at any moment, but it was still rest. Better than nothing.

Chapter Text

There was something to be said for the innate human desire for company.

Shouta hadn’t had any friendly contact since he’d met Naomasa at the police station on his first day of being a cat. He tended to be pretty solitary by nature, but usually he at least had the option to spend time with someone who actually liked him, and who he actually liked in return. Hizashi, Nemuri, even Nezu, Kan, or Ectoplasm. His sisters and parents, if he got really desperate. Now he had nothing but the dwindling hope of escape.

Nor did he have anything to do.

Shouta was not a person who appreciated idleness. He had two jobs, volunteered at a Red Lotus to help Quirkless people, and used the rest of his time to avoid getting roped into social events, which was an exhausting endeavor in and of itself. Sure, Shouta liked to sleep – there was a reason he’d earned the nickname ‘Energy-saver Sho’ in High School – but he had the reputation of the constantly tired teacher because he distributed his sleeping blocks to unorthodox times and places, not because he was actually always sleeping.

Now that he was stuck as a cat, with no thumbs, nothing important to get done, and not even a safe place to meditate in, Shouta was going more than a little bit stir crazy. He understood, now, why cats were always sleeping. There was literally nothing else to do.

Unfortunately, Shouta couldn’t even sleep to pass the time. He’d never struggled to sleep in unfamiliar places, but there was basically nothing Shouta could do to force his brain to sleep properly in an unsafe place. Many years of ingrained paranoia – growing up Quirkless, then with a villain’s Quirk, then being a Pro Hero – had pounded that deep into his psyche.

Once he got accustomed to the different feel of being a cat, Shouta couldn’t manage anything more than a surface-level doze unless he was truly exhausted. His sleep was far too easy to interrupt, and it appeared that sleep was a rare commodity for everyone in the League’s hideout.

No matter the time of day, there was someone up and doing something. It had actually been a downright miracle that Shouta had managed to get any time left alone to argue with the front door his first two nights, because there was always someone in the living room or kitchen. Dabi eating ice like it was the only thing sustaining him, Spinner driven to wander from insomnia, Shigaraki staying up until three in the morning to 100% his videogame, Mr. Compress typing madly on his battered laptop, Kurogiri cleaning or baking or mixing elaborate drinks for reasons Shouta still couldn’t pin down, and even Magne draped over the couch reading cheesy romance novels.

The only person he hadn’t seen out in the living room at unholy hours of the morning was Toga. That was a red flag in and of itself, because chronic exhaustion was almost always paired with the mania that came from a bearer of a blood-based Quirk not getting enough blood.

Honestly, every day Shouta was getting more and more concerned for every member of the League of Villains. No matter what he told himself, spending a lot of time in the same people’s company would inevitably lead to caring about them in some kind of way.

The more time Shouta spent with them, the more he noticed. The more he couldn’t help but notice, no matter how much he tried not to. When he was Nedzu’s personal student, the Rat had told Shouta that his fatal flaw was that he cared too much. Shouta knew he was right, knew since even before Oboro’s death had almost flattened him. He’d intentionally cultivated a strict, unapproachable persona to keep from getting too attached to his students too fast. If he was prickly and unfriendly on the outside, nobody tried to get close, so he never got too close to anyone else.

That didn’t work here.

There was only so much avoiding you could do of someone in a relatively small building with eight people and a cat living in it. Plus, people avoided an ornery cat in a much different way than they avoided an unfriendly and standoffish Pro Hero. As a Hero, people steered clear or responded in kind, returning slight for perceived slight. But Shouta’s unfriendly persona was no match for the inherent adorable nature of all cats everywhere.

There was a unique sort of affection people harbored for particularly ill-mannered and temperamental pets. Just look at old ladies and their feral purse chihuahuas, or Shouta and his own brat of a cat who exploded things to get attention. After long enough, even with tempers enhanced by Quirk pre-meltdowns, sleep deprivation, and personality disorders, the League of Villains had started to harbor a sarcastic kind of endearment for him.

Shouta had pushed a mostly-empty cup of coffee off the counter and Dabi – Dabi, the person who wanted to torch Shouta to cinders – offered him a lazy, “Good work, Demon.” Just because it had been decaf. Which, Shouta agreed that decaffeinated coffee completely defeated the purpose of coffee and deserved to be wiped from existence, but still. That wasn’t normal.

And if it wasn’t bad enough that Dabi was starting to like him, Shouta’s reaction had only made it worse. He was glad that Dabi approved. Glad that he’d made Dabi smile, and no matter how much Shouta tried to brush off the feeling as relief that he wasn’t shooting fire, there was only so long he could deny the reality staring him in the face: Shouta was becoming attached.

The problem with his experience as a hero and hyperawareness of being in the middle of the villains’ den, was that Shouta saw everything. Everything they did or said was catalogued and given a valid explanation. His reasoning was perfectly logical. Every fact he had learned was just that: a fact.

Shigaraki was perpetually dehydrated as a side effect of not using his Quirk properly, but Shouta was pretty sure nobody but him had realized that. Kurogiri struggled with his sense of self. Twice really struggled with his sense of self. Dabi’s hair-trigger temper was a result of his perpetual untreated pre-meltdown. His nightmares were from something else entirely.

Unfortunately, while these were all cold hard facts, Shouta couldn’t explain away the way they made him feel. The younger members of the League of Villains, Dabi, Toga, Spinner, and even Shigaraki, were only a few years older than Shouta’s hell class. They were the same age as some of his older, now graduated classes. The more time Shouta spent in their presence, the more he was forced to accept that they were kids.

They’d hurt his students, had killed an unknown number of people, and had caused the first seeds of doubt to creep into the public’s perception of Heroes and Hero work. But they were still kids. Kids who had no proper support structure, guidance only from a sociopathic mass murderer, and no other options.

Shouta’s resolve – to see them exactly as they were: a threat to him, his class, and potentially all of Japan – was slipping. It was slipping fast. He was holding onto it by his fingertips, but if he stayed here long enough, there was bound to be a breaking point.

Said breaking point came about two weeks after he’d first been picked up by Kurogiri. It was sometime after midnight, and Shouta had just been woken by Dabi slipping into the room for his nightly venture for ice and mints.

Shouta flicked an ear, listening to Dabi’s progress through the room. He padded up the step to the kitchen, and the freezer door opened. Ice clinked on glass, and the freezer door closed. Cellophane crinkled.

As Dabi started back to the living room door, there was a loud thud, louder than any sound Dabi had ever made in his late-night ice-and-mint trips. It was a sound Shouta was intimately familiar with. The sound of a body hitting the ground. It was accompanied by the sharp ‘clunk!’ of a thick glass cup hitting the floor, and the clattering and crinkling of ice and cellophane-wrapped mints spilling over the floor.

Shouta slitted his eyes open, peering out from under the loveseat. Dabi was mostly hidden by the couch, but Shouta could see one hand peeking out from behind the couch, curled like a claw and twitching with uncontrolled spasms. A low gurgle came from Dabi, who had made no move to get off the floor. It was immediately followed by a sizzling hiss and the room flared with light and the sharp scent of burning skin.

Cursing under his breath, Shouta shot out from under the loveseat and darted around the couch.

He almost tripped over a thrashing tendril of flame, and he only barely leaped back in time to avoid getting singed. Wave after wave of heat washed off of Dabi, and flailing coils and sheets of fire writhed around him, the flames ranging from dull red to eye-searing white and lashing out in every direction.

Dabi himself was sprawled on the floor like a dropped doll, twitching uncontrollably. He clutched his chest with one hand while the other clawed uselessly at the floor. Spikes and jolts of his typical blue fire raced over his skin, tracing the edges of his scars and searing new lines into what little unblemished skin he had. Blistering heat radiated from him with every twitch, baking Shouta’s fur to dry, brittle strands in seconds.

Shouta was not one to stand around staring uselessly. That response had been trained out of him years ago. The instant he had taken in the situation it was analyzed – inability to properly control muscles or Quirk, unintentional Quirk activation, sudden onset, still breathing – diagnosed – barely holding back a fire-Quirk meltdown – and provided with a solution – lower the temperature of his core, however possible.

Unfortunately, Shouta was a housecat.

Shouta couldn’t do anything himself to help. Erasing Dabi’s Quirk now would only hurt him more. His insides were literally being cooked by lingering remnants of incautious Quirk uses; the uncontrolled fire was venting that excess heat. Getting rid of that vent would boil Dabi from the inside out. The only thing Shouta had going for him was that he knew what was happening, and how to fix it.

When it came to actually taking on villains, Shouta’s Hero work mostly consisted of hiding, getting places quietly, and then jumping out and taking people down before they knew he was there. He was silent and deadly, unheard even by those with hearing-enhancing Quirks. In his marriage, he was undoubtedly the quiet one; when your husband was Present Mic, it was hard to be the loud partner. That didn’t mean he couldn’t make himself heard. He also taught high school students, after all.

Shouta’s lungs burned as he breathed the superheated air around Dabi, but he didn’t care. His heart was racing, adrenaline pouring through him, and with his deep breath of dry, broiling air, Shouta screamed.

Cats, it turned out, could make a lot of noise.

Shouta’s wordless shriek came out as an ear-splitting “MEAAOOOW!” that had doors flying open and angry footsteps sounding through the hallway. Even Dabi startled at the noise, and he gasped a deep, shuddering breath. His eyes rolled towards Shouta, and the fire flickering over his skin flared higher. Shouta didn’t have the time to care. He howled again, caterwauling as loud as his little cat lungs could manage.

The living room door flew open, and Shouta was off like a shot, diving between Magne’s legs. She was so startled by the sight of Dabi’s meltdown that she didn’t even react to Shouta’s passing.

Shouta bee-lined for the bathroom. The door was only cracked open slightly, but Shouta went through it so fast the door shuddered completely open. With adrenaline pouring through him, Shouta didn’t even stop to think about the shower knob. It had a lever knob that he jerked up with his paws in a move he probably couldn’t consciously repeat, and then he yanked the shower stopper up.

The plug was sitting on the rim of the bathtub, and Shouta managed to grab the ring in his teeth and shove it into place, starting the tub filling. With the shower running over him, Shouta was effectively drenched by the time he leaped out of the bathtub and tore down the hallway again.

The entire League was awake now, hovering around Dabi and making panicked conversation. Shouta quickly sorted through his options and narrowed in on Kurogiri as the one most likely to listen to him.

“Hey!” Shouta shouted, lunging forward to grab the hem of Kurogiri’s pants and yank, “Follow me!”

He let go and bounded towards the door, hovering in the doorway as Kurogiri turned to look at him.

“Come on!” Shouta jerked his head, his tail lashing.

Kurogiri started towards him, and Shouta impatiently waited for him to catch up before making for the bathroom door. Kurogiri peered in, mist roiling inscrutably.

“He needs to cool down his core,” Shouta said, leaping up onto the rim of the bathtub and glaring at Kurogiri, “Come on, you’re not an idiot!”

Dabi materialized in thin air over the bathtub, falling from a misty portal that had twisted into existence, and Shouta leaped away as the uncontrolled flame lashed out at everything around him. Dabi dropped the short distance into the water, and instantly the room filled with steam.

Shouta coughed as smoke and steam warred for dominance in his lungs, but he leaped back onto the rim of the bathtub and reached through the roiling steam to paw at the shower knob. He managed to turn the knob so the water went from lukewarm to freezing cold. It would be unpleasant if Dabi was still aware, but it would cool him down much faster.

Dabi started struggling in the cold shower spray, almost managing to sit up under his own power. Shouta bounded forward without thinking, landing on his shoulders and shoving him back into the water. Dabi spluttered under the spray, and more steam billowed through the room.

The uncoordinated fire was dying down, but under Shouta’s paws, Dabi’s skin was still uncomfortably warm. And he kept trying to sit up.

A whip of cold red fire lashed out at him, but Shouta ignored it, clawing his way over Dabi’s jinbei to land in the freezing water himself, using his paws to scoop waves of greyish water over Dabi’s shoulders. A moment later, black mist filled the tub, mixing with the steam and smoke to make it properly impossible to see anything at all.

Shouta’s nose was full of the acrid scent of burning plastic, his vision was completely obscured by mist, smoke, and the ever-increasing steam, his lungs ached from breathing smoke, one of his hind legs smarted with burns, and he couldn’t hear anything but the shower and Dabi’s incoherent sputtering. He flattened his ears to his skull, pinpointed the brightest light in the haze, and shoveled more water over any flames that popped up.

It felt like it had been hours by the time Shouta hauled himself out of the bathtub. As Dabi cooled down, the uncontrollable fires slowly petered out, no longer turning the water to steam. What had started as elbow-deep rose to knee-deep, then neck-deep, and then Shouta had to paddle to stay afloat or cling to Dabi’s barely conscious, still twitching body. The water was so full of smoke and grime that it was a muddy grey at that point.

Eventually someone turned off the shower, and that was when Shouta elected to leave, hauling himself from Dabi’s shoulder to the rim of the tub. He was soaked to the bone, the taste of burnt plastic lingering on his tongue and the spicy, bitter woodfire scent of Dabi’s Quirk stuck in his nose.

Once, when Shouta was still a relatively green hero, he’d ended up at the site of a building fire. The building hadn’t been super full before the fire started, but with the elevators locked down, there was a woman in a wheelchair and her two grown children trapped on the fourth floor. Shouta had the proper training, an airtight seal in his goggles, and his fire-resistant costume. With the fire trucks still ten minutes out and no other options, he’d run straight into the burning building.

Shouta had gotten her out, and her children had followed once they knew their mom was getting the help she needed. Shouta’s not-quite-as-fireproof capture weapon had caught fire just as they were almost out, but Shouta had done nothing but quickly pass the woman to her son, who – once he was no longer panicking – managed to carry her pretty easily. His jumpsuit, after all, was fireproof enough to get by until they were out of the burning building.

The firefighters on site, upon seeing what appeared to be a man made of fire following the woman and her family out of the building, made the logical decision and turned the fire hose on him.

Shouta felt about like that, now. At the time, he’d gotten away with only a few burns around his neck and a couple cracked ribs from the force of the fire hose, but everything had hurt for days afterwards, his lungs and eyes and even skin aching fiercely from the oppressive heat. At least this time, he didn’t have any broken bones.

For now.

Shouta slumped onto the bathmat – now stained a dirty grey with the grimy water in it – and tried to convince himself to stand up and get out of the bathroom. The bathmat was unfairly comfortable, especially considering it was soaked through with freezing cold water and smelled like smoke. Then again, Shouta was also soaked through with freezing cold water and smelled like smoke.

“Hey.”

Shouta forced his eyes open through the sudden onslaught of exhaustion and found the unreadable face of Mr. Compress hovering over him.

“If I pick you up, are you going to claw my eyes out?”

Shouta mustered a defensive hiss, baring his teeth halfheartedly and flattening his ears to his skull. He didn’t want Compress anywhere near him.

Mr. Compress visibly suppressed a sigh, his face tightening with frustration. “Are you planning to stay covered in soot and who-knows-what-else on the bathroom floor forever?”

Just to spite him, Shouta struggled to his feet, pushing away his exhaustion to shoot a flat look at Mr. Compress.

“I’m going to run you a warm bath in the kitchen sink,” Mr. Compress said bluntly, “If that’s not up to your standards, then I hope you have fun licking ash out of your fur.”

Mr. Compress spun on his heel and stalked out of the room, and after a moment Shouta followed. He felt like he was wading through sooty water still, or like he was in one of those dreams where it was impossible to get anywhere in time and pale-haired villains turned his students or husband to dust in front of him. Every step was a struggle, but Shouta was only alive today because of his immeasurable capacity for spite, so he soldiered onwards.

True to his word, Mr. Compress had the kitchen faucet running by the time Shouta made it to the door. Shouta’s attention was drawn to the back of the couch. There was a broad pattern of scorch marks on the floor where Dabi had collapsed, and the fabric of the couch itself had been reduced to singed tatters. A few of the tiles in the kitchen area had been cracked by the heat.

Suddenly, Shouta’s aching body made more sense. He’d run straight into what was essentially a living bonfire without a single second thought, then spent who knows how long wrestling said living bonfire with nothing but his bare cat paws and a tub full of frigid water.

It took all of Shouta’s not insignificant willpower to get up onto the bartop, and then he almost missed the jump to the counter. His singed back leg missed its grip, but Shouta used his momentum to rock himself forward and managed to avoid being a living example of those cat videos where the cat jumps too short and falls on the floor. Shouta had once spent a night completely sloshed and ugly sobbing over those videos. He almost shed real tears.

Shouta practically toppled into the sink, only putting in enough effort to stay upright.

“I don’t have Shigaraki’s shampoo,” Mr. Compress said, almost apologetic.

“Don’t touch me,” Shouta told him tiredly before dunking his head underwater to scrub at his ears.

The clear water very quickly turned greyish, and once Shouta was sure he’d gotten all the soot he could out of his fur, he hauled himself back up onto the counter.

“I’ve got Dabi’s towel,” Magne volunteered, holding up a towel that was probably blue at some point, but had been stained by so much hair dye that it was almost completely black. Sloppy use of hair dye, that. Shouta knew from experience that even black dye should mostly come out in the first wash, leaving very little behind on your towels.

Shouta let her towel him off, too tired to bother protesting. Once he was mostly dry, he dropped off the counter, slinking slowly down the steps to the living room side. Typically, Shouta had no issue sleeping on the ground. Especially as a cat, he’d found that it didn’t really affect him. But now with every part of him aching and the shallow burn on his leg stinging with every step, Shouta found himself longing for something soft.

The living room was a no-go. Shigaraki would be using his chair, and everything was too out in the open to let him sleep for long, even as physically exhausted as he was now.

The living room door was still hanging open, as was almost every door in the hallway. Shouta limped into Dabi, Spinner, and Twice’s bedroom, found the bed that smelled like smoke, and squirmed his way under Dabi’s comforter. Dabi wouldn’t be using it any time soon. Recovering from a fire-Quirk meltdown left one feeling wired and hyperaware once the immediate fatigue wore off. Hopefully, nobody would bother Shouta until he woke up on his own after sleeping for an entire month.

Chapter Text

Shouta woke up confused.

Oh, he knew where he was and what was happening. That sort of situational awareness was life-or-death in his line of work. Shouta only lost track of himself if he had a nasty concussion or drugs in his system.

No, he was mostly confused at the bright sunlight seeping through the comforter he was curled under, warming the space around him and setting everything aglow. It had been only a little after midnight, around one in the morning when Dabi had showed up for his nightly ice and mints run. Even if the subsequent chaos had taken the hours it felt like, Dabi should have recovered enough to return to bed long before the sun rose enough to light the room up like this.

Even if Dabi had elected to stay up, though, Shouta shouldn’t have slept this long. In such an insecure position, Shouta’s paranoid Hero instinct should have woken him up as soon as he was well-rested enough to fight.

Shouta blinked blearily, dragging himself out from underneath the comforter. The room was empty aside from him, the window shutters hanging open and letting sunlight fill the space. The other two beds were rumpled and slept-in, but Shouta couldn’t tell if it had been recent or was just left over from before Dabi’s Quirk meltdown.

Shouta’s spine curved, and he arched up to stretch like only a cat could, his claws flexing and his jaw cracking with the force of his yawn.

The door was cracked open, and Shouta easily slipped through it, padding down the hallway to poke his head into the living room.

The living room was completely packed. Toga’s head was tipped over the arm of the couch, Shigaraki was curled up in his recliner with his videogame, Kurogiri hovered over something on the stove, and Magne and Twice sat side by side on the loveseat, the former with a book and the latter with his phone. Spinner was at the bartop, his head buried in his crossed arms. Mr. Compress had his laptop open on the table and Dabi was sitting next to him with his back to Shouta, both of them leaning over the screen.

“Demon!” Toga was the first to see Shouta, and her whole face lit up with delight. Shouta suppressed a groan. He’d thought she’d gotten over him! What more did he need to do, actually claw her eyes out?

Everyone in the room turned to Shouta at Toga’s cry. Even Shigaraki looked up from his game and Dabi twisted around in his chair.

“Are you quite well, Demon?” Kurogiri asked almost gently. Shouta stared at him, stunned.

Yesterday, Kurogiri had been barely civil to Shouta. Now he was concerned? With Shouta’s wellbeing? With Dabi – who had just had a Quirk-induced meltdown that might well have been lethal without proper treatment – sitting right there?

“Demon?” Dabi asked, and he sounded bad. Even worse than his usually slightly husky voice, he sounded like he’d just smoked an entire pack of cigarettes and followed it up with screaming at the top of his lungs for an hour straight.

Which… wasn’t far off. That was about how Shouta’s throat felt at the moment, too. Shouta wouldn’t be surprised if they were both hacking up black slime for a few days. Them and Kurogiri, provided the mist man even had lungs.

“Why are you even still awake?” Shouta muttered, slinking into the room with flattened ears. He’d never like attention. The only time he wanted the whole room looking at him was when he was teaching, and at least then he had a lesson plan and wasn’t going in completely blind. Also, he was allowed to give them detention.

Shouta did his best to ignore the eyes on him, crossing the room to his water dish beside the bar. It had clearly been refilled recently – with cantaloupe water, if Shouta wasn’t mistaken – and it felt like heaven on his sore throat.

Everyone was still looking at him.

“What do you want?” Shouta demanded, his tail lashing as he swept a glare around the room.

“Are you sure he was actually trying to save my life?” Dabi asked skeptically.

“There is no other explanation,” Kurogiri said firmly. “Without Demon, you may well have burned to death before any one of us could think clearly enough to help you.”

A heavy silence settled over the room. Shouta twitched his ear and awkwardly broke eye contact with Dabi, wishing he had his capture weapon to hide his face in.

“…hell of a way to go,” Dabi said finally, then immediately dissolved into a coughing fit.

Shouta would have furrowed his eyebrows if he had any. Instead, the skin around his eyes tightened with worry, and he left his water dish behind to jump up onto the table. Mr. Compress went completely still as Shouta approached, but Dabi was too busy dragging in desperate lungfuls of air to notice.

His breath was rough, hoarse and rasping, and when Shouta pressed his ear to Dabi’s chest he could pick up wheezing and maybe some crackling sounds? Shouta frowned, twitching his ear and trying to somehow listen harder. Smoke inhalation was the most likely answer, and the preferred one, but secondary drowning was also a worrying possibility. Without good medical care, a bad case of secondary drowning could be just as deadly as the initial meltdown.

“Um…” Dabi had finally stopped gasping for breath, and was instead staring down at Shouta. Shouta pulled his head away from Dabi’s chest to fix him with a judgmental look. He replaced his ear with his paw on Dabi’s chest and started making loud, overexaggerated breathing sounds.

“Take deep breaths, Dabi,” Mr. Compress instructed.

Shouta had his head pressed against Dabi’s chest again in an instant, listening to his breath rush through his lungs. His tail twitched with concentration, and he flattened his other ear to his skull to try and dampen external sounds. It didn’t sound quite like the crackling, bubbling crepitations that would point towards secondary drowning, but more like the low rumbling from smoke inhalation.

Finally, Shouta pulled back with a huff, deeming it probably fine for the time being.

“Did the cat just check my breathing?” Dabi asked, and there was stunned disbelief under the rasp in his voice.

“It appears he did,” Mr. Compress said thoughtfully. Shouta flicked an ear at him irritably. Of course he checked Dabi’s breathing. Nobody else was going to do it, and it was important to watch out for secondary drowning, especially when it might be compounded with smoke inhalation.

“That cat’s too smart,” Shigaraki grumbled, finally turning back to his videogame.

Shouta snorted, jumping down from the table to return to his water dish, “You have no idea.”

The next several days Shouta spent watching. Mostly watching Dabi, monitoring him for signs of his smoke inhalation or possible secondary drowning getting worse. It was interesting to see how the man acted without the constant stress of a Quirk-induced meltdown looming over him at all times.

Shouta wouldn’t say that Dabi was a different person. He still took shots at Shigaraki and cackled like a hyena when someone else had a minor misfortune. He still cursed at Spinner when he thoroughly trumped everyone else at the racing game and tossed back hot coffee like it was water. But he went about it differently.

His barbs were more habit than anything else, casual and almost lighthearted instead of actually intended to hurt. His laughter was the same, but his litany of curses steered clear of causing any actual offense.

More and more, he reminded Shouta of Bakugou. It was a dangerous connection to make. That sort of mental connection would colour Shouta’s impression of both Bakugou and Dabi, predisposing him to be tougher on the former and more lenient on the latter. Not that he could really get much tougher on Bakugou. Short of expelling him – which he couldn’t really do anymore, not with the League having already shown an interest in recruiting him – there wasn’t much Shouta could do that he wasn’t already.

If Dabi had Bakugou’s prickly shout-to-keep-the-haters-out mentality, he also undoubtedly had Todoroki’s bone-dry sarcasm. Shouta had noticed it before, but now that Dabi’s temper wasn’t constantly running on all rage-fueled cylinders, it was ten times as evident. He’d say the most insane things with a completely straight face, not laughing even after the rest of the League had laughed themselves to tears. With proper emotional regulation, he also had a killer poker face. Even Shouta was sometimes hard pressed to figure out if he was bluffing.

But Dabi wasn’t the only one to change. Most of the changes were direct consequences of Dabi’s shift in personality. Fewer hurtful barbs were thrown in general, once people weren’t angry and hurt. More laughter was shared when it wasn’t cruel. Some of it, though, Shouta had no idea how to interpret.

The League members were still wary of Shouta. They didn’t get too close to his claws or try to touch him, but they seemed less… hostile. They offered him smiles and ‘good morning’s and cantaloupe water. The name ‘Demon’ became less of a completely accurate description and more of an affectionate nickname, like Little Bastard, before her name had been updated.

Dabi, especially, seemed to have completely flipped the script. He went from wanting to torch Shouta on sight to sharing bits of his own food with him. Dabi had slipped an entire strip of bacon under the table the day after his meltdown, and Shouta almost wanted to test him for mind control. It was probably just the personality adjustment from suddenly no longer being under constant stress, but still…

As a more helpful sign of his recovery, Dabi had stopped emerging in the middle of the night to eat ice. That was a good sign, at least for the moment. Shouta hadn’t been able to use the extra alone time to do anything useful, especially since, even with Dabi sleeping through the night, that left six other insomniacs to interrupt Shouta’s sleep schedule. But at the very least, it meant Dabi wasn’t going to spontaneously combust any time soon.

Which only increased Shouta’s concern when, around one in the morning, the living room door swung silently open and Dabi stepped through.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Shouta grumbled under his breath, watching Dabi pad silently into the room. He headed directly for the couch, dropping onto the cushions like a puppet with its strings cut.

Shouta flicked an ear at him, watching Dabi fling an arm over his eyes. He was shaking slightly, his shoulder trembling and the skin around his eyes tight. A tear ran down his cheek and caught on a staple.

It wasn’t more meltdown symptoms – those took months of constant Quirk use to build up – it was something much more mundane. Nightmares.

With a heavy-hearted sigh, Shouta uncurled from his perfect cat croissant and stood into a stretch, his tail poofing out and his claws flexing. He jumped down onto the floor, padded across the room, and jumped up onto the couch next to Dabi.

Dabi let out a wet laugh, barely louder than a whisper, and pulled his arm away to look down at Shouta.

“Hey there, Demon,” Dabi whispered, and his voice was raspy with tears rather than smoke. Shouta reminded himself that he was never, ever, under any circumstances going to tell anyone that he had been turned into a cat, especially not the League of Villains. Then, he crept forward to butt his head against Dabi’s hand. Dabi’s fingers curled around Shouta’s throat, and he almost held his breath, forcing himself to lean into the touch.

Dabi sniffled. Then sobbed, the sound wrenching itself out of his throat. He covered his mouth with the hand not resting on Shouta’s back.

“I almost died,” Dabi shuddered. His breath was coming too fast and hoarse, almost whistling in his throat. “I almost died, and I can’t even remember.”

Still, Dabi didn’t made a sound louder than a whisper. It took a lot of practice to have a complete mental breakdown this quietly. Shouta knew that much from experience. That sort of conditioning certainly hadn’t come from the League. At least, not the parts of it Shouta had seen. Dabi had only joined a few months ago at most, between the USJ attack and the attack on the summer training camp. Even if All For One’s presence had necessitated this kind of silent, hidden breakdown, it would have taken longer than that for it to stick like this. If Shouta ever figured out where Dabi had been before he’d shown up out of the blue to join the League of Villains, they were going to get a visit from a very unhappy Pro.

Shouta caught that thought as it passed through his head, but he didn’t have the time to examine it at the moment and instead tucked it into the back of his head to pick apart later.

At the moment, Shouta was focused on comforting Dabi, who was shaking with silent sobs. What had his life come to?

Dabi had his wrist in his mouth, teeth clamped down on his skin and tearing staples out of his scars. Shouta stepped up onto Dabi’s legs to bat hurriedly at his mouth. Dabi made a little ‘mph’ noise, yanking his hand out of his mouth to stare at Shouta wide-eyed.

“Why are you being nice to me?” Dabi rasped. “Why did you help me? I tried to kill you! You’re supposed to be smart! You should hate me! You should- should- why do you care? Why am I even talking to you? You’re a cat!”

Dabi was falling apart at the seams. Mentally, that is. Shouta was almost ashamed of himself. He should have seen this coming. He desperately wished that Dabi had someone, anyone else he could talk to. Someone who could actually respond, who Dabi knew actually understood him. A real person.

But it was unlikely that Dabi would be saying this at all if he knew Shouta was a person in cat form. Shouta had been there once, when it seemed easier to keep his secrets secret. He would have been a million times more likely to confide in a cat – even a highly intelligent cat – than any person.

All Shouta could do at the moment was offer whatever comfort he could.

Shouta pushed his head against Dabi’s cheek, propping his front paws up on Dabi’s shoulders to reach above the scars. Dabi’s arms abruptly snapped shut around him, clamping Shouta to his chest like a vise. Shouta let out a startled ‘mrp!’ but didn’t resist, tucking his paws close to his chest as Dabi buried his face in Shouta’s fur.

This was fine. He was fine.

Shockingly enough, this was not the first time an overly emotional villain had forcibly cuddled Shouta. That had been a weird night.

At least this time, Shouta wasn’t bleeding from several places and nursing a fractured wrist.

 Shouta flicked his tail awkwardly, but let Dabi continue to sob into his fur. He was almost scarily quiet, the only sign that he was crying the shuddering convulsions and the slowly growing damp patch in Shouta’s fur.

“I don’t want to do this,” Dabi whispered between sobs, “I don’t want to be here, I don’t want this. Why am I so angry? Why am I so angry, Demon?”

Dabi pulled Shouta away from his chest and Shouta stared up at him wide-eyed.

“You don’t even care,” Dabi snarled, suddenly angry, and fire flared to life tracing up his arm.

Shouta saw it coming, saw the sparks festering in Dabi’s scars, and didn’t even twitch when the shadows turned flaming azure. Dabi wasn’t actually angry. He was scared. Scared, confused, and lashing out at everything around him like a cornered prey animal.

There were a lot of things about Dabi’s perpetual pre-meltdown that Shouta only suspected. He was pretty sure it had made Dabi’s scars hurt more than usual. It was likely it had made it harder or even painful to breathe deeply. It might even have made Dabi’s non-scarred skin hypersensitive. What Shouta knew for a fact was that it ramped up his negative emotions, anything that would make him want to vent flames. It didn’t work, though, and Shouta suspected that Dabi didn’t use his emotions – and therefore stockpiled heat from previous Quirk uses – to fuel the angry flames. Cremation clearly required a lot of effort and concentration to use without burning things he didn’t intend to. So, Dabi never fueled his fire with his emotions, only his emotions with his fire.

Which meant that, without the constant simmering heat of the pre-meltdown, Dabi’s anger burned short and cold.

The fire was still fire, and it was hot. Hot enough to dry Shouta’s fur out in only a few seconds and make him clench his eyes shut to protect them from the heat. But the anger and the fire barely lasted a blink.

Shouta’s skin tingled under his fur, but once the fire was gone, he stared up at Dabi with a neutral expression.

“You’re something else, Demon,” Dabi sighed, settling a hand on Shouta’s head. It squished Shouta’s ears to the side, but Shouta found he didn’t actually mind a whole lot. It didn’t hurt, just felt a little unusual, and at least Dabi wasn’t crying anymore.

“You have no idea,” Shouta sighed back.

That made Dabi’s lips quirk upwards in a tired, bitter smile. A thin trickle of blood leaked from one of his staples, and Shouta’s own scars ached in sympathy.

“You’re so soft,” Dabi marveled, slowly rubbing his hand over Shouta’s ears. Oh yeah. He had no idea how to pet cats. Had he never pet a cat before?

It honestly reminded Shouta, once again, of Todoroki. Once Shouta had overheard the self-proclaimed Izucrew giving Todoroki a crash course on petting small critters, including cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, a couple different types of reptile, and hedgehogs for some reason. Midoriya had even brought in Koda to provide an object lesson. Shouta had never been jealous of a student before, but when it was remarked upon that cats seemed to like Todoroki a lot since his left side was warm, he’d come very close.

Now, though, Shouta thought he understood. The cats’ perspective, at least.

Dabi’s fingers were warm. Not, like, going-to-burn-you hot, or even potentially-overheating warm. Just… warm. Like sunshine given physical form. Shouta considered retreating from the contact now that Dabi wasn’t at risk of having a mental breakdown alone anymore, but honestly, he’d come this far, might as well go all in. And besides, there had been a huge number of studies about how beneficial the sound of a cat’s purring could be for mental and physical health.

Now Shouta just had to figure out how to purr.

As with a lot of naturally feline things, Shouta found that he couldn’t really do it if he thought about it too hard. But when he prodded his cat brain with the idea of comforting a sad kitten, his throat immediately started vibrating. It was a bizarre feeling. He was using muscles he knew for a fact that humans didn’t have, and the sensation was somewhere between talking, humming, and whispering.

“You’re vibrating,” Dabi observed blankly. Then with real concern in his voice he added, “Is that supposed to happen?”

Shouta had never heard anything that tragic before in his life. He purred harder, pressing his head into Dabi’s hand.

 “I hope that’s supposed to happen,” Dabi whispered, and returned to carefully patting Shouta’s head.

Cats, as it turned out, did have a natural instinct for ‘purr and make the human pet you’. So, Shouta could lean on his cat-brain for that and focus his human brain on other, more pressing things.

Like how to get Dabi some real therapy. As much as Shouta loved cats, even he had to admit that therapy could not be replaced by cuddles. Dabi needed to have some long talks with a Quirk therapist, probably several appointments with a physical therapist, and undoubtedly some psychological help. Since Dabi was a wanted villain, that would be tricky to pull off.

Although, Dabi had said that he didn’t want to ‘do this’, and Shouta suspected that a lot of the mindset that drove him to be a real villain was actually just enhanced negative emotions he didn’t know how to deal with. Maybe, he could convince Dabi to leave his villainy behind. That would probably entail getting consequences for whoever had hurt Dabi enough to drive him to such an extreme measure, although honestly Shouta was eager to do that anyway.

Which led to the part of his own mental conversation that Shouta didn’t want to think about. Apparently, all it took was two weeks and a near-death experience for a wanted villain to worm his way into the group of people that Shouta considered His People. Not quite on the same level as Hizashi, Nemuri, or Tensei were His, but on par with his students.

After all, Dabi was the exact right age to be one of Shouta’s graduated students. He had the power level and cocky attitude of a rookie hero, but the capacity for realism of someone who had graduated from Shouta’s class. All he was missing was the self-sacrificial tendency that all of Shouta’s students inherited from him no matter how hard he tried to convince them to be selfish about their own lives.

Shouta sighed over his purring, tipping his head against Dabi’s shoulders as he mentally berated himself. He really did get attached too easily. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up adopting the entire League before he found a way out.

Chapter Text

Shouta’s ears twitched when the living room door swung open, but he made no move to extricate himself from Dabi’s lap. Dabi himself had fallen asleep again, clutching Shouta like he was a stuffed animal, and Shouta knew for a fact that Dabi hadn’t gotten enough sleep in the past two weeks. Likely in several months or even years.

“Hey, Dabi,” Spinner whispered, and Shouta heard his claws scritch softly over the hardwood. Spinner rounded the couch to crouch in front of the TV stand, digging around briefly before coming away with one of the battered Nintendo Swaps stashed there.

He slumped onto the couch next to Dabi, not looking up as he booted up a game on his Swap. Shouta peered over Dabi’s arm, watching Spinner’s screen with the vague interest that came of nothing else to do.

It was some kind of racing game, which appeared to be all that Spinner ever played. Shouta wouldn’t say he was especially familiar with video games – he hadn’t been very interested in them when he was a teenager himself, and his interest hadn’t grown as he’d gotten older – but he always picked up some information about the most popular ones from sheer exposure teaching high school students.

He wasn’t familiar with this one. At least, he didn’t recognize the name that popped up on the loading screen.

It didn’t have great graphics – everything was pretty flat and blocky – but it looked entertaining enough. Spinner must have been trying for a speedrun or a record or something, because he kept restarting the level over and over. Shouta watched mostly for the lights and moving pictures, not particularly interested in the game itself. Spinner seemed pretty good at it, as far as Shouta could tell. His little car looked more like a Hotwheels car than a real car someone would actually drive, but that was videogames for you.

After several dozen attempts, Spinner got a result that was apparently satisfactory, and he moved onto another level. This one had a much longer track, peppered with jumps and hairpin turns and… inflatable cacti? For some reason?

Shouta leaned his head on Dabi’s shoulder – still the perfect amount of warm – and watched Spinner expertly weave between virtual potted cacti. And sometimes crash directly into virtual potted cacti.

After almost half an hour of crashing into cacti, flinging himself into walls or off the sides of the track, or driving too slowly to make it within whatever time frame he was aiming for, Spinner quit that game with a frustrated grumble and opened another that Shouta was far more familiar with.

Hizashi, it had to be noted, loved rhythm games. Not only did he love them, he excelled at them. Shouta was good at DDR because he had fast reflexes and was very competitive. Hizashi was insane at DDR, better than anyone else Shout had ever seen, because he had a natural intuition for the beat of the game and the reflexes of a pro hero. That applied to pretty much every rhythm game he ever tried his hand at, from Beatsaber Vocaloid (platinum edition) to Necrodancer’s Requiem.

EnSnare was a newer game that had hooked Hizashi’s interest. Shouta knew it had hooked Hizashi’s interest because Hizashi had spent three and a half hours giving Shouta a deep-dive explanation of every single fact about the game. This included a long-winded, tangent-filled telling of the plot and backstory, an hour-long description of controls and game mechanics and how to cheat them, and a heartfelt lament on what was ‘undoubtedly the most frustrating mechanic in any game ever, Sho’.

This most frustrating mechanic only showed up in later levels, after you’d unlocked the EnSnare drum itself. It was apparently called a counter-beet, and it was so frustrating to Hizashi because, as the name implied, it didn’t follow the rest of the rhythm of the game.

Shouta had watched Hizashi try and fail to beat a dozen different levels with the counter-beet enabled. He watched Spinner click the switch to turn the counter-beet on with an almost gleeful sense of foreboding.

The first time the counter-beet – represented by an actual digital vegetable being ‘thrown’ at the screen – appeared, Spinner lurched to hit it and missed three other notes. The second time, he missed it entirely. The third time he tried to hit it, missed, and failed an entire drum sequence.

 His score for that level was a single silver quarter note. Spinner grimly restarted the level.

 He nailed the first counter-beet right on the money, then managed to hit the second with only two missed notes to pay for it. Since Shouta wasn’t focused on the main threat in the level – the sapient forest that had come alive by the power of the Darconductor and was bent on consuming the whole earth – he saw the counter-beet coming several seconds before Spinner did each time.

The third time it popped up, Shouta lurched in Dabi’s hold, shooting his paw out and slapping the counter-beet before Spinner even knew it was there.

Spinner yelped and jumped so hard he almost launched his Swap across the room. He caught it at the last second, fumbling with the device and almost dropping it twice more while hastily backpedaled away from Shouta, clutching the Swap to his chest and pressing his back against the arm of the couch.

“How long have you been sitting there?” Spinner rasped, panting.

Shouta just stared at him, unamused. Shouta’s right paw, the one he’d used to hit Spinner’s screen, remained stretched out of Dabi’s hold, dangling idly in front of him.

“Dabi, what did-?” Spinner cut himself off as he finally realized that Dabi was dead asleep. He hadn’t even twitched when Spinner had kicked him to get away faster.

“What is happening?” Spinner whispered, almost horrified. He squinted, tilting his head back and forth like some people with mutant Quirks that made their eyes farther apart did to focus better. “Demon? Is that you?”

“Who else would it be?” Shouta asked blandly.

Spinner set his Swap on the back of the couch, tentatively creeping forward across the cushions. “What in the world?”

“You act like you’ve never seen a cat before,” Shouta said, curling his tail around Dabi’s wrist, “who are you, Dabi?” He snorted at his own terrible, frankly tragic joke.

“If I sit next to Dabi again, are you going to claw my face off?” Spinner asked dubiously.

Shouta considered his options. He could easily scare Spinner off at this point. Just flexing his claws would probably send him scuttling back to his room. But honestly, Shouta just… didn’t really want to. Spinner was around the same age as Dabi, probably younger. Shouta wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t even old enough to drink yet. It was one thing to get what little revenge he could on villainous adults who had full knowledge of what they were doing. It was quite another to pettily attack kids who were just trying to do something good.

The reports of the attack on the training camp had noted that Spinner had stopped Magne from attacking Midoriya. Though Spinner was basing his opinions on Stain’s ideals, it pointed towards someone who had been failed by Hero society, and so he wanted to improve it. It was just a tragic coincidence that Stain and the League of Villains had got to him before someone actually helpful could.

With a reluctant sigh, Shouta pulled his extended paw back into Dabi’s loose hold. Eying him warily the whole time, Spinner gingerly slid into place next to Dabi again. When Shouta didn’t immediately claw his eyes out, Spinner slowly started to relax. He turned his Swap back on and restarted the level Shouta had interrupted.

Shouta watched him flunk it twice more in rapid succession.

The third time Spinner retried the level, Shouta darted his paw out again and hit the first counter-beet before Spinner even knew it was there. Spinner jolted hard at the unexpected interjection, but he managed to recover before he missed more than a beat. The second time the counter-beet popped up, Spinner didn’t miss a single beat. The third time, he barely even twitched as Shouta’s paw flashed across his screen.

The level ended in a dramatic chord, complete with trumpets appearing on the screen and digital confetti spraying in from the sides. With Shouta’s help, Spinner had gotten three gold quarter notes on the level.

Spinner stared at the end-of-level screen, disbelief written so clearly across his face it might as well have been scrawled on his forehead in sharpie.

Silently, he loaded the next level.

Was this cheating? Yeah, probably. But if Spinner was fine with it, Shouta was fine with it. It was good reflex training, anyway. And he didn’t even run the risk of having his eardrums blown out if he messed up.

The next level had five counter-beets, all of which Shouta hit without issue. It was kind of entertaining, in a bored-out-of-his-skull, I-haven’t-done-anything-but-fail-to-sleep-for-two-weeks sort of way.

Spinner gazed down at his second score of three gold quarter notes like he’d been handed the answer to life on a silver platter.

“You have anything marginally more interesting than rhythm games?” Shouta sighed, watching Spinner quickly load the next level.

He still participated, of course. It was better than nothing.

While Spinner was basking in his new high scores, Shouta took the opportunity to bat at the Swap, hooking it out of Spinner’s hands.

“Hey!” Spinner yelped, retrieving the Swap before it could fall into the crack between couch cushions. “What was that for?”

“Your games are boring,” Shouta said bluntly, “do something more interesting.”

Spinner, of course, didn’t understand him. “I guess you’re done,” he grumbled, saving his game and closing EnSnare. He turned the Swap off and stood up to shove it back in the haphazard pile of gadgets and controllers on the TV stand, then plopped back onto the couch and dug both his phone and a tangled mess of wires from his hoodie pocket. Spinner wrestled with the wires for a solid couple minutes before getting them untangled. He plugged one end into his phone and then waved one of the other ends at Shouta.

“You want an earbud?” Spinner asked.

If Spinner hadn’t said it, Shouta wouldn’t have realized it was an earbud at all. It looked more like a hearing aid than any earbud Shouta had ever seen. Then again, Shouta had a lot more experience with hearing aids than earbuds.

The unexpected shape was quickly explained when Spinner brushed his hair aside and revealed a round hole behind his jaw in place of standard human ears. Shouta supposed it made sense. If someone with a cat Quirk had cat ears, then it rationally followed that someone with a gecko Quirk should have what amounted to gecko ears. Spinner fitted one hoop-shaped earbud into his ear hole and set the other one carefully on Dabi’s shoulder, right next to Shouta’s ear.

That was… startlingly considerate.

Shouta leaned against Dabi’s shoulder, waiting patiently for Spinner to flick through his apps and scroll through his playlists before settling on something.

It was a song that Shouta only vaguely recognized. Likely something he’d heard from Hizashi once or twice, either on ‘Put Your Hands Up!’ or in the car from Hizashi’s own playlist. It didn’t have words, so likely something from one of Hizashi’s many playlists.

Spinner tipped his head onto the back of the couch, his thick, wild hair acting like a built-in cushion. Shouta listened idly to the music, watching Spinner slowly doze off.

There was no way in a million years Shouta would be able to fall asleep while literally sitting in Dabi’s lap, but he was almost starting to feel left out. Here were two separate people sleeping right next to him, and Shouta could hardly bring himself to close his eyes. It was like they were mocking him.

The real question was, just how deeply were they sleeping?

Dabi was pretty solidly out of it, and Shouta suspected he’d be sleeping until someone put in a dedicated effort to wake him up. Spinner was a bit harder to tell, but Shouta knew a great way to test that.

It was relatively easy to slip out of Dabi’s hold, and after so long wrapped in his sunshine warmth it left Shouta feeling slightly cold. With the haughty indifference of every cat in the world combined, Shouta confidently walked right across Spinner’s lap.

He didn’t even twitch.

That was all Shouta needed to jump down from the couch and step up to the TV stand. The Swap was still sitting on the shelf, and Spinner hadn’t bothered to turn it off all the way, so it woke up with just a tap of Shouta’s paw. Shouta released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding as the home screen popped up. It was still logged in.

The touchscreen made everything exponentially easier, and Shouta resolved to figure out Spinner’s password as soon as possible for the future.

It took a bit of finagling to get to the web browser on the Swap – it was primarily a gaming device, and not really supposed to be used for accessing the internet – but he got it eventually. He immediately pulled up the anonymous hero report.

The touchscreen keyboard was also a lot easier to use with cat paws, and Shouta typed out his message with what felt like lightning speed compared to the time it took on Mr. Compress’s laptop.

‘Code OA-U/C- 5.18.1.19.21.18.5, fwd msg to pres mic, midnight, nedzu. This is eraserhead. Safe. Still working on gttng out. Still dnt need hlp. May take lnger thn xpctd. Might brng home strays. Will try to stay in cntct.’

He quickly hit send, then closed the website and navigated back to the Swap’s home screen. Shouta didn’t have the leverage required to press the tiny power button, so he had to wait for the Swap to time out, the screen finally turning black.

Spinner and Dabi were both still asleep.

Nerves jangling, Shouta retreated under Shigaraki’s recliner to let his heartrate settle. He was a professional, and didn’t lose his head in tense situations, but it was still never exactly fun.

It didn’t help that Shouta hadn’t had the chance to meditate in two and a half weeks. It wasn’t like he did it every day, but whenever his anxiety ramped up too high or he was going to do a tense undercover or infiltration mission, he usually tried to spend half an hour meditating beforehand. It helped him put his thoughts in order.

Shouta glanced at Dabi and Spinner, who were now practically cuddling on the couch. The other League members were decently leery of Shouta already, and he’d observed that nobody other than Kurogiri dared to disturb Dabi while he was asleep. Unless and until Kurogiri did prod Dabi awake, he would probably sleep for several more hours.

After a moment of weighing risks and rewards, Shouta jumped up onto the couch and slipped back into Dabi’s arms. It seemed highly unlikely Dabi would hurt him, especially after having so recently vented both his Quirk’s built-up heat and his own emotional struggle. The meditation would do Shouta a lot of good.

It wasn’t a normal position to meditate in, but Shouta wasn’t in a normal situation by any stretch of the word. He rested his chin on Dabi’s arm, slowly closing his eyes. He intentionally evened his breathing, settling in his body as he took deep, slow breaths in through his nose and out through the mouth.

He started with his external senses.

He could feel Dabi’s fire-Quirk warmth all around him, the arm pressing his body against Dabi’s chest and holding Shouta’s paws close to him. He couldn’t taste anything, but his throat was somewhat dry. With his eyes closed, he could see nothing, and that was familiar. His other two senses had been enhanced dramatically by his physical transformation, and there was far more information coming from his ears and nose than he was used to.

Shouta smelled the bitter woodfire musk of Cremation, the indescribable scent on Spinner’s scales that his cat brain registered only as ‘lizard’, and dozens of other tiny hints of fading scents. Cleaning products, coffee, dust, blood, metal, salt, alcohol, sand, lemons, hair dye, glue. Even things that he wouldn’t usually associate with a scent, like plastic, fabric, paper, or wood.

The air in the League’s hideout was still, and when he focused on his ears, he could hear the steady breathing of the two sleeping on the couch, the distant rush of water through pipes and the hum of air conditioning, faint sounds of the building settling, and someone snoring in another room. The music was still playing from the earbud resting on Dabi’s shoulder, soft and lulling. Over it, Shouta could hear Dabi’s steady heartbeat in his chest. There were cicadas outside, their chirping only barely audible when he strained his ears to the max.

Fully settled into his surroundings, Shouta turned his attention inward. The muscles in his wrists and paws were a little strained, and his eyes ached from focusing on the bright screen in the dark. He was a bit tired from being unable to sleep properly, but in a way he was mostly used to, not the bone-dragging, muddy-headed tired of maintaining actual twenty-four-seven alertness for too long.

Some of his old scars tingled and itched, like they always did. The patch on his elbow Shigaraki had given him, the ugly Lichtenburg burn over his shoulder from when he was still starting out as a Pro and his capture weapon hadn’t been electrically insulated, the deceptively small white circle right over his kneecap from where he’d once been forced to his knees on top of one of his own caltrops.

When he focused on his chest, he could feel the faintest lingering ache in his lungs from breathing too much smoke and water during Dabi’s meltdown, but it was pretty much unnoticeable if he wasn’t focusing on it directly. Same with the faint burn on his leg.

Finally, Shouta poked at his Quirk. It was still a coil of possibility inside his eyes, like a loose thread ready to be pulled taut. Other than the slight snag in his right eye that had been there since his face had been reconstructed after the USJ attack, it appeared to be completely normal.

Overall, Shouta wasn’t doing too badly. In terms of physical health, he was about at his peak level. His only real issue was that he couldn’t get much real sleep.

Shouta sighed, interrupting his steady breathing. He reluctantly opened his eyes, swishing his tail and stretching as best as he could with Dabi’s arms wrapped around him. He curled more comfortably against Dabi’s chest, tucking his tail around himself and settling back into his even breathing and barely slitted eyes.

He couldn’t fall asleep in Dabi’s lap, but he could certainly rest. It was his firm belief that, while real sleep was better than a nap and a nap was better than a rest, a rest was far better than nothing at all. And Dabi was so comfortably warm.

Shouta rested there, loosely coiled in Dabi’s arms, until morning crept up on him and Kurogiri and Magne slipped into the living room. They started to pull together breakfast, and the League hideout slowly began to wake up.

Shouta considered leaving Dabi behind now that there were more people in the room, and then he remembered that he actually didn’t care.

Besides, lying on Dabi was warmer, softer, and far more comfortable than retreating under Shigaraki’s recliner or crouching under the kitchen table, and he supplied as much if not more security than either of those options. So, Shouta stuck around.

Spinner was woken by the sounds and smells of breakfast, and cast Shouta a single wide-eyed look before slinking into the kitchen himself. Mr. Compress sidled in to start the coffee maker, and then Kurogiri vanished to drag Toga and Shigaraki out of bed. It was only after he’d returned with the two trailing behind him that he rounded the couch to prod Dabi awake. Shouta closed his eyes and dropped his head completely against Dabi’s arm, suppressing a feline grin as he waited for Kurogiri to spot him.

Chapter Text

“Dabi?” Kurogiri called, and the crisp scent of clean thunder came closer. Then Kurogiri cursed softly but with feeling and took two rapid steps back.

“What’s wrong?” Magne asked.

“Demon’s sleeping on his lap,” Kurogiri hissed under his breath.

A flurry of whispers erupted from the breakfast nook, and several pairs of footsteps left the table to round the couch.

Shouta allowed his tail a single flick, his nose twitching with amusement. Several people cursed under their breaths. This was even better than pulling a logical ruse on his students.

“…should we wake them up?”

Shouta only caught Magne’s bare whisper because he had enhanced cat hearing.

“I mean… Demon wasn’t that bad last night,” Spinner said dubiously.

“No cat likes being prodded out of sleep,” Mr. Compress pointed out dryly, “Even easygoing cats will usually swipe at you if you disturb them.”

None of them voiced the fact that Shouta was not, in any sense of the word, an easygoing cat.

“Do you think we can wake up Dabi without waking up Demon?”

“Cats are lighter sleepers than most people,” Kurogiri said ponderously, “And most people are lighter sleepers than Dabi.”

There was a long silence, and Shouta imagined the League members all swapping glances that said ‘you wake him up’ and ‘not a chance’, then ‘you can have the good controller tonight’ and ‘what part of ‘not a chance’ do you not understand?’.

Finally, Shouta elected to have mercy on them, uncurling on Dabi’s lap and stretching like only a cat could. He found himself making the standard cat activation sounds, letting out a low ‘mrrp’ as he stretched. His tail curled as he relaxed from his stretch, flicking against Dabi’s arm.

There was a loose semicircle of people around the couch, Kurogiri in the center with pretty much the entire rest of the League standing around him. They were all looking at Shouta like he was a bomb about to go off.

He’d been trying to terrorize them since he’d first been picked up by Kurogiri, but maybe he’d done his job a little bit too well.

…nah. This was basically what he’d been going for.

Shouta slithered out of Dabi’s hold like a furry snake, dragging his tail under Dabi’s nose as he went. Sure enough, the longer fluff on his tail was enough to make Dabi sneeze, and Shouta only barely pulled his tail out of the way as a jet of colder red fire shot out of his nose.

“Why are you sneezing fire?” Shouta demanded. It came out as a judgmental ‘mrawp’ as Shouta leveled a flat look at Dabi.

“Sorry, Demon,” Dabi said tiredly, rubbing his nose and attempting to wipe dried blood off his scars. He blinked up at the wall of baffled concern standing around him, and his expression immediately morphed into a scowl. “What do you want?”

“Breakfast is prepared,” Kurogiri said blandly, and Shouta snorted. That did absolutely nothing to explain why they had all flocked to Dabi. Shouta approved.

“Well let’s go eat it, instead of staring at me like I’m some kind of zoo animal,” Dabi rolled his eyes, pushed himself up off the couch, and shoved his way through the crowd. Shouta jumped to the back of the couch then down to the ground and followed him, slipping under the table and sitting right on top of Dabi’s feet.

He was unfairly warm. No wonder cats liked Todoroki so much. Shouta would have to find a way to duplicate this for himself. Maybe heating pads built into the cuffs of his pants? That was worth looking into.

Slowly, the rest of the League filtered back to the table. Shouta couldn’t see anything but their feet, but even with his limited perspective he could tell they were still getting over their surprise and confusion.

Eventually, conversations started to trickle into existence. Shouta chewed on a bit of sausage Dabi had slipped him and listened to Toga, Dabi, Magne, and Twice discuss the potential dating lives of Miruko, Hawks, Mt. Lady, and basically every other youngish unmarried hero in the rankings. Meanwhile, Shigaraki was having a heated discussion with Spinner about… EnSnare, actually. And Kurogiri and Mr. Compress were discussing in lower tones the necessary errands of the day.

Mr. Compress was one of the go-to shoppers, since his face wasn’t nearly as well known as the rest of them. Anything they actually bought – instead of stealing – was purchased by Mr. Compress, a shapeshifted Toga, or Spinner. Apparently having such an advanced heteromorphic Quirk made you essentially invisible in modern society. Shouta suspected it was a bit like Quirklessness that way.

Shouta let it all wash over him, sitting on Dabi’s feet throughout all of breakfast and not bothering to move until Dabi poked at him.

“I need to get up, Demon.”

“Do you really?” Shouta reluctantly picked himself up off Dabi’s feet and wandered away from the table.

“Was he sitting on your lap?!” Toga demanded, “Again!?”

“No, he was not sitting on my lap,” Dabi grumbled, shuffling into the kitchen. Shouta snorted as Toga started interrogating Dabi on how he’d managed to ‘woo’ Shouta into liking him. Wow, okay, when he put his real name in there it was so much worse. That was a horrible image that Shouta would like to erase from his brain forever, thanks.

To escape the argument and the images it spawned, Shouta pushed out through the living room door to do his daily sweep of the hallway. The door to Dabi, Spinner, and Twice’s room was hanging half open, as it usually was when nobody was in the room. Shouta had already thoroughly explored that space, but he poked his head in briefly to see if anyone had been foolish enough to leave a window open. All of them were, unfortunately, shut tight.

The door to the boys’ bathroom was also cracked open, which Shouta similarly ignored. There wasn’t anything useful in it.

Today, it appeared Shouta was in luck. The door to Toga and Magne’s room hadn’t latched completely. Though it looked closed, a single nudge let it swing open again.

Shouta padded cautiously into the room. He knew that both Toga and Magne were still in the living room and kitchen area, so there was no danger of finding someone half-dressed. Still, it was impossible to predict what a pair of morally dubious women would keep in their room. Or even a pair of normal women. Shouta would never forget the day he found, taped to the wall like it actually belonged there, an exclusive pin-up poster of Midnight wearing less than her original hero costume.

Honestly, that was an accomplishment in and of itself.

Fortunately, there were no posters of any scantily clad people in Toga and Magne’s room.

It looked relatively normal, all things considered. There were two twin beds, one on each side of the room with the curtains drawn on the window between them. A bookshelf overflowing with cheap paperbacks was pushed up against one wall, and a large dresser was on the other, a cracked-open door barely fitting between the wall and the bookshelf.

Poking through the closet and dresser revealed a lot of clothes – a mixture of the schoolgirl uniforms Toga appeared to favor and the more utilitarian jeans, t-shirts, and loose button-ups Magne typically wore – a few makeup accoutrements – mostly nail polish and a few lip glosses – and a frankly alarming number of knives.

Most notably, he didn’t find any powdered blood substitute.

This room was the last place he’d held hope for, and with it now ruled out, Shouta had to face the facts. He’d suspected it since his first search of the living room area – honestly, he’d suspected it since first hearing about Toga’s Quirk and personality – but now he couldn’t deny that Toga was blood-starved. The real question was, why?

There were charity organizations that pretty much just gave it out for free. Just flashing her fangs at them would probably get people falling over themselves to give her synthetic mixes, and doing the barest amount of paperwork would get her all the way to real, human blood if she needed it. Nobody wanted anyone – and especially anyone with a blood-based Quirk – to go Quirk-starved. That inevitably led to uncontrollable hunger that always resulted in innocent people being attacked and possibly killed.

Honestly, loathe as he was to admit it, Shouta had to be glad Toga was a villain. If she hadn’t been getting the blood intake required to disguise herself, she likely already would have gone on a desperately ravenous rampage, and all things considered, she’d hurt a lot fewer people than just a single average blood-starved rampage. It wasn’t anywhere near a real solution, though. Using the blood to disguise herself meant she was using it for her Quirk, and that meant rapidly depleting what little blood reserves she got.

This was a lot harder to solve than Dabi’s Quirk meltdown issue. It required an outside material that Shouta couldn’t provide, not unless he managed to get out of the hideout. And if he got out of the hideout, he would immediately head to UA to get turned back into a human. …Right?

Discomfited by his own indecision, Shouta put that out of his mind for the moment.

The more pressing matter for the time being was windows. Specifically, he needed to find an open one.

Unfortunately, the window in Toga and Magne’s room was also shut tight, leaving Shouta once again on square one. He wasn’t willing to risk taking any of Toga’s knives to replace his hidden chef’s knife – they’d be better in a knife fight, but since they were Toga’s personal possessions and not a communal commodity, she would likely know when one was missing. Which left him with not much else to do in Toga and Magne’s room, aside from snag one of the floppier books in hopes he might be able to turn the pages properly.

It looked like the sort of sappy romance Hizashi would go dewy-eyed over, but it would be better than lying under the couch stewing in his own thoughts for hours on end. Probably.

Shouta dragged the book out of the room, shoving it into the boys’ bathroom for the time being while he continued his sweep of the hallway. Unfortunately, it appeared the girls’ room would be his only new adventure today. All the other doors were shut tight, and Shouta quickly returned to his stashed book.

Since it was sitting flat on the floor now instead of hanging off the shelf, it took him several tries to pick it up again, but he eventually managed. There was nowhere to put it in the living room, so Shouta retreated into Dabi, Spinner, and Twice’s bedroom. Their beds were all mismatched, undoubtedly sourced from three different places.

Dabi’s bed was a double that was only elevated off the floor by a single brick under each corner. Spinner’s bed was a quasi-loft bed, so high up that Shouta could probably comfortably sit underneath it in his normal form. Twice’s bed, on the other hand, was just the right height off the ground that it wasn’t blatantly obvious someone was under it, but there was still room for the pages to turn.

Shouta stowed his book by the wall where no one would see it and emerged from under the bed slightly dustier than he’d entered. With Shigaraki, Dabi, Toga, and Twice’s Quirks, it was honestly a miracle the whole hideout wasn’t more dust, ash, and sand than carpet. Not to mention eight people and a cat living in a relatively small space.

If Shouta hadn’t seen how much time Kurogiri spent cleaning, he almost would have believed one of them had a secondary cleaning Quirk.

With a final glance at the still-shut window, Shouta slunk down the hallway and back into the living room. Mr. Compress, Dabi, Kurogiri, Spinner, Twice, and Magne were all sitting around the table playing some sort of card game. That was, at the moment, the sum total of Shouta’s knowledge about it, but he suspected Mr. Compress was winning.

Cards and card games were to Mr. Compress what racing games were to Spinner.

Shigaraki, as was his wont, was sprawled across his recliner with his attention glued to a Nintendo Swap, effectively blind to the world. Toga had an array of whetstones and sharpening blocks set up on the bartop and was carefully sharpening a large array of knives.

That, at least, Shouta knew something about. He jumped nimbly up onto the stool next to Toga, watching her stroke the blade of each knife over her sharpening blocks.

“Hi, Demon,” Toga chirped, wiping the knife she was holding dry. “You here to watch?”

Shouta, of course, said nothing.

“Look,” Toga picked up the next knife in her neat row, holding it to one side so Shouta could see it. It looked sturdy enough, a solid piece of metal with the hilt wrapped in a cord to give it a proper handle. A bushcraft, outdoorsy sort of knife.

“It’s super dull,” Toga said, tilting the knife this way and that. It was, in fact, super dull. Shouta could see that much just by looking at it, even with his wacky cat vision, and Toga demonstrated by dragging it a couple times over her skin. Shouta’s claws would do more damage.

“I left it under my dresser for too long,” Toga whispered to Shouta, as if admitting a secret, “I only found it ‘cause I realized it was missing for so long and went looking.”

“I really like this knife,” Toga told him idly as she spread water over her whetstone, “It’s got a really nice grip, see?”

Shouta propped his paws up on the bartop to examine her knives. Of the ones spread over the counter, the one she was currently working on did look like the best to hold. Shouta wouldn’t describe himself as a knife fanatic, but all of his friends would. He thought they were being ridiculous. Knives were just very interesting, and it was always good to have a knife or two on your person. They were useful. It was logical.

Toga started sharpening her knife, and the familiar scrape of the blade across the whetstone was almost soothing. She was good at this. Shouta was glad to see someone taking good care of their weapons, though he would appreciate it if she took half as good care of herself.

Shouta sighed, resting his chin on the bartop as Toga continued testing and sharpening her knife. She switched whetstones several times, and eventually finished with that knife and set it to one side with her other finished knives. Shouta pawed at it, tilting it towards him to get a good look at the blade. It looked very well done, expertly sharpened to just the right amount so it would easily cut through skin and muscle but skid off of bone.

Shouta’s own combat knife, the tanto he kept in his belt when he was doing Hero work, was sharpened to the point that it could cut through bone. If he was driven all the way to pulling out his knife, he was far past nonlethal combat. His tanto was mostly for utility, but if he was using it in a combat situation, Shouta treated it like a gun. He only pulled it on people he was willing to kill.

“Someday I’m going to get one of those fancy belt sanders,” Toga said, swiping a cloth over the blade of her next knife, “That’ll speed this up a lot!”

“Only if you have somewhere to put it,” Dabi drawled, sorting through his cards.

“And the finances to get it,” Spinner added.

“I’m bidding three,” Mr. Compress said, drawing their attention back to their game.

“This knife has a striated blade,” Toga said, flashing the blade at Shouta. It had some interesting lamination lines on it, the values different enough that Shouta could easily tell them apart even with his cat eyes. “But I like this one better,” she flicked the hilt of another one towards him, and Shouta squinted at it. It looked somewhat marbled, or maybe paint splattered.

“Even when it’s clean, it looks like it’s got blood on it!” Toga chirped. “Sometimes I leave blood on the blades too long and it gets all rusted, but it just looks so much better, don’t you think?”

Shouta continued to say nothing. He was glad, not for the first time, that he was currently a cat and therefore didn’t have to respond to people. He had no idea what he’d say to that even if he could speak a language Toga could understand.

Toga continued to chatter about her knives as she worked her way through them, carefully cleaning and sharpening each one. Shouta idly watched her work, turning the issue of Quirk starvation over in his mind.

If Shouta could figure out how to write as a cat, he could maybe leave Kurogiri or Mr. Compress a message about getting Toga a blood supply. That would run the risk of someone concluding that writing should be beyond even a Quirked animal and deducing that Shouta was a human in a cat’s body, though. He could try to leave a typed message somewhere, but that would also be risky. Both in getting the time and space to type the message, and in getting it found. He had no way of knowing what would happen if they found a message on one of their devices that nobody would admit to writing.

Toga’s blood supply wasn’t the only issue, either. Spinner’s Quirk-related issues could be fixed or at least significantly improved by sorting out some sort of crepuscular sleep schedule for him, and Shouta was pretty sure that Shigaraki’s perpetual dehydration could be remedied by decaying something with a very high water content every now and again. Maybe a tree. Or a watermelon. Even Dabi, if he wanted to avoid having another Quirk meltdown, would have to keep venting his internal temperature somehow.

The problem was, Shouta didn’t have any way to tell them that.

Any sort of clear communication was dangerous. Quirked animals were smart, but not really smart enough to understand reading or writing, and with a cat’s oral structure he was completely incapable of forming any sort of comprehensible speech. Was it logical to risk his life here and now to get one or two people the help they needed? Did it matter that they were villains, and would use that help to harm others?

Shouta sighed, his tail lashing with frustration. He wasn’t getting anywhere like this. All he’d done was chase his thoughts around in circles, settling into a path he’d been wearing into his mind for the past two weeks. What was worth potentially revealing himself? What was the limit he could push himself to, before they realized he was something beyond a Quirked animal? Why might it be worth the risk?

Toga wiped another knife clean, setting it down in her neat row of sharpened knives, and reached for the next. Shouta turned away from her, peering idly at the group at the table. Their card game was still in full swing. A notepad and pen had appeared at some point, apparently for keeping track of points. It was a team game, as far as Shouta could tell, but he hadn’t paid enough attention to know what was going on beyond that.

His best bet, at least for the moment, was to wait and see. He didn’t necessarily like it, but Shouta had practice being patient. If he waited long enough, something would change. Either in his own feelings or externally. Something that would make the logical decision more obvious.

Hopefully, it would happen soon.

Chapter Text

“Meow,” Shouta said bluntly.

“What do you want?” Spinner demanded hysterically, “what do you want?”

“Meow,” Shouta repeated insistently.

Dabi, sprawled over the couch like a fainting Victorian maiden, snickered. Whether he was snickering at Shouta, Spinner, or the situation in general, Shouta had no idea.

Spinner tried to skirt around Shouta, but he was ready. He hissed furiously and puffed up all his fur, swiping at Spinner’s ankles and baring his teeth.

“What do you want?” Spinner was almost sobbing as he stumbled back from Shouta’s attack.

“Go to bed!” Shouta shouted at him, and Spinner yelped and lurched backwards through the living room door.

Very familiar with training – cats, students, coworkers, and other things – Shouta immediately responded with positive reinforcement, perking his ears and tail up and meowing his approval, hurrying forward to stand in the door and stop Spinner from returning to the living room.

“Keep moving,” Shouta insisted when Spinner stood in one place too long.

Spinner caught on quickly. He backed cautiously down the hallway, and glanced only briefly at the doors on either side as Shouta urged him down the hallway to the door to his room. It was half-open, like usual, and Spinner reluctantly ducked through it and into the room he shared with Twice and Dabi.

Twice looked up from where he was sitting on his bed, phone in hand, then paused when he took in the sight of Spinner being threatened into compliance by an animal a tenth his size.

Shouta kept his gaze fixed on Spinner as he shoved the door with a back paw. It slammed shut with a ‘bang!’, and Spinner looked like Shouta had fired a gun at him.

“How are you an infamous villain,” Shouta asked tiredly.

“What’s going on?” Twice asked. “I don’t care.”

“I don’t know!” Spinner practically wailed, “He just started biting me!”

“What’cha want, Demon?” Twice drawled, “Why should I care?”

Shouta rolled his eyes, but easily climbed the short steps to get up onto Spinner’s bed. He picked up the pair of sweatpants that Spinner used as his sleepwear and dropped them off the side of the bed.

Spinner and Twice both blinked at the soft ‘fwump’ of the sweatpants hitting the ground.

“…that did not clear anything up.”

Twice shook his head in agreement. “It did not. I think it makes perfect sense!”

Shouta sighed, wished desperately that he could pinch the bridge of his nose, and jumped down from the bed.

He’d practiced this part several times, and by now was an expert at it. Shouta crouched on the floor with his hind legs beneath him, carefully measuring the distance, then leaped up and slapped the light switch.

The overhead light turned off, and the room was only illuminated by the afternoon sunlight streaming through the window.

That, Shouta could also solve. He jumped up onto the windowsill, gripped the curtain as high up as he could reach, and laboriously dragged it closed. Then he did it to the other curtain as well before dropping off the windowsill.

The curtains were surprisingly high quality for something in the League of Villains’ hideout, and they blocked the majority of the light. The room was now so dark that Shouta suspected Twice couldn’t see much with his normal human vision.

“…is Demon trying to make me take a nap?” Spinner asked in a half-whisper.

“Close enough,” Shouta grumbled, slinking away to drape himself grumpily in front of the door.

“I mean, that’s what it looks like to me,” Twice agreed cautiously. “That’s stupid.”

“It is stupid, I agree,” Shouta huffed. “Someone other than me should have taught you how to function properly with your Quirk. Like maybe an actual human who can tell you these things instead of a housecat hinting aggressively.”

“I mean… I guess I’m kind of tired,” Spinner admitted dubiously, his gaze darting from Shouta to the pile of fabric that was the pair of sweatpants he had dropped on the floor. Shouta flicked his tail lazily at Spinner, lounging in front of the door like a sphinx and flexing the claws on one of his front paws. That got Spinner moving.

Shouta stared blankly at the gap under the door while Spinner changed, only looking up when he heard the sound of bedsprings from Spinner’s corner of the room.

One sleep-deprived teenager successfully delivered to bed.

Shouta was about ninety percent sure that, if he left Spinner to his own devices, he’d get up and leave in an hour or two. Which meant that Shouta had to stick around to make sure Spinner got enough sleep.

If someone had told him a month ago that he’d be guarding a door all night because he was worried about a villain’s sleep schedule, Shouta would have sent them to get psychological help.

On the other hand, it wasn’t like Shouta had anything else to do all night. Unless he wanted to read sappy romance novels over Magne’s shoulder or watch Shigaraki play videogames. Which he didn’t.

Shouta only moved to graciously allow Twice to slip out the door. About an hour and a half after Shouta had forced Spinner into bed, he did, in fact, try to get up and leave. Shouta guarded the door with claws and teeth and furious hissing and just dared Spinner to try going out the window. He’d certainly make it out, but if he so much as cracked that window open, Shouta would be gone in a heartbeat.

Spinner eventually gave up and went back to bed, proving Shouta once again the victor.

Considering the fact that Shouta was a housecat, he really should not have been the victor this often.

Several hours after that, the door bumped into Shouta from behind. He begrudgingly hoisted himself up out of his Sphinx pose and let Dabi into the room.

“You know, I thought Twice was lying when he said you bullied Spinner into sleeping,” Dabi whispered as he softly closed the door behind him.

“Mrrp,” Shouta said quietly, watching Dabi with narrowed eyes.

Sure enough, Dabi summoned a tiny flickering tongue of flame in his hand only a second after the door was shut. Shouta hissed, immediately lashing out at the exposed stripe of skin between the bottom of Dabi’s skinny jeans and the top of his socks.

“Hey!” Dabi hissed back, “cut that out!”

“You cut that out,” Shouta returned, pinning his ears and flexing his claws furiously, “you can light your way with red fire!”

Dabi grumbled at him but put out his fire. Shouta huffed and lashed his tail in frustration, glaring at Dabi as he fumbled his way through the room. Here was yet another time that life would be infinitely easier if Shouta could talk.

Shouta had to pin his gaze to the gap between the door and the floor again while Dabi changed. For once he was irritated at the cat eyes for giving him better vision than a normal human.

Soon the room fell into the silence of two sets of steady breathing, Dabi and Spinner both fast asleep. Shouta kept an eye on the clock ticking away on the wall. It was an hour behind, but so long as he kept that in mind, it would be fine.

Time slipped slowly away, Shouta leaning against the door as he kept half an eye on the clock. He sighed to himself in the silence of the night, wondering where his life had gone. In less than a month, he’d gone from the mentor and authority figure of a pack of feral high schoolers to the ornery pet cat of a pack of equally feral infamous criminals. And now he was essentially babysitting one of the current most wanted villains in the country.

At around midnight, Shouta hoisted himself off the floor and into an arched stretch. His tail curled and fluffed out, and he paused to shake out each paw individually. Then, he started towards Spinner’s bed.

“Hey,” Shouta said, patting Spinner’s face with one paw, “wake up.”

Spinner blinked groggily, his gaze slowly focusing on Shouta.

“If I was human, I would have already dumped you on the floor,” Shouta informed him, “come on, up you get.”

“What do you want this time,” Spinner groaned, turning his head away.

“For you to wake up,” Shouta said, patting Spinner’s cheek again, “come on, if you’re too slow I’ll pull out my claws.”

“Leave me alone,” Spinner grumbled, brushing Shouta’s paw away from his face.

“Let the record show that you asked for this,” Shouta said before promptly raking his claws down Spinner’s cheek.

Spinner flailed away with a barely-stifled yelp and almost fell over the side of his bed. “Okay! Fine!” He shoved Shouta away and threw the blankets off, angrily clambering off his mattress and down the short steps to the floor. Shouta flowed after him, twining between his legs to get in front of him and stopping at the base of the dresser. He turned and fixed Spinner with a steady gaze.

“You want me to get dressed?” Spinner asked, and finally, he was catching onto the fact that Shouta was a cat and couldn’t answer anything but yes-or-no questions.

Shouta nodded slowly and let Spinner get to the dresser, returning to staring at the crack between the floor and the ground until the rustling of cloth had petered out.

“Now we go out,” Shouta said, batting at the door.

Spinner cracked it open, and Shouta slipped out of the room with Spinner on his heels, leading him back to the living room.

“Congratulations, you’re crepuscular now,” Shouta said wryly.

“Hey, Spinner,” Twice said from where he was lounging on the couch, “shouldn’t you be asleep? You finally come to join the party?”

“I have no idea,” Spinner sighed.

“Well, whatever you’re doing, do it quietly, I’m trying to focus.” Shouta hadn’t even noticed that Shigaraki was in the mound of blankets and pillows on the recliner until he spoke.

“You should be going to bed,” Shouta told him, though unlike with Spinner, Shouta wasn’t willing to get close enough to Shigaraki to make him do so.

“What’s he playing?” Spinner asked Twice.

“Dunno,” Twice said, not looking up from his phone, “Probably something stupid.”

Shouta rolled his eyes and jumped up the steps into the kitchen.

“Good evening, Demon,” Kurogiri said, plucking the kitchen towel from the bar in the cupboard and replacing it with a clean one from one of the laundry baskets balanced on his hip. Shouta flicked his tail idly and followed Kurogiri as he walked out of the living room.

Kurogiri slipped into first the boys’ bathroom and then the girls’. He swapped the bathmats out for clean ones, replaced the hand towels with fresh ones, and stacked several large bath towels up under the sinks. As he went, one of his laundry baskets emptied while the other slowly filled. Shouta trailed idly behind him, not particularly interested in Kurogiri’s chores but preferring to move around after lying still on the ground for eight hours.

With his basket of clean laundry empty and his basket of dirty laundry now full, Kurogiri opened the door at the end of the hallway. Shouta’s ears pricked up, and he threaded himself neatly between Kurogiri’s legs to get into the room before he closed the door.

It smelled very strongly of the earthy, almost oily scent of Shigaraki’s Quirk. It was clear that the room was also shared with Mr. Compress. The half that wasn’t covered in videogame posters, figurines, and other merchandise was instead a tasteful blend of bedroom and magician’s workshop. Even from his perspective so close to the floor, Shouta could see the end of a string of scarves, a plastic wand that had rolled under the bed, and at least three decks of cards.

 Kurogiri didn’t pause for anything in the room except to pluck a towel off the bedpost of Shigaraki’s bed. Then he continued on, to an accordion door on the wall to the left of the door to the hallway.

The accordion door was cracked a few centimeters open, and Kurogiri slid it all the way open to reveal a narrow laundry room.

Shouta jumped up on top of the dryer, boredly watching Kurogiri rotate the laundry. It was frankly horrifying that watching someone rotate laundry was quite possibly the most interesting thing he could do at the moment.

Kurogiri started his load of towels in the washer and slid the accordion doors closed again, this time with him inside the laundry room. The doors still didn’t close all the way, and Shouta suspected that, if precise perfectionist Kurogiri couldn’t close them, then they likely just wouldn’t stay closed.

“If you would please move to the side for me, Demon,” Kurogiri requested softly.

Shouta toyed with the idea of continuing to be as irritating and uncooperative as possible, but he was curious to see where this was going. He jumped up onto a low shelf and watched with mild disbelief as Kurogiri hoisted himself up to sit on the top of the dryer, fishing a battered hardcover book from the shelf next to Shouta.

“I am currently reading the tale of the Tripitaka,” Kurogiri said, and the book fell easily open in his lap, revealing worn pages and a well-loved bookmark. “You may stay with me, if you wish, but I doubt I’ll be very good company.”

It wasn’t often that Shouta spent time with Oboro without anyone else around, but whenever he did, Oboro spoke almost exclusively about The Journey to the West. Shouta knew more about The Journey to the West than he really should have. Oboro had even gone so far as to read it in the original Chinese, and whenever he and Shouta were alone together Oboro was sharing some fun fact or funny anecdote or interesting translation difference between the Japanese, modern Chinese, and original Chinese editions.

It hardly needed to be said that Shouta instantly recognized the name ‘Tripitaka’, and considering what he knew of the book – that is, that it was actually at the very least four books – strongly considered leaving Kurogiri to his nighttime reading.

But Kurogiri was reading the Japanese translation, and Shouta was weak to the rainwater and clean ozone scent of his mist, so he settled onto the shelf behind Kurogiri and started reading over his shoulder.

Kurogiri was still early in the story, just when Sun Wukong was being reintroduced in chapter thirteen. He read slowly, or at least slower than Shouta, who was used to grading a veritable mountain of homework in a single night, so Shouta could easily keep up with him as he paged through the book.

Somewhere around two in the morning – which Shouta only knew because the washing machine had a digital clock built into it – there were low sounds from outside the laundry room. Kurogiri quietly stashed his book back on the shelf where he’d found it and turned himself into mist to flow through the open crack in the door. Shouta jumped down from the shelf to follow him and found Mr. Compress tucking his messenger bag onto the shelf under his bed.

“Good night, Sako,” Kurogiri offered quietly as he slipped out the door. Shouta realized too late that Kurogiri was closing the door, and Shouta was now stuck in the room. He sighed, more disgruntled than anything else. It wouldn’t be hard to get Mr. Compress to open the door for him, just annoying.

In the meantime, Shouta had access to this room for the first time, and while he couldn’t give it a proper search with Mr. Compress present, he could at least look around.

Shouta didn’t know that so many different stage magic props even existed. Yet no matter where he looked, the next cubby or nook he poked his head into had yet another bit of magic paraphernalia. There were decks of cards, silk handkerchiefs solitary and tied together, foam balls, wands, cups, a skein of invisible thread, a range of trick and standard coins, flash paper, a huge variety of specific trick boxes and papers, and even an assortment of tape dispensers for some reason.

Also, at least two dozen of Mr. Compress’s Quirk marbles.

Shouta didn’t dare try to break one – he didn’t even know if it was possible, and if it was, he didn’t want to pick the wrong one to break and end up crushed under a boulder or something – but he did try to peer at each one to try and tell what was inside. He couldn’t see anything through the flat sheen, but he didn’t know if that was because there actually wasn’t anything to see or just because Shouta’s cat vision wasn’t built for this.

Since Mr. Compress kept shooting Shouta warning and judgmental looks, he quickly moved on from his side of the room to tackle Shigaraki’s.

It appeared that everything Shigaraki owned was videogame themed. His bedspread, the posters on his walls, even the assorted clothes Shouta found scattered over his bed, on the floor, and poking out of the drawers on the left half of the dresser. Even his underwear, which was not something Shouta ever needed to know.

Once again, though, Shouta was more concerned with what he didn’t find. No matter how much he poked around, he couldn’t find any gloves. Even the half-gloves that only covered the pinkie and ring finger, for people with more irritating than destructive five-point-activated Quirks. Definitely none of the more complex finger-cap gloves designed for people who couldn’t risk their Quirk even affecting their gloves.

Shouta didn’t dare venture under Shigaraki’s bed – just poking his nose under there had left him rapidly backing away in a fit of sneezing – but it seemed unlikely there would be anything useful under there.

Which meant that Shigaraki didn’t have any kind of Quirk support items.

Why was it that none of these people had any sort of Quirk support? A single trip to a halfway decent Quirk counselor would probably solve half their problems. Heck, mentioning their Quirk anywhere near Midoriya and paying attention to even a quarter of what he said would probably solve all their problems!

Shouta sighed, swiping dust off his cheek and turning to the hallway door. He planted himself next to the door and wrapped his tail around his paws, surveying the room. Mr. Compress had turned the light off at some point, not that Shouta particularly cared with his feline night vision. The magician had clambered into bed while Shouta was busy searching Shigaraki’s side of the room.

Either Shouta could wake Mr. Compress up, or he could wait until Kurogiri or Shigaraki returned.

Fortunately, just as Shouta was trying to decide how much of a menace he really wanted to be, the decision was taken out of his hands. …out of his paws? Whatever. He didn’t need to decide anymore, because the doorhandle rattled slightly and Shouta stepped back to let the door open, hoping it was Kurogiri and Shouta could peacefully slip past him.

It was Shigaraki. Obviously.

Unwilling to be anywhere within arm’s reach of Shigaraki for any longer than he had to, Shouta bolted through the door as soon as it was opened wide enough for him to fit, zigzagging between Shigaraki’s legs and not slowing down until he was standing in the living room doorway.

Shigaraki cursed under his breath, stumbling as Shouta unbalanced him. More curses quickly followed as the hallway was filled with the sharp earthy scent of Decay.

Shouta glanced back to find Shigaraki with clenched fists and a hole where the doorhandle had once been. He flicked his tail in mild amusement as Shigaraki continued to swear at the doorhandle – or, rather, the lack of a doorhandle – then sashayed into the living room with the smug grace that only cats have. Shouta was just glad that, unlike when one of his students broke something in the dorms, it wasn’t his job to make sure it was fixed.

Chapter Text

Shouta didn’t know if he’d ever been this dusty before in his life. He didn’t know a cat’s fur could even hold this much dust.

With the door to Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s room now incapable of closing completely, Shouta had free reign of the space. He’d used that free reign to wait until both were busy elsewhere – Shigaraki buried in his gaming console on the recliner in the living room and Mr. Compress out on a supply run – before doing an in-depth search of their room.

Though this search was much more thorough than his original one, Shouta didn’t really find anything new. He’d even tentatively ventured under Shigaraki’s bed only to emerge with the knowledge that Kurogiri apparently didn’t see fit to clean that space, and evidently Shigaraki had never bothered to do anything with it himself.

But with Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s sides of the room both searched and as much of the dust shaken off as Shouta could manage, that left only the laundry room.

Shouta’s discoveries in the laundry room included a stack of well-loved books that was mostly made up of all the volumes of The Journey to the West, a simple handheld gaming device with a cracked screen that was at least a decade out of date, and, tucked so far in the back that it was almost crushed by the washing machine, a battered cardboard box.

As a general rule, when secretly searching places, Shouta avoided doing anything that couldn’t be undone. Anything that left a sign that he’d been there was a no-go, and there was no way Shouta could close the cardboard box once he opened it. Even if he could, it had an even layer of dust on it. Not Shigaraki’s Decay dust, but just the dust that accumulated on something after it sat in the same spot for too long. So, reluctantly, Shouta left the box alone.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He didn’t touch the box, but he did jump over it. It turned out that the washing machine was pulled out just enough from the wall that Shouta could fit into the gap.

Somehow, it was even dustier behind the washing machine than it had been under Shigaraki’s bed. It was a mixture of lint, Decay dust, Double sand, ash, and the more standard accumulated dust that every household developed, especially behind the washing machine. Clearly, nobody had cleaned this space since the League had moved into the hideout.

Shouta gingerly picked his way through the grime. He wasn’t really expecting to find anything back here, but it was better to check and be disappointed than miss something important.

He was glad he did.

The space was so narrow and dusty that Shouta didn’t see it until he’d basically stumbled into it. A hole in the floor, almost as long as Shouta’s cat body and wide enough that the edge disappeared under the washing machine. The edges of the hole were splintery and rough, but Shouta wriggled his way through them and found himself under the floorboards, in a crawlspace that was cramped even for a cat.

In the dark of the crawlspace, Shouta could make out a beam of sunlight, and through the dust it smelled very faintly of sunbaked asphalt.

Shouta slunk towards the light, weaving between splintery wooden support beams until he reached the edge of the house. There was a tiny hole in the wall, the edges uneven and smelling faintly of rodents. The hole was about as wide as a closed fist, maybe a generous eight or nine centimeters.

Without needing to really think about it, Shouta leaned forward to stick his face in the hole. His whiskers stretched wider than the opening, but in the cat part of his brain he was positive he could fit through.

Shouta did just that, slipping through the opening with only a little wriggle of his hips to get all the way through. He shook himself hard once he was through, clearing as much dust out of his fur as he could, then looked around.

On the other side of the hole was a completely ordinary back street. The narrow stretch of bare pavement was lined with concrete rain gutters. A telephone pole stood awkwardly on one side of the street, and a dozen other houses were butting up against this alley, a mishmash of walls, windows, fences, and air conditioners.

Just like that, after three weeks of trying to get out, he was finally free.

But did he want to be?

Without Shouta there, Spinner wouldn’t maintain his crepuscular sleep schedule. Dabi’s internal heat would continue to build until he had another Quirk meltdown. There would be no one who even knew what was happening if Toga went on a Quirk-starved rampage.

Shouta had already told Hizashi, Nemuri, and Nedzu that he might take a while. His hellions’ training had undoubtedly been picked up by Kan already, and while the two of them had a tendency to ‘act like constantly bickering siblings’ as Nemuri put it, Shouta acknowledged that Kan was a good teacher and a good Hero. He had to be, to last long at UA. After the licensing exam, the students would either go to internships if they succeeded or do makeup work if they failed, both of which would be overseen by other heroes. Shouta would always prefer to be there for them himself, but he knew Hizashi and Nemuri would look after them in his absence.

There was no one who would look after the League if Shouta left.

This shouldn’t even be a question. They were the League of Villains. The most wanted criminal organization in the country. They should not need a babysitter, and Shouta should not want to be that babysitter. Except they were also children, and Shouta had always had a soft spot for children, even when he was still a child himself. Not only that, but there was the chance that if he got them the help they needed, at least some of them would realize that they didn’t actually want to be Villains after all.

His class was already taken care of. They didn’t need his help at the moment. The Leage of Villains decidedly did. It was the most logical course of action to stay and help them.

Shouta did not immediately head back into the hideout, but instead turned to trot down the alley, keeping careful track of his surroundings. He cased the neighborhood like he would a crime scene, poking around anything that looked suspicious or out of the ordinary. There wasn’t a whole lot to it, really. It was a relatively normal neighborhood on the outskirts of a larger city, not necessarily wealthy but not really poor, either.

The houses were squat, one-story affairs for the most part, with a few having attics or lofts that were identifiable from the outside. The streets were narrow but clean, and the vending machines on street corners were clearly maintained and kept stocked. There was a konbini only two blocks down from the League’s house, and Shouta poked his head in through the propped-open door.

The cashier at the register offered him only a passing glance, and Shouta ventured through the door and into the konbini. He bypassed the aisles of ready-made food and poked around through the dry goods. He didn’t have high hopes for actually finding what he was looking for, and so he was pleasantly surprised to see one singular foil bag nestled between paper packets of water flavoring and plastic jars of protein powder.

There was a special license required for selling human blood, but synthetics and dried or frozen animal blood were much easier to stock. The standard go-to for most small businesses was to have a few options of dried blood, usually synthetic, cow, or pig’s blood, and occasionally some frozen concentrates.

The dried ones were the ones that Shouta could carry as a cat, though.

It took three tries, but Shouta managed to knock the foil bag off the shelf. Unfortunately, in the process he knocked down half a dozen little plastic jars of protein powder and several boxes of drink mix packets. There was a loud clatter of jars and boxes hitting the ground, and one medium-sized jar of protein powder fell directly on Shouta’s head.

Shouta shook it off and quickly pawed at the bag of powdered blood, trying to get it in the right position to pick up. He could hear footsteps already coming towards him, the cashier undoubtedly wondering what the commotion was. Finally, with a bit of awkward maneuvering, Shouta managed to tilt the top bag up so he could pick it up in his teeth, careful to keep his grip above the resealing line so he didn’t poke any holes in the bag itself.

The cashier rounded the corner and paused, staring down at Shouta in shock. Shouta stared back for a split second and then bolted, darting past the stunned cashier. There was a camera over the checkout area, and Shouta glanced up to make sure he showed up on the recording holding the bag of powdered blood. He didn’t want the cashier to be accused of stealing.

With the door still propped open, Shouta easily trotted back out onto the street, making his way towards the League’s hideout. Nobody offered him so much as a second glance, even the woman with the heteromorphic bear Quirk that Shouta was sure could smell the powdered blood he was carrying. Shouta made it to the back alley with the hole in the wall in short time, and managed to squeeze himself and his prize back through the hole in the wall. From there, he slithered through the crawlspace and popped up out of the hole behind the washing machine again, immediately becoming coated in dust and grime.

Fortunately, the bag was still sealed, and in a single leap Shouta had cleared the mysterious cardboard box and was standing by the wall in the laundry room. He set the bag down briefly to poke his head out of the cracked-open laundry room doors, scanning the room beyond. It was fortunately still empty, so Shouta grabbed his bag again and slipped out of the laundry room, bounding through Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s room to peer out that door.

He went so far as to peek into the living room and found that the kitchen table was covered in assorted groceries with neither Kurogiri nor Mr. Compress anywhere to be seen. Perfect.

Shouta snagged his bag of powdered blood and darted into the kitchen, jumping up onto the table amid the groceries to start making the sound that every cat owner learned to recognize even in their sleep.

The sound of their cat – who they love and adore but is so very, very stupid – eating plastic.

He had to admit, it did feel strangely satisfying to chew on the edge of the bag. It had just the right amount of give under his teeth. He’d have to find some cardboard or something, too. Just to give it a try.

“Demon!” Kurogiri scolded, appearing in the living room doorway with an empty grocery bag wadded up in his hand, “are you eating plastic?!”

“No,” Shouta said dryly, teeth still buried in the plastic edge of the bag.

“Give me that,” Kurogiri said sternly, “You can’t eat plastic, Demon.”

“You’re not my real dad,” Shouta muttered around the plastic in his mouth.

Of course, Shouta wasn’t just going to give it to him. That would be too easy.

Kurogiri reached for the bag and Shouta leaped to his feet, bouncing backwards with his spine arched and his tail puffed up. He hissed past the bag still clenched in his teeth. Kurogiri only sighed, a hint of frustration in his tone.

“If I give you something else to chew on, will you give it back?” Oh, it appeared they’d moved on to bargaining. Kurogiri was getting faster at running through the stages of grief when Shouta did something infuriatingly feline. Or just infuriating.

“The absolute gall to think you can barter with a cat frankly astounds me,” Shouta sighed, picking himself up off the table. With the bag still in his mouth, he dropped neatly to the ground and trotted towards the front door.

The door opened as he was moving towards it, and Mr. Compress’s eyes widened as he saw Shouta approaching. He quickly slammed the door shut behind himself, though Shouta had only just reached the stairs. Then again, Shouta himself knew how fast a cat could be when faced with a tantalizingly forbidden doorway, and he had already proven himself capable of getting down the stairs and through the door in the blink of an eye.

“Did he get the cat treats?” Mr. Compress asked, squinting at the bag in Shouta’s mouth.

“He was chewing on it on the table,” Kurogiri said, “I don’t know what it is.”

“Did you buy cat treats?” Shouta demanded. “You don’t have the budget for that! And you should have learned by now that I won’t eat them!”

“Come on, Demon,” Mr. Compress urged gently, “let me see that.”

“Both of you are delusional,” Shouta grumbled. In the hallway, a door opened. There was definitely the sound of a door latch, so it wasn’t the door to Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s room or Dabi, Spinner, and Twice’s room, which was always standing open. It wasn’t a sliding door, either, so that eliminated the girls’ bathroom, and the boys’ bathroom had a very distinctive squeaky hinge that was entirely absent. Which left only one possibility.

Shouta bolted for the living room door.

Kurogiri and Mr. Compress both yelped as he zipped away, and neither was fast enough to catch him before he rocketed through the living room door, leaped towards Magne, who froze at the sight of Shouta bolting in her direction, and dove between her legs and through the open door to the girls’ room.

Toga was lying on her bed on her stomach with her feet kicked up behind her. Shouta leaped up onto the bed, jarring the manga Toga was reading and making it flop closed.

“Demon!” she cheered. “Are you here to snuggle with me!?”

Shouta gave her a flat look that he suspected went right over her head.

“What’cha got there?” Toga asked, tilting her head curiously.

Instead of answering, Shouta dropped the bag on the bed in front of her. Toga hummed curiously, clearly interested, but was cautious enough to avoid sticking her hand in biting distance and instead wait for Shouta to draw back before reaching for the bag. They learned so fast.

Toga made a curious noise, gaze flicking over the package.

“What is it?” Magne asked, poking her head back into the room.

“Beef Blood,” Toga read off the packaging, “powdered.”

“No wonder Demon wanted it,” Magne sighed, “that cat eats better than I do.”

Oh, okay, now it was Shouta’s fault that Dabi kept slipping him sausage and bacon?

“Maow,” Shouta said demandingly, flicking his tail irritably.

“Okay, I can mix you some,” Toga agreed, rolling off her bed, “but you gotta let me pet your ears.”

Shouta hesitated for only a moment. The blood wasn’t actually for him, so logically he wouldn’t actually need to follow through on that promise. He reluctantly bobbed his head, then slunk after Toga as she sailed out of her room.

Magne only shook her head with a sigh. “You’ve got a death wish, little sis.”

Toga grinned at her. “You’re just jealous because Demon’s gonna let me pet him! And I don’t even have a self-heating Quirk!” She looked positively thrilled at the idea, and a little bud of guilt cropped up in Shouta’s chest. Fortunately, his cold dead heart rapidly choked the guilt out.

“Ah, Toga, did you reclaim Demon’s prize?” Kurogiri asked as Toga skipped into the living room.

“He gave it to me!” Toga chirped, holding up the bag, “I think he wants me to mix him some blood.”

Shouta pricked his ears cautiously, watching Kurogiri and Mr. Compress both look at the bag Toga was holding. This was a make-or-break moment. If everything went to plan, Kurogiri would assume the blood was something Mr. Compress had picked up at the store and Mr. Compress would assume it was something Kurogiri had stocked that Shouta had managed to drag out of its proper place.

“Very well,” Kurogiri said after a brief pause, “please refrain from using the nice kitchenware for mixing blood, though.”

“And transfer it to a sturdier container when you’re done,” Mr. Compress suggested, “We don’t want Demon to get into it again and spread blood powder everywhere.”

Toga made a vague noise of agreement, and Shouta breathed an internal sigh of relief.

In the kitchen, Toga made quick work of rehydrating the blood, following the instructions on the bag. She made about half a cup, mixing it together while humming and practically bouncing through the kitchen. Shouta watched her from his position on the bartop, taking in the way she stumbled almost imperceptibly every few steps and bumped into the counters and chairs. Most would probably write it off as clumsiness, but Shouta had gotten reports on Toga’s combat skill from the students who fought her at the training camp.

Midoriya had an incredible – if a bit rough and untrained – knack for judging combat skill. Asui was fast and competent, and she was bluntly honest in her appraisals. Uraraka had been trained by Gunhead to read her opponents’ skills. All three of them had attested that Toga was fast, agile, and fought competently with a two-handed style. Just fighting two-handed required a proper knowledge of your own body and center of balance. To do so fast enough to catch Asui off guard meant that Toga certainly wasn’t clumsy. Not by a long shot.

Beyond the more obvious signs, Shouta could see a slight absent fog in her eyes. Her fingers trembled slightly, and every now and again she’d straighten too suddenly, like she’d gotten dizzy. Most people would write it off, see her bouncing and skipping and humming and figure she couldn’t possibly be tired. But Quirk starvation usually led the brain to increase production of adrenaline and endorphins, attempting to urge the body to push through whatever other issues it was dealing with to find nutrients.

Chronic exhaustion was a much more widely-known side effect of Quirk starvation, but the problem was that most people assumed their exhaustion was gone once the extra adrenaline and endorphin production kicked in and they didn’t feel tired anymore. Even the sudden crashes when the brain couldn’t maintain the higher levels of hormone production were typically brushed off as normal everyday tiredness.

Of course, Shouta already knew Toga was Quirk-starved. He’d inferred that just from the lack of Quirk support anywhere in the hideout, including under the floorboards. But when he was truly paying attention, it couldn’t have been more obvious.

“Here you go, Demon!” Toga chirped, sliding a sauce dish onto the table.

Shouta carefully put a paw on the rim, careful to avoid tipping the dish or getting blood on his paw, and pushed it back towards Toga.

“What’s wrong?” Toga asked, almost concerned. “You said you wanted some, right?”

“I want you to drink it,” Shouta insisted, pushing it towards Toga again.

“Did I do it wrong?” Toga hummed, lips twisting with displeasure as she picked up the bag of powdered blood.

She wasn’t going to get his hint, was she. Mentally bracing himself, Shouta dipped just the pads of one paw into the dish, then hurried forward on three legs while Toga was studying the bag. She looked up once he entered her line of sight, and Shouta reared up on his hind legs and smacked at Toga’s lips with his bloody paw.

Toga made a sharp ‘oh!’ noise, her head jerking back automatically at the sudden movement. Then her eyes widened.

“Oh,” she said again, lifting one hand to swipe at the blood on her lips. “This… is blood.”

“Incredibly observant, give the girl a cookie,” Shouta said, now dubiously inspecting his bloody paw. On the one hand, it was real actual blood. On the other, at least it wasn’t human blood, and Shouta had already taken a bath today. He hated waiting for his fur to dry.

With a mental shrug, Shouta started licking the blood off his paw.

Unfortunately, it was delicious.

Toga apparently agreed with him.

“Can I have some of yours?” she ventured.

Shouta looked up from his paw, glancing between Toga and the sauce dish. Then, with his back paw, he slid it closer to her.

“Thanks, Demon!” Toga chirped, swiping the dish off the counter and tilting it to drink. Shouta paused, watching her desperately suck down the whole thing like it was water in a desert. Considering the fact that it hadn’t even occurred to her to drink any until Shouta had forced that conclusion on her, the metaphor was painfully accurate.

Toga licked the dish completely clean, and there wasn’t a drop on the dish or around her mouth when she set it back on the counter with a happy sigh. Then she paused, blinking at the empty dish. She glanced at Shouta. Then at the dish.

“Oh no!”

Shouta snorted under his breath, working his teeth between his paw pads to make sure he got all the blood out.

“I’m so sorry, Demon!” Toga gasped. “I can make you more if you want!”

“I don’t,” Shouta sighed, pushing the dish away. He stood, rubbing his paw briefly on the counter, then jumped down onto the floor.

“Wait, Demon!”

Shouta continued down the steps to the living room.

“Wait, if I make you more can I pet your ears?”

He jumped up onto the couch, padding over the cushions.

“Please?”

Shouta made the fatal mistake of glancing over his shoulder at Toga. A girl with teeth that sharp shouldn’t have such an irresistible puppy-eyed pleading face. Well, he supposed they were called ‘canines’.

If there was one thing cats were good at, it was pretending everything had been their idea in the first place and there was nothing anyone else had done to convince them. Shouta was glad for that, since it let him cling to what few scraps of his pride still remained.

With a waving tail and a general air of ‘It’s a complete coincidence that my goals happen to align with your desires’, Shouta made a full lap of the couch, jumping up onto the backrest and from there onto the kitchen floor. Toga gasped when he stopped in front of her, only hesitating a moment before tentatively reaching a hand down towards him.

Very brave of her to stick her hand anywhere near his face. Instead of biting it, though, Shouta gave her fingers a haughty sniff – they still smelled faintly of blood, but it was far from the worst thing in the hideout – and then gingerly pressed his forehead against them.

Toga looked like the entire world had just opened up in front of her, and she’d received the key to life, the universe, and everything. Gentle fingertips traced feather-light over Shouta’s ears, slipping around his head to scratch at the softer fur under his ears and around his jaw.

The feeling was intoxicating. It was like putting his eyedrops in after too long using Erasure or pausing for a drink after a long run. Like settling in to sleep on a week off during summer, knowing he wouldn’t need get up and do anything useful for at least sixteen hours. It touched his soul and transcended him to a higher plane. Shouta felt his throat make the strange humming-whispering feeling of purring, and it was all he could do to avoid completely falling over as his limbs tried to go boneless from delight.

He could certainly get used to this.

Chapter Text

Shouta had played a lot of roles in his life. He was a Hero, an Underground Hero, specifically, which implied no small number of sub-roles. He was an informant, a strategist, a street contact, hitman, beat cop, Quirk theorist, and more. He was also a teacher of teenage Hero students, and that included even more jobs; teacher, yes, but also conflict resolution specialist, Quirk theorist again for completely different reasons, and, most often, glorified babysitter.

The concept of being a glorified babysitter was not new to Shouta. He’d been doing that since he was thirteen and stepping between his sisters and fights they didn’t need to start. A flash of his own Quirk was usually enough to deescalate whatever conflict had been started by the three of them existing in the same place with their matching Primordial-red shoes.

And then it had only gotten worse once he started UA and met not only Nemuri, but also Hizashi and Oboro. And, basically, his life only ever got more complicated. After Nemuri had submitted Shouta’s application to teach at UA, the title of ‘glorified babysitter’ had gone from a lighthearted in-joke to a legitimate part of his job.

Once Shouta had gotten the hang of things and mostly knew what he was doing, his current class of hellspawn had been dumped in his lap like a box of feral kittens.

Well, that wasn’t quite right. Shouta knew how to deal with feral kittens. He would have loved a box of feral kittens. No, his current class had been dumped on his head like a box of furious snakes, and it was all he could do to keep them all together and in one piece through the onslaught of Villain attacks, disasters, and, frankly, the natural consequences of their own terrible decision-making.

So, Shouta acknowledged and embraced his title of glorified babysitter. He just hadn’t ever expected it to be quite this literal.

“I can’t go to bed right now!” Spinner hissed, “I need to finish this!”

“You’re not going to finish that before midnight!” Shouta snapped, swiping wildly at whatever parts of Spinner were within reach.

“Stop that!” Spinner squawked, hopping away from Shouta’s attack. “Kurogiri! Kurogiri, come get your demon!”

Why did his tone of voice sound exactly like a kid tattling on their sibling? Fortunately, he started swearing up a blue streak as Shouta opened a bloody slice over his ankle and the comparison quickly dissolved.

Well, mostly.

“You have some incredible faith in Kurogiri if you think he can do anything about Demon,” Dabi said idly as he nursed his tea. For the few days immediately following his Quirk meltdown, Dabi had craved warm drinks but couldn’t handle caffeine, and as a result he’d developed an affinity for Magne’s fruity tea. Not that Dabi had admitted that to anyone else, and Shouta only knew the mug contained tea and not coffee like Dabi had claimed because of his feline sense of smell.

One day Magne was going to dig out her box of tea for a quick pick-me-up and be very disappointed in what she found. Especially if Dabi continued to refuse to admit to his new addiction and never requested a restock.

“While I don’t necessarily disagree, you did not have to phrase it quite like that,” Kurogiri said, appearing in the doorway like an overdramatic bank of fog.

“You’re right but you didn’t have to say it,” Shouta paraphrased with a snort. It was a line Oboro had said at least once a day, and both Shouta and Hizashi had eventually picked it up as well, though they used it much less often than Oboro had.

“Demon, perhaps you could share your desires without the use of violence?” Kurogiri offered somewhat desperately.

“You guys only listen to me when I threaten you,” Shouta said crossly, one paw still held up to bat at Spinner.

“No, I think he made himself pretty clear,” Dabi said. “He wants Spinner to go to bed.”

Kurogiri hesitated. “…it’s only four o’clock.”

Dabi only shrugged, taking another sip of his tea, “Demon’s been making Spinner go to bed at four for like, three days now. Nobody’s sure why yet.”

Shouta had needed to bully Spinner into maintaining his crepuscular sleep schedule every night since the first one. That was in addition to making sure Toga remembered to drink at least some blood, keeping an eye on Magne’s fatigue and pain levels, and trying to teach Dabi to vent his internal temperature. So far, the best strategy he’d found for the last was making Dabi sneeze, which always ran the risk of Shouta’s fur getting singed from the ensuing flicker of red fire.

As for Magne, Shouta was pretty sure that it was mostly just her Quirk was giving her a lot of the standard packet of mental-Quirk side effects. Headaches, dizziness, strange cravings, insomnia, and probably even increased dysphoria.

It took training to alleviate these issues, training and Quirk counseling to figure out exactly what they were stemming from. When Shouta’s Quirk had first developed, he’d gotten a long run of horrible migraines that each left him out of commission and extremely light-sensitive for days on end. Until he’d managed to get into the UA Hero course, with both the best Quirk counselors in the country and Nedzu on staff, he’d had awful migraines basically ever time he’d used his Quirk, and that was in addition to the dry eye, insomnia, and baseline increased light sensitivity.

He didn’t think Magne’s Quirk side effects were quite that bad.

Partially because Magne was at least third-generation Quirked where Shouta was at most two-point-five. His dad had been a second- or third-generation – it was kind of hard to tell if his great-grandfather had actually had a Quirk, since there were basically no records of him – and his mom had been Quirkless, so Shouta was solidly in the two to two-point-five range. Younger Quirks were less developed, less predictable, and more likely to negatively affect their user.

Also, Shouta had seen Magne react to her Quirk’s drawbacks. She barely even winced most of the time, occasionally blinking hard or pressing her fingers to her temples. The largest reaction he’d ever seen from her was a squinty grimace and a hand groping blindly for her tinted glasses.

What was really interesting were the tinted glasses themselves. There were identical pairs of pink-tinted sunglasses scattered all throughout the house. On the shelf in the TV stand, tucked behind Dabi’s now rarely-used bowl of mints, discarded haphazardly on the vanity in the girls’ bathroom, and at least three pairs scattered around just the girls’ bedroom. Not to mention the pair Magne usually kept in her pocket.

When Shouta had inspected the glasses, he’d found the lenses themselves to be made of thick, polarized plastic. Even with his weak feline color vision, Shouta could tell that they cast everything into identical shades of pink. They didn’t even darken anything, like you would for migraine or concussion-like symptoms. They just made everything pink.

It implied some things about Magnetism that Shouta hadn’t considered before. Some things he’d been planning to test out tonight. Except it seemed that Spinner would once again require Shouta to stand guard at the door all night. Again.

“At four o’clock?” Kurogiri asked slowly.

“Every night,” Spinner hissed, clutching his Swap close to his chest, “It’s unreasonable!”

“And what time are you getting up?” Kurogiri asked, clearly intrigued.

Spinner shrugged, taken off guard. “Um, like, midnight I guess?”

“Four to twelve is eight hours,” Kurogiri mused, “an unusual eight hours, to be certain, but a relatively common sleep schedule for those with a Quirk that makes them partially nocturnal.”

Shouta’s tail curled with relief. Finally, someone else got it.

“So, Demon’s trying to make me share his sleep schedule?”

Shouta sighed, and his tail drooped again.

“Certainly not,” Kurogiri said, almost amused, “cats are purely nocturnal. They are biologically designed to sleep during the day and be awake at night. There’s a word for sleeping around twilight or dawn, rather than being fully nocturnal or diurnal, but I can’t remember it at the moment.”

“Close enough,” Shouta decided.

“So, what, Demon’s trying to make me be twilight-urnal?”

“That seems quite likely, yes,” Kurogiri said, “although I can’t possibly fathom why.”

“Uh, duh.” Dabi downed the last of his tea before continuing, “It’s because Spinner’s got nocturnal heteromorphism.”

Spinner blinked, looking from Dabi to Kurogiri and then down to Shouta. Shouta stared up at him judgmentally, tail lashing.

“Okay, but why would Demon want to do that?”

At that, Dabi actually turned to look at Spinner, leveling a flat look at him, “You haven’t noticed?”

“Noticed what?” Kurogiri tucked his hands behind his back curiously.

“Really? None of you have noticed? Nobody? Twice?”

“I haven’t’ noticed anything important! I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’!”

“Shiggy? Toga? Sako? Tell me one of you noticed!”

“Noticed what?” Toga asked, spinning around on the couch to prop her elbows on the back. “Something about Demon?”

“Yes, something about Demon! He’s been nothing but helpful for over a week!”

There was a weighted silence as everyone shared dubious looks and furrowed eyebrows. Toga opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again.

“Um… Dabi?” Spinner ventured, “I think he tried to claw my eyes out yesterday.”

“I was waking you up, you ungrateful lizard,” Shouta huffed. “If I’d wanted your eyes out, they’d be out.”

“He continues to bite me when I go anywhere near him,” Mr. Compress added.

“I have nothing against you, just your Quirk,” Shouta grumbled, his tail flickering with irritation.

“Also, he keeps clawing at my bedroom door,” Toga piped up.

“And he shredded one of my books,” Magne said, not looking up from the book she was currently reading. Honestly, that one was their fault. Kurogiri, at least, should have known that cats needed good scratching posts. Besides, it had been a book that she had three copies of. It wasn’t like she was missing it or anything. In fact, he was pretty sure she was reading one of the copies right now.

“Okay, fine.” Dabi rolled his eyes so hard Shouta could practically hear it, “Ugh, let me rephrase. Aside from just being a cat, Demon’s done nothing but help us for over a week.”

“What do you mean by that?” Kurogiri asked.

Dabi ticked them off on his fingers, starting with “He saved my life,” and then continuing, “he’s constantly tricking Toga into drinking blood, he’s always hanging around you during your solo sulking sessions, he stopped Magne from falling down the stairs just a few days ago, and he’s the one who keeps closing the fridge when Twice forgets.”

Twice looked up from his phone, startled. “I do not!”

“You do,” half the room chorused at him.

“Your personalities swap, and you forget what you were doing,” Shouta grumbled under his breath. At the moment, he was mostly trying to let the floor swallow him as he himself realized everything that he’d been doing for the League, but he could spare the energy for snarking. He could almost always spare the energy for snarking. It was a fabulous coping mechanism.

The things Dabi were listing weren’t even the half of it. Shouta had automatically fallen into habits of tidying and helping out, the sort of things he’d do for his students or around his own house. Putting left-out stuff away, silently retrieving things people needed before they could ask, offering his silent support by simply sitting in the same room. And more, things that he could only really do as a cat. Comforting Dabi and Toga after nightmares, acting as Kurogiri’s emotional support animal, even listening to Shigaraki’s manic half-mumbled rants at three in the morning when everyone else was asleep.

“You know, I did notice that Demon’s a lot less mean all the time,” Toga said, “you really think he’s just… helping us now? Why?”

“Why do cats do anything?” Mr. Compress put in rhetorically.

“Often, humans will ascribe self-interested curiosity or aloofness to a particular feline action that would, to other felines, be seen as affectionate and caring,” Kurogiri said, “In the wild, even feral cats feed and care for other members of their clowder, marking them with their scent and guarding them from danger. There is a chance that Demon has come to see us as his clowder.”

Oh, Kami. Kurogiri thinks they’re family.

Shouta looked away from the curious and stunned gazes as practically the whole room turned to him, flicking his ears back to keep track of the conversation. He was sure that if he was a human, his face would be bright red.

“A cat shows trust and comradery by turning their back to a clowder member,” Kurogiri pointed out. “It means they have faith in you to not attack them and they’ll help you look out for any potential threats.”

The worst part was, he was right. Shouta knew too much about cats himself, but he hadn’t expected Kurogiri to be a feline psychologist. Honestly, that was his mistake. Considering everything else Kurogiri had known about cats, Shouta should have been prepared for him to know a lot about feline body language.

“Aww,” Toga cooed, “he’s just a little tsundere.”

Shouta wasn’t the best at interpreting Kurogiri’s expressions – he was made of inscrutable mist and usually had strict picture-perfect posture – but even he could see that the man was hovering somewhere between exhausted and despairing.

That particular feeling was intimately familiar to Shouta.

“Can we get back to the matter at hand,” Shouta grumbled to himself. Since no one was going to answer him – obviously – he took matters into his own hands and rounded on Spinner again.

Spinner, who had forgotten the original conflict in the discussion of helpfulness and clowders that followed, only barely dodged the furious swipe of Shouta’s claws.

“Hey!” Spinner squawked, dancing away from Shouta. “Leave me alone!”

“It’s past your bedtime,” Dabi drawled.

“It’s four thirty!” Spinner shrieked back at him.

“Yeah, way past your bedtime.”

“I’m not letting the stupid cat boss me around,” Spinner insisted, clutching his Nintendo Swap close to his chest, “I don’t care how helpful he is, I’m in the middle of something!”

“You’ve been playing videogames for the past three hours,” Dabi pointed out dryly.

“And I’m in the middle of something,” Spinner hissed.

“Is the something a videogame?” Kurogiri asked sternly.

Spinner hesitated, glancing from Shouta to Kurogiri. “…no?”

“Well, I cannot force you to do anything,” Kurogiri said, “but without a direct order, I will not be restraining Demon. He is working to your good; I, for one, appreciate him greatly.”

Spinner gaped from Shigaraki to Kurogiri as the mist man slipped out of the room. That meant he wasn’t watching Shouta anymore.

Instead of going for his ankles again, Shouta leaped for the Swap in Spinner’s hand. His grip had slackened in shock, and with the element of surprise on his side, Shouta knocked the device out of his hand and jumped clear before Spinner had even realized what had happened.

Spinner cursed at him, scrambling to catch the Swap before it hit the ground. He failed rather spectacularly, and a thick spiderweb crack splintered the glass screen.

Mr. Compress sighed heavily. Spinner winced, drawing his hands back to his chest, then turned to glare at Shouta.

“It wasn’t me this time,” Shigaraki said moodily, sinking lower in his chair.

“It was Demon’s fault!” Spinner hurriedly defended himself.

“No, I think this one’s on you,” Dabi mused, “We’ve seen Demon go after Kurogiri’s expensive alcohols. If you thought the possibility of breaking your Swap was going to stop him, you’re crazier than Shiggy.”

“Yeah, I’m with Dabi on this one,” Toga hummed, cupping her face in her hands, “Demon’s still a cat, you know. A cute little tsundere kitty!”

If the tsundere bit became a thing, Shouta was going to riot.

“Come on, to bed with you,” Shouta patted at Spinner’s leg, “let’s go.”

“Here, hand me that,” Mr. Compress waved a hand at Spinner, who reluctantly picked the Swap up off the ground and handed it to Mr. Compress. “I’ll transfer your data to a fresh one. I’m just glad it’s not completely destroyed.”

“It’s not my fault,” Shigaraki whined, still not looking up from his game.

Nobody else paid him any mind, so Shouta felt confident in his decision to ignore Shigaraki as well. In the three weeks he’d been there, Shouta had seen Shigaraki decay three different gaming devices, two controllers, and six remotes.

Shouta took the opportunity to herd Spinner to bed again, though he noted that Mr. Compress stashed the cracked Swap on the shelf above the TV. That could come in handy later.

Apparently, the breaking of the Swap had taken all the fight out of Spinner. He went along with Shouta’s bullying without a peep, closing the curtains himself and clambering into bed. Shouta hesitated for a moment, considering, then leaped for the doorhandle. It was a relatively easy lever handle, and it swung open with only a bit of finagling. Shouta hooked a paw around the edge of the door to pull it closed behind him, then trotted into the living room again.

“You came back!” Toga gasped, delighted.

“It’s your turn,” Shouta told her blandly. He hopped up onto the bartop, dodged Dabi’s attempt to pet him, and instead jumped across to the counter. He avoided Kurogiri’s assorted bottles and decanters this time – Shouta was pretty sure Kurogiri had some kind of sixth sense for someone disturbing his collection – and stopped under the cupboard that Toga kept the powdered blood in.

Shouta sat down, curling his tail around his paws. “You have five minutes!” he called, though it came out as a low ‘mraww’.

“Oh!” Toga slid off the couch, shoving her phone into her pocket and hurrying into the kitchen. “I don’t usually see you here until the morning!”

“You should be getting at least one serving of blood a day,” Shouta said as Toga pulled out the designated blood-only whisk, a chipped mug, and a tiny sauce dish. “Preferably, now that you’ve started introducing larger quantities of blood to your body and considering that you’re getting dehydrated animal blood instead of fresh human, you’d get two or even three. At least while in the process of making up for nutrient deficiencies.”

Toga started mixing the blood powder with water, and Shouta stepped back to let her slide the sauce dish onto the counter. He grimaced at the dark red liquid in the dish.

“Eventually, I’m going to find a way to get you to drink this stuff without getting me any,” Shouta grumbled. But Toga had always been worried and upset when Shouta had rejected the dish of blood she’d offered him, so for the time being he forced himself to lean down and carefully lap up the rehydrated blood.

Shouta had nothing against people with blood-based Quirks needing to drink blood. It made perfect sense, and so long as the blood was given willingly – either donated or sold – he didn’t particularly care. But drinking blood himself was… strange. He couldn’t really taste it very well – though what he could taste was unfortunately quite good – but there was a significant psychological insistence in the back of his head that said this was wrong and bad and made him cringe every time.

On the other hand, that psychological block was undoubtedly the thing that made people so quick to discriminate against Quirks that required strange nutrient intake like blood, so Shouta had decided that he was going to do his level best to ignore it. That was no small part of the reason he hadn’t tried very hard to discourage Toga from giving him blood. It wasn’t like there was anything actually wrong with drinking animal blood.

Besides, it gave Toga someone to relate to. It was more than a little concerning that said ‘someone’ was a cat, but on the list of concerning things that went on in this house, that didn’t even make top ten.

So, Shouta drank his sauce dish of blood and made sure Toga finished her mug. No matter how much he enjoyed it, Shouta had resolved to not let Toga pet him except after drinking blood or having a nightmare. It was a good incentive for them both to make sure she got the blood she needed. He treasured the few minutes of chin scratches after she’d put their dishes in the sink, a rumbling purr building up in his chest.

“Is Demon purring?”

Shouta practically jumped out of his skin, leaping away from the voice and arching his back with a hiss.

“Big sis,” Toga whined, “now he’s not gonna let me pet him again until tomorrow!”

Magne glanced between the two of them, then at the dishes in the sink. “Sorry, Toga.” She sounded like she thought Toga was more than a little insane. Which, at the moment, was still somewhat true. Shouta was working on fixing that, though. He might have to get started on Magne soon. Her dislike of him had faded significantly since Dabi’s Quirk meltdown, though because of the others’ changing opinions she was now the one that liked him the least. That was, provided Spinner didn’t swear revenge for making him go to bed.

Maybe Shouta should hold off on his judgments.

At the moment, though, he’d probably need to go lie in front of the bedroom door. Spinner had yet to completely sleep through the dusk, and last night he’d only glanced briefly at Shouta before turning over and going back to sleep, but considering the altercation they’d just had, it was possible that Spinner would get out of bed when he woke up just to spite Shouta.

With a heavy sigh, Shouta turned back to Spinner’s bedroom. He was not looking forward to another night of half-sleeping in front of the door.

Chapter Text

‘I won’t wait forever, Tomura,” the voice bypassed his ears entirely to slither down his spine, yanking Shouta out of his doze and into full wakefulness in the space of a sentence. He shot to his feet, spine arching and tail hooking as his fur stood on end and his claws curled out to their full extent on all four paws, digging into the coarse carpet.

Dabi propped himself up on his elbows, and Shouta could see the whites of his eyes flashing in the dark. Spinner rolled over in bed, his hands clenched tightly on his blanket. Twice didn’t move, but Shouta heard ragged breaths from his side of the room, and the steady snoring had stopped. Shouta could feel tension palpable in the air as they all braced for… something.

Nothing came.

The seconds dragged out, until Shouta’s muscles and tendons ached from the strain of holding his tense position. Dabi’s rapid breathing gradually slowed to normal levels, and Spinner stopped holding his breath.

It was Dabi who finally broke the silence, letting out a shaky breath and dropping back down onto his bed in a squeal of bedsprings.

“What… what was that?” Spinner whispered hoarsely.

Shouta couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes – something feral buried in his bones howled in terror at the very idea – but he did slowly reign in his claws and flatten the fur on his sides. His hackles refused to go down and he couldn’t get his tail out of its terrified kinked pinecone shape, but he managed to pull his claws out of the carpet and loosen the strained arc of his spine.

The doorhandle clicked and the door tried to open, bumping against Shouta. He crabbed sideways, his legs still stiff and muscles tense. He managed to clear the arc of the door and let Kurogiri pop his head into the room.

“There is nothing to be concerned about,” Kurogiri said softly, “All For One simply had a message for Tomura.”

That was All For One? It made some amount of sense, considering Shouta didn’t know anyone else who called Shigaraki ‘Tomura’, but wasn’t the man supposed to be in prison? In Tartarus, no less, pumped with enough drugs and locked down in enough restraints to hopefully cancel out a hundred Quirks.

Quirk restraints and Quirk-suppressant drugs were a bit finicky, even if you had the best quality and knew what you were doing. They didn’t do much against latent mutations and had about a fifty-fifty chance to do precisely nothing to a passive Quirk like Hagakure’s, but the sort of telepathic communication Quirk that would let you speak to multiple people from such a distance should be instantly caught and smothered by the cocktail of drugs and restraints they surely had on a high-profile Villain like All For One.

“When did that overgrown potato pick up a telepathy Quirk?” Dabi snarked, though there was an obvious tremble in his voice.

“It is perhaps… unwise to speculate on the origin of All For One’s Quirks,” Kurogiri cautioned, “the provenance of this particular communicative Quirk is unknown to me.”

Well, that was fine enough for Dabi and the other League members who were squarely under All For One’s thumb, but Shouta was certainly going to speculate.

Shouta was no Midoriya, to pick out all the little nitpicky details of a Quirk from one distant observation – how the kid had figured out, from observation alone, that Hizashi could see the soundwaves produced by Voice, Shouta would never know – but he was a practiced Quirk analyst himself. He had to be, to graduate as an Underground Hero under Nedzu’s strict direction.

The voice had come while he was sleeping, but had woken him up. It could have been a simple telepathy ability like Mandalay’s, but telepathy Quirks tended to represent themselves as dreams to people who were asleep. Shouta wouldn’t have been surprised if something like that had woken him – he was trained to recognize mental manipulation and intrusions and to react accordingly – but Dabi, Spinner, and Twice had all come awake as well.

It seemed likely that the communication Quirk was actually some sort of dreamspeaking or alert Quirk. Something designed to specifically broadcast warnings or to allow the user to communicate only through other people’s dreams. Those were both much more likely to result in waking up the recipients. Considering that it had affected an area rather than a select set of people and the terrified, on-edge sensation the Quirk had left behind, Shouta suspected an alert or warning Quirk. The elasticity of the Quirk’s capabilities, as well as how it could combine and mutate with All For One’s other Quirks, were harder to determine.

Either way, it was past midnight, and Shouta certainly wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon. He doubted that anyone who had received All For One’s message would make it back to sleep for several hours.

Shouta slipped out of the room behind Kurogiri, padding into the living room. Sure enough, Mr. Compress and Shigaraki were both in the room already, the former staring sightlessly through the screen of his laptop while the latter curled himself into a tiny knot of blankets on his recliner and scratched frantically at his neck and face, muttering under his breath unintelligibly enough to give Midoriya a run for his money.

Toga was sitting still as a statue on the couch, face pale and hands curled into white-knuckled fists on her lap. Shouta hesitated for only a moment before jumping up onto the couch.

His legs still felt stiff with sourceless terror, but he managed to crouch down and butt his head against Toga’s hand. Her hands were clenched so tightly that when she finally managed to uncurl her fingers, there were deep crescent-moon grooves in her palms. Shouta licked the marks, wriggling deeper into her lap as Dabi collapsed onto the couch next to them.

Shouta’s paws worked without any conscious input from his human mind, kneading steadily at Toga’s legs, and his throat rumbled with steady vibrations. Shouta only distantly noted the tentative fingers Dabi curled around his tail and Toga’s shaking hands carding clumsily down his back, more focused on stretching himself across as many laps as he possibly could.

That ended up being three and a half, as both Twice and Spinner appeared a moment later, with Spinner sitting practically on top of Dabi. It was a worrying note on his psychological state that Dabi didn’t even pretend to protest.

Shouta had been trained to recognize and resist mental intrusions and manipulations, and that included drills for throwing off emotional tampering. He’d also been an underground Hero for over a decade, and that left him with a lot of experience, practice, and instinct. He’d run into artificially- and Quirk-induced fear, rage, pain, sadness, despair, hatred, and a whole slew of other negative emotions. He’d also encountered a laundry list of neutral and positive emotions that could be generated from nothing or dramatically enhanced by a Quirk or drug.

The most amusing of these situations was when Shouta had encountered a Villain that had been stirring up trouble for several teams of Heroes, both Limelight and Underground. This particular Villain could enhance and redirect all feelings of sexual desire in others. Both she and Shouta had been surprised – though her much more than him – when she’d turned her Quirk on him and it had very anticlimactically done absolutely nothing.

Suffice it to say that Shouta had his fair share of experience with external mental manipulation.

Whether it was that, the feline instincts sharing his head, the mere existence of two sets of minds and instincts in one body, or some mixture of the three, the fact remained that he recovered much quicker than the League.

By the time Toga had managed to unclench her other fist, Shouta had already gotten proper hold of his mental facilities, done a subtle but effective physical self-assessment, and run through a couple breathing and grounding exercises.

In that time, he’d become a glorified stuffed animal shared between four different people, with his front paws absentmindedly making biscuits on Twice’s legs, his head and shoulders monopolized by Toga’s shaky petting, one of Dabi’s hands resting distantly on his hip, and Spinner slowly playing with the end of his tail.

Was this what it was like to be Ojiro? Everyone always touching his tail? Because it was a bizarre sensation. Shouta wasn’t really a big fan, but he didn’t have the heart to pull his tail away from Spinner.

Magne was sitting on the loveseat across from Shouta. She didn’t have the distant, dazed look of someone who had been caught by an emotional manipulation Quirk, only a frown of natural worry. There was a paperback book splayed facedown on the arm of the loveseat next to her, and Shouta concluded that she must have been in the living room when All For One had broadcast his alert. That would imply some measure of precision, if he’d managed to hit all three bedrooms and not the living room.

Kurogiri was similarly unaffected, though his steady, almost mechanical motions seemed slower than usual.

He rounded the couch with a tray of mugs balanced easily on one hand, a feat that Shouta knew from experience was more difficult and nerve wracking than it looked. He silently distributed the mugs from the tray to the arrayed League. Shouta smelled both chocolate and blood from Toga’s mug, while Twice and Spinner’s smelled only of chocolate and Dabi’s had the much fainter scent of Magne’s tea. Kurogiri, it appeared, had noticed Dabi’s new favorite drink.

“Sit down, Kurogiri,” Shigaraki rasped.

“Master Tomura-”

“Sit down!” Shigaraki snapped, digging his fingernails deep into the skin on his neck. “Stop hovering around like an angry stormcloud! Kami, I can barely look at you!”

Kurogiri sat down, his mist coiling in tight, nervous tendrils. He was still holding the tray, forgotten in one hand. In a brief bloom of roiling mist, it dropped out of his hand and onto the kitchen counter with a clatter. Everyone on the couch under Shouta flinched.

Shouta’s tail lashed, jerking out of Spinner’s grip, and he took a long, slow breath. Then he rolled neatly off Toga’s legs and landed lightly on the ground. He padded slowly towards Shigaraki’s recliner, his tail flicking with indecision. Twice, he hesitated, reconsidering. Then, he continued.

Blood was caught under Shigaraki’s nails, his whole neck and up his chin practically shredded. Shouta jumped up onto the arm of the recliner, balancing easily on the far edge.

“What?” Shigaraki hissed, “what do you want, Demon? You want to drink my blood now? Want to help me claw my skin off!?”

Shigaraki pulled one hand away from his own skin for the first time since Shouta had entered the room, splaying his bloody fingers wide and reaching for Shouta. But the closer he got, the slower his hand moved, and the more his fingers shook.

Had Shouta been human, he would have cocked an eyebrow at him. He cautiously rocked forward, moving his head only a centimeter closer to Shigaraki’s hand. Shigaraki practically leaped backwards, withdrawing his hand so fast he almost fell out of his recliner.

Shouta narrowed his eyes and kept moving, slowly stepping off the arm of the recliner and onto Shigaraki’s lap. Shigaraki stared at him wide-eyed, hands shaking as he drew them high into the air, as far from Shouta as they could get.

Well, Shouta was fine with that. This was quite possibly the stupidest thing he’d ever done; it was nice to have some sort of defense for his decision-making, at least in his own mind.

With little fanfare, Shouta lifted his muzzle up to Shigaraki’s neck and started gently licking the scratches clean.

 Shigaraki jolted at the first touch of Shouta’s tongue, pressing himself against the back of the chair like he was trying to physically sink into the cushions. Shouta followed the motion, carefully clearing the blood and torn skin out of the scratches. He would spare himself the time to be revolted at the fact that he was eating human blood later. At the moment, Shigaraki needed his help. This was far from the grossest thing he’d done to help someone, especially one of his kids. Which… apparently Shigaraki was.

That, too, was an issue for later. The current issue, now that the blood was cleared out, was getting it disinfected. Cat saliva had some antibacterial properties, but those were minor at best and tended to be completely overwhelmed by the hordes of bacteria that also lived in feline mouths. There was a reason cat bites were twice as likely to develop an infection than dog or even human bites.

However, that was something Kurogiri could handle.

Shouta rubbed his head against Shigaraki’s cheek, mustering a purr deep in his throat. Shigaraki was shaking all over now, his breath coming in rasping gasps. He made several choked, whimpering noises.

Shouta looped his whole body over Shigaraki’s shoulders, curling his tail tightly around Shigaraki’s bicep, which he had lowered as he lost the stamina to hold his hands in the air. He couldn’t get the tension that made his hackles lift out of his shoulders, not this close to Shigaraki, but for the time being, he ignored it. From his new vantage point, Shouta was well within Kurogiri’s view, and he pinned his judgmental gaze on the spot he thought Kurogiri’s eyes were at.

“Well?” Shouta said curtly. “Tell me you know how to disinfect things.”

Kurogiri simply stared back at him, misty curls still tight with concern.

“Come on, injuries caused by claws and fingernails are more likely to get infected,” Shouta urged, flicking his ears irritably.

Kurogiri shifted slightly, tilting his head down and then up again.

“Don’t make me come down there,” Shouta threatened.

“Just do it,” Shigaraki said hoarsely. His voice had a particular tone to it that wasn’t a normal part of Shigaraki’s usual rasp. It was a sound that Shouta recognized intimately, though. The thick, almost choked tone that came from crying without the ability to actually bring out tears.

“Do what?” Kurogiri asked, his tone so flat it sounded almost robotic.

“Whatever it is you’re trying to do,” Shigaraki muttered. “Just do it.”

Kurogiri stood and paced mechanically around the couch. He returned with a first aid kit, which he set on the arm of Shigaraki’s recliner and popped open.

Shouta shifted back, sinking deeper into the cushions behind Shigaraki to allow Kurogiri better access to the scratches.

With efficient, impersonal motions, Kurogiri disinfected the scratches, gently rubbed in a salve that smelled strongly of lidocaine, and wrapped thin gauze around Shigaraki’s throat.

As soon as he was done, Kurogiri closed the first aid kit, set it on the coffee table with a hollow clunk, and sat back down on the loveseat.

Shigaraki’s hands hovered around shoulder height, each held at least half a meter from Shouta. The position looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Shouta’s nerves were already shot from lingering around Shigaraki for too long, so he slipped off Shigaraki’s shoulders and onto the coffee table.

Shouta was no stranger to trauma. He’d experienced it himself dozens of times, and seen it in victims, perpetrators, and bystanders alike. He knew what it looked like.

Whatever alert Quirk All For One had used to share his message left an unnatural sort of fear behind. But it wasn’t the Quirk that had left that terror lurking in Shigaraki’s bloodshot red eyes.

Shouta had been lucky enough to be born into a happy family. Parents who loved him and his sisters equally, regardless of their Quirk status. But he had his share of experience with people in positions of power abusing that power. And abusing everyone with less power than them.

No, it wasn’t the Quirk or the sudden wake-up or even the warning that All For One had delivered that left Shigaraki so rattled and frantic. It was All For One’s voice itself that had done that.

In a place Shigaraki had seen as safe, at a time when he’d been safe, likely sleeping peacefully in his videogame-themed bed, surrounded by people that were the closest thing to friends and family he’d likely ever had. And the terrifying, blood-chilling, omnipresent voice of All For One – his ‘Sensei’, his abuser – had intruded on that safety.

Fury seethed in Shouta’s chest, the same fury he felt when parents hurt their children or Heroes used their power to harm. The fury that reared its head when police officers turned their back on the Quirkless and Shouta found another person sitting at the top of a tall building with their shoes already sitting on the ground beside them.

Shouta had long since learned to acknowledge that fury. To pin it down in his mind, harness it with logic and strategy, and use it to fuel himself. Those that were close enough to him to call him their friend joked that Shouta was fueled thirty percent by caffeine and the other seventy by spite. They were not entirely wrong, but they saw perhaps the uppermost layer of motivations that ran much deeper.

Everything Shouta had done, at least the big decisions in his life, he had done to change something. He’d become a Hero to ensure that there was at least one who would see bright red shoes on a rooftop and still sit down next to the stranger on the ledge. He’d become a teacher to ensure that no other hopeful Heroes-in-training lost their classmates forever in stupid, preventable accidents. He’d gotten married – in large part – to prove to himself that he could love and be loved despite his asexuality.

His fatal flaw was that he cared, and when he cared, he couldn’t stop. He’d do anything in his power to keep his people safe. Sometimes, that meant using his contacts through Nedzu and Naomasa to go down legal routes, financially and reputationally ruining his enemies. Sometimes it meant using his status as an Underground Hero, foster parent, emergency Hero backup, and default guardian for wards of UA to allow a more physical defense of his people.

Sometimes, when there was nothing he could legally do, Shouta had been known to dip onto the other side of the tracks.

As of yet, Shouta had never run across anything he wouldn’t be willing to do for someone who was solidly his person. Already, his heart was trying to claim the League of Villains, or at least a smaller subset of it. He hadn’t fully latched on yet, but if he stayed around the League for much longer… he wouldn’t be able to resist.

Half of them were hurt, lonely people barely old enough to be considered adults. The other half were hurt, lonely people well past the threshold for adulthood but no less deserving of help. Despite his prickly façade, Shouta had always had a bleeding heart. He wasn’t an optimist, not by a long shot, nor did he believe that every Villain could be saved and rehabilitated. Some people were too far gone, or unwilling to put in the effort themselves.

But, as far as Shouta could tell, the members of the League of Villains were all there for one of two reasons. Either they wanted something to change, or they had no choice in the matter. They weren’t irredeemable or apathetic, like others that Shouta had encountered. They were hurting. Hurting and hopeless and kicked down over and over by people who were supposed to help them, so many times that they didn’t realize there was a better way.

 Which meant that reforming them – or at least making an effort – was worth doing. And, despite the fact that Shouta shared his profession with his father, it was his mother who had taught him that anything worth doing was worth doing well. And the best way to make sure it was done well, was to do it yourself.

Shouta looked around, at the people sitting around the room. Their faces were still haggard and touches of unnatural – and very natural – fear still clung to the corners of their eyes and the shapes of their hands. But they were strong. Strong enough to do a great deal of harm, of course. To hurt and kill and destroy for the sole reason that they themselves were hurting and dying and being destroyed from the inside out. But also, possibly, strong enough to heal.

To heal themselves and possibly to heal others. There was only one way to find out.

Shouta sighed, twitching his whiskers as he surveyed his new students. This was going to take a lot of work.

Chapter Text

Shouta trotted down the street, tail arched over his back to wave in the air like a pennant. It was still the wee hours of the morning, when all sensible non-crepuscular people were in bed, and the streets were completely abandoned.

At the moment, Shouta’s current order of business was pinpointing where exactly he was. That would tell him how far he was from Tartarus and UA, which would in turn give him more data on All For One’s alert Quirk and also allow him to estimate just how difficult it would be to get back to UA.

It was good to have the option of returning to UA, but once he figured out where he was, Shouta realized he didn’t really. Have the option, that was.

Because not only was he in a different city, he was in a completely different prefecture. Pretty much as far as it was possible to get from Musutafu without crossing the Tsugaru Strait to Hokkaido.

It was a five-hour shinkansen ride from Aomori city in Aomori prefecture to the Shizuoka station. Since taxis weren’t an option and walking was definitely not in the cards, Shouta would then have to find some way to navigate the Shizuoka train lines to get to Musutafu, and then the Musutafu bus lines to get to UA. The last part should be the easiest, but Shouta hadn’t managed it the last time he’d tried, and that was from a familiar starting point.

Which left him with… very limited options.

Even if he wanted to get back to UA, the trip would be perilous in the extreme for a housecat. There wasn’t really anywhere useful he could go in Aomori, unless he wanted to track down Kan’s summer residence. Which he didn’t.

Fortunate, then, that he’d already decided to stick around with the League.

Shouta sighed, flicking his tail. He paused at an intersection to glance down the street, then turned instead into the konbini he’d gotten Toga’s powdered blood from. He didn’t recognize the cashier, and either she hadn’t been informed of his last visit, or she didn’t care. She barely offered him a passing glance, and Shouta disappeared down the aisles yet again.

There were no finger-cap gloves available on the shelf, but Shouta found a small selection of cut-off gloves that covered only the pinkie and ring finger. There were a few options, including plain black, simple patterns, and cartoon dogs, but Shouta opted for the pair that had the ‘The Legend of Zelda: Lives of Power’ title card emblazoned across the cardstock hanger.

Even as out of touch with popular culture as Shouta was, it was impossible to be unaware of the Legend of Zelda franchise. All he really needed to know was that it was a videogame, and apparently Shigaraki didn’t wear anything that wasn’t videogame related. He had no idea how the pattern on the gloves themselves – a red and black magma-like background topped with a spiky piece of what might have been jewelry and three golden triangles – was related to the game, but he didn’t actually care a whole lot.

Shouta pawed the gloves off the rack, carefully picking them up in his teeth. Fortunately, the gloves were close enough to the ground that he didn’t have to jump for them. There was no noise to draw the cashier’s attention, and Shouta trotted out of the store unimpeded. The cashier didn’t even look up from her phone.

He made it the few blocks down to the League’s house and squeezed through the narrow hole in the wall, pausing below the hole behind the washing machine. There was light streaming through the hole. Not a lot, but more than there should be. It smelled like dust and sand, obviously, but there was also the powerful scent of clean thunder. Too strong for it to be an old scent.

Shouta cursed under his breath, setting the gloves on the ground and tentatively poking his head up through the hole in the floor. Sure enough, Kurogiri was perched on the washing machine, mist swirling steadily out of him. Shouta couldn’t see it, but he suspected Kurogiri had The Journey to the West opened on his lap.

Maybe Shouta could stick another book on Kurogiri’s stack. Would that be too suspicious? If he could find something about crespuscular sleep schedules, Quirk buildup meltdowns, Quirk starvation, or even the side effects and treatments of mental activation Quirks, he could try to pass it off to Kurogiri. It would be useful to have someone who was both capable of communicating with actual words and who knew what Shouta was trying to make happen.

Then again, whatever he found would have to be light enough for him to carry back to the house and small or flexible enough to fit through the hole in the wall. It would also have to be accurate, which was sometimes tricky to find, especially for things like Quirk starvation. There was a lot of misinformation out there about what kind of nutrients this Quirk or that Quirk really needed.

That was an idea that Shouta would have to shelve for the moment.

In the meantime, he needed to figure out a way to get past Kurogiri without tipping him off that Shotua had been behind the washing machine. If he was seen emerging from the laundry room too often, people might start looking for him there, and that could lead to them finding the hole in the floorboards he was getting through.

Shouta carefully picked up the gloves again, jumping up through the hole and into the narrow gap between the washing machine and the wall on silent paws. It was all he could do to avoid sneezing on the puff of dust he sent up when he landed. After almost a full minute of desperately holding his breath, Shouta tentatively straightened and started padding silently towards the open end of the washing machine. He had to tilt his head at a strange angle to avoid scraping the cardstock hanger on the gloves against the back of the washing machine.

This was the real hard part.

If he missed this jump, he would either land on top of the box – and likely fall through the flaps and inside it – or run face first into the wall. To make it worse, Shouta had only a vague idea of how large the cardboard box actually was, and it was important to remember that he’d only been a cat for three weeks.

That was enough, though.

Shouta jumped true and landed – still completely silent – in the space between the box and the wall. He chanced a glance at Kurogiri, spending the effort to try and figure out where the mist man’s eyes were pointing. It looked like he was still engrossed in the book in his hands, and Shouta hugged the side of the machine as he crept around it and out the door.

Kurogiri hadn’t seen him.

With an internal sigh of relief, Shouta slipped under Shigaraki’s bed.

It was still just as dusty as he remembered, and Shouta once again had to resist the urge to break into a sneezing fit. He quickly shook himself, getting the larger, gritty sand and clay particles out of his fur and leaving him with only the superfine Decay dust. He dropped the gloves in the dust, shoveling a bit more dust on top of them.

Shouta paused for a moment, his skin crawling. Then, holding his breath and very reluctant, he tipped onto his side to roll in the dust himself.

As soon as was reasonable, Shouta straightened onto his feet again, gingerly picked up the gloves, and emerged from under the bed to jump onto the bedspread.

Shouta left a trail of dusty pawprints as he pattered over Shigaraki’s Minecraft-patterned bedspread, dust shaking out of his fur with every step. He laid the gloves on the pillow, feeling ridiculously like a cat delivering some dead critter to its owner. Or like Bakugowo, who liked to leave socks she ‘caught’ from Shouta’s sock drawer on top of the two of them as they slept.

Then, Shouta jumped down from the bed and sailed out the door.

He was still leaving a faint trail of dust behind him as he trotted into the living room, bee-lining towards Dabi.

“Whoa!” Magne yelped as Shouta jumped up onto the arm of the couch. He bounded over her, took two steps on the center couch cushion, and stepped brazenly into Dabi’s lap.

“Hi, Demon,” Dabi said, clearly startled, “Wat’cha doing- why are you grey?”

“I hope you like coughing,” Shouta told him bluntly, and then finally gave into the urge to sneeze.

Dust flew off his fur in a wild cloud of grey, and apparently Dabi did like coughing. He sure was doing it a lot, at the very least.

Shouta backed away, watching the coughs get more and more violent and literally explosive. With every cough, a burst of cold crimson fire bloomed from Dabi’s mouth. His eyes watered and he shook with the effort of coughing so hard.

Finally, after a dozen attempts, Dabi managed to take a breath without breaking into more coughs. By that point, the bursts of fire had died down significantly into barely sparks.

“What-” he gasped, “-was that?!”

“Oh, Demon’s trying to help us, he’s got good intentions, he thinks we’re friends,” Shigaraki mocked from his recliner.

“Shut-” Dabi erupted into another coughing fit halfway through his retort. Shouta watched closely as even the sparks faded to nothing, and Dabi was just coughing like a normal person. He nodded sharply, jumping down from the couch and onto the hardwood floor, where he shook himself hard, getting as much of the dust as he could out of his fur.

“Shut up,” Dabi finished hoarsely, “He’s still a cat.”

“Why are all of you as observant as a brick wall?” Shouta hissed, lashing his tail.

“Okay, I have a question,” Magne said, edging a bit farther away from Dabi, “are you supposed to be coughing fire?”

“What?” Dabi paused to cough into his hand briefly, “Yeah, I guess. It’s normal.”

“Then is it okay that you stopped?”

Dabi hesitated, blinking at her dumbly. He coughed again, and then looked stunned when not even sparks came out. “Uh… that’s… never happened before…”

“That feels kind of important,” Magne pointed out cautiously.

“Will miracles never cease,” Shouta grumbled, “’that feels kind of important’ indeed.”

“You think?” Dabi shrugged, shoving himself up off the couch. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

“I mean… it’s important to pay attention to changes in your Quirk,” Magne said. “It could be a sign of other serious changes in your health.”

“Meh,” Dabi slunk into the kitchen to fill a glass with water, “I guess. I’m not going to mess with it unless something actually happens.”

“You know,” Shouta said, jumping up onto the bartop to watch Dabi, “this is how you end up covered in nasty purple scars and self-treating your imminent Quirk meltdown by eating ice and mints.”

“Demon, your tail,” Spinner complained. Shouta glanced to the side, where Spinner was perched on a barstool with his Swap clutched in both hands. Shouta’s tail – which even still had a mind of its own sometimes – was sticking out over Spinner’s screen.

There was a half-empty cup of orange juice sitting on the counter in front of Spinner, and he was absently chewing on a straw as he tried to continue his game past the tail in the way. Since Spinner had a drastically different sleep schedule from everyone else, he no longer had anyone to make him breakfast when he woke up. This naturally led to Spinner simply… not eating breakfast.

“If all you had for breakfast is orange juice, I’m going to be very displeased,” Shouta informed Spinner blandly.

Spinner, of course, didn’t answer, and instead jerked his Swap to the side to get it out from under Shouta’s tail.

Shouta sighed and cast a desperate glance at Dabi. Nothing. Magne had already gone back to her book, and it would take a full-blown hostile takeover to pry Shigaraki from his videogame, which meant either Shouta had to let it go, or he had to pester Kurogiri.

After three weeks of living with the League, Shouta knew that Kurogiri got approximately negative three hours to himself on a given day. As someone who treasured his own little drops of quiet alone time like they were solid gold, Shouta was not going to disrupt Kurogiri for something this trivial.

Which meant that, unfortunately, all Shouta could do was watch judgmentally as Spinner pushed away the rest of his orange juice to brace his Swap against the bartop. Shouta did too much watching things judgmentally these days.

Oh, how he longed for the good old days when he had actually been able to do things.

Shigaraki jolted upright in his chair and swore so sharply and suddenly that Shouta almost fell off the counter. Dabi startled so hard he slopped half the water out of his cup and onto the floor, Magne dropped her book, one of the joysticks on Spinner’s Swap broke with a sharp crack, and Mr. Compress, who had been mindlessly shuffling three different decks of playing cards at the table, dropped them all in a flurry of card stock.

“He was on half a heart!” Shigaraki seethed, squeezing his gaming device so hard the plastic creaked, “and my attack was going to hit!” He made a furious snarling, roaring noise in his throat, like a congested dinosaur, then threw his device across the room. It hit the wall with a loud bang and clattered to the floor.

Shouta rolled his eyes so hard he practically saw the back of his head. It was not the first time he’d seen Shigaraki rage quit and he doubted it would be the last. Shouta had no idea what game he was playing, or if it was even the same game every time, but just from observation Shigaraki seemed more likely to quit with a litany of curses and a temper tantrum than having succeeded at whatever his goal was.

Shigaraki tipped himself out of his recliner, scratching at his neck and muttering furiously, and Shouta perked up. He was heading for the living room door, which meant he was planning to go to his room. Which meant he’d find the gloves.

Shouta jumped down from the bartop to trot out of the room behind Shigaraki, peeking through the door that Shigaraki had no choice but to leave slightly open, since it still didn’t have a doorhandle.

Shigaraki was still grumbling and idly scratching his neck as he rifled through his drawers. Shouta snickered when he finally looked up at his bed for the first time.

“Hey!” Shigaraki snapped, “that stupid cat left dust all over my bed!”

“Impossible,” Shouta deadpanned, “I can’t imagine what that’s like. Leaving dust everywhere? So uncouth.”

Unfortunately, Shigaraki did not understand his incredibly witty repartee. Instead, he started awkwardly brushing the dust off his bedspread with four careful fingers. Then, finally, he found the gloves.

“What the- what is this?”

They were so covered in dust that even Shouta would have been hard pressed to say if he hadn’t been the one to put them there. Shigaraki picked the gloves up by the cardstock hanger, flapping them sharply in the air to try and get the dust off.

“Gloves?” He asked, turning them over in his hand. “What?” He squinted at the hanger, mumbling under his breath as he read the text on the packaging. “No-stress, sleep easy, no need to worry about pesky unintended Quirk activation- wait.”

With a slight brush of his fingers, the hanger dissolved into dust and Shigaraki pulled the two pairs of gloves apart, turning them over in his hands.

“Are these…” he set one pair aside, then broke the plastic tab holding the two halves of the second pair. With careful motions, he pulled the right glove on. It was shaped a lot like an artist’s glove, but with a much more exaggerated scoop taken out of the palm, so that there was less chance of the pointer and middle finger touching the glove at the same time.

Shigaraki clenched his hand into a fist, then tentatively reached out to brush his fingers against his bedspread. Of course, nothing happened. That was the point of having five-point activation protection gloves.

Shigaraki pulled on the other glove with almost frantic haste, pulling the wrist strap tight. He flexed his hands several times, staring wonderingly at the gloves. Well, might as well give him something to do with his newfound safety.

Shouta slithered all the way into the room, swiftly crossing the floor and jumping up onto Shigaraki’s bed.

“I’m going to give you one chance to pet me, no strings attached,” he said bluntly, “because you need to do something to celebrate. But this is your one chance.”

Shigaraki’s mind was clearly racing as his gaze darted from his gloved hands to Shouta. He dragged his fingers over the bedspread again and again, testing and re-testing the effectiveness of the gloves. Shigaraki looked almost like a cat kneading the blanket nervously.

Shouta flicked his tail, took three steps forward, and, before he had the chance to second guess himself, shoved his head under Shigaraki’s hand.

Shigaraki froze.

He went completely dead still, barely even breathing. His fingers trembled slightly against Shouta’s eyebrow whiskers, and Shouta pushed his head up, rubbing his forehead against Shigaraki’s palm.

“You’re so soft,” Shigaraki whispered, voice rough.

“I steal Hizashi’s ¥3,500 conditioner,” Shouta said, tilting his head to rub his chin on Shigaraki’s palm. It was only after he’d completed the action that he realized it came from the cat-instinct side of his brain, and he’d just rubbed a scent gland – and therefore his own claiming scent – all over Shigaraki, basically declaring to anything with a sensitive enough nose ‘this kitten is mine’.

Well, at least other cats would know that Shouta had claimed new students.

Finally, Shigaraki started moving again, tentatively curling two fingers to scratch behind Shouta’s ears. He was rougher about it than Toga, but at least he knew what he was doing, unlike a certain fire-throwing League member Shouta could name.

Shouta mustered a rusty purr in his throat despite the rough handling, allowing Shigaraki to run his hands over Shouta’s back and sides. Even with the gloves, Shigaraki was impossibly careful. He only used two fingers at a time, his ring finger and pinkie both curled away from Shouta’s fur.

It was honestly kind of heartbreaking how scared he was.

With good reason, Shouta knew – he had first-hand experience on what Shigaraki’s Quirk could do – but if Uraraka was wearing gloves, all her Quirk control pretty much went out the window. That was the point of the gloves. To give people some amount of freedom. A chance to relax and know their Quirk wouldn’t ruin anything.

Shouta suspected that Shigaraki didn’t have a lot of experience with wearing protective gloves. The cheaper half-gloves like the ones Shouta had brought would likely eventually decay, especially if Shigaraki did use them with the sort of reckless abandon Shouta had seen from Uraraka and even Thirteen. It would take much pricier finger-cap gloves to last long on Shigaraki, and those just weren’t in the League’s budget. They weren’t something that could be easily stolen, either.

At the very least, Shouta was glad Shigaraki had these ones now. They wouldn’t last forever, but they were there. And, for that matter, so was Shouta. It was his job to help his students flourish, after all.

Chapter Text

Shouta watched the sign at the top of the bus as it scrolled the name of the next stop. A panel of pixels was broken on the sign, leaving the stopped name with a blank section in the middle of it, but it wasn’t hard to put it together.

There was one single other person on the bus aside from Shouta and the driver. He had neatly styled dark hair and was wearing a cheap suit and carrying a briefcase that smelled of glue and mildew, and he hadn’t even looked away from where he was gazing blankly out the window when Shouta had gotten onto the bus. Even the bus driver hadn’t given Shouta a second glance. Even though Shouta was still slightly damp from the gentle rain that had been falling and was carrying a book in his mouth.

He wasn’t really expecting much else at four in the morning.

The bus went right past the next stop – nobody was there waiting for it, and nobody inside had called for a stop – and the words on the sign changed.

Shouta carefully set his book down on the seat next to the one he was perched on, then turned and gripped the stop cord in his teeth, pulling with all the force he could manage. The indicator light next to the screen flickered, changing from grayish-red to green, and Shouta settled onto his seat again.

The book had come from a used bookstore that Shouta had found after painstakingly unfolding and reading a map from a stand by the bus stop. It was old and clearly well loved, with signs of wear and water damage even before Shouta had taken it out into the gentle rain. It was small, light enough for Shouta to carry for a while and hopefully thin enough for him to bend it and fit it through the hole in the wall to get back into the League’s hideout.

Shouta had paged through the book as well as he could in the bookstore, mostly thanks to the no-doubt-numerous times the spine had been cracked. It looked like it held mostly accurate information, if a bit oversimplified, though at this point Shouta would be glad for anything of substance.

Imaginatively titled Good Morning, Moon, the book was a brief, educational guide on crepuscularity, particularly as it related to the development of heteromorphically Quirked children. It had clearly been written to help parents explain the concept to children, but it was the only book on crepuscularity small and light enough that Shouta thought he might have the chance of getting back into the hideout. He hadn’t been able to find anything at all on Quirk buildup meltdowns, the only books on the side effects of mental activation Quirks had been textbook-sized, and everything he’d found on Quirk starvation had been wildly inaccurate, unhelpful, or both.

The bus squealed to a stop, doors opening with a squeak of metal on metal, and Shouta picked up his book and jumped down the bus stairs to the street. The doors squeaked shut behind him after a brief pause, and the bus trundled away. Shouta doubted either the driver or the remaining rider would give him a second thought.

Shouta adjusted his grip on the book and started down the street again. The bus stop was relatively near to the League’s hideout, only a few blocks down, but his jaw was already starting to ache from holding the book for so long. It was a welcome relief to stop at the hole in the wall and set it down, resting his strained muscles.

Then, Shouta was faced with the issue of getting the book through the hole.

With a lot of fiddling, swearing, and several times getting hit in the face by the book rapidly uncurling, Shouta managed to brace one side on his paw and bend the other side up beneath his chin. Then, crab-walking awkwardly, he shoved the end of the curled up book into the hole. It was relatively easy to push it the rest of the way through with his paws after that, and then he easily slipped in after it.

The hole behind the washing machine should be easier, but there Shouta had to be on the lookout for Kurogiri, and incredibly quiet to avoid waking either Shigaraki or Mr. Compress, who were hopefully in bed at this hour.

A careful inspection revealed that Kurogiri was nowhere to be seen, and Shouta tentatively crept out from behind the washing machine. The book was much more cumbersome than the gloves or bag of powdered blood had been, and in attempting to jump over the box, Shouta misjudged his arc and ended up sprawled inelegantly on the floor.

He winced and picked himself back up, shaking out each paw individually. For a moment, he held still, listening intently. He couldn’t hear anyone moving, so either the sound of his crash hadn’t woken them, or they didn’t care enough to investigate. Hopefully, it was the former.

Shouta jumped up on top of the washing machine and gladly deposited his book on Kurogiri’s stack, happy to finally be rid of it. Then, he slipped out of the laundry room.

Shouta frowned, whiskers twitching. Without needing to actually see it, he could tell that something was wrong.

There was no deep, slow breathing of people sleeping. Both Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s scents were there, but not strong enough to imply that they were currently in their beds. Kurogiri and Shigaraki’s scents were fresh enough that Shouta was pretty sure they’d spent a lot of time in the room that night, but none of them were currently there. Mr. Compress likely hadn’t been in the room since the day before.

With a mildly concerned flick of his tail, Shouta slunk out of the room, slipping into the hallway. He could hear the radio playing at low volume in the living room, soft music that he didn’t recognize drifting through the door.

Shouta poked his head into the living room.

The entire League was draped over the couches, leaning on each other’s shoulders and staring blankly at the wall. Even Kurogiri was sitting on the couch, sandwiched between Toga and Dabi.

Shouta crept farther into the room, padding closer to the people on the couch. There were traces of unnatural lingering fear clinging to the lines of their faces, and Kurogiri’s mist curled in tight, worried flickers. With his neck still bandaged from the night before last, Shigaraki was clutching his own forearms, grip so tight that his knuckles were bloodless white.

It appeared Shouta had just missed another alert from All For One.

The radio in the kitchen was playing, boring instrumental music that honestly sounded more like something they’d play in a grocery store or hair salon than anything you’d actually intentionally listen to.

Shouta went up the short steps to the kitchen, then jumped up to the shelf under the bartop that the radio was sitting on. The power button was easy to locate, and the music turned off with a click. Then, Shouta returned to the living room and bounded up onto the coffee table. The remote was sitting discarded on the surface, along with the usual detritus of magazines, videogame remotes, and pens and pencils.

By now, Shouta was proficient at flipping things over with only his paws. In moments, he had the remote right-side-up and started working on the buttons themselves. Not for the first time, he lamented how clumsy his cat paws were.

“Does Demon look… fluffier than usual?”

Shouta paused, looking up at Dabi. He didn’t look like he was working through unnatural fear, more tired than scared. Like he’d been awoken by an ordinary nightmare and ended up in the living room before All For One’s alert had gone through.

Toga tilted her head at Shouta, partially blinking away the blank, shattered look in her eyes. “Maybe…”

“Does he need to get a haircut or something?” Dabi asked idly, fingers agitatedly tapping against the arm of the couch.

Shouta knew what he was doing. Use something else to distract from both his own nightmares and whatever new ultimatum All For One had delivered to the rest of the League.

“Cats don’t get haircuts,” Kurogiri said, almost emotionless. “It is far likelier that his fur is longer because he is healthier and in a less stressful environment.”

Shouta had no idea what Kurogiri was working through. It was rare for him to be so stiff and unfeeling, and in the three weeks before the alerts, Shouta had only seen it twice. It wasn’t like his reaction to frustration or irritation – Shouta knew that one quite well – but was instead triggered by some unknown cause that Shouta hadn’t been able to figure out. He might have said it was random, but now Kurogiri had showcased the exact same reaction to All For One’s alerts both times. Perhaps it was a fear response?

 With a tired sigh, Shouta went back to arguing with the remote. He didn’t miss Dabi’s hand drifting up to his own hair, rubbing the dyed strands between his fingers. That would be an issue to think on later.

Finally, Shouta managed to hold the remote still with one paw and press the power button with the other, turning the TV on.

As far as comfort media went, Shouta had seen it all. His own comfort show was old GanRiki Neko episodes that he had to pirate off of bootleg websites. Or, more often, that Hizashi or his sisters would pirate for him.

Hizashi watched American sitcoms when he needed to unwind, and Nemuri opted for, of all things, glassblowing competitions. In only the short time of class 1A living in the dorms, Shouta had seen them use English cooking shows, horseracing competitions in languages nobody in the dorm actually spoke, true crime videos, educational children’s cartoons, playthroughs of videogames that weren’t even available anymore, and campy low-budget horror movies as their comfort shows.

Needless to say, the genre of comfort media was wide and varied. There was no way of telling what someone would prefer. With that in mind, Shouta thought a nature documentary was probably a safe bet.

There were a couple to choose from, and Shouta arbitrarily picked one that he knew Koda watched a lot.

The TV’s volume was turned very low, but it still startled Shigaraki, who jumped so hard he actually briefly released his grip on his forearms. Shouta winced as he watched blood well up in the deep crescent-moon divots that Shigaraki’s nails had cut into his own skin. Even through the sturdy fabric of his gloves, his nails had cut deep.

Shouta left the remote behind, jumping up onto the arm of Shigaraki’s recliner. He stepped carefully into Shigaraki’s lap, tipping onto his side to drape himself over Shigaraki’s crossed arms.

Shigaraki let out a shaky breath, his eyes finally losing their thousand-yard stare to focus hazily on Shouta.

“Meow,” Shouta said plaintively.

“Wha-?” Shigaraki gasped, blinking several times. His eyes, like the rest of him, looked far too dry. Shouta would have to figure out something with a high moisture content for him to decay soon. That would be harder than getting Toga her blood, convincing Spinner to be crepuscular, or even dealing with Dabi’s Quirk meltdown, because it required an amount of communication that Shouta just didn’t have as a cat.

For the moment, Shouta put that on the backburner along with Dabi’s realization. At the moment, Shigaraki needed him to do what cats did best. Make well-meaning nuisances of themselves.

Shouta wriggled on Shigaraki’s lap, worming himself into the hollow created by Shigaraki’s loosely crossed arms. Then he stretched, pressing his paws against Shigaraki’s upper arms and manually prying his arms open.

“Demon?” Shigaraki mumbled distantly, confusion finally enough to cut through his daze. “What are you doing?”

“This is where you start petting me,” Shouta said, flicking his tail against Shigaraki’s shoulder. “Come on, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

With the scent of blood and fear on Shigaraki’s skin, it was even easier than with Dabi to convince Shouta’s inner cat that Shigaraki was a kitten in need of comfort. Shouta turned to start licking one of the arms wrapped around him as Shigaraki’s other hand hesitantly came up to rest on Shouta’s back.

At this point, the flavor of blood was unfortunately familiar to Shouta, and he didn’t even pause as he swiped his tongue over the bloody divots in Shigaraki’s skin.

It wasn’t very common anymore, but when Shouta had been younger, he’d often had panic attacks and depressive or dissociative episodes. He’d been a new Hero, with Oboro’s death a fresh wound in his heart, less of a support system to fall back on, no real motivation to keep going, and an onslaught of new responsibilities that could mean the life or death of innocent people. Before he’d opened up and let Hizashi, Nemuri, and Tensei back into his life, his only companion had been Missy.

Nowadays, Missy was a cantankerous old man of a cat, living up to his full name of Missile Launcher far more than his cutesy shortened name. In the past, though, while he’d been irritating and aloof most of the time, he always had a sixth sense for when Shouta needed emotional support.

Over time, Shouta’s hindbrain had come to recognize the sandpaper-like rasp of Missy’s barbed tongue on his skin. Missy’s steady licking of his skin could drag him out of his most intense of panics, deepest depressive episodes, and most distant dissociations. There was something soothing about the repetitive sound, something grounding about the sensation. Rough just bordering on painful, but without any risk of permanent harm.

Apparently, Shigaraki agreed.

Slowly but surely, he began to relax.

Shouta was lying across his lap, pinning one hand and acting as a weighted heat pack as well as continuing the steady grounding licks. Shigaraki’s other hand was splayed over his side, fingers buried so deep in Shouta’s fur that he doubted anyone else could see the trembling. While it made the hyperaware Hero part of his mind start shrilling warning klaxons in his nerves, the physical contact was worth it.

By the time the random nature documentary had finished – with the next episode autoplaying after a few seconds – Shigaraki had essentially melted into his chair. His breathing was coming deeper and slower now, not the shallow almost hyperventilation of distant terror. His hands also weren’t shaking anymore.

Shouta finally stopped licking Shigaraki’s arm, instead settling back against Shigaraki’s chest. Even he couldn’t stay on high alert forever, and the frantic hyperawareness that he was constantly in close physical contact with an instantly deadly five-point-activation Quirk had slowly died down to a minor lingering reminder in the back of his head.

At some point, Mr. Compress had slipped out of the room with a ringing phone, which at the time Shouta hadn’t considered incredibly noteworthy. He hadn’t had the same haunted look as most of the others, so Shouta assumed he’d been working in the kitchen when the alert was sent out and therefore missed it entirely. He stuck his head back in with a grim expression that immediately made Shouta’s Hero instincts sit up and pay attention.

“I don’t know if this is a good time…” Mr. Compress said, “but I got a message from the informant network.”

Shouta flicked his ears curiously. He was working on setting up a steady stream of communication with Nedzu, which meant he should make note of any information Nedzu might want. And any information the League thought was important enough to share now was likely something that Nedzu would want to hear.

“What could possibly be this important?” Dabi mumbled, half asleep sitting up with his head leaned on the back of the couch. If he did fall asleep in that position, he’d wake up with a nasty crick in his neck. Maybe Shouta would have to prod him up to go to a real bed. …as soon as he heard what Mr. Compress had to say.

“There have been several corroborating reports, but the informants only brought it to my attention because we finally got an agent into the HPSC’s files on it,” Mr. Compress said.

“Just spit it out,” Shigaraki sighed, his fingers tightening slightly in Shouta’s fur.

“Eraserhead is missing.”

It was all Shouta could do to not visibly react beyond a startled jerk of his tail. He knew, logically, that his absence would be noted by both the Villain and Hero world. While not a Limelight Hero by any means, Eraserhead was a well-known threat to serious and well-connected villains, and he was an acknowledged workaholic. He knew he’d been spotted patrolling in bandages after the USJ incident, and many other times besides. It wasn’t necessarily common to actually see him, but with no new rumors of Eraserhead-led takedowns in three weeks, people were bound to notice.

“What exactly do you mean, ‘missing’?” Shigaraki demanded.

“Exactly what I said.” Mr. Compress arched an eyebrow, stepping fully into the living room. “The information networks have no information; none of the big names – or even any of the small names – are claiming the kill, the police have no new cases with his name on them, and even the HPSC files just state him missing. Not KIA, not even MIA, just-” he lifted one hand to click his fingers loudly, like a magician pulling a vanishing trick, “-missing.”

“And UA?”

Mr. Compress shook his head. “They’ve upped security impossibly high since our last break-in. I doubt we could get a look at their records even with Kurogiri, and our spy wouldn’t be able to get away with snooping for them.”

So there was a spy in UA. They had suspected that already, but it was good to have it confirmed by a reliable source. Now Shouta just had to pass that information on without causing an uproar.

Shigaraki frowned, his face contorting with thought. “This means… Hm.”

“What does it mean?” Toga asked, blinking curiously.

“One of three things,” Shigaraki said slowly. “The first is that he finally ticked off the Commission enough for them to disappear him, and they fudged the job enough that there was no way to confirm it.”

“The Commission disappears people?”

Despite being half-asleep already, Dabi snorted and cracked an eye open, leveling a flat look at Spinner. “Every government disappears people. The only question is just how far you have to push them.”

Spinner swallowed nervously.

“The second option,” Shigaraki continued darkly, “is that someone is holding him and refusing to fess up. Possibly someone who doesn’t know who they have, or caught him for reasons other than to get rid of a nuisance. Even someone unconnected with the underground…” Shigaraki trailed off, narrowing his eyes at thin air, staring distantly into the corner, clearly deep in thought.

“What’s the third option?” Toga prodded after a moment.

“Hmm, yes, the prospect that would be the most fun… Eraserhead went AWOL.” The familiar jagged grin spread over Shigaraki’s face, though by now it had stopped setting Shotua’s nerves on edge.

After living with them so long, Shouta could forget, sometimes, that they were still Villains. It was a dangerous thing to become complacent over, but fortunately they reminded him every now and then.

“The second prospect sounds the most plausible,” Kurogiri put in slowly. “Though a catch like Eraserhead is big in the underground, there are many people unfamiliar with him or otherwise uninclined to spread the news that he’d been captured.”

“The Rat Hero,” Shigaraki said darkly, and considering how often Shouta himself called Nedzu a rat, it wasn’t hard to make that connection. “He’s not human, and his motivations are unknown. He has the resources and opportunity to disappear even a Hero like Eraserhead.”

“Perhaps,” Kurogiri said neutrally, “though I was thinking more of a particular Yakuza boss.”

“Yakuza?” Shigaraki’s nose wrinkled, “what do the Yakuza want with Heroes?”

“Master All For One and his doctor are not the only ones interested in Erasure, Young Master,” Kurogiri noted, with a tone like he was gently scolding Shigaraki for forgetting something he should remember. “There is one rising in the underground who is quite intrigued by the ability to temporarily eliminate Quirks. The young Chisaki Kai, commonly known as Overhaul.”

“Overhaul,” Shigaraki said slowly. “And he has the ability to capture Eraserhead?”

“It is possible,” Kurogiri stressed.

“Hmm,” Shigaraki hummed. Shouta’s tail flicked without his input, and tension crawled up his spine. Something important was going on in Shigaraki’s head, and though he seemed uninclined to share his thoughts, the whole room seemed to sense it. The silence was tense enough it was liable to snap.

“Why don’t you set me up a meeting with this… Overhaul,” Shigaraki said finally, his words coming out as a deadly hiss, “It appears he has something I want.”

Shouta suppressed a shiver and looked away, his ears flattening to the sides. If Shigaraki ever realized that he already had Eraserhead… well, it was a good reminder that Shouta still needed to be careful. A slip-up now could still result in his death.

Chapter Text

Shouta switched his hips, flexing his claws as he measured his balance. He shifted in place one last time, pulled his claws out of the back of the loveseat, and leaped. It was a jump that he could certainly make in his human form, and that a dedicated cat would probably be able to clear. Still, it somehow felt like an accomplishment when he landed perfectly on the shelf above the TV.

There was dust on the shelf, but not enough that Shouta’s steps left clear prints in it. Likely, Kurogiri did occasionally dust up here, but not very often. Still, Shouta intentionally swept his tail over the shelf as he passed, obscuring any tracks he might have left and sending some dust drifting down to settle on the TV stand.

The shelf was set quite high, just barely under the roof, and it had clearly taken the role of a place to store items they wanted to keep but didn’t want to deal with. There were a few battered movie and videogame cases that were clearly long abandoned. A stack of children’s drawings done in crayon and colored pencil and labeled in the round, cutesy handwriting that Shouta recognized as Kurogiri’s. Another much smaller stack of drawings sat next to it, clearly not done by a child but also certainly not by an artist. They looked mostly like videogame characters.

There was an ugly, lopsided little clay figure that might have been an attempt at sculpting Kurogiri and a few clippings from recent newspapers reporting on the actions of the League of Villains. A knife that appeared to be made of resin with a cracked translucent blade was leaning against a lump of what was probably once clay but was now too scorched to determine.

It was all stuff he’d seen before in his first inspection of the room, but there was one new thing on the shelf. In the middle of it all was the object Shouta was actually looking for. Spinner’s cracked Swap was sitting discarded on top of a small stack of fliers for magic shows.

Shouta fiddled with the Swap until he managed to press and hold the power button long enough for it to start booting up. He sat back on his haunches, watching the boot-up sequence impatiently. It finally cleared into a welcoming screen and informed him that he needed to make an account.

 After a lot of frustration – it turned out the cracks meant the top left corner of the touchscreen didn’t work, and Shouta had to navigate mostly with the joysticks and arrow buttons – he managed to create an account which he named ‘ADMIN’ and left with the default gray silhouette profile picture.

Then, he escaped from the game selection – where it wanted him to purchase something, since Spinner’s data had all been moved to a different device – and finally managed to get a search engine open.

First order of business, set up an email address for himself.

That was tedious but not actually very difficult, though Shouta made sure to set it up with a fake name just in case. He was briefly stuck on what to call it before settling on voidwitheyes@[domain], as both a nod to Erasure and a reference to solid black cats being called voids.

Once that was done, Shouta briefly made sure he could access his emails on the device and also that he could eliminate any trace of them from existence, and then he opened the anonymous hero report website.

With the Swap’s large touchscreen and little worry of being interrupted, Shouta finally had the chance to take his time and properly explain himself, at least to an extent. Now the only issue was how much he actually wanted to tell them.

Shouta deleted and restarted his message several times, waffling on just how much information to share. In the end, he decided that – no matter how much he desperately wanted to keep it under wraps – they needed the context that he’d been turned into a cat. Finally, after what felt like hours of writing and rewriting, Shouta had a message he was mostly happy with. He sat back on his haunches to read it over one last time.

‘Code OA-U/C- 5.18.1.19.21.18.5, forward message to Present Mic, Midnight, Nedzu. This is Eraserhead. I’m currently under the influence of a Quirk known as Soul Form. Check the files on my work computer. At the moment I’m posing as a Quirked cat in the headquarters of the League of Villains. One or more of the League members have potential for reform, and I intend to pursue that potential. I’ve set up an email address for use on this mission, voidwitheyes@domain. Treat it like an Undercover’s address; I’ll try to keep it secret, but there’s always the possibility they’ll find it. Similarly, I’ll try to check it as often as I can, but there are no guarantees I’ll be able to access it. Don’t let my students do anything stupid.’

With a low huff, Shouta deleted the last sentence – even attempting that was a fool’s errand he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy – and pressed the send button.

Shouta curled his tail around his paws and waited with one ear cocked towards the living room door. It would take a few minutes for the HeroNet servers to snag his code, verify it, and send it to human employees for screening. They would then have to authorize sending it onwards to the three different Heroes separately, which would take a few more minutes.

It was edging towards three in the morning, but HeroNet was supposed to be set up so that important or time-sensitive notifications were always received by the designated recipients. Shouta knew that Hizashi at least had his phone programmed to flick the lights on and off in their bedroom when he got an important HeroNet alert.

Once they woke up and read the message, they would then have to verify the code themselves, which was required by protocol but always rushed through, and then write and send an email to Shouta’s new address. Nedzu would likely want to do a quick background check on the email address itself, but Hizashi and Nemuri would probably bypass that entirely. Shouta estimated about seven minutes for Hizashi’s email, eight or nine for Nemuri, and closer to twelve for Nedzu.

Almost exactly seven minutes after Shouta had sent out his message, the Swap buzzed, and Shouta pounced.

The email was from one of Hizashi’s ‘anonymous’ addresses – the ones he used for Undercover Heroes and underground contacts – and consisted of an inarticulate keysmash, a brief and necessarily vague but positively scathing lecture on safety and asking for help, and an admonishment to take care of himself. Shouta read it three times before pausing to navigate to the settings and turn off any and all notifications. Then he read it again. Twice.

Nemuri’s email came in four minutes after Hizashi’s instead of the predicted one or two. The reason for that was obvious as soon as Shouta opened it. Not only had Nemuri made herself a new email address, she’d also taken the time to put together a small, vague, and immensely appreciated report on how his hell class had done on their licensing exam and what agencies they were considering doing their work studies with. Unfortunately, she had referred to his students as his ‘kittens’ and Shouta could therefore never forgive her.

Twelve minutes on the dot after Shouta sent his anonymous report out, a message from one of Nedzu’s many, many anonymous and/or burner addresses appeared in his inbox. It was short, simple, and to the point. Three short sentences, only eight words in total.

‘Understood. Action Plan Son Goku initiated. Good luck.’

A sharp feline grin spread over Shouta’s face, and he turned the Swap off with a careful paw. Nedzu had hundreds of potential action plans, failsafes, projects, and more, each codenamed and kept carefully under lock and key in the most secure servers and safes that the rat could get his hands on. In his time as Nedzu’s personal student, Shouta had learned about a lot of them and helped create more. Some were personalized one-time plans, like the newer Attack Plan Icarus or the much older Project Blank. Others were reusable, designed to adapt to the situation, like the Nicol Bolas Failsafe or Action Plan Oxylus.

Action Plan Son Goku, which had unfortunately been named before Shouta came along, was one dedicated to Villain reform. Despite being only a vague outline, since it needed to apply to any villain or vigilante they could possibly want to reform, Action Plan Son Goku was watertight. It included lists of everything from potential therapists to Heroes that might sponsor various attempts at reformation to police officers and judges that were already in Nedzu’s pocket. There was mid-reform housing set aside in half a dozen different undisclosed locations, skeleton frameworks of contact channels for friends and family, even methods for integrating reform-ees into UA.

The beginning of Action Plan Son Goku was to establish believable false identities, which – considering the incredibly notable appearances and Quirks of the Leage and the fact that their images and abilities were spread all over the internet – would be almost impossible in and of itself. Fortunately, Nedzu excelled at doing the impossible. Shouta could leave that part of the plan, and basically all of the other logistical issues, to him.

Which left Shouta with just the actual reform part.

Hooray…

Shouta jumped down from the shelf above the TV, leaving his new secret weapon behind. If he ever had the chance, he might try to drag it down to the crawlspace under the washing machine. Since that required getting the Swap down from the shelf and then bringing it through the living room, the hallway, Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s room, the laundry room, and then down through the hole behind the washing machine, it seemed quite unlikely that he’d get a chance like that.

Either way, at least he had some kind of contact with the outside world, even if his friends now knew that he had been transformed into the physical form of a cat. At least they hadn’t heard of anything he’d done as a cat. That, he was still going to keep under wraps.

Shouta made his way to Shigaraki’s recliner, undoubtedly the most comfortable place to sleep in the entire house, and curled himself into a loose half-circle, resting his chin on his paws.

Sleep was still slow in coming, but it was getting easier the longer he spent here. Shouta let himself doze off in a light cat nap, enjoying the peace and quiet for once. Almost everyone was in bed, with only Spinner, Twice, and Kurogiri out of the house.

There wasn’t much information Shouta could get on Overhaul, much as he itched to investigate. He didn’t have access to Hero information networks or the dubiously legal web of informants that he’d cultivated as an Underground Hero, and even the internet could only go so far. At the moment, all of the information Shouta had on Overhaul came from the League itself.

He knew that Chisaki Kai was the de facto leader of the Shie Hassaikai, that his Quirk allowed him to completely destroy and reform anything he touched, and that he was a germophobic hypochondriac who thought Quirks were a plague on society. Unfortunately, none of that could really be confirmed, and Shouta suspected that all of it was somewhat exaggerated.

With the rise of Quirks, ancient yakuza families had been left scrambling to keep up. Any yakuza leader would want to emphasize the destructive and threatening capacity of their Quirk to make others think twice about messing with them. On the same note, it was likely that the amount that Chisaki Kai was actually leading the Shie Hassaikai was overexaggerated. He was young, not yet thirty, and while it was possible that someone that young could inherit the loyalty of an established yakuza family, the circumstances of Overhaul’s inheritance were somewhat dubious.

Still, the information he’d received already was, for now, the only information he could conceivably get on the matter. He could try to contact Nedzu or Hizashi and ask for their informant networks to weigh in, but not only would that mean a higher likelihood of Shouta being caught, it would also likely be too late by the time that information arrived. Twice and Kurogiri were in the process of setting up the meeting tonight, and Shouta suspected the meeting itself would take place in only a few days at the latest. It ranged from highly unlikely to downright impossible for even Nedzu to gather all the information Shouta needed in that timeline, and equally unlikely that Shouta would get the chance to read it, even if it did come through.

So, with all the information Shouta did have, he began to plot.

They would likely travel to and from the meeting via Kurogiri’s portals, both because it gave them a much quicker escape route and since the meeting spot was likely clear across the country. If they considered it a real possibility that Overhaul had managed to capture Shouta, then he was likely stationed somewhere relatively close to Musutafu or at least in Shizuoka prefecture.

If Shouta was quick and careful, though, he might be able to slip through the portal while the League was going through. It would have to be a rather large portal to fit a person through it, and likely most of them would be distracted by the upcoming meeting. If the meeting was at night, that would make it all the better for Shouta, since he would blend in perfectly to the nightscape, with only Spinner possibly being able to detect him. The only question was if Kurogiri could feel when something went through one of his portals. Generally, Shouta would say it was unlikely, but since the portals appeared to be made of Kurogiri’s body – or vice versa – it was a distinct possibility.

Shouta would have to find a way to test that, if he could.

Just as he was starting to brainstorm ways he might be able to test Kurogiri’s portals, Shouta’s pricked ears caught a sound.

Every place had sounds that were normal. It was easier to pick up on these sounds at night, when there was less abnormal noise going on, and Shouta had long since learned the normal sounds of the League’s safe house at night. The soft ticking of the clock in the kitchen, the low thrum of the air conditioning and occasional rush of water in the pipes, the distant but steady snoring from Twice when he was in.

Shouta had been trained to filter those sounds out and focus on out-of-place noises, things that didn’t fit in the standard nighttime ambiance of wherever he happened to be. Even very quiet sounds, much softer than the tick of the clock or the rush of water, stood out to Shouta. With his enhanced feline hearing, he could hear even more than usual.

In the hall, a door clicked. Shouta’s ears swiveled towards the sound automatically. He couldn’t hear footsteps, no matter how hard he listened, but he heard the faintest creak of the living room door swinging open.

Now that he was in the open, Shouta could hear Dabi’s breath rasping too quickly in his throat. It was the loudest thing about him, as even his footsteps were so soft that Shouta struggled to hear them.

It was dark in the living room, to the point that Dabi’s human eyes likely couldn’t see anything at all. Still, he didn’t bother to reach for the light switch. He navigated the area with the ease of muscle memory and in complete silence. Somehow, he was quieter than even his usual midnight ventures into the living room. What Shouta could see of his face under the darkness and scars looked stricken.

The couch didn’t even creak as Dabi settled into the cushions, laying across it lengthwise with his feet sticking off the edge. He laid his hands over his chest, and Shouta could see that they were shaking hard.

“Are you awake, Demon?” Dabi whispered into the darkness.

For some reason, Shouta found himself reluctant to break the silence. Instead of responding aloud, he rose to his feet and leapt nimbly from Shigaraki’s recliner to the arm of the couch. He brushed his tail along Dabi’s arm, padding carefully down the very edge of the couch cushions.

“I had another nightmare,” Dabi breathed, his voice thick with emotions, “but I didn’t care. I know my- the man whose genetics I share is a dumpster fire of a person. I know he hurt me when he shouldn’t have. He’s a liar and a monster, and he doesn’t deserve to be a Hero. He doesn’t deserve to keep living. Not after what he did.”

Dabi took a shaky breath, forcefully unclenching his hands from where they’d tightly fisted in the fabric of his jinbei. His whole hand was shaking, and he dragged both hands down over his face in a practiced motion that avoided any staples catching on each other.

“I don’t care that he hurt me,” Dabi insisted, but his voice shook so much that it was clear he was trying to convince himself more than anything. Shouta took a chance and crept up onto Dabi’s chest, slow enough that he could push Shouta off if he wanted. He didn’t.

“But I was thinking… you don’t know what a Quirk marriage is,” Dabi changed tracks abruptly. Shouta actually did know what a Quirk marriage was – there was a rather unfortunate direct relation between high-ranked Limelight Heroes and Quirk marriages, and Class 1-A got all the legacies – but it made sense that a cat, even a Quirked cat, wouldn’t.

“My dad had a powerful Quirk,” Dabi said quietly, and sparks danced over his skin, the only light in the room. “He wanted a powerful heir.”

Dabi let out a short huff of laughter, bitter and sharp and without a drop of real humor in it. “All he cares about is his fame. He wants to be better than everyone. He came second place one time, and he can’t stand it. He hates it. He hates it so much, he’ll never let the world forget about it.”

Shouta had seen that time and time again. In Heroes, yes, but also in all sorts of people. People who built themselves up around being the best, then failed, and decided to double down and fester in their hatred of the person who had beat them. When he saw it in his students, he tried his best to knock them down a peg immediately, to see how they responded. If they threw a tantrum and demanded he change his mind or their grade or something else that he had no possible control over, he expelled them. For good. If they stood up again and insisted that they would try harder, he let them stay in his class.

Somehow, Bakugou had done both, and even still Shouta didn’t quite know what to do with the kid.

“So, he picked a powerful wife to give him powerful kids,” Dabi continued, and Shouta laser focused back on the topic at hand. Quirk marriages, and just how badly they could mess up the kids that resulted from them.

“But fire alone wasn’t enough for him,” Dabi scoffed. “No, his kids needed to control another element, too.”

A bud of foreboding grew in Shouta’s chest.

“I inherited his fire,” Dabi said, and the sparks that glimmered on the lines of his scars grew into tongues of blue flame. Shouta shot Dabi a dirty look and pulled his tail away from where it had drifted near a lick of fire.

“But I wasn’t good enough,” Dabi snarled, clenching his hands into fists and snuffing out the fire, plunging the room into darkness once again. “I inherited his fire, but I got my mom’s mutations. My body isn’t built to handle my Quirk. I can burn hotter than he could ever hope to, but I always have to burn myself.”

Now seemed like a good time for purring. Even as that bud of foreboding began to blossom in Shouta’s chest, it was painfully easy to muster a raspy vibration in his throat, and Shouta set his head down on Dabi’s chest and let the purr reverberate through his whole body. Dabi took a ragged breath, settling a hand on Shouta’s back.

“My brother…” Dabi trailed off, an unreadable expression on his face before it was wiped away by a heartbroken sort of hatred. “He’s not my brother anymore. He’s the perfect son, and I want nothing to do with him. He was perfect the day he was born.”

Dabi scoffed, reaching a hand up to run his fingers through his hair. They tightened abruptly, and he yanked at his own hair with a muffled curse hissed through his teeth. “Half and half, the perfect little weapon for him to turn into his prize. And after that…”

All the fight drained out of Dabi, and Shouta purred harder, stretching to drape himself completely across Dabi. Dabi’s hand slowly let go of his hair, dragging downwards to cup loosely over his mouth.

“He didn’t care about me anymore,” Dabi mumbled through his hand, voice thick with tears, “I was his old toy, broken and burnt from overuse, and he had a shiny new pawn to play with. I don’t even think he did it on purpose, leaving me behind. He just… forgot. Why- why did he forget me?”

Shouta didn’t cry a lot. He hadn’t even before his Quirk came in, and now that he used Erasure so often, crying was almost physically impossible. Sure, sometimes outside stimuli could make his eyes water, like Nemuri’s Quirk or cutting onions, but he never cried from anything emotional, whether it be sadness, anger, or joy.

Still, if Shouta had been in a form with human tear ducts, he might have cried.

Dabi certainly was, sobs muffled by long practice and the hand over his mouth but still shuddering through his body as tears streamed freely down his cheeks.

Shouta lifted his head off Dabi’s chest and began gently licking the tears away. Dabi gulped in several ragged breaths and dragged his hand away from his mouth to bury both of them in Shouta’s fur. Shouta carefully cleaned off his face, working gently along the seam between scars and whole skin.

“Why did he forget me?” Dabi whispered again, shaken and impossibly quiet.

Shouta couldn’t tell him. Even if he’d been human, had heard everything Dabi was willing to say about his biological father and more, he couldn’t say. There was no explanation for how parents could hurt their children, could turn their back on the people who relied on them and loved them. All Shouta could do was continue to purr, and keep carefully licking tears off of Dabi’s skin, and, internally, seethe at the injustices that the world had dumped on so many people.

There was, at the very least, one thing Shouta could do. Next time he had an unobserved moment, he would be messaging Nedzu. It was time to set the stage for Action Plan Prometheus. Endeavor had done too much harm to be permitted to retain his rank and license. If Shouta had it his way, Endeavor would end up incarcerated. If Shouta ran into Endeavor in person, he would likely end up arrested for assaulting a Pro Hero.

Nobody hurt his students. Not on his watch.

Chapter Text

It was difficult to get into the girls’ bathroom. The door was always closed, only opening infrequently when one of the girls actually went in or out, and the point of this venture was that Shouta needed to be discreet. If someone saw him take his target from the bathroom, they would start to notice everything else he’d stolen.

Fortunately, though the door was always closed, it was only ever latched when someone was actually using the bathroom. After a great deal of practice and several failed attempts, Shouta had figured out how to hook his paw under the door and strain what felt like every muscle in his tiny four-kilogram body to lift and drag the door a centimeter to the left. Then there was an opening just wide enough to slip his paws into, and, with a great deal of effort, he could pull it open to make a gap a few centimeters wide.

That was wide enough for Shouta to slip through it, though it was a bit of a tight squeeze. Once inside, his target was easy to locate. Even picking it up was easy, since it was relatively light and had several thin, easy-to-grip sections.

Getting it back out the door was a little tricky, since it was a bit of an awkward shape, but Shouta managed.

After a brief check of the area, Shouta made his way through the living room and to the corner between the TV and the loveseat. There, he gingerly pried free the loose baseboard, revealing his ever-growing hoard tucked away in the hollow space behind it. The knife that had previously been there had been returned to Kurogiri’s drawer, somewhat dusty but none the worse for wear. That had been to make room for the heaping pile of items that Shouta had collected in its place.

The prize he’d taken from the bathroom was the last piece added to the pile, and Shouta carefully fitted the loose baseboard back into place, barely able to fit it with everything that was stuffed behind it. Fortunately, it all fit together reasonably well, and despite having at least a dozen items in the cubby, the baseboard did eventually slot into place. Shouta let a little feline grin grow on his face as he padded away from the scene of the crime.

Now, he just had to provoke Magne.

If there was one thing Shouta was good at, it was provoking people. Just ask his sisters. Or parents. Or coworkers. Or anyone he’d ever gone to school with, including the classmate who had eventually become his husband. Or… well, honestly, anyone who had ever met him could probably tell you that.

Step one, be a cat.

As Magne was walking into the living room, Shouta twined between her feet, almost tripping her up. She only barely managed to catch herself on the back of the couch, and paused to shoot a glare at him before sitting down. Shouta returned it with an imperious, offended look, acting like it was her fault that he’d chosen to stand where she was about to step.

Step two was actually also just being a cat.

Magne sat down on the couch and pulled out her book, resting it on her lap. Shouta jumped up onto the couch himself, padding along the cushions until he reached Magne. Then, he stepped up into her lap and laid down right over her book.

“Would you move?” Magne demanded. Shouta flicked his tail, staring at her with a blankly unimpressed look.

Step three was fun, a little callback to his first week with the League. It consisted of being a cat some more.

When Magne moved her hand, Shouta bit it. Tried to pull her book out from under him? Bitten. Tried to push him out of the way with a hand on his hips? Shouta twisted into a pretzel and bit her again. Tried to grab his head to stop him from biting? Get bitten anyway, idiot.

Magne snarled wordlessly, flailing her hands at him wildly. Shouta twisted to stand up on his hind legs and bat at her hands. She growled, shifting underneath him. Magne was about to stand up and dump Shouta off her lap, which meant it was time for step four.

With his front paws braced on her shoulders, it was a simple matter to dart his head forwards and snatch the pair of pink-tinted glasses from Magne’s pocket.

Then he was away, leaping down from her lap and bolting around the couch.

Magne lurched up with an offended shout, her book going flying as she lunged after Shouta. Compared to Spinner or Kurogiri’s portals, Magne was slow. Shouta had shot up the steps and was skidding around the kitchen table before she’d even made it around the couch.

Shouta darted behind the counter, right past the fridge. He only saw it because he knew exactly what to look for, but even from across the room, he could see Magne’s eyes flare just a fraction wider. Got her.

Unlike most people with external emitters, Magne seemed to instinctively use her Quirk. She was good at it, too, careful with timing and the spacing of the items she Magnetized relative to other items in the room. A little too good.

Under her glasses, Magne’s irises and pupils were quite small, on par with his own. Strangely-shaped irises, like Hatsume or even Hizashi’s, were well-known to be linked with specialized visual aspects of Quirks. Less well known was that larger or smaller than average irises or pupils were also correlated with visual Quirks. A shrunken iris and pupil usually meant that the eyes were adapted to see more with less input, and, when normal sized, could see things that others couldn’t.

Shouta’s own eyes were hardwired towards motion, and it had taken a lot of training for him to not instantly dart his gaze towards whatever was moving most insistently when he had Erasure activated and normal-sized irises. The only real question was, what did Magne see when Magnetism was activated?

Shouta had a few theories, for which he had a few simple tests. His tests ranged from relatively common but unlikely things like motion or color to things he suspected were far more likely to actually go along with a Quirk like Magnetism.

As Magne’s irises and pupils dilated together, blue light fizzed into existence around Shouta. His weight against the floor vanished completely, and he twisted nimbly in the air with, well, catlike grace, landing easily on the side of the fridge. Then, he froze. Not even his ears moved, and he hardly dared to breathe.

The only part of Shouta that moved was his eyes, pinned on Magne and watching every flicker of her own eyes, every twitch in her expression. As she walked towards him, she ignored the erratic motion of the insect buzzing by the window, the vibrant contrasting colors of Kurogiri’s shelf of alcohols, and the heat of both the oven that Shouta had turned on a few minutes ago and the ice he’d stashed in the corner of the counter.

What did catch her attention was the bowl of mints on the counter, which she seemed unable to draw her gaze away from. She paused in her approach towards Shouta, squinting down at the mints. Or, rather, the item that Shouta had slipped under the bowl of mints.

There was absolutely nothing externally interesting about the piece of plastic. It looked about like a coaster, just a simple square of black plastic with no visible seams or other features. It was almost invisible on the dark counter and underneath the eye-catching bowl of mints. Even Shouta, closely inspecting the room, would have had no reason to suspect anything strange about it.

Except for the fact that he’d pulled it out of a box he’d found in one of the cubbies under Mr. Compress’s bed. It was part of a simple levitation trick, using a careful arrangement of magnets in the base and a separate flying-saucer-shaped piece to ‘magically’ make the saucer hover. The trick relied a lot on the presentation and the willingness of watchers to suspend their disbelief, but it was reasonable for a beginner, Shouta supposed. It also worked quite well for his purpose.

Not only was the magnet strong, but the magnetic field it produced was somewhat unique. It was far more noteworthy than even a more powerful – but less specialized – magnetic field would be to someone who could see magnetic fields.

Which, it appeared, Magne could. Or at least something close to it.

Shouta finally took a full breath and began making his way up the fridge. He couldn’t lift his paws off the ferromagnetic surface, but he could slide them one at a time. By the time Magne had dragged herself away from the magnetic field – wincing and squinting at him, so there was definitely something wrong – Shouta had almost made it to the top of the fridge.

He still had Magne’s glasses gripped in his teeth, and he managed to flop onto his side on the top of the fridge, wriggling towards the back where Magne couldn’t reach him.

She let out a frustrated noise low in her throat, and Shouta growled back, squirming farther out of reach.

Finally, Magne gave up with a huff, and the fizzing light around Shouta faded.

“I hate you,” Magne snapped, and she stormed away to drop onto the couch with a huff, almost letting her book slide onto the floor.

The living room door opened before Magne could open her book and Toga spun through it wearing a frilly skirt and a broad grin. She paused mid-spin when she caught sight of Magne.

“What’s wrong, big sis?”

“Demon stole my glasses,” Magne grumbled.

“I can grab one of your spares!” Toga chirped.

“Thank you,” Magne said begrudgingly.

Toga hummed in agreement and began scouring the room. She checked the coffee table, the shelves under the TV stand, the countertops and table and the dusty, long-abandoned rolling stand for the tiny screen that had been crammed into the corner. She glanced behind Kurogiri’s rows of alcohols and even under the kitchen table.

She found nothing.

“Do you know where you left your spares?” Toga asked, twirling back and forth slightly to make her skirt flare around her knees.

“Did you check behind Dabi’s mints?”

“Yeah,” Toga said, “I checked everywhere.”

“There should be a pair in our bathroom,” Magne instructed. “On the shelf above the vanity.”

Toga skipped away back down the hallway, and Shouta heard the bathroom door slide open. There was a soft clatter of plastic bottles, and then Toga’s footsteps returned much slower.

“You’re sure there was some in the bathroom?” Toga asked.

“Yeah, pretty sure. Did you check both shelves?”

“And the cabinet,” Toga confirmed. “Anywhere else you might have left some?”

Magne paused to think for a moment, then decided, “There’s definitely some in our bedroom. Check my nightstand.”

And Toga skipped away again. She was gone much longer this time, and Shouta flicked his tail and waited with bated breath for her to return. He was pretty sure he’d gotten all the glasses from the girls’ room, but there was the very real possibility that he’d missed one in his haste, especially since he wasn’t able to open and rifle through all their drawers.

“There’s nothing here!” Toga called down the hall. Magne groaned and levered herself off the couch, vanishing into the hallway behind Toga.

“What are you two looking for?” Dabi’s voice was muffled by the hallway but still clear to Shouta’s sharp hearing.

“Magne lost her sunglasses and we’re trying to find her spares!”

“Demon stole my sunglasses,” Magne corrected angrily.

“And he didn’t give them back?” Dabi asked.

“Of course not,” Magne huffed, then raised her voice to call, “that stupid cat hates me. What makes you think he’d do anything I wanted him to? Do you hear me, you little rat!?”

Well, that was just uncalled for.

Dabi sighed and stepped into the living room, looking around. Shouta nyaaed softly from his perch on top of the fridge, and Dabi blinked at him.

“What are you doing up there?”

“Meow,” Shouta said blandly.

“I told you he stole my glasses,” Magne hissed, stalking into the living room after Dabi.

“You got Magne’s sunglasses up there?” Dabi asked.

“What’s your intuition on that?” Shouta asked around the sunglasses still gripped in his teeth.

“Could you give them back please?”

“Nah.” Shouta turned away from Dabi, turning to stare at the wall beside him.

“You see?” Magne huffed. “He hates me.”

Shouta completely turned around, putting his back to Magne but tilting his ears back to keep track of their conversation.

“Kurogiri said that’s a show of trust,” Dabi pointed out, and Shouta hid a smirk. Kurogiri wasn’t wrong. For a normal cat. And Shouta was using that information to his advantage.

“Well, is there a reason you aren’t giving them back?” Dabi asked.

Shouta turned to look over his shoulder, then slowly blinked at him.

“I’m going to interpret that as a ‘yes’,” Dabi said, “if that’s wrong, shout at me.”

Shouta blinked at him again.

“Cool, so there’s a reason you’ve stolen Magne’s glasses. Is there something wrong with the glasses?”

Shouta shook his head. He attempted to do so normally, just enough to get his point across, but he ended up shaking his head so hard that he made the fridge shudder.

Dabi’s eyebrows shot up, and Toga gasped. Magne looked like he’d personally slapped her in the face.

“You are not actually going to play twenty questions with the cat,” she scowled.

“Well, it actually looks like I am,” Dabi said, already recovering from his surprise. “Did you want the glasses for some reason? Like they’re important to you?”

Shouta shook his head again, this time managing to make it less energetic, only enough to make his ears flap.

“Okay, uh…”

“Is it because you’re upset for some reason?” Toga stepped in.

Shouta paused, unsure how exactly to react to that. He wasn’t necessarily upset, there was just information he still needed.

“So, not really upset but not quite not not upset,” Toga concluded.

“What the heck did you just say,” Dabi deadpanned.

Shouta rolled his eyes but blinked in confirmation at Toga.

“So, what is it?” Toga hummed, rocking on her heels as she thought. Shouta watched the motion carefully, paying attention to how she distributed her weight. She wasn’t in combat and didn’t have the boost of adrenaline and deadly intent that came from fighting, but she still had the prolonged coordination and balance to rock on her heels like that without falling over or getting dizzy. It was a statement to her recovering Quirk health, and Shouta made a very glad mental note of it.

“Curiosity killed the cat,” Toga realized, snapping her fingers loudly.

“It certainly did,” Magne muttered darkly.

“No, he’s curious,” Toga corrected, “but he can’t talk. The only way he can figure out why you always have the sunglasses is if he takes them away.”

It was Shouta’s turn to gape in shock. Okay, new mental note: Toga was startlingly clever when she was getting proper nutrients. After a moment, he blinked at her hard, creeping closer to the edge of the fridge.

“Why do you wear the glasses all the time?” Dabi asked, turning back towards Magne.

She shrugged. “Doctor said I have a Quirk-induced chromatic astigmatism. When I activate Magnetism, the world looks like a bad 3D movie. Without the 3D glasses.”

Shouta wanted to slam his head against a wall. This was why people should get counseling from licensed Quirk counselors and not their pediatrician or family doctor or whoever else. Medical doctors had enough issues just responding properly to all the Quirks and idiosyncrasies of their patients; they weren’t trained in Quirk Theory. They got all the information about a patient’s Quirk in order to provide proper care, and they weren’t supposed to change it. It was something he’d had to repeat to every one of his first-year classes over and over again when they got into UA with vastly incorrect understandings of their own Quirks: medical doctors were not qualified to diagnose a patient’s Quirk. Even Quirk side effects – like Shouta’s dry eye or migraines – must be run past someone with a degree in Quirk Theory before they’re set in stone.

By taking his doctor’s advice, Shouta had almost given himself permanent nerve damage. Hizashi had been forced into muteness until he was twelve years old. Nemuri had completely thrown her own internal chemistry out of whack, and it had taken her the better part of a year to put it back together again. When it came to Quirks and their side effects and drawbacks, doctors were not to be trusted.

Shouta did not have a degree in Quirk Theory. But he did have a minor in it.

And he could say, with about ninety-nine percent surety, that Magne did not have a Quirk-induced chromatic astigmatism. Not only were they incredibly rare, but they also tended to only affect people with personal vision Quirks, light or color manipulation Quirks, or both. The occasional line-of-sight Quirk would come with a Quirk-induced chromatic astigmatism, and it was actually one of the things Shouta had been tested for once he took his Quirk-induced headaches to an actual professional.

Magne didn’t have a personal vision Quirk or a light manipulation Quirk, and Magnetism certainly wasn’t line-of-sight.

Shouta would actually hazard a guess that she was suffering from QPD, also known as Quirk-Perceptive Dissonance. Similar to dizziness, QPD came about when an enhanced or additional sense from someone’s Quirk didn’t line up with their sight or inner ear. Its exact effects ranged along the spectrum of overstimulation and migraine-like symptoms, and it appeared Magne had drawn a bad hand in that regard.

“So, you provided your own glasses,” Dabi drawled.

Magne only shrugged, clearly still irritated. “I tried to.”

Shouta hoisted himself to his feet, fixed his grip on Magne’s glasses, and padded to the edge of the fridge. He carefully laid the glasses on the edge and meowed to get Magne’s attention.

“What?” She demanded, “What do you want now?”

Shouta tilted his head down at the glasses he’d set down.

“…is this a trick to bite me again?”

“If I wanted to bite you, I would just bite you,” Shouta said drolly. “I just don’t want to drop your glasses on the floor.”

“I can pick it up, if you want,” Toga volunteered.

Nope. None of that. Shouta hissed at her, just a little warning hiss, and she squeaked a hurried, “nevermind!”

“You should get them,” Dabi encouraged, almost keeping the little edge of evil delight out of his grin.

“You just want to see me get my hand sliced open,” Magne huffed, but with a bit more prodding from Dabi, Toga, and Shouta himself, she tentatively approached the fridge.

“Mrow,” Shouta said plaintively, blinkingly slowly and tipping his head forward. It was getting easier and easier to summon a purr, and his throat started to vibrate as Magne shuffled closer.

“Why is he purring?” She demanded of Toga.

“I think he wants you to pet him!” Toga whispered back excitedly.

“I actually value my life!” Magne hissed.

“Is that what that vibration is,” Dabi mused quietly.

“Come on, big sis, give it a shot!” Toga urged, either ignorant of or intentionally ignoring Dabi’s quiet comment.

Magne looked at Shouta. Shouta blinked slowly at her, ears pricked and purr humming deep in his throat.

“…fine,” she sighed, “I’ll try. But just you wait, he’s going to bite my hand open, and it will be your fault.”

Toga only grinned at her.

Magne huffed and shuffled closer to Shouta and her glasses. First, she quickly snatched the glasses from underneath him. Shouta let her, not even reacting to the hurried motion. Then, slowly and carefully, she stretched her hand out towards him.

Shouta sniffed her fingers – paper, ink, metal, nail polish, faint traces of grease and the laundry detergent Kurogiri used – and then pushed his forehead against her hand in a by-now well-practiced motion.

“…oh,” Magne said, soft and stunned.

“Isn’t he so soft!?” Toga squealed, and Dabi cracked a wry smile.

“Oh, Kami, he is!” Magne agreed, and her hand shifted, fingers curling to scratch under his chin. Okay, Shouta had a new favorite. Toga took a solid second place, because this was heavenly.

Chapter Text

“Spinner.”

Shouta lifted his head from where he was attempting to doze off on the back of the couch, glancing at Kurogiri in the doorway.

“Hmm?” Spinner asked, not looking up from his phone.

“Did you perhaps leave a book somewhere?” Kurogiri asked.

“Don’t think so,” Spinner said, “why?”

“I found this in the laundry room,” Kurogiri said, holding up the book on crepuscularity that Shouta had retrieved.

“Laundry room’s your domain,” Spinner shrugged, and then his digital car went up in a fiery explosion and he cursed and finally glanced up at Kurogiri. Spinner frowned, eyeing the book Kurogiri was holding. “Doesn’t look familiar. Why are you asking me?”

“It appears this book is on the benefits of an altered sleep schedule similar to the one Demon is enforcing on you,” Kurogiri said, flipping the book open. “I assumed you had obtained it somewhere for research purposes.”

“I mean, I don’t remember doing that, but it sounds like a good idea.” Spinner turned all the way around, almost knocking Shouta off the back of the couch behind him, to which let out a meow of protest. “Oops, sorry, Demon. Can I see it?”

Kurogiri glided forward to deposit the book in Spinner’s outstretched hand.

“Good Morning, Moon?” Spinner asked incredulously.

“I believe it is designed for small children.”

Spinner huffed and rolled his eyes but flipped the book open. Shouta glanced down at the first page. It contained a diagram of the sunrise and set and a close-up picture of a cat’s eye with text of two different sizes – one for adults to read, one for their children to follow along with – around the graphics.

The book began with a description of different sleep schedules and what it meant to be crepuscular. Shouta watched Spinner skim through it rapidly before moving on to the second section, where the book went into a list of potential reasons for and benefits to being crepuscular.

“Did you know,” Spinner said, “that thirty percent of people with a heteromorphic Quirk based on a nocturnal animal developed an additional Quirk-related skill or ability after switching to a crepuscular sleep schedule.”

“You sound like a Geico commercial,” Dabi said absentmindedly.

Spinner paused to shoot Dabi a positively scathing look, which went completely unnoticed as Dabi had not actually looked up from his phone to make the comment.

“That means that I could develop some new aspect of my Quirk,” Spinner said insistently.

“Only if you actually keep to the crepuscular sleep schedule,” Dabi shrugged.

“And if you’re in that specific thirty percent,” Mr. Compress added, flipping over one of the playing cards that were spread over the table in front of him.

“You guys are such downers,” Spinner huffed.

“I’m just saying, man, if you want the benefits of a new sleep schedule, you have to stick to the sleep schedule.”

“He’s not wrong,” Shouta agreed, absentmindedly flicking his tail. When he’d first tried biphasic sleep, he’d struggled for weeks to get his schedule consistent, and for a little while he’d been banned from active Hero training until he could get enough sleep to not be a danger to himself. Eventually he’d figured it out, and he still used mostly the same sleep schedule to this day.

“Fortunately, with Demon around, I don’t see that being much of an issue,” Mr. Compress said dryly.

“Hey!” Shouta objected, “I don’t want to do this forever!”

“See?” Mr. Compress waved vaguely at Shouta, still mostly focused on his game of solitaire, “even Demon agrees with me.”

Spinner rolled his eyes and turned back to his book.

Shouta read over his shoulder for a few minutes to make sure that Spinner was actually going to read the book, then jumped down from the couch and meandered through the living room looking for something to catch his attention. Eventually, he wandered through the living room door and from there into Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s room.

It was around six in the morning, and Shigaraki was still in bed. Shouta knew from experience that he wouldn’t stir until Kurogiri came to forcibly rouse him for breakfast.

But the door to the laundry room was cracked slightly open, as it always was, and there was just a bit more light behind it than usual.

Shouta slipped through the gap between doors and found Kurogiri sitting on the washing machine leaning back against the shelves behind him. There was a book propped open on his lap and a thin sliver of light was glowing from the pages. One of those personal reading lights.

It was an easy jump to the shelf above the one Kurogiri was leaning against, and Shouta spared only a passing glance for the book in his hand. The Journey to the West, obviously. He hadn’t been expecting anything else.

With nothing better to claim his time and nothing interesting happening, Shouta draped himself over the shelf and attempted to fall asleep there. Despite being unpadded wood, it was far from the least comfortable place he’d ever fallen asleep, and as a cat that didn’t matter nearly as much. And, since he was behind Kurogiri who wasn’t likely to move any time soon, the scent of rain and clean thunder was stronger than ever.

The safe, familiar scent lulled Shouta into a deeper sleep than he would have expected. His dreams, of course, held clouds.

In his human body, Shouta desperately leaped between fluffy white cloud platforms, running from something he couldn’t see. Behind him, the cheerful cumulous clouds he’d left behind turned dark and stormy, bellies swelling with rain and lightning racing out of them to claw at the sky.

The transformation swept over the sky, too fast for Shouta to outrun it. The cloud beneath him swelled, fluffy white turning ominous gray-black, and Shouta fell through the cloud like it was nothing but water vapor.

He fell uninterrupted for hours, wide-eyed and staring at the world racing past him. Three times, he landed. First standing in a fountain full of water that for some reason left him covered in blood. The water was a thick, grimy gray, full of ash and dust. Around him, the world was burning down. Hazed with warring blue and red fire and wreathed in thick black smoke.

The smoke smothered him, and the floor fell out from underneath him again.

He landed again in an endless forest that stretched on into infinity on all sides. The forest floor was marred by thick red rivers of blood, and drifts of rancid gas crept between the trees like fog. Shouta ran through the forest for days, his eyes burning and feet aching, bare face and arms lashed with branches, before the shadows of the trees lunged out and descended on him, shredding the earth beneath him and sending him falling again.

Falling forever, turning over and over in the air with no end in sight. He wasn’t scared, despite the long fall. The cat part of his mind assured him that any fall was survivable if you only knew how to fall.

The third time he didn’t land.

He went from falling to standing in a split second, with no transition time at all. He was a cat again, and he knew for sure that he was dreaming. Not for any particular reason, he just knew. The instant his paws touched the ground, he was aware of the fact that none of this was real.

The world, which had been an indecipherable blur of colors, solidified into a dark, misty room. Oboro was sitting in front of Shouta, his cloudy hair drooping over his shoulders like heavy fog, barely flowing at all. To his right, Toga was sitting cross-legged, yawning widely, and Twice was shoving himself up off the ground and looking around curiously.

Somehow, with the innate knowledge that came from dreaming, Shouta knew that there was something dangerous on the other side of Oboro. He braced his front paws on Oboro’s back to peer through his foggy hair, ignoring the damp feeling of mist in his fur.

Despite the knowledge that he was dreaming, this scene felt more real than any of the others before it.

Shigaraki knelt on the floor a few meters away, an all-too-familiar figure standing over him. All For One had no eyes or hair and was practically featureless, but he still emanated an aura of deadly fury.

“You continue to fail me, Tomura,” All For One said, brittle and damning. “Do not forget that you can be easily replaced.”

“I haven’t forgotten, Sensei,” Shigaraki promised. Even through Oboro’s cloud, Shouta could see the tension drawing Shigaraki’s shoulders tight and the fear curling his hands into trembling fists at his sides.

“Oh, Tomura,” All For One said, detached and sharp and cruel, “If you haven’t forgotten, why are you acting out like this? Do you want me to replace you?”

“No!” Shigaraki gasped, his head shooting up to look at All For One, “No, Sensei, please, I’ll do better!”

“Did I say you deserved to look at me?” All For One asked with a mocking facsimile of gentleness. Shigaraki quickly dropped his head again, fine tremors racing all through him.

“I’ll let it slide just this once,” All For One cooed, “because I know how much stress you’re under.” He rested a heavy, possessive hand on Shigaraki’s head and Shouta watched Shigaraki visibly struggle to hold still under All For One’s hand. “But don’t keep me waiting, Tomura. You don’t want my displeasure aimed at you, do you?”

“N-no, Sensei,” Shigaraki hurried to assure him.

“Good boy,” All For One said, and the world was yanked out from underneath Shouta.

He was falling for less than a second before he slammed back into his body, shooting awake so quickly he almost fell off the shelf.

In front of him, Kurogiri took a hitched breath, and then his shoulders settled. While Shouta was catching his breath, Kurogiri was mechanically marking his place in the book and slipping it neatly back onto the shelf.

The two of them left the room at the same time, Kurogiri pausing to robotically straighten the cuffs of his shirt before sliding the door open. Shigaraki was sitting up in bed, his hands clenched into fists and a fine layer of Decay dust spread over his bedspread. His gloves were gone.

Shouta padded to Shigaraki’s dresser and pulled his extra pair out of the half-open drawer, then followed the two of them out to the living room. He was now officially confused.

It had to be some kind of dreamwalking or sleeptalking Quirk to intrude on dreams like that, but how and why had it even pulled him into it in the first place? All For One clearly only wanted to talk to Shigaraki, but Shouta had seen Twice and Toga in the dreamscape as well, not to mention him, who All For One shouldn’t have even known existed.

And what was the deal with Oboro?

It hadn’t seemed strange in the dreamworld – things were rarely strange in dreams, no matter the source of the dream – but there had been no reason for Oboro to be there. Sure, he or some representative of him ended up in Shouta’s dreams a lot, but that dreamworld with All For One in it had definitely not come from Shouta’s dream. Shouta might have been tempted to say that Oboro had been pulled into the dreamscape as a remnant of Shouta’s dream – if he had been the only one in REM sleep, it would explain why no one else had manifested a part of their dreams – but despite the clouds, Oboro himself hadn’t actually been present in Shouta’s dream.

Which left Shouta with more questions than answers once again.

He sighed around the fabric in his mouth and scanned the denizens of the living room. Toga seemed less tiredly distracted than usual thanks to proper nutrition dealing with her chronic exhaustion, so the unnatural fear was hitting her harder than it had previously, but even so, Shigaraki was still the most seriously impacted by the dream message.

Which, once again, only raised more questions. If it wasn’t actually an alert Quirk, why the lingering, undoubtedly Quirk-induced fear?

“Another message?” Spinner asked empathetically as Toga and Twice slumped onto the couch.

“Worse,” Twice sighed into his hands, and his alternate personality muttered a vehement, “I wish.”

Spinner frowned, looking up from his videogame. “What do you mean, ‘worse’?”

“Some kind of dream vision,” Toga explained, her voice shaking, “he- All For One was there in person, and he was…”

“He was there,” Shigaraki repeated in a raspy, scraped-out voice, and really that was all they needed to know.

Shouta dropped the gloves on the arm of Shigaraki’s recliner and waited for him to pick them up. Shigaraki only glanced at them, then at Shouta. Then he reached up to start clawing at his neck.

“No!” Shouta scolded, darting forward across Shigaraki’s lap to bat at his hands.

“Don’t touch me!” Shigaraki screeched, clutching at his neck so tight he was practically strangling himself and writhing in his chair like he was possessed, kicking and bucking and twisting back and forth.

Shouta didn’t lose his footing, even on the roiling uneven surface of Shigaraki’s lap, but it was a near thing. He made it up to the back of the recliner and clung onto the fabric with his claws, trying to keep from falling over in either direction.

After a moment, Shigaraki settled down somewhat, stilling and letting go of his neck, if only so he could claw at the barely-healed scabs from before. Shouta continued to cling to the back of the recliner, his tail swishing in thought.

Shigaraki smelled like sleep and Decay and the laundry detergent that Kurogiri used, but there was something else in his scent that didn’t seem quite right to Shouta. Something acrid and clinical lingering around him. After only a moment of hesitation, Shouta leaned forward and stuck his nose in Shigaraki’s hair.

Decay dust, dandruff, shampoo… there. Rubbing alcohol. Why did Shigaraki smell like rubbing alcohol?

Well, if Shouta’s working theory was correct, then it was for the same reason that Shouta was a cat in the dream. Because it wasn’t a dreamland at all. It was some sort of alternate dimension. It wasn’t their minds that were transported to somewhere else, it was their actual physical bodies.

That would explain the falling sensation; it wasn’t just that they were getting snapped out of their dream, they were literally falling back into the real world. The unnatural fear could also partially be explained by the alternate dimension theory. It had been proven time and time again that any Quirk regarding alternate or pocket dimensions wreaked havoc on people’s – and even animal’s – minds. Similar to the uncanny valley, human brains were hardwired to expect very specific things, and alternate or pocket dimensions differed just enough from the natural world that it made something instinct-deep sit up and take notice. The lingering unnatural fear couldn’t be entirely from that cognitive dissonance, but some part of it could.

Unfortunately, the theory fell apart a little bit when Shouta realized that it would entail All For One also being physically present in the pocket dimension. Shouta didn’t know a whole lot about how Tartarus was run, but he suspected they’d be a bit upset if their highest-profile inmate spontaneously vanished every now and again.

There were ways it could still make sense – if the Quirk included or All For One had added some kind of temporal shifting element, if the user of the Quirk didn’t have the same side effects as the targets, etc – but Shouta knew better than to decide on a theory and try to force proof of it. Not to mention, it still didn’t explain Oboro’s presence. There wasn’t a lot he could say for sure right now, so he needed more information before he could do any more theorizing.

In the meantime, with Kurogiri regressed into his stiff, almost robotic mindset, Shouta was the most qualified caregiver in the room. And he was a cat.

Shigaraki looked like he’d jump out of his skin if anyone looked at him too hard, so Shouta moved on to Toga and Twice, who had sandwiched an awkward-looking Spinner between them.

Shouta, of course, put his head on Toga’s lap. He was not above milking Quirk aftereffects for his own gain and Toga was still the second-best cat-petter in the League. That also meant that he was free to flick his tail at Twice’s face over and over again until both of the man’s personalities were irritated rather than scared. A condition like Dissociative Identity Disorder was actually a benefit in matters of emotional manipulation Quirks, since most Quirks like that didn’t really work properly on two ‘minds’ in one person.

By the time Shouta managed to drag himself away from Toga’s gentle petting, Shigaraki had calmed down somewhat. Enough that, when Shouta approached the foot of his recliner and nyaaed pitifully, Shigaraki actually paused to slip his gloves on.

Shouta took that as the invitation it was and jumped up onto Shigaraki’s lap.

“Twice,” Shigaraki rasped as careful fingers began to trace down Shouta’s spine, “tell me about your progress with Overhaul.”

Twice looked up, briefly startled, then took a breath and glanced at Kurogiri, who was standing stiff and unresponsive beside Shigaraki’s recliner.

“I don’t have anything new,” Twice said slowly, then bit out, “Stop rushing me, idiot.”

“Remind me what we do have,” Shigaraki demanded.

“Kurogiri and I set up a meeting,” Twice said, watching Shigaraki from the corner of his eye, “It’s tonight – or tomorrow? It’s at one in the morning in a relatively neutral area. Kurogiri will warp us in a few blocks out from the meeting place at around twelve thirty, and I’ll lead Overhaul to the building once he shows up. He’s under the impression that the meeting is to negotiate a merging of organizations.”

“Does he have Eraserhead?” Shigaraki asked, and Shouta suppressed his instinctive jolt into a simple flick of his tail.

“I don’t have any concrete information,” Twice said, “but there have been rumors that if you go up against the Shie Hasaikai, you better be ready to do it Quirkless. Supposedly, they have a way to get rid of their enemies’ Quirks. The effect is temporary, though!”

Shigaraki hummed, tentatively stroking a hand down Shouta’s back again.

“How temporary?”

“Reports are unclear,” Twice admitted. “Around the length of a relatively brief fight. Some instances report that it lasted several minutes, longer than Eraserhead can hold Erasure at one time if the timing from your encounter with him holds. But if you’re not trying to activate your Quirk constantly, it would be next to impossible to notice the time between stopping and reactivation.”

A chill crept down Shouta’s spine as he sat idly by and listened to a group of Villains clinically discuss himself and his Quirk. It was a scene that he was sure had happened many times in many places, but it was the first time he’d heard it so directly and in person.

And then, of course, there was the issue of exactly how Overhaul was shutting off people’s Quirks, since Shouta at least knew for a fact that he wasn’t using Eraserhead to do that. Erasure was an incredibly useful and, in the wrong context, incredibly dangerous Quirk. If someone – especially someone on the wrong end of the law like the leader of a yakuza family – had a way to artificially duplicate the effects of Erasure… it could be devastating.

Shigaraki’s fingers spasmed over Shouta’s fur, curling possessively around him, and Shouta tilted his head slightly. Shigaraki’s face was pinched in thought, anger and consideration warring for dominance.

“If we can get Eraserhead for ourselves,” Shigaraki said, “we’ll have leverage against Sensei.”

What. What? Shouta went completely still, desperately trying to avoid reacting. He didn’t even let his ears flick. Shigaraki wanted him for what?

“You mean to betray your master,” Kurogiri accused, mist roiling off him in furious sheets.

“No!” Shigaraki snapped, scowling at Kurogiri as he slowly went back to stroking Shouta’s fur, “I’m not a traitor, Kurogiri! I just want… some leverage. Something to level the playing field.”

“You just want Eraserhead to be your pet,” Dabi said bluntly, “because you’re obsessed with him.”

Oh, the irony. Hizashi would be in tears.

Shigaraki snarled and fisted his hands in Shouta’s fur. “I’m not obsessed with him! His Quirk is… fascinating. Useful.”

“There’s no guarantee that Overhaul even has Eraserhead,” Twice reminded him cautiously.

Shigaraki seemed unbothered by that completely relevant fact. “If not, we can look elsewhere,” he said dismissively, “but Overhaul will undoubtedly have something we want.”

He had something Shouta wanted, too, even if it was just information. Shouta had to admit, he wasn’t too keen on the League of Villains getting access to some kind of Quirk-disabling technology, but hopefully he’d be able to tag along unseen to their meeting with Overhaul and send any relevant information he picked up to Nezu.

Shouta finally allowed himself to breathe as Shigaraki relaxed the tight grip on his fur. Hopefully, more of Shigaraki’s motivations would make themselves clear over time. Possibly at the upcoming meeting. In the meantime, Shouta would have to brace himself. Something big was coming.

Chapter Text

Shouta watched from under the kitchen table as midnight struck and the League began to move. They left behind the coffee and high-calorie snacks Kurogiri had provided. Shouta had insisted that Toga drink some blood only an hour ago, just in case. They were planning to meet a dangerous yakuza leader, and there was a high likelihood of something like that breaking out into a fight; it was better that Toga have the extra energy from the blood.

Kurogiri produced a key from a warp gate and unlocked the solid metal door that looked so out of place in the cozy kitchen. Behind the door, Shouta could see a relatively small room, about the size of a walk-in closet, with clearly reinforced walls and several very familiar costumes on display, visible even from Shouta’s perspective under the table.

He had wondered where the League was keeping their gear.

Quickly and efficiently, the League pulled on their costumes. Toga redid her hair ties to get her perfect spiky space buns. Mr. Compress neatly layered his bold orange shirt and black vest. His mask this time had black lines like a sunburst, complete with a large black circle in the center. Shigaraki’s disembodied hands were about a hundred times worse than Shouta had expected.

He had suspected that the hands were actual human hands, but there had been no real way to confirm that. Now, he was positive. Since he was so close and had the chance to study the hands without being stuck in combat mode, he could easily tell that yes, they were actually just severed hands. They smelled awful, sharp and bitter in his sensitive feline nose and not at all like the soft earthy scent of Decay.

Even aside from just the idea of wearing disembodied human hands, the League’s outfits were… kind of bad.

Some of them, he could maybe give a pass. Shouta knew quite a bit about how teenagers designed Hero costumes, and he figured Villain costumes wouldn’t be that different. Toga was inexperienced and new in the field. She had gone with something familiar and had elected to just fight in the school uniform she usually wore with some support gear on top. Not as rare as one might think, at least for the first year or so, though usually people picked the gym uniform.

Shigaraki might have been given the same allowances as Toga – he was also new to the scene, and he had fallen for the classic trap of prioritizing drama and looks over actual in-combat effectiveness – but Shouta was not willing to just overlook the fact that he was accessorizing with actual severed human hands.

The older members of the League had fallen for the classic costume-design pitfalls a bit less, but not really by much. Kurogiri was made almost exclusively of fog, but his shiny metal collar piece – which had already proven to be a weakness that was very visible and exploitable even to teenagers with less than a month of training under their belt – could not have been more obvious against his black mist. Magne just didn’t even have a costume. All she did was swap her sunglasses for a tighter-fitting pair. The likelihood of an ordinary pair of sunglasses getting knocked off in the middle of a fight was incredibly high; even Shouta’s goggles fell off – or were intentionally ripped off – sometimes. And then there was Mr. Compress.

Mr. Compress, out of all of them, should have known better. He had been an established thief before joining the League of Villains. He should know how to be sneaky. So why was his costume a mix of black, bright orange, and white? Was he trying to hide, or trying to stand out?

Honestly, the best costume in the lot was Twice. It was simple, easy to put on, and had just enough of a specific look to make it clear who he was in battle. If the theories that he could clone himself were true, then the striped black-and-gray design would also lead to a disorienting effect in large groups of doubles of himself.

Unfortunately, Shouta was forced to dock points because the jumpsuit wasn’t armored in the slightest. It made sense for some people to have patches of thinner fabric or even no coverings at all if they needed to let skin-based Quirks out, like Nemuri, Kan, and even Ashido. But Twice, whose Quirk came from his hands, had no excuse.

In fact, not one of the villains had any armor to speak of. The closest they came were Kurogiri’s metal collar – which was more of a hindrance than a help – and Toga’s tooth… collar… thing. Neither of which really counted in Shouta’s mind. Maybe Mr. Compress’s mask, but only if it was specially reinforced, which Shouta seriously doubted.

“I’ll form the warp gate outside,” Kurogiri said, and Shouta caught several people glance at where he was sitting under the table. Shouta wasn’t complaining. He only flicked his tail and watched them turn back to their preparations.

They decided to leave the room in groups of two, hoping to keep Shouta in the house without too much fuss.

Shouta watched the first group disappear through the door, then waited with the second group as they paused to make sure the first were all the way out of the house. Then, they entered the mudroom.

That was when Shouta stood up and lazily sauntered to the door that led to the hallway. Feigning nonchalance and apathy was way easier to as a cat.

There was obviously nobody in Shigaraki and Mr. Compress’s room, and Shouta darted through it as fast as he could without making any noise, slipping through the hole in the floor behind the washing machine and emerging onto the street.

Sneaking around as a black cat at night couldn’t have been easier. Shouta rounded the house on silent paws, slinking through the darkest shadows and towards the narrow puddle of light on the porch. With Spinner absent and everyone light-blind from the internal lights, none of them even had a chance of seeing him.

“Turn off the porch light,” Shigaraki instructed, and Twice was quick to comply, plunging the night into proper darkness. Shouta shrank back slightly, into the shadows of a large bush. The last pair, Magne and Mr. Compress, slipped through the front door.

The air twisted, wriggling and scrunching in on itself, and then bloomed into a writhing black-on-black hole in the night.

On the other side of the warp gate, Shigaraki blinked, squinted, and then jerked his head at Twice. “You first.”

Shouta crept forward as Twice stepped through the portal, moving slow and steady with no sudden starts or stops and no sharp, attention-grabbing changes in speed or direction. There was a tiny gap under the seething mist of the warp gate, only a centimeter or two, but Shouta could see Mr. Compress’s white boots approach next and then pause, hesitating only a second before forging onward. At the exact instant that Mr. Compress stepped through one side of the portal, Shouta stepped through the other.

Fortunately, they emerged on opposite sides of the portal as well.

Shouta slipped out of the portal looking for one thing and one thing only. Somewhere to hide. He found it instantly in the form of a rusty fire escape staircase, and with the same fluid, unremarkable pace that he’d used to get to the warp gate, he slipped away from it, ducking into the darker shadows under the stairs.

Only then, once he was better hidden, did Shouta stop to take in his surroundings.

He was at the edge of a dark, cramped alley. A narrow passage that ran between two huge warehouses. Pipes and boilers pockmarked the area, and the pavement was cracked and pitted. Everywhere there was rust and crumbling architecture, and even the weeds that grew in the cracks were nothing more than ragged, scraggly scrub.

Shigaraki emerged from the warp gate, which reformed into Kurogiri. The group briefly conferred, and then they started walking. Shouta slipped out from under the stairs and slunk after them, gliding between deeper pools of darkness like little more than a shadow himself.

They walked for several blocks through the twisted industrial purgatory. In addition to watching the League for signs that they’d noticed him and scanning the area ahead for potential hiding spots, Shouta had to carefully watch where he put his paws to avoid stepping on something rusted or tripping over something hidden in the scraggly grass.

Finally, they made it to what appeared to be the designated meeting area. The League filed into the empty warehouse, and Shigaraki glanced at his watch.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said.

Mr. Compress vaulted nimbly up onto a metal structure left behind in the warehouse, and Magne hauled herself up onto an old storage container. Toga plopped down onto the ground under Mr. Compress, and Shigaraki chose to lean against the wall like an emo teenager on their smoke break, arms folded and black coat flared around him. Kurogiri completely melted away, vanishing into the darkness like Shouta was doing. The only reason he was visible was because of the constant subtle motion of his mist.

Twice shot a salute at Shigaraki and backed out of the warehouse again, sliding the door shut behind him. Shouta followed him through a crumbling hole near the bottom of the wall and slipped away into the darkness.

He couldn’t believe the League hadn’t even bothered to do a preliminary sweep of the area. They were supposed to be some up-and-coming Villain organization that was going to take the world by storm and uproot Hero society as they knew it, and they couldn’t even be bothered to check the perimeter of the place they were planning a meeting with a completely unknown element.

Amateurs.

Fifteen minutes and a housecat’s body couldn’t give Shouta anything close to the careful search he would have hoped for, but he could confirm that there was nobody lingering in the immediate vicinity, at least at the moment.

Shouta returned to the warehouse mere moments before a sleek black car pulled up in front of it. He sat down carefully in the middle of hole in the wall to watch from the shadows as a man emerged from the backseat. Shouta spared the man only a bare glance, just long enough to confirm that he matched Overhaul’s description – which he did, complete with plague doctor mask and flamboyant ruff of feathers around his throat – before darting his gaze back to the car. Sure enough, the driver slipped out a moment later, a man in a dark robe, broad-brimmed black hat, and beaklike mask.

Twice, who had already turned away from the car to accompany Overhaul to the building, completely missed them.

Shouta barely suppressed a sigh, slipping fully through the hole in the wall back into the building to see the League’s first impression of Overhaul. And vice versa.

“-guys inside are already sick!” Twice was saying as he hauled the doors open again, leaving Overhaul – who both was the head of a struggling yakuza family which had more than enough reason to hate the League of Villains and had a touch-activated Quirk that was just as if not more dangerous than Shigaraki’s – standing directly behind him, unmonitored and unwatched, while Twice was focused on something else.

Amateurs.

“Ooh, a real-life yakuza!” Magne cooed, “I’ve never seen one in person before! You smell so dangerous~!”

“Not quite,” Mr. Compress corrected gently, “Despite what modern media implies, mafia families mostly fell apart as Quirks became more widespread and Heroes began to prosper. He’s less a dangerous kingpin and more of an endangered species, left over from old times.”

Overhaul was completely still for a moment, and Shouta watched him with Erasure smoldering just behind his eyes, ready to activate at a moment’s notice. Finally, Overhaul tilted his head just slightly.

“I suppose you’re not wrong,” he mused.

“So, what’s this impoverished yakuza boy doing here?” Magne asked, “is your ~mighty empire~ also on a crime high now that All Might’s gone?”

“All Might?” Overhaul asked. “No. The fall of All For One was far more significant. My generation regarded All For One as an urban legend. The emperor of darkness, pulling the strings from the shadows… The old leaders believed in him, feared him despite rumors that he was dead. But now we’ve all heard that he showed up again in person. And lost.”

Overhaul looked up, his eyes flashing with challenge. “No one rules the day or the night anymore. So, the real question is… who will be next to rule?”

A tense silence fell over the room, and Shouta swept his tail in a slow, thoughtful arc through the dust behind him. It was a question that many were asking. Mostly about All Might, because few could even consider the idea of Endeavor being the new Symbol of Peace. You needed to at least preach peace to be a symbol of it. But a lot of Shouta’s colleagues had been asking the same question that Overhaul was.

If All For One was considered dealt with, what would happen to the power vacuum he left behind? Would the crew he had formed be enough to fill it, or would the Villain underworld fall into infighting and chaos? The Heroes who worked on the street level – the Intel and Underground and Undercover Heroes – needed those answers. That information could spell the difference between life and death of any given Hero. Between salvation or destruction for whole neighborhoods and cities and regions.

Finally, Shigaraki broke the silence. “You came here knowing full well you were meeting with me. And you ask me that? Are you trying to start something?” He tilted his head up, one red eye flashing dangerously under his bangs and between the spread fingers of the hand over his face. “The next leader will be me.”

“We’re only gathering more strength,” Shigaraki hissed, “and with our combined power, we will bring down all of Hero society.”

“And what’s your plan for that?” Overhaul asked, with all the pointed bluntness of Shouta shooting down a first year’s borderline-illegal marketing scheme.

“Our plan?” Shigaraki asked, clearly thrown for a loop. “You- You came here to join us, didn’t you?”

“A goal without a plan is a delusion,” Overhaul pointed out scathingly, “What will you do with your gathered strength? How will you pull strings? What organization are you even building?”

He waved his hand idly, listing off names. “You had the Hero-Killer Stain, Muscular, Moonfish; all premium pawns, but you wasted them. It seems to me like you don’t know how to use your game pieces. You couldn’t make use of the perfect opportunities given to you, but you want to extend your power. And do what with the power you clearly can’t control?”

“I didn’t come here to join your group,” Overhaul informed them bluntly. “To accomplish an objective, a plan is necessary, and I have a plan.”

Shigaraki snarled wordlessly, almost grinding his teeth, and Toga tilted her head curiously at Overhaul.

Overhaul continued. “My plan requires a lot of financial support. The sort of funding I can’t access with what remains of the yakuza. But you’re all overhyped, what passes for media darlings in the underground. With you on my side, it would be a different story. Join me, and I can show you how a resource is meant to be properly used. And then I will become the next ruler.”

Silence.

It stretched for several heartbeats, tense and cutting. Shigaraki dipped his head, pale bangs falling into his eyes. Magne tensed, grip tightening on the bulky cloth-wrapped item she’d brought with her.

Finally, Shigaraki spat, “Leave,” and Magne moved.

The cloth wrapping was gone in a single tug, revealing the largest magnet Shouta had seen since Power Loader had been experimenting with magnetic fields as homing signals for a pigeon-Quirked Hero student a few years ago.

“Sorry, Mr. Yakuza,” Magne snapped, hauling her magnet over her shoulder, “we’re not here to be someone’s minions.”

Overhaul lit up with fizzing blue energy, and he immediately started skidding towards Magne’s giant magnet despite planting his feet on the warehouse floor.

“I have a good friend,” Magne said as she tilted the magnet towards him more, “who is timid and shy and accepts me as her friend despite my background. Just the other day, she told me, “those who are bound by the chains of common knowledge will laugh at those who aren’t.””

Magne voice rose until she was shouting, declaring her intent to live a life without shackles, but Shouta wasn’t paying attention to her. He was looking at Overhaul, who had smoothly slipped his left glove off even as he was sliding uncontrollably.

Shouta reacted on instinct alone, information about Overhaul – the Quirk and the person – tripping through his mind even as his paws carried him swiftly out from behind the box he’d been lurking in the shadows of. In a split second, Shouta’s mind switched from passive observation to active combat.

His attention expanded. He heard everything. Saw everything. Sensed every minute shift in his opponent and allies. The shadows were silent around him – dangerous – something glinted through the high windows near the ceiling of the warehouse – dangerous – and Overhaul was reaching towards Magne’s bare arm, his finger extended and eyes cold and hard – deadly.

A hot fury roiled in Shouta’s chest like a living thing, clawing at his throat and pressing against his ribs. It was the furious monster that made Shouta into a hero, that reared its head when he saw a child being abused or an innocent person being hurt. His fury melded with the cold calculation that he had spent years cultivating. He knew what it looked like when someone was intending to hurt. Overhaul was going to hurt Shouta’s student, and Shouta wouldn’t stand for it.

He would rather die.

The fury in his chest spilled over in a frothing flood, and something began to change.

Every pawstep, despite being completely silent on the warehouse floor, seemed to echo in Shouta’s ears. His strides lengthened, each leap carrying him farther, faster, faster. He was bigger, stronger, his fur shorter and sleeker and impossibly darker.

One moment he was less than forty centimeters tall, made mostly of fluff and exasperation. The next, he was a meter-tall shadow of death composed of sharp teeth, tightly coiled muscle, and wild, unfettered rage.

Overhaul’s eyes widened in shock and terror even as he made contact with Magne’s skin, but Shouta’s own eyes burned with fury and Erasure, his fur standing on end and teeth flashing in the darkness, and Overhaul was completely powerless.

The next second, Shouta slammed into the yakuza leader with a furious snarl. Overhaul reacted at the last possible second, raising an arm to shield his face, and Shouta’s teeth clamped down on his forearm instead of his throat.

Blood ran thick and hot over Shouta’s tongue, and he felt bones crunch in his jaws. Overhaul howled, a raw, agonized sound, and it startled Shouta enough to grant him brief clarity from the feral feline protectiveness. He shoved the cat brain out of his head and leaped away from his downed opponent. It was only after he was clear that Shouta realized with dawning horror that Overhaul’s arm wasn’t connected anymore.

Overhaul scrambled to his feet, face bloodless pale and twisted into a furious, panicked snarl. Mr. Compress chose that moment to strike, leaping off the structure he’d been perched on and reaching forward with his hand outstretched.

“Don’t touch me,” Overhaul snarled, breathless and frantic and furious, and even with his own tangled emotions and crosswise instincts, Shouta caught the flash of something small and swift striking Mr. Compress in the shoulder.

His hand made contact with Overhaul’s arm.

Nothing happened.

Until Overhaul whipped his remaining arm to the side, and this time Shouta was too slow. Mr. Compress’s left arm up to the shoulder turned into a spray of blood and pulverized bone.

Mr. Compress stumbled backwards with a breathy gasp and Shouta abruptly changed his trajectory to fling himself behind and beneath Mr. Compress as he collapsed to the floor. Mr. Compress landed heavily over Shouta’s back, blood immediately soaking into Shouta’s fur.

Shigaraki was moving now, darting forward with his own hand spread.

“Shield!” Overhaul demanded, and when Shigaraki made contact, it wasn’t with Overhaul.

The whole wall caved in the second before Shigaraki could touch Overhaul, and half a dozen people in plague doctor masks tore through the gaping hole. Shouta cursed, frantically wriggling out from underneath Mr. Compress to back up Shigaraki. Blood matted his fur, sticky and pulling every time Shouta moved, and he doubted it would be the last blood spilled today.

Magne joined them a second later, her giant magnet hefted over her shoulder and her hands shaking only slightly.

“You could have done that earlier,” Overhaul hissed to his rapidly-decaying minion. They did not respond.

Three people were talking at once, Shigaraki muttering to himself and Twice astonished that they had been followed and Overhaul berating one of his underlings for being slow. And the underling responding, saying he’d missed a shot, but it had a fast-acting effect. Shouta flicked an ear back towards Mr. Compress, listening to Twice rapidly trying to stem the bleeding and Mr. Compress’s hissed curses and pained sounds.

Overhaul straightened and cleared his throat, and Shouta’s ears flicked forward again, attention sharpening.

“I had hoped we could have a peaceful negotiation,” Overhaul managed, clutching a hand to the bloody mangled stump just past his elbow, “But like this, neither of us will be able to make level-headed decisions. It’s… unproductive to spend any more time fighting. We’re missing something on each side, so let’s just stop here for now. We can talk again when we’ve cooled down.”

“I’ll kill him!” Toga snarled, lunging forward with a knife in her hand, and Twice and Magne both agreed, shouting curses and threats at the yakuza leader. Shouta lunged forward to snag Toga by the collar, dragging her back away from the yakuza fighters tp stand in front of Magne right as Shigaraki spoke.

“Don’t,” he commanded, and the League reluctantly subsided.

“Good call, Handman,” one of the yakuza – a puppet-like figure perched on top of a bulky bruiser that reminded Shouta of nothing more than the nomu from the USJ attack – called to Shigaraki.

“Think long and hard about your organization,” Overhaul said darkly, “and once we’ve both calmed down, contact me again.” Overhaul nodded sharply at the white-cloaked man standing beside him, and he flicked a small rectangle of white paper at Shigaraki’s feet.

And then the yakuza members vanished out the door, leaving it hanging half open as they disappeared into the dark industrial cityscape beyond, and only Shouta and the League remained.

Chapter Text

Shouta slunk forward, padding to the half-open door and peering out at the withdrawing yakuza members. The one in the white coat glanced back, and Shouta bared his teeth at the man, growling low in his throat. He turned away again.

The fur along Shouta’s neck prickled, and he whirled around just in time to see Shigaraki’s outstretched hand reaching towards him.

“Hey!” Shouta snapped, leaping away from the threat. What was Shigaraki thinking? Was it lingering adrenaline from the conflict making him lash out? Or was he upset that Shouta hadn’t managed to save Mr. Compress’s arm? Either way, it seemed like an extreme reaction.

“Don’t!” Toga shouted, and before Shouta needed to do anything but dodge that first attack, she was leaping in between him and Shigaraki.

“What are you doing?” Shigaraki demanded, lurching back to avoid decaying Toga.

“You can’t hurt Demon!”

Shigaraki jolted to a stop, his expression clearly shocked and horrified even under the disembodied hand over his face. “Demon?”

Shouta ducked his head around Toga and leveled Shigaraki with his trademark unimpressed judgmental look. Shigaraki gaped at him. Clearly, he needed some serious situational awareness training. Well, at least he wasn’t actually trying to kill Shouta.

Once he was sure that Shigaraki had realized who he was, Shouta bounded away from Toga to nose at Mr. Compress. He was semiconscious, leaning heavily against Twice and taking frantic, shallow breaths. Shouta inspected what remained of his shoulder, but found nothing but bloodsoaked fabric.

He turned to the floor where Mr. Compress had fallen, and there he found what he was looking for. A small cylindrical yellow capsule with a bloody needle on one end. The glass was spiderwebbed with cracks and the metal part on the front was crumpled slightly, the needle crooked. Shouta gingerly picked it up between his teeth. He looked around briefly – Toga couldn’t be trusted not to lick the bloody end, Shigaraki didn’t have his gloves on him, and Twice was busy with Mr. Compress who was trying to avoid bleeding out – before slinking up to Magne.

She was in the process of wrapping the fabric cover back around her giant magnet, but she looked up as Shouta approached.

Shouta tilted his head up expectantly, showing her that he had something in his mouth, and Magne held out a hand to accept it. Shouta deposited the capsule into her palm. Behind her glasses, Magne blinked, lifting her hand to peer at the capsule.

“Hey, Shigaraki!” She called, and Shigaraki turned to her. “Look what Demon brought me.”

Shouta left them to their inspection and went looking for Kurogiri. It was suspicious that Kurogiri hadn’t done anything. Shouta had seen how observant he was, and how quick with his warp gates. He should have had plenty of time to intervene before Shouta needed to.

Instead of Kurogiri, Shouta found a low fog spreading over the ground from behind a huge metal hopper that was mostly rusted through. The fog was a normal misty white color, and it was thick and roiling like it had been spread from a smoke machine. Shouta gingerly ventured into the mist, sending huge billowing swirls through the white drifts.

Behind the hopper there was a towering mound of cloudy mist slowly spilling out more fog that seeped slowly over the ground. It already came up to Shouta’s elbows when he was still over a meter away. Shouta forged onwards.

The fog reached his nose and then the tips of his ears, and it smelled like rain and springtime and crisp, clean thunder, and Shouta had to pause in his approach, ducking his head and flattening his ears as he was overcome with emotion. Kurogiri’s purple-black mist was one thing, but this was so like the smokescreen technique that Oboro had been experimenting with before his death, and it made Shouta’s heart ache with the loss all over again.

He managed to force himself into motion again, venturing deeper into the fog until he found a warm body beneath the mist. He couldn’t see through the fog and his nose was clogged with the scent of thunder and rain, but Shouta’s questing paw could feel the cold edges of Kurogiri’s metal collar, slick with condensation but instantly recognizable. Just under the collar, only a few centimeters from the bottom, there was yet another needle-tipped capsule.

Shouta carefully pulled the capsule out of Kurogiri’s skin and backed out of the fog with damp fur. He turned and padded around the hopper, making a deep noise in his throat to call attention. Magne glanced up at him, stilled for a moment, then rapidly strode towards him, hand already outstretched. Shouta dropped the second capsule in her palm and jerked his head back towards Kurogiri.

“What happened?” Magne gasped, taking in the living cloud that had settled on the floor.

“What is it?” Shigaraki demanded, stalking over to them and then frowning under the hand over his face. “What happened to Kurogiri?”

“Kurogiri caused this?” Magne asked, tentatively stepping into the fog.

“That is Kurogiri,” Shigaraki scoffed, “I haven’t seen him do this in years, but when I was younger, he used to have some problems controlling his Quirk properly. Every time he failed, his mist would turn white and start spreading around like this. It makes everything damp.”

Shouta had to wonder just how long Kurogiri had been assisting Shigaraki. If he’d been struggling to control his Quirk properly when they’d first met, then Kurogiri must have been in his late teens at the oldest. He acted much older than that now, almost like a father figure, although a decidedly subservient one, and Shigaraki said he hadn’t seen Kurogiri do this in years, which implied it had been quite a while since even the temporary lapses in control that most twenty-somethings struggled with.

“Look!” Toga called, and she pointed at the seething pile of mist in the middle of the fog. The depths of the swirling cloud were beginning to tint darker. Shouta edged forward to get a better look and watched as, like blood on a white bandage, dark purple-black color seeped through the soft white mist. It started quickly, flooding out from the center where Kurogiri lay, then slowed as it reached the edges. The farthest tendrils of drifting white fog stayed resolutely white even as Kurogiri began to stir.

He rolled over, absorbing a great deal of the dark mist spread around him, and slowly levered himself upright.

“…I appear to have a small gap in my memory,” he said slowly.

“You got hit with some kind of drug,” Shigaraki said bluntly, carefully plucking the capsule from Magne’s hand. “What is it?”

“A sedative?” Magne suggested.

“Sedatives don’t work on Kurogiri,” Shigaraki scoffed.

“It didn’t feel like a sedative to me,” Mr. Compress added thoughtfully. “And I believe we were influenced by the same thing.”

Several people glanced between the two capsules in Shigaraki’s hands. Aside from the cracks and crumpled metal on one, they were identical.

“Is your memory at all altered?” Kurogiri asked lightly.

Mr. Compress shook his head. “I don’t know exactly what it did, but I felt as if I could feel each and every one of my veins, like my blood itself had nerves. I certainly don’t have any gaps in my memory.”

“That’s why it affected Kurogiri so strangely,” Shigaraki proposed, scratching idly at his neck, “He doesn’t really have veins. Kind of.”

Magne cleared her throat, interrupting the conversation and drawing all eyes to her. “I think we should discuss this later. We should prioritize getting home now; Compress needs more medical attention than we can give here.”

Shigaraki glanced at Mr. Compress, then looked away with a tsk. “Kurogiri, open a portal.”

A dark warp gate was swirling open almost before he’d finished the sentence, though Shouta thought the edges of the misty portal might have been a bit paler than Kurogiri’s usual work. Perhaps.

Shouta leaped onto the top of the rusty hopper in a single bound, scanning the area around them to ensure no one was around. With his nose to the wind and his ears pricked, he sensed nothing but those below him: the misty clean thunder of Kurogiri’s mist, the tangy metallic scent of Magnetism, the damp dusty smell of Decay. He watched from his perch as they all filed into the warp gate, vanishing through the dark mist. When it was only Kurogiri left on this side, Shouta flowed to the ground and slipped through the warp gate himself.

It opened directly into the living room, where Spinner was kneeling backwards on the couch and watching the chaos that had erupted once they were all inside. One of the chairs had been dragged from the kitchen table and Mr. Compress had been seated in it, his upper body completely bare to reveal the bloody stump where his arm should be.

Twice was busy cleaning the wound and thereby revealed why Mr. Compress hadn’t already bled out while they were in the empty warehouse. For whatever reason, Overhaul had mostly sealed up the end of Mr. Compress’s shoulder. It looked like the missing arm had merely been a birth defect, or like it had been amputated and healed for many months already.

There were a few jagged lines tracing over Mr. Compress’s shoulder, almost like the lines that formed at the beginning of Decay taking effect, where his skin was still cracked open and partly destroyed, and these Twice was carefully patching up one by one. Shouta paused to rub his head sympathetically against Mr. Compress’s knee, appreciating his higher perspective.

Also appreciating the bug-eyed terrified look Spinner was pointing at him. Spinner’s hands were clenched so tightly around the back of the couch that his claws were tearing the fabric, and even under his scales he looked pale.

Unfortunately, Shouta didn’t really have a way to clue Spinner in that he was Demon.

Well, better kill two birds with one stone.

Magne was clearly shaken. In a horrifyingly similar way to how Asui had been shaken after the League’s attack on the USJ, actually. She’d seen exactly what Overhaul could do, and Shouta had no doubt that, after watching Mr. Compress’s arm turn to nothing but a spray of blood, she had recalled Overhaul’s hand touching her skin and realized just how close she’d come to death.

Hopefully, she would assume that Overhaul just hadn’t had the time to activate his Quirk before Shouta had torn him away. Or that her memory was playing tricks on her. Loathe as he was to gaslight people, it would be far better for everyone involved if Magne assumed that she’d misremembered in a traumatizing situation and that Overhaul hadn’t actually managed to touch her.

Shouta offered Spinner a slow blink and an acknowledging flick of his tail and then slunk away to twine around Magne. It was a lot more effective now that he was at around hip-height instead of shin-height, and Magne slowly set down her giant magnet to collapse to her knees and bury shaking hands in Shouta’s fur.

His fur was much shorter than usual in this big-cat form, but Magne didn’t seem to care, practically draping herself over him. Very quickly, the side of Shouta that wasn’t stiff and clumped with flaky dried blood was soaked through with salty tears as Magne sobbed almost silently into his flank.

“What’s going on?” Dabi asked, bewildered and tired, sounding like he’d just woken up. He was standing in the doorway to the hallway, leaning heavily against the doorjamb with his eyes squinted almost closed against the relatively dim light in the living room.

“The talks with Overhaul… didn’t go super well,” Twice said, chagrined. It didn’t help that he followed up with, “I hate that guy!”

“No kidding,” Dabi snarled, gripping the doorjamb so tight his knuckles turned white. “Did he do that to Compress?”

“Don’t,” Shigaraki said warningly. He had dug his gloves out from wherever he’d stashed them and was peering thoughtfully down at something in his hand. It was the white paper that the white-robed yakuza member had thrown at him. “We’re going to wait to pass judgement. It was self-defense on Overhaul’s part. We can discuss this later.” He stowed the card in his pocket, and Shouta watched him brush past Dabi and slink down the hallway.

Shigaraki was actually thinking about Overhaul’s offer. Shouta didn’t know how to feel about that. On one hand, he wanted Shigaraki to have someone he could possibly rely on instead of All For One. On the other, he really didn’t want it to be Overhaul. Sure, Shouta completely agreed that, in this specific instance, Overhaul had reacted in self-defense. It might even be argued that his reaction was reasonably proportional to the threat. Intentionally or not, Shouta had torn off Overhaul’s arm. In turn, Overhaul had removed Mr. Compress’s arm.

Overhaul hadn’t killed anyone, but Shouta was sure that was only because he had stopped him from doing just that.

Dealing with the yakuza was… dangerous. Not just because of the yakuza themselves, who were the obvious threat in these sorts of deals. But also because dealing with the yakuza left you in the world of the yakuza, and in the mindset of the yakuza. Most Villains fully acknowledged that they lived in a dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest sort of world. But yakuza… yakuza would promise you things. Would draw up alliances and agreements and deals. And then, half the time, they would do whatever they wanted anyway.

For a Villain, having a yakuza mindset – thinking you could sign a contract and then everyone would actually follow through on it – would very quickly get you killed. Even for a Hero, expecting Villains to act like yakuza was borderline suicidal.

And, though Shouta couldn’t quite put his finger on it, there was something… off about Overhaul. Aside from the clear apathy for the lives of others, aside from his fanatical conviction in his own cause, even aside from the deadly intelligence that he’d paired with that apathy and fanaticism, there was something wrong with him. Shouta knew that what he had seen was a polished mask of Overhaul. The mask that he showed potential allies and pawns before he had full control over them. Shouta didn’t know what was under that mask, but if the mask itself was made of borderline sociopathic mania, well. There couldn’t be anything good beneath it.

Shouta flicked his tail with a deep sigh. Too many questions, not enough information. The age-old issue of investigative Hero work. He’d have to ask Nedzu for information on Overhaul now that there was enough time for it to be useful. He added that to his mental list, along with Action Plan Promethius and looking into dreamwalking or mindsharing Quirks that might be able to get past Quirk restraints.

Magne had finally stopped trembling and either Spinner had connected ‘giant black monster cat who is friendly and letting Magne cry on him’ to ‘probably Demon with some kind of shapechanging’ or he’d decided it wasn’t an immediate threat. He’d turned away from Shouta to start quizzing Mr. Compress and Twice on what exactly had gone down, with Dabi also listening attentively despite the clear exhaustion in his frame.

Shouta gently eased himself out of Magne’s hold, only actually slipping away once he was sure she was well enough off to not need his immediate support. Twice and Toga were mostly unaffected, Mr. Compress was being handled, and both Shigaraki and Kurogiri had disappeared down the hallway. They would both no doubt need some sort of comfort, though whether or not Shouta was at all qualified to give it was anyone’s guess.

In the meantime, though, Shouta would have to deal with the fact that there was still a great deal of blood – and now tears and probably snot – in his fur. It had been literally itching at him this whole time, and his discomfort only got worse once he wasn’t preoccupied with other, more immediate concerns.

At the moment, Shouta’s best bet for getting relatively clean was Toga.

Like a shadow on a mission, Shouta silently crossed the room until he was standing right behind Toga, waiting patiently for her to put the first aid kit away. She almost jumped out of her skin when she turned around and found him standing behind her, and Shouta considered the fact that, now that he was a big cat rather than a housecat, he was no doubt a lot more terrifying to encounter in low light, even if you already knew he was friendly.

“What’s the matter, Demon?” Toga asked shakily, one hand splayed over her heart.

Shouta craned his neck to gesture emphatically with his muzzle at the blood drying in his fur.

“What’s that?” Toga asked, reaching out a hand, “do you have… is this blood?”

Shouta huffed at her and blinked in confirmation.

“Are you bleeding?!” Toga demanded, and the frantic commotion was back, this time centered around Shouta, who wasn’t even bleeding. It took a great deal of snarling and shaking his head and even snapping his teeth – very, very carefully to make sure he didn’t actually bite anyone – to get them all to back off.

“Come on, you’ve got a Quirk that requires blood consumption to function,” Shouta scolded when everyone had mostly stopped fussing over him, “you should be able to smell the difference between a cat’s blood and a person’s blood, especially a person you’re already familiar with.”

That had been an interesting thing to learn about Kan when he’d revealed that he could literally smell when one of them was bleeding, no matter where or why. It had made the women particularly irritated, but it had come in quite useful when Kan had been able to tell them when someone was hiding an injury or passing it off as less important than it was.

Also, though Shouta would never admit it out loud, he had taken to subtly checking Kan’s reaction around every month to determine when Nemuri’s period had started. Just so he knew when he had to be sure to avoid her. Since Somnambulist relied a lot on hormones and pheromones, Nemuri’s control was always a lot more tenuous when she was on her period, and she had a habit of accidentally gassing any man who got within three meters of her. There was no better way to judge that sort of thing – and therefore avoid ending up knocked out and missing the first half of his class – than by piggybacking on Kan’s blood-sensing capabilities.

  “This feels like old blood.” Toga frowned, gingerly running her hand over Shouta’s side. She tentatively stuck out her tongue and licked his fur, which Shouta begrudgingly allowed. “Tastes like Compress’s.”

The room let out a collective sigh of relief, and Shouta heaved an irritated sigh of his own. This girl needed some serious Quirk training.

Everyone in this entire household needed Quirk training. Including, apparently, Shouta himself.

Toga looked taller than she had a few seconds ago. Something was tingling in his eyes, and it took him a moment to realize that his fur was itching all over, not just where various things were drying in it. His nerves prickled and burned like someone had set off firecrackers in his veins, and each one of his bones ached with a distant, needling sort of pain that set his teeth on edge. Shouta’s breath briefly caught in his throat, and he ducked his head, pinned his ears, and waited it out.

The strange sensations slowly faded, and Shouta blinked hard and glanced up. He was back to being the size of a housecat.

Well, at least now he’d fit in the sink.

Chapter Text

Shouta’s newest students weren’t doing well. Magne was shaken, Compress was hurt, Kurogiri was isolating himself, and Twice and Toga were furious, though it appeared that they couldn’t decide if that anger was pointed at Overhaul and the Shie Hassaikai or at themselves.

Shigaraki was pacing. Back and forth, all the time, hands clenched into fists as he muttered under his breath. It was nigh unintelligible, only one word in ten being anything approaching recognizable, but Shouta could get the gist. Confusion, distress, indecision. Overhaul.

Even Dabi and Spinner were affected despite not even being present for the confrontation. Spinner was hypervigilant and jumping at shadows when he was awake, and his sleep was feather-light. Dabi had sparks and flickers of flame tracing up his arms and over his shoulders, hidden under his long sleeves but visible to Shouta, who knew both what to look for and that he should be looking.

At the very least, that meant that Dabi was beginning to fuel his fire with his emotions. From what Shouta knew of him, Dabi probably thought it was a sloppy failure to control his Quirk, but it was good news in the long run. As contrary as it seemed, fueling little split-second fires with strong emotions was the first step towards properly venting built-up internal heat.

At the moment, though, the most pressing issue was Overhaul. The fact of the matter was that nobody was looking at the situation with any sort of objectivity. They were focusing on what Overhaul had done instead of what he could do, and they were reacting instead of reasoning.

Now, Shouta couldn’t really say one way or another what they should do in this situation; they undoubtedly had more information than him, even now. Information about their resources and what was expected of them, and of how far they were willing to go for their goals. And what their goals even were, at their heart.

Overhaul was dangerous. His proposition was dangerous. But he did have a point. Shigaraki and the League clearly didn’t know how to best utilize their resources. They had a lot of sway at the moment, but if they weren’t careful with it, they’d end up back where they started or worse, either ceding it to All For One after breaking him out of prison or wallowing without him and losing all the clout they’d gained under his instruction.

Working with or for Overhaul would give Shigaraki experience, but it was impossible to say whether he’d be able to use that experience for his own good, or whether he’d accept new leadership after so long being subordinate.

Either way, Shouta couldn’t decide for the League what they should do. Especially since even he didn’t know. But what he did know was that, to properly decide that for themselves, they needed to consider things logically. And as emotionally charged as everyone was now, they certainly weren’t considering anything logically.

Which, to make a long story short, meant that Shouta needed to find some way to distract them from the Overhaul situation, at least long enough for them to calm down.

So, Shouta was wriggling his hips to slip out of the hole in the wall and trotting around the side of the house once again.

Toga was standing on the porch, staring at the closed door in front of her with narrowed eyes.

Shouta padded closer until he was standing right behind her, and then he meowed loudly.

Toga practically jumped out of her skin and whirled around to find Shouta sitting casually behind her, idly swiping a paw over his ear.

“You scared me, Demon!” She scolded lightheartedly, letting out a sigh of relief. Shouta shot her a look that hopefully conveyed ‘you were literally standing out here waiting for me to show up’.

Toga just smiled at him, and Shouta jumped up to balance on her shoulder as she turned back to the door. She knocked loudly, and a second later the door swung open.

“He definitely didn’t get through any of the windows,” Dabi said, “but I didn’t see if he- oh, hi, Demon.”

“Hello,” Shouta drawled from where he was draped over Toga’s shoulders.

Riding on people’s shoulders had been a recent development. After reverting back into the small housecat form, Shouta had found himself missing the slightly higher vantage point that the big cat form had given him. Nobody realized just how much the world was designed for adult human perspectives until they were running around with an eye level less than thirty centimeters high.

It wasn’t like climbing or standing on people was a new thing, either. The first time he’d encountered Mr. Compress as a cat, Shouta had done so by instinctively retreating to his shoulder to avoid a snake. Not to mention when he’d scaled Toga to protect himself from Dabi’s tantrum and all the times he’d clambered, crawled, or draped himself on Dabi.

Also, physical contact – even with a cat – was good for mental health, and his students – all of his students, but these ones in particular – needed as much mental health support as they could get.

So, Shouta had taken to vaulting up onto people’s shoulders. Kill two or three birds with one stone; indulge his desire for a better vantage point, encourage physical contact, and provide surprise center-of-mass training.

Shouta was glad to say that Toga’s balance had improved by leaps and bounds. There was a natural sort of predator’s grace that was visible in people experienced with physical combat, and Shouta hadn’t realized how unnatural it was to see Toga without it until she had started getting it back. She’d stopped bumping into things and tripping over her feet, and, while Shouta suspected she still had a long way to go before she fully recovered from her Quirk nutritional deficiency, she was already doing much better.

“So, you didn’t see how he got out?” Toga asked, breezing back into the living room with Shouta as her attentive passenger.

“Not a clue,” Dabi sighed. “I swear, I looked away for a second and he was just gone.”

“Maybe it’s part of his Quirk?” Toga suggested, “Ooh! Maybe that’s why Kurogiri felt like he was so familiar, maybe Demon can turn into mist!”

“Demon turns into a panther,” Dabi pointed out dryly.

“Maybe the panther,” Toga said dramatically, “is made of mist!”

“The panther isn’t made of mist,” Magne said bluntly.

Shouta glanced over at the loveseat, where Magne had a book open on her lap. The book was open to the first page of chapter sixteen, and as far as Shouta could tell, Magne hadn’t turned a page in at least half an hour. She was just sitting there. With the book.

After carefully pulling his claws out of Toga’s shirt to avoid ripping anything, Shouta jumped down to the ground and trotted over to the loveseat, where he settled into a comforting loaf next to Magne.

She let out a shaky breath, resting a hand on his back, and Shouta distractedly rubbed his chin over her leg.

It felt like every time Shouta turned around, there was some new emotional crisis going on. Just like home.

Toga and Dabi had to be pulled out of their own heads, Mr. Compress needed to be jarred out of his depression spirals, Twice needed someone other than himself to talk to, Spinner needed reassurance, Magne needed reminders that she wasn’t dead… Honestly, all of them needed therapy.

If they were students at UA, Shouta would be sending them off to Hound Dog – or whatever specialized therapist Hound Dog recommended – in a snap. But they weren’t UA students. They were a team of the most infamous villains in the country, faced with an impossible decision and caught in the power struggle between All For One, Overhaul, and the legacy that one was pushing on and the other was trying to strip away from Shigaraki.

One single housecat who was too smart for his own good couldn’t fix that. He could barely even help with that.

Not for the first time, Shouta wished he had Ectoplasm or even Bakugowo’s Quirk. What he wouldn’t give to be able to split himself into half a dozen mini Shoutas, one for each student who was hurt and struggling and – most of the time – doing it alone.

If he could, he would send one – or a dozen – of the clones back to UA, to keep an eye on his students there.

But he couldn’t even get to UA with the full-sized version of him.

Then again, that had been alone.

One solitary housecat riding the train or catching the bus could be brushed off as a coincidence. A dozen tiny housecats all traveling together? That would certainly be something.

But unfortunately, Shouta did not have Bakugowo’s Quirk. Just Erasure, and now the effects of Soul Form, which Shouta sincerely doubted would include the ability to duplicate himself. At least, not for him.

So, either way, he was just one single cat – sometimes a housecat, sometimes a big cat, but always just a cat – against the world.

Honestly, if he had any chance of actually making it to UA, he might have done it now. The League were familiar enough with and cared enough about the cat version of him that Shouta might be able to get them to agree to something akin to surrender just by leveraging what he already knew and how they felt about him. Especially if he could negotiate through someone with an ability to communicate with cats and therefore not have to reveal his identity.

But there was no way that Shouta, alone and a tenth the size he should be, could make it all the way back to UA.

Wait.

Wait a second.

Shouta scrambled to his feet as realization struck, cursing his own stupidity.

Oh, he was an idiot. He wasn’t alone!

Here he was thinking about how much his students trusted this cat form, and he still assumed that he was working completely on his own. A single housecat didn’t have a chance of making it all the way from Aomori city to the heart of Musutafu, but a housecat accompanied by a person? Well, that was a different matter entirely.

Sure, his students were widely recognized Villains. Shouta couldn’t just step outside with Kurogiri or Dabi and assume everything would go just fine, but they knew how to use disguises. And if their disguises weren’t up to snuff, then Shouta could help them correct that.

Going straight for the seven-plus-hour trip from the League’s hideout to UA would be too much to ask of their three-week bond, even though it was also a two-lives-saved sort of bond. Which meant Shouta would have to ease them into it.

In the meantime, he might as well get a good feel for their dexterity and agility.

With Magne now actually reading her book – which was very important for her mental health – and Toga making herself food, that left one target for Shouta’s new plan.

Shouta darted off the loveseat and stopped dead in front of Dabi, who was meandering lazily for the living room door.

“Hey, Demon,” Dabi greeted, slightly confused, “you need something?”

Shouta glanced meaningfully at the mudroom door.

“You want to… go outside?”

Shouta blinked at him, circled once around his legs, and sidled up to the door.

Dabi shared a silent conversation with Toga that basically amounted to Dabi asking ‘are we letting him outside now?’ and Toga responding ‘Have we yet managed to stop him?’ and Dabi conceding her very valid point.

Then, Dabi pulled the mudroom door open. “Can’t you open this door on your own?” He asked as he stepped into the mudroom with Shouta. “I saw you like a few weeks ago.”

“Just because I can doesn’t mean I want to,” Shouta said, “come on, we’ve got things to do.”

“Okay, jeeze.” Dabi opened the front door, and Shouta stepped into the doorway just to turn and sit directly in the middle, facing Dabi. Dabi stared down at him, and Shouta stared back up, unblinking.

“Are you going to go through, or just sit here all day?” Dabi asked.

“Every time I almost forget that you know nothing about cats, you somehow find a way to remind me,” Shouta remarked, and then stared meaningfully at Dabi’s beat-up black converse.

“Ugh,” Dabi grumbled, but he followed Shouta’s silent instructions and crouched to slip his shoes on.

“Where exactly are we going?” Dabi asked as Shouta led him out onto the street. That was a great question.

At the moment, all Shouta knew was up. They were going up.

With feline grace and years of training, Shouta clambered up the sides of buildings – jumping from windowsills to ledges to narrow protruding bars and more – with ease. Dabi looked up at him from the ground and scowled while Shouta began casually running a paw over his ears.

Then, very reluctantly, Dabi followed him.

Shouta led Dabi on a merry chase all around the city. They scaled buildings, raced over rooftops, caught busses, stood on top of busses, and even once Shouta managed to convince him to run across a short board spanning two roofs.

In all, Shouta would say that Dabi performed better than he had expected.

He clearly knew his own body and what it was capable of, and while that wasn’t a whole lot – any one of Shouta’s UA students would beat Dabi in a direct test of strength or balance – Dabi certainly demonstrated a mastery of what skills he did have.

His flexibility was decent, and his endurance – as expected of an energy-intensive emitter Quirk fighter – was off the charts. He was also brazen as anything, and willingly followed Shouta onto and through private property, restricted areas, and places neither a cat nor a person really should have been so late at night.

Also, it was clear that Dabi was having a great time. He was grinning a real, genuine smile that didn’t look anything like his wild arsonist’s grin. It was somehow softer. Still wild and toothy, but without that raw edge that came from constant emotional strain and mental imbalance.

As they rode home on the top of the bus, Shouta realized that he had enjoyed it, too. It had been so long since he’d gone free running just for the fun of it. No Hero patrol or dangerous threats, just running over rooftops under the stars, taking in the distant sounds of the city at night so far below him and feeling the wind ruffle his hair.

He really should do this more often. Preferably after he got back to his proper human form.

Shouta jumped onto Dabi’s shoulder as the two of them slipped off the roof of the bus, and they turned back towards the safehouse. Dabi was walking slower now, moseying along the sidewalk instead of up racing across the tops of buildings. He was slightly out of breath still but grinning widely.

Dabi let them into the safehouse and toed his shoes off, and Shouta immediately made for his water bowl. He made sure Dabi got some water, too, and then worked on bullying him into doing some stretches.

It was a bit harder than he would have expected – cats, while very stretchy, just weren’t built to do it in the same way as humans. Fortunately, Dabi appeared to know how to cool down from a workout, so after a bit of stretching and a long drink of water, he was ready to be prodded into bed, and Shouta could set his sights on a new target.

Since most of the League were already in bed and hopefully staying that way until morning, Shouta didn’t have a lot of options to choose from. Kurogiri was a no go – he was busy cleaning the boys’ bathroom, which Shouta was certainly not going to mess with, and he doubted Kurogiri would bother to accompany him properly even if Shouta did get him outside – but Spinner had woken up hours ago and had nothing better to do at the moment, so Shouta moved his focus to him.\

Spinner was much easier to get out the door but far more frustrating to work with. It took him ages to realize that Shouta was trying to get him to follow, and then he kept expecting them to go somewhere. Hadn’t anyone ever told him that the joy was in the journey?

Eventually, though, Spinner got the idea, and he made up for his earlier difficulties by being a great free running buddy. Since Gecko let him stick to walls, he could scale buildings that even Shouta struggled with, and his balance and speed on flat ground were also pretty good. Not as good as a Pro-Hero-turned-cat, but certainly better than most of Shouta’s UA students.

His endurance wasn’t as good as Dabi’s; in fact, it was pretty trash, but he was more inclined to stealth than Dabi and had a natural knack for it that Shouta very much appreciated. There was something about climbing walls and sneaking up on your enemies that gave Shouta maybe a bit too much joy.

Once he was in the swing of it, Spinner really got going. Sometimes, he even managed to outpace Shouta. Which, of course, led to Shouta redoubling his attempts at losing Spinner in the snarl of the city at night and Spinner responding by redoubling his own attempts at outdoing Shouta.

The two of them raced through the city together, leaping between rooftops, climbing sheer walls, and sprinting after each other. Shouta could turn faster and fit quicker through smaller spaces, but Spinner easily overtook him on long a straightaway and had a lot of vertical advantage.

Spinner was more wary than Dabi regarding trespassing in places that could get them caught, but he was far less cautious when it came to dangerous stunts or heights. If it looked cool, Spinner would probably do it. Or at least try it.

In the end, Shouta decided to head home because Spinner was getting just a little too risky with his stunts. He fell off a wall and would have plummeted to the ground three stories below if it weren’t for Gecko letting him cling to the smooth wall, and Shouta decided to call that good. They could do some more crazy stunts in a safer environment, at least the first couple times.

The second ride back home on the top of a bus was much like the first, and Shouta loafed beside Spinner, who had his legs hanging idly over the edge of the bus.

“Was there a purpose for this adventure?” Spinner asked, vaguely curious as he stared up at the stars.

Shouta flicked his tail and twitched an ear, slumping against Spinner’s leg.

“Alright,” Spinner hummed. “We’ll have to do this again sometime.”

They would. They certainly would.

Chapter Text

Shouta scrambled up onto the top of the fence, just barely hauling his hips up over the edge, and Toga looked at him like he had lost his mind.

It was something approaching morning, and he and Toga had been running around the city like crazy people.

Without an advantage like Gecko, Toga hadn’t really been a challenge for him, but she’d kept up better than Dabi and was the perfect mixture of Dabi’s willingness to go anywhere and Spinner’s willingness to do anything. She’d also proven herself to be quite stealthy and had decent endurance.

Toga had a good handle on her center of balance, though Shouta noticed that occasionally she would look surprised when something like a big jump or tricky stunt actually worked. That implied a somewhat worrisome mentality that she’d try dangerous things like that while expecting to fail, but Shouta had to start somewhere.

Toga’s expression morphed into one of determination, and she scanned the smooth cement fence that Shouta had just jumped on top of. It wouldn’t have given Spinner pause and Dabi would have just given up, but Toga took it as the challenge it was.

She backed up several steps, then took off in a run straight at the wall. She managed to run a few steps up and just barely catch the ledge that Shouta was standing on with her fingers. Shouta stepped back, letting her get her feet under her and, slowly but surely, drag herself up onto the narrow ledge at the top of the fence.

“Now we’re going this way,” Shouta said, and did just that.

Toga got up into a carefully balanced crouch, then started off after Shouta with her arms spread like she was walking a balance beam.

The fence stopped abruptly against a wall, a smooth side of a building with the only thing marring the surface being the occasional window. Shouta leaped up from window box to window box until he found one that was propped open.

The second he landed in the box, the fur on his spine was standing up. There was something decidedly wrong at this window, though Shouta couldn’t tell if it was his cat instincts or his Hero instincts that were telling him that.

Toga caught the windowsill with a grunt, laboriously clambering onto it as Shouta scanned the room with a critical gaze.

At first glance, it looked like an ordinary storage room and pantry. Near the back, where they were perched on the windowsill, the shelves were piled with stacks of bulk foodstuffs. Closer to the front, there were neat rows of plastic containers, all ranging somewhere from almost empty to filled to the brim.

Except all the food was animal food.

Giant bags of dog food and cat food were stacked next to rabbit feed and birdseed. There were two coolers in the corner, both labeled in neat, bold script. One ‘snakes’ and the other ‘fish’.

“Is this a pet shop?” Toga wondered aloud, swinging her legs over the windowsill to lean into the room.

No, it was something a bit worse than a pet shop. Shouta could smell catnip and a few other things that he couldn’t name but that made a sense of foreboding trace up his spine. One of the shelves held dozens of tiny glass jars like the type they used in the hospital to fill needles. Beside them, there was a box of individually sealed needles. The collars, muzzles, and harnesses hanging on the wall were far more high-tech than should be necessary, and there were dozens of overlapping claw marks on the floor, at base of the door, and even on the windowsill.

It was certainly not a pet shop. And oh, the irony. That Shouta, a person with a Quirk who was currently trapped in the form of a cat, would stumble across an illegal Quirk breeding facility.

“Oooh,” Toga hummed, slipping off the windowsill to venture into the room, “that’s pretty!”

She had picked up one of the collars, turning it over in her hands. It was bedecked in far too many cheap rhinestones, clearly an attempt to cover the high-tech electronics built into the collar, though they were doing a miserable job of it.

“That’s weird,” Toga said, pulling the collar open and peering at the inside, “how come it’s all electric like that? Is this a shock collar?”

Shouta wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but he was certain that electrocution wasn’t its primary purpose. It was a Quirk suppressing collar.

When Shouta had first adopted Missy, he’d looked into the possibility of getting him a Quirk dampening collar of some sort. In his research, he’d ended up going down the rabbit hole of Quirk suppressant technology and – since he was in college at the time – even doing a lot of assignments for his classes, both Quirk Theory and Law and Ethics, about Quirk suppressants, including the manufacturing processes and the effects they had on different types of Quirks.

The upshot was that, while ‘official’ Quirk suppressants like the ones the police and prisons used were generally well-made and specialized, any form of Quirk suppressant that was available for widespread use was… well, bad. Horrible, in fact. Quirk suppressants had to be specialized, because unanimously targeting the alpha gene that caused Quirks could result in disastrous results.

The alpha gene provided necessary meshing between the brain and all parts of the Quirk. Emitter Quirks relied on their alpha gene to activate and deactivate, but also to target, to provide necessary checks and drawbacks, and to inform the brain of Quirk exhaustion. Depending on how the Quirk was activated and what exactly it did, a blanket dampening of all alpha gene utilization could result in anything from mild inconvenience to death. Using a blanket dampener on Shouta would make his vision just a bit worse and mostly get rid of his migraines. Using a blanket dampener on Hizashi would suffocate him.

For Transformation and Heteromorphic Quirks, it only got worse.

A blanket suppression on someone with a Heteromorphic Quirk could paralyze them. It could make their body reject extra or ‘unnatural’ limbs. Shouta had seen reports of skin sloughing off, organs being attacked by their own immune system, complete nervous system failure, and worse. Awful, disgusting, nightmare-inducing stuff that made even him squeamish.

The problem, though, was that there was basically no way to get specialized Quirk suppressants unless you worked for the government, got a prescription – which required extensive paperwork and investigation and were rarely granted even in extreme cases – or went to the black market.

And few people would go to the black market for something as simple as pet collars, especially for their illegal Quirk breeding practice.

Shouta bolted off the windowsill and leaped up to snatch the collar out of Toga’s hand before she could do something monumentally stupid like put it on. He dropped the collar back on the shelf and glanced at Toga – who was blinking at him with a mixture of hurt and confusion.

“Demon?” She asked, “is something wrong?”

Shouta lashed his tail, looking away indecisively. He hated the idea of an organization like this. It was the stuff of Nedzu’s nightmares and the root of his trauma, and Shouta had sworn – in the privacy of his own thoughts if nowhere else – to never let anything of the sort remain standing if he had any way of eliminating it. Even beyond that, breeding and selling animals for their Quirks was just one step away from selling humans for their Quirks. Quirked animals were smart. Insanely smart. Smart enough that Shouta, an experienced Underground Hero with a degree and a teaching license, could pass himself off as a Quirked animal with basically no effort. An adult Quirked animal could be smarter than a human child.

On the other hand, though, Shouta was a housecat. Sure, he was a Hero housecat, but this organization – whoever they were and however they were run – specifically specialized in catching and keeping highly intelligent animals. Shouta was smarter than any non-intelligence-Quirked animal, but also, his only backup was unreliable at best. Maybe the League would be willing to help with this. Possibly one or two in particular; Toga or Dabi or even Spinner. But without that assurance… Shouta couldn’t risk it.

He'd alert Hizashi to the existence of a Quirk breeding facility in this area and let him handle it. Shouta knew that Nedzu wouldn’t go anywhere near an investigation like this. Not if he could help it and certainly not in person. Too many bad memories.

So, Shouta turned away from the collar and feigned nonchalance. Just an ordinary cat doing ordinary cat things, attacking anything that moved or sparkled. Nothing to concern yourself with.

“No,” Toga said softly, “don’t do that, Demon. You’re lying. Stop lying.”

Shouta paused mid-step.

“I can see it,” Toga said, and she sounded close to tears, “I can always see it, Demon, tell me what’s wrong.”

Oh, Kami, Shouta should have realized that ages ago. Of course, Toga was so good at interpreting what he wanted. An increased ability to notice and read body language would make perfect sense as a secondary or tertiary ability with an imitation Quirk like Transform.

Shouta dropped his head for a second, trying to gather his thoughts. Okay. Toga was a walking body-language-lie-detector. She was also the most likely to be willing to help him with something like this, tied only with Dabi. She was stealthy, quick on her feet, and she wasn’t going to let this go easily.

He lifted his head, mind made up. He’d start with scouting the area, try to gather as much information as he could before passing it on to Hizashi. That would get Toga off his back and give Hizashi a better starting point in his investigation.

“Okay,” Toga breathed, “what’s the plan, Demon?”

Shouta took only an instant to be dumbfounded by the fact that, after only a few weeks, Toga had decided to take orders from a housecat. Then, he started for the door.

Toga opened it for him, silently and only a crack, and Shouta made an exaggerated ‘stay here’ gesture before he slipped through the opening.

On the inside, it was clear that the building was a reclaimed apartment. Faint outlines of apartment numbers were still evident on the doors that had mail slots, the ones that hadn’t been replaced. The whole place smelled like dirt and rot and various animals. Dogs, cats, rabbits, birds, several rodent-y things, a couple of difficult-to-distinguish reptiles, and more.

Shouta swiftly trotted down the hallway, nose in the air, trying to figure out which rooms were for animals and which were for humans. He was only halfway down the hallway, standing black and fluffy and obvious in the middle of the muted cream carpet, when the door that used to be apartment 302 flew open and a woman strode out. She had straight black hair chopped off into a severe bob and bottle-green eyes that seemed to swirl almost hypnotically.

Her eyes were… entrancing. Shouta couldn’t look away. He couldn’t look away. He couldn’t even move.

“Ugh,” the woman said, “that stupid black one got out again.”

Several voices grumbled and swore from inside the room she’d just emerged from, and another person stepped out behind her. He was relatively short but overly built, his muscles bulging under his skin, and when he folded his arms Shouta distantly worried that his shoulders might pop from the strain of holding his deltoids in.

“Get it another collar,” the man grunted, stepping around the woman, “I’ll hold the little blender still.”

The man’s hand clamped down on Shouta’s neck, and he still couldn’t move. He let out a little sound, nothing but a throaty whine of desperation, and the man huffed a cruel laugh.

“Oh, yeah, you don’t like that, do you, you little monster,” he shook Shouta roughly, and Shouta had to clench his jaw to avoid his teeth knocking together. “If they didn’t want all the pieces of ya intact, I’d have cut your claws off ages ago.”

“Let go of him!”

The door to the storage room flew open so hard it nearly broke off its hinges, and Toga’s footsteps sounded light but swift down the hallway.

The woman startled, her gaze darting away from Shouta, and he found that he could finally move. He couldn’t pull out of the man’s grip, but he could twist and wriggle and clamp his teeth down hard on the man’s thumb.

The man started cursing furiously, and Shouta used his distraction to flash Erasure for just a split second. It was just long enough. He shot out of the man’s grip in the instant his hold wasn’t Quirk-enforced, and then Shouta was running. Leaving the man and the woman behind to retreat to where Toga was now standing stunned in the hallway, her knife dangling precariously from limp fingers and her gaze fixed unwaveringly on the woman.

Shouta did the only thing that made sense. He dug his claws deep into Toga’s leg.

“Ouch!” she yelped, stumbling backwards and jerking her gaze away from the woman. “Oh, you-” Her eyes focused, and she was back to being furious, drawing a second knife from under her skirt.

“We need backup!” The woman called into the room they’d both just left, and Shouta darted his gaze around the hallway, trying to find anything of use.

For a moment, he thought someone had propped a mirror up on the wall. What other explanation was there for the yellow-eyed black cat in the grey-white collar that was staring at him? Except this cat was much smaller than Shouta, almost half his size, and it still had a round, younger face shape and soft fluffy kitten fur.

The cat mewed at him, two parts curious, one part sympathetic, one part judgmental.

“I’m working on it,” Shouta defended, lashing his tail and darting in to rip his claws down the man’s leg just in time to make him stumble as Toga went on the attack.

Toga shifted her grip on one of her knives, spinning on one heel and bringing it up in an arc that Shouta knew in a split second would be fatal to the man. He didn’t have time to swear, only worked on a perfect melding of Hero and cat instincts to leap from the ground to the woman’s shoulder to Toga’s wrist, changing the angle of her swing just enough to make the imminently lethal stab wound into a painful but nowhere near lethal cut.

“No killing people unless they deserve it!” Shouta shouted as he fell off of Toga’s wrist and twisted mid-air to land on his feet.

“Demon!” Toga scolded, then yelped as the man counterattacked while she was distracted.

Shouta growled under his breath, lashing his tail and weaving between the shifting legs. Toga was a good knife fighter, but she didn’t have all her gear with her, and she was already tired out from running around the city. She could probably handle these two on her own now that she knew to avoid looking at the woman’s eyes, but there were more pouring out of the room already.

“The window!” Shouta shouted, nipping at Toga’s ankle to grab her attention, “Come on, to the window!”

Fortunately, she got the message. Toga turned on the spot and darted towards the door to the storeroom, Shouta hot on her heels. The door was still hanging open, and they made it through the door, out the window, and onto the narrow wall beneath with barely a second to spare. From there, instead of going back to ground level, Shouta went up.

Sure, they might go looking for a cat on the rooftops instead of the streets, but pretty much no one expected a person to take to the roofs.

Toga, fortunately, followed him. Just as they’d been doing for over an hour before, Shouta led the way along precarious ledges, over daring leaps, and up sheer walls, and Toga followed him faithfully. Also following, like Shouta’s fluffy shadow, was the black cat from the Quirk breeding facility.

Finally, once Shouta deemed them to be well and truly safe, he slowed to a stop on the edge of a high rooftop.

Toga dropped heavily onto the ledge, breathing hard, and the cat settled down so close to Shouta that they were almost touching.

“Hoo boy,” Toga heaved, “that was quite the rush! You good, Demon?”

Shouta patted her hand reassuringly and mustered a brief purr in the base of his throat.

“What was that place?” Toga wondered aloud, leaning forward to prop her elbows on her knees. “Some kind of pet store gone wrong, huh?”

Shouta knew that the concept of Quirk breeding wasn’t really a well-known idea. Most people didn’t really think about Quirk trafficking or Quirked animals unless they ran into them a lot, and the possibility of an overlap – selling animals for their Quirks – rarely occurred to anyone who wasn’t introduced to it first. He flicked an ear and blinked at Toga.

“That’s not very nice.” She wrinkled her nose in exaggerated distaste. “I guess I understand why you were so upset.” Toga patted Shouta’s back briefly, and he allowed it with rapidly fading reluctance.

“Who’s the new friend, though?” Toga asked, quickly distracted from the topic of Quirk breeding. Shouta supposed that, as a human with no close connections with Quirk breeding, it made sense that it wouldn’t affect her very much.

Shouta also glanced at the unknown cat. According to Shouta’s nose and the cat that now lived in his brain, the unknown cat was male. He tilted his head at them, ears flicking, and then wriggled his butt to scoot a little bit closer to Shouta.

He smelled a bit dirty, like he didn’t know how to groom himself properly, but he was fortunately wearing a grey-white flea collar almost identical to Shouta’s own, so he at least didn’t have fleas. His eyes were wide and yellow, though Shouta couldn’t say exactly what shade with his washed-out cat vision. His fur was black and of about medium length, and it looked very soft.

“He looks just like you!” Toga squealed, leaning over Shouta to reach towards the unknown cat. “Like a widdle baby Demon! Oh! I’m gonna call him Baby Demon! You’re such a cutie, Baby Demon! Aww, so soft and fluffy!”

The newly dubbed Baby Demon looked decidedly apathetic to his new name. He deigned to sniff the hand that Toga shoved under his nose, then for some reason glanced at Shouta.

There was curiosity and wariness in his eyes, and also something like desperate hope.

“I’d recommend you go for it,” Shouta said, slumping down to lazily drape himself over the concrete, “she gives great pets.”

Baby Demon tentatively nudged his forehead into Toga’s palm, and she proceeded to cup her hands around his head and scratch at the base of his ears. It took only a few seconds for Baby Demon to start purring up a storm, literally crawling over Shouta to get closer to Toga. He was so enamored by Toga and her gentle scratching that Shouta almost expected him to misstep and somehow fall off the roof.

But Baby Demon made it to Toga’s lap successfully, and Shouta flicked his tail and hid a smirk in his paws. It appeared he’d found just what he was looking for. One extra him. Twice the affectionate black cats, twice the therapy.

Or, as Hizashi would put it, twice the thera-purr. Or would that be fur-apy?

Shouta needed to get out of here. He was making dumb puns in his own head, and the only person he had to share them with was an actual cat.

Chapter Text

Dabi craned his neck back, peering up at the building in front of them. There was nothing externally off about it. Nothing to suggest that it was anything different from the dozens of buildings around it. Shouta twined around Dabi’s ankles, his ears flattening as he stared at the door.

“You sure this is the place?” Dabi asked dubiously.

“Yes, I’m sure!” Toga defended, “and Demon thinks so, too!”

They all glanced down at Shouta, who flicked an ear and blinked in confirmation.

“Alright,” Dabi sighed, “and… what’s our beef with them?”

“Oh, sure, you’re all ready to set anyone and everyone on fire, but the second they actually deserve it, now you hesitate!” Toga huffed, propping her hands on her hips. In Dabi’s defense, this was the first time he’d been presented with an opportunity to set someone on fire since after his Quirk buildup meltdown. That sort of thing could – and had – wreak havoc on someone’s emotional regulation. It made sense that, without the Quirk buildup constantly urging him to use his Quirk, he was more discerning with his targets.

“I’m just saying!” Dabi defended, “we’ve been laying low for a bit, trying to avoid Hero attention, and this feels exactly like the sort of thing that would draw Hero attention.”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“We just have to be careful about it,” Toga said, folding her arms with a huff. “Maybe if your fire wasn’t so obvious, it wouldn’t be as much of an issue.”

“Are you calling me a one-trick pony?” Dabi demanded, almost scandalized. “I’ll have you know, I can do subtle! I can start perfectly ordinary fires, too!”

Once again, Shouta wanted to slam his head against something hard and unmoving. Dabi already knew how to maintain lower-temperature fires? And he wasn’t?! Why, why, why? Why was everyone so cosmically underinformed!?

“Well then, let’s do it!” Toga huffed, “C’mon, we’ll just do a little bit of subtle interference. If we don’t do anything, they might come after Demon!”

That, for some reason, seemed to convince Dabi. And, though they hadn’t said anything since this conversation had started, Twice and Spinner both also started looking more convinced.

Shouta had to admit, he hadn’t seen Twice coming. Dabi, sure, he was weirdly protective of Shouta these days. The second Toga brought up the fact that someone had tried to snatch him – and had threatened him with declawing – Dabi had been sold. Spinner was still a bit wary of Shouta, but now that he didn’t need any prompting to maintain his proper crepuscular sleep schedule – and especially after their nighttime romp together – Spinner was a lot more relaxed around Shouta. Twice, though… Twice had come out of left field.

The issue that Shouta had was that… well, he kind of didn’t know what to do with Twice. His issues looked Quirk-induced on the surface, but despite appearances, Twice had a frankly astounding knowledge of and skill for using his own Quirk. If he hadn’t had top-tier, Hero-support levels of Quirk counseling, Shouta would eat his scarf.

But what Twice really needed was a therapist. An actual trained psychologist who could figure out the root of his dissociative identity disorder. Someone who he could talk to and who could talk back and help him work through his issues in healthy, beneficial ways.

Shouta did what he could, but he didn’t have anywhere near the training or even the communication ability to really help Twice.

Either way, Twice had rolled out to join them when Toga had brought up the ‘mission’ she was leading. As far as Shouta could tell, the mission objective was just destroying whatever they could and getting revenge on people for the perceived slight of attempting to catch a cat that wandered into the middle of their animal-catching organization.

Since that destruction and revenge was going to be wreaked on a Quirk breeding organization that Shouta would have gone after on his own regardless, he hadn’t objected. And of course, he’d had to come along, or there was the risk of someone – friend or foe – getting killed, which Shouta wouldn’t stand for.

“Alright,” Spinner scratched his head idly as he peered up at the walls of the building, “what’s the plan?”

That made Toga falter. She clearly hadn’t thought past getting everyone there to launch the attack.

“I’ll try to get in through the front door, if I can,” Dabi supplied absentmindedly, “Then we’ll have two or three lanes of attack. We can’t leave Double sand anywhere, so if we do need to duplicate someone, we’ll have to make sure we bring them out with us or torch the body. Spinner will go through the window, if you can find one that’s open, and Toga will come down from upstairs. Toga and Spinner will be in charge of finding and releasing animals. Focus first on big animals like dogs or anything with a size enhancement or combat-oriented Quirk. What floor were the Quirk breeders on?”

Nobody said anything for a long moment, all of them looking at Dabi like he’d just revealed that his scars were fake, and he painted them on every morning.

“What?” Dabi scowled.

“Since when have you been a plan-maker?”

“Hey, I was the one who kidnapped that Bakugou kid.”

“Yeah, but your plan for that was just ‘jump in headfirst and bring Compress to make sure you actually succeed,’” Spinner pointed out ruthlessly.

It made perfect sense for Dabi post-meltdown to be more capable of accessing the strategic side of his brain, so Shouta mostly tuned out their increasingly spirited discussion of Dabi’s questionable planning skills. It was beyond frustrating to learn that the attack on the summer training camp hadn’t had any more strategy put into it than Kaminari’s attempts at flirting, but such was life. At the moment, Shouta had bigger things on his mind.

Most notably, Dabi had used the term ‘Quirk breeders’. That was not a thing that most people would say. Toga hadn’t said it. She hadn’t even known there was anything like Quirk breeding going on. So, where had Dabi got that information from?

Shouta had his suspicions.

With what he knew about Dabi and his family situation, it made sense for him to care a lot about Quirk trafficking, at least when it came to Quirk marriages. Combine that with a Quirked animal that Dabi had grown close to and which the League had initially been planning to hold onto for the sole purpose of giving All For One its Quirk… It made sense that Dabi would make the connection between Quirk trafficking and Quirk breeding, and he had access to the internet.

What Shouta was more surprised by was the fact that Dabi had recognized a Quirk breeding organization from only Toga’s short explanation. Then again, if he’d been researching it recently, it made sense that it would be the first thing to jump into his brain.

“This is a stupid argument,” Twice said loudly, cutting through the now somewhat heated argument about any given League member’s capacity for formulating coherent action plans. Shouta could see him bite back a personality switch even though his face was almost completely obscured by the paper bag over his head. “Don’t we have somewhere to be?”

“There!” Toga pointed energetically in the vague direction of the Quirk breeding organization.

“Alright,” Dabi sighed, “what floor was it on?”

Silence.

Shouta twisted to level a flat look at Toga. She didn’t even remember?

“Three or four?” Toga hedged sheepishily.

“Demon?”

Shouta resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he tapped Dabi’s leg three times. He, at least, remembered important things like that. It was fortunate that all they needed was a simple number and not something that required a detailed verbal response, because apparently Shouta couldn’t trust Toga to supply that information.

“Okay,” Dabi said, “third floor. Toga, Spinner?”

“Going,” Toga chirped, skipping away.

“Already gone,” Spinner sighed, slinking off in the other direction as he scratched at the scales on the back of his neck.

“Twice, what are you doing?”

“I think I’ll stick with Demon,” Twice decided, “see if he has anything else to share with us.”

“You do that,” Dabi said, staring almost fatalistically up at the building. He took a deep breath, adjusted the medical face mask he was wearing, and started forward. Shouta flicked his tail and glanced at Twice, who was watching him expectantly.

“I hope you’re good at parkour,” Shouta warned.

As it turned out, while not capable of the sheer verticality that Spinner got with Gecko, Twice was actually pretty great at free running. He clearly knew how every little piece of his body worked and moved, and he used that to his advantage. For reasons that Shouta assumed were related to his Quirk, Twice just happened to have a reinforced, sharp-edged measuring tape on him. With thick gloves over his hands, he used the measuring tape in a similar way to how Shouta used his capture weapon to assist in moving up and around the outsides of buildings.

 The two of them made it to the roof with only minor difficulty, Shouta leading the way up narrow ledges and across precarious perches. And then it was time for a deeper investigation.

In this part of town, the gaps between buildings ranged from narrow to nonexistent. Shouta peered down each of the ones around the building that hosted the actual Quirk breeding operation, scanning the walls and scenting the air. A cat’s sense of smell was a great boon in this search, especially with his vision not what it was supposed to be.

Shouta smelled it before he saw it.

If they wanted to rip this organization out by its roots instead of just giving a few people a scare, they’d need to get actual law enforcement involved. Animal abuse – even of Quirked animals – was hard to pin down and harder to prosecute.

Possession of illegal drugs and unlawful use of Quirk suppression technology, though… that was something that could very quickly get someone in real trouble.

The dumpster the Quirk breeders were using smelled like a litter box. A litter box filled with hairballs, covered in bird poop, lined with rotten vegetables, and doused liberally in bleach, disinfectant, and artificial citrus scent so strong and sharp that it was practically a bioweapon.

Shouta leaped nimbly back down the side of the building, and Twice followed him gamely, though he did grimace so hard from the reek of the dumpster that Shouta could see it under the paper bag.

“Is there a reason we went up and down the building?” Twice asked as he landed back on the ground with only a slight stumble.

“Builds character,” Shouta answered absentmindedly as he padded around the base of the dumpster. In truth, it had been partly to stay out of sight and partly because scaling the building’s walls was a lot easier than scaling the tall, smooth fences that closed off this alley they were now standing in. But Twice couldn’t even understand him, so Shouta wasn’t going to bother explaining.

“What are we looking for?” Twice asked, then absently muttered, “I hate climbing things,” under his breath.

“Anything that looks illegal,” Shouta said, gingerly nudging a mess of twisted wires away with one paw. It looked like a birdcage that had been crushed by some giant fist, and Shouta was just glad that there were no bloodstains or shredded feathers on any of the bristling sharp-edged steel.

Shouta carefully poked through the dumpster and the ground around, trying to desperately divorce himself from his too-sensitive feline nose. This sort of thing was bad enough as a human investigating more typical dumpsters. Here, with this embodiment of filth and rancid odors, it was all Shouta could do to shove down his gag reflex and keep searching.

“Ugh, what is that? It looks creepy…”

It was Twice who finally discovered something useful, right as Shouta began to catch the faint scent of Quirk-produced smoke. It wasn’t necessarily a welcome smell as it joined the scents of dumpster and feces and painful nauseating cleaning products, but it was probably a good sign. It meant he was that much closer to getting out of here.

Shouta glanced over at Twice and found him crouching over an actual dead animal. It was a bird of some kind, though Shouta couldn’t begin to tell what. Partly because he didn’t know a whole lot about birds, partly because the bird had been partially transformed into some kind of flowing abstract structure made of bone fragments and musculature and sprays of colorful feathers that almost looked sculpted.

Its head was lost to the macabre distortion, along with its left wing and most of its right. Its tailfeathers and lower body were still intact, and there was a tiny still-active Quirk suppressant band wrapped around its leg. They hadn’t even bothered to remove the poor thing’s Quirk suppressant before dumping it on the ground beside the trash – not even making it into the trash can – like a worthless broken toy.

Shouta picked his way towards Twice with fury swelling in his chest. The bird smelled very recently dead, and Shouta gestured at it with his nose before looking up at Twice expectantly.

“I’m not picking that thing up!” Twice hissed, and for once he agreed with himself, because he followed that up with, “You’re crazy, Demon!”

“You have gloves for your human hands and all I have are my teeth, which are built into my mouth!” Shouta returned with a growl. “Pick it up!”

Twice picked it up. He seemed disgusted to be anywhere near it, but he picked it up. Shouta was going to count that as a win.

“Let’s go,” Shouta said, lifting his nose to the air. The scent of smoke was rapidly overpowering the scent of filth from the dumpster. It was, indeed, time to go.

Shouta led Twice up the much easier side of the adjacent building and then around the side, to the front of the Quirk breeders’ building. Twice held the dead bird at arm’s length as much as possible, looking disgusted under his paper bag.

By the time they reached the front of the building, thick black smoke was frothing out of the windows on the third floor. People were panicking, and Shouta could hear the distant sounds of sirens.

Dabi, Toga, and Spinner met them on the corner, along with a couple dozen other people. All of them looked slightly worse for wear, smudged with ash and wide-eyed from adrenaline, but nobody looked seriously injured. Nobody looked quite devastated enough to have left behind a friend or family member or even a stranger in the burning building, so Shouta had hopes that the whole building had been properly evacuated.

“Heroes will be coming soon,” Dabi said, pulling his face mask a bit higher to cover the scarred skin under his eyes.

Heroes were, in fact, already on the scene. A Rescue Hero that Shouta wasn’t familiar with was riding in on top of one of the fire trucks, blending in with her red and white outfit. She was wearing a gas mask but not a lot of thermal gear, so Shouta was forced to assume she had some sort of internal temperature regulation as part of her Quirk.

Or really, really awful costume designers, but he hoped it was the internal temperature regulation bit.

“Uh, Demon, what did you want me to do with… this?” Twice held out the dead bird like it had personally offended him, and Toga made a slightly nauseous expression and resolutely turned away.

“Over here,” Shouta said, slinking through the crowd towards the too-muscular man with the gripping Quirk. He was wearing a long coat that was singed in several places. Shouta could tell from a single glance that the burns on his coat were from intentional Quirk use, and likely any halfway decent Hero would be able to tell that, too. He’d be snapped up for an interview in seconds, as soon as they started investigating the fire. Shouta was sure that the inside of the building would also display clear signs of fire-Quirk arson. Dabi could make more typical fire, but that didn’t mean he was subtle with it.

Twice picked up on Shouta’s intentions pretty quickly, and – after shooting him a decidedly horrified and disgusted look – managed to reluctantly pull off a relatively smooth bit of sleight of hand to plant the dead bird in all its incriminating glory in the man’s pocket.

Then, all five of them rapidly stole away from the crowd. Shouta let Toga take the lead, falling back to act as the rearward, ears on a constant swivel and nose to the air. Nobody came after them.

They made it back to the hideout without any trouble. Nobody even looked at them twice, despite their somewhat worse for wear appearance. And Twice wearing a paper bag over his head. Then again, in modern Quirked society, a man with a bag over his head was far from the strangest thing you’d see on the street on any given day.

Toga threw the door open with her usual indomitable energy, and they all filed in after her. Shouta immediately went to his water bowl, noting absently that the TV was on, and the local news was playing. A woman with literally sparkling eyes was standing in front of the building they’d just come from, mic in hand. Behind her, the red-and-white-clad Hero was emerging from the building with a length of fire wound around her neck like a superheated feather boa.

“You’ve been busy,” Shigaraki observed, voice as dry as his skin.

“They deserved it!” Toga huffed, skipping up the steps to the kitchen. “They were gonna hurt Demon!”

“They were doing a lot more than hurting Demon,” Twice muttered, still looking slightly queasy, “I need to wash my hands.”

“Where’d Baby Demon get to?” Toga asked, clattering around in the kitchen.

“Jacopo,” Shigaraki emphasized, “is over here.”

The new black cat’s name had become a matter of hot debate. Toga was still insistent on calling him Baby Demon. Shigaraki wanted to name him Jacopo. Why exactly Shouta wasn’t sure, but it had something to do with videogame demons – or possibly devils? – and that old poet Dante. Mr. Compress was rooting for names from the musical Cats whenever he was present and coherent enough to argue his point. Kurogiri had yet to weigh in. Dabi wanted to call him Soot, or, barring that, Char. Magne had picked up Toga’s suggested name but had shortened it to just ‘Baby’.

Personally, Shouta was calling him Mist.

He was pretty sure nobody else had seen it, but Shouta had been there one day when Mist had hopped up onto the windowsill in Dabi, Spinner, and Twice’s room, glanced around the empty room to ensure no one was watching, and turned into a roiling cloud of staticky, shadowy mist. He’d flowed through the window like it was a semipermeable membrane, then reformed into a cat – complete with his grey flea collar – on the other side.

So, his name was Mist. That was how Shouta had named his other Quirked cats, with Missy being short for Missile Launcher and Bakugowo initially being Little Bastard based on her ability to split into a dozen tiny copies of herself.

Shouta was sure that, if Hizashi or Nemuri were around, they would have instantly found a way to give Mist a much more idiotic nickname. Fortunately, neither of them was there, so Shouta could keep calling him Mist in his head. At least until the League settled on a name for him. Maybe even then.

Toga gasped, one part shocked and two parts dismayed, when Shigaraki shifted and lifted the blanket on his lap to reveal Mist draped over his legs like a furry black noodle.

“This is betrayal of the highest order,” Toga insisted, and Mist’s ear flicked at her absently. “Treason!”

“You can’t have treason without a government,” Shouta said dryly, shaking his ears out and trotting into the living room, “and you guys are like, the direct opposite of a government. Technically, I guess just associating with you would be considered treason, so you’re not really wrong. Just ridiculous.”

Shigaraki smugly pulled the lever on his recliner to lean it back, and Shouta stopped next to Toga’s feet.

“I can’t sit on your lap unless you’re sitting down,” he informed her bluntly.

Toga chose to sit down.

“Hey, guys,” Spinner started, and Shouta glanced up to find Spinner shooting nervous looks at both Shouta and Mist, nervously rubbing his arm. “Does anyone else think it’s kind of… weird?”

“What is?” Toga tilted her head curiously, resting a hand on Shouta’s back.

“Well, I mean… those guys were breeding and training Quirked animals to sell them,” Spinner pointed out, “and when Toga and Demon first came home, they brought -” he waved vaguely at Mist “- you know, him. And… well, doesn’t he look a lot like Demon?”

They had all already noticed that, Shouta was sure. So, why was Spinner bringing it up again?

“And on the charts that those guys were keeping, it said that, uh, that their black cat’s father had escaped instead of being sold or dying…”

Oh, no. Shouta thought he might know where this was going, and he was not looking forward to Spinner’s conclusion.

“And he, well, he certainly acts like Demon’s kitten, doesn’t he?”

Toga whipped her head towards Mist and Dabi froze, eyes going huge as he glanced between the two of them. Shigaraki’s hand stilled from where he was carefully running two fingers over Mist’s spine.

“Oh, I should have set them all on fire,” Dabi snarled, knuckles white around the glass in his hand.

“Is there time to go back and stab them?” Toga asked with a surprisingly effective scowl despite her cute little schoolgirl aesthetic.

“Did we plant enough evidence, do you think?” Twice wondered, “You should have told us, Demon!”

Shouta buried his head under his paws with a world-weary sigh and tried desperately to drown out everything everyone was saying. He regretted every choice he had made in his life that led to this point.

Chapter Text

Shouta picked himself up off of Toga’s lap at around five in the evening. Mist was clinging to the back of Shigaraki’s armchair and peering down at the videogame on his device, his ears twitching and tail lashing every time the handheld console let out its familiar little jingle that marked some in-game event. 

A soft sound caught Mist’s attention, and when Shouta padded into the kitchen, Mist dropped down from Shigaraki’s recliner and followed. 

Shouta jumped onto the counter, and Mist joined him a moment later. Shouta nyaaed insistently. Mist copied him curiously. 

Toga was off the couch and in the kitchen in moments, pulling things out of various cupboards and setting them on the counter in front of Shouta and Mist. A chipped ceramic mug. Two sauce dishes, a small whisk, a mixing bowl with a pouring spout, some measuring cups. Finally, a plastic container full of dark brown powder. 

Toga popped the lid off the container and Mist’s pupils widened. His ears pricked and he leaned forward, tail lashing with interest. 

“Hold on,” Shouta scolded, batting at Mist’s ear. 

Shouta waited for Toga to mix the powdered blood with warm water, whisking swiftly. She dipped a finger in it to taste, then added a dash more water. Finally, Toga declared it finished, poured a small serving of blood into each of the sauce dishes, and the rest into the mug. The whisk, measuring cups, and mixing bowl were all set aside next to the sink. 

Mist wriggled with excitement, and Shouta finally flicked a permissive ear at him. Mist dove for the sauce dish with the same speed that Toga went for her mug. Shouta lapped at his saucer of blood with more restraint. He had worked his way through a lot of his internal holdups with drinking blood, but it still wasn’t really his favorite. He’d always preferred sweet or sour flavors to savory. 

But Mist and Toga were both happy with it, and it was nutritious and not bad, so Shouta finished his portion and let Toga carry the sauce dish away to wash everything. 

Shouta twitched his ears at Mist, who paused in the middle of an impromptu grooming session. The look he shot Shouta was easily interpreted as ‘where are we going’? 

“You already figured out that Shigaraki should only be approached if he has his gloves,” Shouta said bluntly, “I’m going to give you a crash course on the others before you do anything stupid.” 

Mist and Shigaraki’s first meeting had been, to put it lightly, eventful. Mist had been unaware of Decay and had begun investigating Shigaraki’s hands looking for pets. Shigaraki had almost had a panic attack at his closeness, Mist had gotten concerned and began inspecting Shigaraki’s hands more insistently, and it had all gone downhill from there. 

Fortunately, Shouta had managed to step in before Mist got Decayed or Shigaraki had ended with in a full-blown mental breakdown, but Mist had been pouty and offended until Shouta had prodded Shigaraki into demonstrating Decay in front of him and therefore proving why everyone had reacted so strongly. 

It had not been a fun time. 

From what Shouta could figure, Mist had decided that, after his first failed attempt, he would be leaving everyone other than Toga and Shigaraki alone until he had a better idea of what to do with them. But Shouta needed as much help as he could get, so he was going to see if he could put Mist’s understanding and familiarization on the fast track. 

“Dabi has no concept of cats,” Shouta said, jumping up onto the back of the couch. Mist followed him gamely. “He has no idea what he’s doing at the best of times, but he’s very warm. Just be careful of his staples and you’ll do fine.” Shouta paused to run his chin against Dabi’s arm and reluctantly submitted to an awkward pat. Mist looked a bit taken aback, but he took it in stride. 

“Toga, as previously mentioned, is basically a cat in human form.” Shouta bypassed her completely. If he stopped long enough for her to start petting Mist, they wouldn’t get anywhere in the next hour. 

“Magne is better than Toga, but she’s selective. Don’t interrupt her reading time unless she’s not actually reading. Wait.” Shouta tapped Mist’s shoulder with his tail, and they both stilled, side by side and watching. 

Magne didn’t even look up from her book. After a moment, she turned a page. 

“Good,” Shouta said, “she’s fine. You only need to worry if she sits there for too long without turning a page.” 

Shouta turned away from Magne and jumped down from the sofa. “Let’s keep going.” 

“Spinner,” Shouta introduced briefly. “Different sleep schedule than most humans, sometimes he needs some prodding.” 

Spinner was, in fact, sitting up on his bed with his phone in hand, dressed in sleep clothes but with the light still on. 

“I’ll grab his phone, you get the light switch,” Shouta decided. 

He wasn’t sure exactly how much Mist understood him. Shouta knew that his own cats understood Japanese quite well, but Shouta wasn’t speaking Japanese at the moment. The transformation gave him an instinctive understanding of Mist’s body language and facial expressions, but didn’t translate them into anything like actual words, which all added up to the fact that Shouta had no real landmark or expectation for how much Mist could gather from him speaking in cat form. 

Either way, Mist had picked up something, because he immediately went to the light switch by the door, leaving Shouta to clamber up onto Spinner’s bed. 

Spinner’s eyes flicked towards him briefly, but he otherwise didn’t react. 

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” Shouta said judgmentally, “not on your phone.” 

It was good practice to give students the chance to fix their own mistakes. Unfortunately, Spinner couldn’t understand Shouta’s warning, and he wasn’t paying enough attention to figure it out himself. 

“Mine now,” Shouta announced, and pounced. 

After a brief but heated scuffle, Shouta came away victorious once again, bounding off Spinner’s bed with the phone gripped tightly in his mouth. 

As Shouta’s paws hit the ground, Mist jumped up and slapped the light switch, and the room was plunged into darkness. Shouta adjusted his grip on the phone, trying to balance the device between his teeth, then trotted over to the charging cable trailing from the wall. It took him a few tries, but he managed to get the charger lined up with the socket and then pushed the phone – charging cable and all – against the wall to push it in all the way. The phone vibrated slightly to show that it was plugged in, and Shouta turned away with a swish of his tail. 

He jumped up onto Dabi’s bed this time and turned to sit on the edge, staring Spinner down with an expression of disapproval that he was pretty sure Spinner’s night vision was good enough to see at the moment. 

With a great deal of grumbling, Spinner tugged the blanket up and slid underneath, finally lying down. 

Shouta slipped out of the room with Mist on his tail, mission successful. 

“Twice knows he has issues, but can’t really get past them on his own,” Shouta said, padding down the hall. “A lot of the time, he feels less crazy if he has someone other than himself to talk to, even if it’s just a cat. He’s been too nervous to pet me, but you might make some progress.” 

“Then, there’s Mr. Compress,” Shouta sighed, pushing the door to his room open slightly. 

Since losing his arm, Mr. Compress had spent a lot of time bedridden. A mixture of depression and pain kept him hovering somewhere on the edge between lethargy and unconsciousness. There was only so much that Shouta could do for him. Even if Shouta had been a human, capable of proper communication, Mr. Compress was going through an awful, terrifying, and deeply tragic part of his life. Neither Shouta nor anyone else could make him change his outlook, and healing – if he chose to heal at all – would be a long, painful process. 

“I think,” Shouta said gingerly, “that for the moment, you should leave him to me.” 

Mist glanced at him curiously, flicking an ear in inquisition. 

“Mr. Compress is… having a rough time,” Shouta explained, and he wished he knew exactly how smart Mist was, because that would help this explanation a lot. Quirked animals could have a wide range of intelligence, and it didn’t help that Mist was still pretty much a kitten. 

“He had a very… stressful injury. He’s not in a great headspace, and he needs- well. I have to be careful that I don’t push him over the edge.” 

Mist seemed to understand that, at least partially, and he only flicked his tail in acknowledgement and glanced away. Towards the slitted-open closet door. He glanced back at Shouta, curious. 

The laundry room smelled of clouds and rain and worn paper – a librarian’s worst nightmare, honestly – and it was a scent unequivocally associated with Kurogiri.  

“Kurogiri is a special case,” Shouta said slowly. “There’s something going on in his head that even I don’t understand. He’s not big on petting, but he’ll sit with you for hours if he’s not doing anything, and so long as you don’t get in his way too much, he’ll appreciate your presence while he works. Can you read?” 

Mist flattened his ears to the side and jerked his head away, flicking his tail. Shouta was going to read that as Mist being ashamed that he couldn’t read very well. 

“That’s fine,” Shouta assured him bluntly, “you just might get bored.” 

Mist flicked his tail in a dismissive gesture that Shouta interpreted as something akin to a shrug, so Shouta left it at that. 

Shouta slipped back out of the laundry room, leaving Mist to cuddle up to Kurogiri, and instead leaped nimbly onto Mr. Compress’s bed. 

Mr. Compress’s eyes drifted towards Shouta slightly, then stared at the spot he had been in as Shouta continued to move across the bedspread. 

It was the closest Shouta had ever intentionally gotten to Mr. Compress’s hands – hand. It barely even registered as a threat anymore. 

Oh, sure, his bone-deep ingrained Hero instincts were pinging danger warnings at him, perpetual reminders of the inherent terrifying capabilities of a Quirk like Compress, but the logical reasoning part of his mind – the part that had lived with Mr. Compress for almost a month and seen exactly how, when, and why he used Compress, and that knew for a fact that he wouldn’t use it at the moment likely even if his life depended on it – easily put that worry to rest. 

Shouta slipped underneath Mr. Compress’s remaining arm, draping himself over the man’s chest and starting up a strong, rumbling purr. 

There was something gripped tight in Mr. Compress’s hand, shaking fingers closed around a small round object. Shouta slowly laid a paw on Mr. Compress’s fist, and the fingers tightened to a painful, white-knuckled grip. 

Shouta withdrew his paw and rolled onto his side to more properly cover as much surface area of Mr. Compress’s body as possible. He didn’t stop purring. 

Gradually, as Shouta’s easy purr ebbed and flowed, Mr. Compress relaxed his grip on the object. Fingers shaking, he slowly opened his fist. 

There was a small metal crotal bell in his hand, originally painted or stained black, but the color had been rubbed away over the years, revealing a tarnished brass beneath. The bell was clearly quite old. It was covered in small dents and scrapes, scratched and worn and even cracked in a few places. Still, the bead inside rolled around with a bright metallic sound. 

After a moment, Mr. Compress closed his hand again. Shouta laid his head down and purred harder, trying to somehow broadcast uplifting and supportive thoughts to Mr. Compress. 

They lay there together, motionless save for the occasional flickering of Shouta’s tail, for almost an hour before anything changed. 

“It belonged to my great-great-grandfather,” Mr. Compress said in a decent attempt at his normal voice. It shook a bit too hard, and there was little he could do about the haunted look in his eyes, but Shouta had to admit that his acting was impressive. Almost painfully so. 

“Kitai no Nusutto,” Mr. Compress mused slowly, and the words rolled off his tongue as easily as a greeting, almost automatic, as though he’d said them a hundred times before. “The Thief Without Match.” 

Shouta flicked his tail in surprise, but his purring didn’t stop. The Peerless Thief was still a big name, even a hundred-odd years later.  

Records were scarce, since Heroism as a profession was still a burgeoning industry at the time, and a lot of the recording and assurance guidelines hadn’t been dreamed up yet. That time was incredible fodder for Shouta’s Law and Ethics classes, though, and if there was any resource that he hadn’t found on the subject, one of his students had eventually dug it up in the search of extra credit. 

Needless to say, Shouta knew probably too much about Oji Harima, the Thief Without Match. 

Some put his name on par with Destro or All For One, one of the first revolutionaries in the new norm of Quirks, which were still often referred to as ‘Meta Abilities’ in his time. Oji Harima wasn’t a modern Robin Hood, not after being dead for over a hundred years, but he had been in his time. 

Stealing from Heroes who, as far as Shouta and most of his informed students could tell with the resources at their disposal, mostly had it coming, then delivering his stolen goods to those in need. 

“The Thief Without Match,” Mr. Compress repeated, softer this time. “That was what they called him. We were all supposed to try, though.” 

Mr. Compress tightened his grip on the bell again. “I was supposed to be the greatest. I had the… the natural talent, I suppose. I got the training to go with it, my mother… she taught me everything she knew. But I was always too dramatic. Too much of a showman. It’s… well, it’s in my blood. As much as helping people from the wrong side of the law, as much as…” 

He squeezed his hand tight, and a cold, sharp scent sparked in the air. Something tugged and shifted inside his grip, the motion only barely visible from the outside. When he opened his hand, the bell had been replaced with a perfect cyan marble. 

“As much as my marbles,” Mr. Compress finished, rolling the marble slightly in his palm. “Once a showman, always a showman. I- I moved too slow. Or I telegraphed my motions too much. Or something. Did you see it, Demon? Do you know what I did wrong?” 

Instead of dismissing it as a rhetorical question that Shouta couldn’t even answer, he paused to consider it. What did he recall from that encounter? 

At the moment, it had mostly been a blur of instinct in his mind, as most fights were. A mess of act-and-react filled with a million in-the-moment observations that didn’t translate to out-of-combat information as much as lingering instinctive knowledge. But after years of being a Heroics teacher, Shouta had learned to go back and rerun the fights, to pick apart what exactly had happened, who had done what, what he’d noticed, and what could be done better. 

It had been a few days, instead of the few hours at most that he left between supervising his students’ fights and writing up the reviews, so the memory wasn’t nearly as sharp or crisp, but it wasn’t completely gone. 

He remembered mostly feral, fire-blooded fury and then Overhaul’s scream and forcefully grasping clarity in his own mind. He remembered… the realization that he’d torn Overhaul’s arm clean off. The rage and almost incongruous panic in Overhaul’s snarl. 

He remembered Mr. Compress jumping down from the structure he’d been perched on. It had been a very dramatic leap. The flash of orange and black-and-white blocked mask that was intended to draw the eye and disorient. The swift motion of standing followed by the fluid leap. The preemptive outstretching of his hand, fingers splayed dramatically. 

The flash of something small and swift, striking Mr. Compress’s bright orange shoulder as he dashed through a patch of moonlight. 

And then the pause, as Mr. Compress touched Overhaul and nothing happened, leaving Overhaul the opportunity to retaliate. 

Some of that was certainly overdramatizing. The sort of thing that Shouta had to remind Aoyama of day after day. Some of it was simply mid-combat shock, a deadlock of something fatally unexpected happening in an intuitive, instinct-run situation. 

“I don’t,” Mr. Compress admitted, pulling Shouta out of his own thoughts, “I don’t know… I can’t even remember that night. Not really. I know you were a panther, and then Compress didn’t work, and- and then instead of an arm I just had- pain and blood, and I don’t know.” 

Hand still clenched around the marble, Mr. Compress drew his forearm tight over Shouta, pressing him down into Mr. Compress’s chest. Shouta made a small noise of surprise, but he didn’t protest the motion. 

“I don’t know what I did wrong,” Mr. Compress whispered, and it felt like something much, much worse. Something horrible and fatal, something that Shouta heard in his Hero students after they first pitted themselves against real-world Villains. The creeping, pervasive doubt that they weren’t good enough. That they would never be good enough, no matter what they did. 

It was something Shouta himself struggled with, that every halfway decent Hero had felt at some point. For some of them, it killed them. Directly or indirectly, and there was a reason Shouta kept a close eye on the statistics for Villain Assisted Suicides, because most of the time, the people who reliably got close enough to Villains to even attempt it were Heroes. 

Sometimes, they overcame that feeling and kept going anyway. If they couldn’t be perfect, they could at least be good. If they weren’t the best, they could always be better. No matter how many people they couldn’t save, couldn’t help, constantly failed over and over, they could at least do one thing right. And one thing could lead into two, and two into five, and five into seventeen, again and again, building on each other, until the good that they had done outweighed their perceived failures. 

Shouta butted his forehead into Mr. Compress’s hand and let his heart ache for the man. For the legacy he wanted to live up to, and all the work that it would take him to get there again. 

If he was willing to work for it, Mr. Compress could still be a great thief. He could be a Villain like no other the world had ever seen. He could be a paragon Hero on par with All Might. He could be an actor, a scientist, an architect, or a broken, crippled shell of a person who never bothered to get out of bed again and slowly withered away to nothing. The thing about people – all people, everywhere – was that they all had potential. Mr. Compress could work. Shouta knew that. He could put his mind to something and do it until it was done, and he would be good at it. 

But he could only do that if he actually tried. If he decided that he would. If he decided so strongly that he actually did it. This was his tipping point right here. This was the time when Shouta would look at one of his students and decide whether to train them – put them through a unique personalized hell of his own careful construction, designed to force them to improve and keep pushing themselves towards their own betterment – or expel them on the spot. 

Shouta had to admit, though, he’d never had quite this in-depth look into exactly what his students were thinking at that quintessential tipping point. 

“I don’t know how to fix it,” Mr. Compress added after a long, trailing silence. “If I could fix it… I don’t know.” 

And with that admission, Mr. Compress slipped his eyes shut. His breath slowly evened out, but Shouta couldn’t find it in himself to fall asleep. 

His mind was humming with too many thoughts, half-formed schemes and plans that might work and the complex intertwining of two philosophies and groups that were in direct opposition. It was a dangerous line he walked, the impossibly narrow ledge between his necessary ingrained long-lived wariness and the chance to save a whole group of people and possibly the entirety of Japan if he pulled it off right. 

So narrow was the line, that it was in essence the blade of a knife, only traversable at all due to a cat’s natural balance. If Shouta wasn’t careful, the cuts he gained from a single slip just might be fatal. 

Chapter Text

Shouta’s eyes twitched, blood pouring down his face and trailing down his arms. He needed to keep his eyes open, needed to keep watching or- or- Bakugou was burning- Toga was screaming - Midoriya was bleeding- Asui was cold, too cold, fingers turning blue- Spinner’s scales were almost purple with the cold- Todoroki’s warm blood felt like ice on his skin- Koda had his hands over his ears, sobbing desperately- Every one of Yaoyorozu’s ribs was visible under paper-thin skin- Kaminari was fried by his own Quirk and wandering helplessly through enemies- Shouta couldn’t see. 

He reached for his student, but his hand moved too slowly. Loops of his own capture weapon were tangled around his arm, tight enough to cut off his blood flow, tight enough to strain at his bones, tight enough that Shouta could hardly move, reaching and straining against the cords coiled around him. But he wasn’t strong enough. He wasn’t fast enough. He wasn’t good enough. 

Every time, he fell short. Bakugou turned to ash. Asui’s face turned pale and cold, eyes glazed over. Toga was bleeding. Bleeding, bleeding, so much blood, too much blood, it was spilling like a river over the ground until it rushed around Shouta’s knees. Around his waist. Up to his shoulders as he still strained against the tight coils of his own capture weapon. All the way to his throat, where it mingled with Shouta’s own blood and rose higher and higher still, and Shouta was desperate to stay afloat, to pull free from the restraints dragging him downwards, until hands reached up from the blood, familiar hands, hands of all the people he had failed. 

They clawed at his skin, gripping his shirt and closing around his arms, dragging him down down down until his head was yanked below the tide of thick crimson blood. 

Shouta shot awake, deathly still but with his heart pounding and breath racing. Only his eyes moved, darting wildly around the room. He was lying on his side, splayed out over Mr. Compress’s chest. The room was dark, but Shouta could see Shigaraki’s bed from where he was lying, and he could smell the familiar clean thunder of Kurogiri and musty earthy scent of Decay. 

It also smelled somewhat of ash and metal, glass and new paper and sweat. No blood. There was no blood. Nobody was bleeding or burning or freezing to death. Nobody was having their face Decayed away or artificially starving themself by using up all their lipids or even electrocuting their own brain out of commission. Shouta wasn’t failing anyone, at least not right this very instant. 

With a deep breath that was only somewhat shaky, Shouta rolled off of Mr. Compress and slipped down to the floor. Mr. Compress and Shigaraki were still asleep, both scents fresh and Shigaraki’s slightly worrying rasping breaths an unexpected comfort to Shouta’s nightmare-rattled mind. 

The door was cracked open a sliver like always, which he instantly took advantage of, slipping out and padding into the dark hallway and from there to the living room. 

Spinner was draped across one couch, phone in hand and essentially dead to the world as he played some sort of high-intensity game. Mist lay on top of the couch, watching Spinner’s screen intently and barely sparing Shouta an acknowledging flick of his ear. Magne was on the loveseat, head tipped back and breath coming slow and even. Shouta suspected that she’d been in the living room since daytime and had been so busy reading that she hadn’t bothered to go to sleep. Instead, sleep had arrived to claim her. 

The book Magne had been reading was balanced precariously across her knees, clearly seconds away from toppling off completely. 

Shouta sighed. He found that it was always easier to recover from a nightmare if he had something worthwhile to do, so he wasn’t particularly upset, but the sigh was mostly for show, anyway. 

With a low jump, Shouta made it onto the couch cushion and tiptoed towards Magne. He leaned over her legs and hooked a careful paw over one side of her book, slowly dragging it towards him. Once the book was splayed open on the couch instead of Magne’s lap, Shouta could pull Magne’s bookmark from her hand and slip it between the pages before silently closing the book and pushing it aside. He would like to have moved it to the coffee table, but the book was too heavy and bulky for him to carry properly in his mouth, and dropping it on the ground would undoubtedly result in Magne waking up. 

A perfect rectangle of dark mist appeared above the book, and Shouta watched as it swept downwards, gently transporting the book to the coffee table. Shouta glanced up. 

He’d noticed Kurogiri entering the room. There was no way for him not to, not with the sudden flood of cool, misty rain scent. He just hadn’t realized that Kurogiri was watching him as he dealt with Magne’s book. 

“If you would move a moment, Demon,” Kurogiri said softly, and Shouta tiredly jumped over to the coffee table. With gentle motions, Kurogiri tilted Magne to the side and adjusted her so she was lying down on the loveseat, a throw pillow under her head and one leg draped over the arm of the loveseat while the other drooped off the cushions to one side. There was a perfectly cat-sized hollow between her head and neck, and Shouta considered for only a moment before bounding nimbly back to the cushion, carefully jumping over Magne’s face, and turning in an instinctive circle to drop down into a loosely-curled cat croissant. 

He flicked an ear, burying his nose under his tail. 

By this point, his heart had stopped racing. There was no instinctive lurch of raw panic in his chest when he closed his eyes. He could hear Magne’s steady breaths and smell the faint metallic scent that always clung to her. She was safe, he was safe, and Shouta would one hundred percent hear if anyone opened the front door. 

This was fine. 

It was with a small amount of lying to himself and a heaping helping of perpetual exhaustion that Shouta managed to drift off again. 

It was a feather-light slumber, drifting somewhere on the edge of proper sleep in that hazy, disconnected sort of way where you’re aware that you’re asleep but you can’t bring yourself to pry your eyes open. The sort of sleep where you might feel like you got showered and dressed and went on with your day, but in actuality you never even got out of bed. 

And then something grabbed him, catching at the back of his head like someone had snagged the base of his skull with a fishhook and yanked, hauling him away from his comfortable drifting and tipping him head-over-heels into a solid, inescapable dreamland. 

Shouta landed and simultaneously simply appeared already standing on his feet, legs braced wide and fur puffed with shock. Magne shot upright from where she’d been lying on the floor of… somewhere. 

The room alone was bigger than the footprint of the League’s current hideout, and the floor was made of large, polished stone tiles, each one about as wide as Shouta’s tail was long. They might have looked neat and even pretty if there hadn’t been a dozen mismatched patches where something had destroyed the tiles, and the gaps had been haphazardly filled in with nothing but bare cement. The walls were tasteful wood paneling and elegant yet subtle wallpaper that was marred by patches of bland white plaster. There was a folded tatami mat with a paper-thin mattress on top shoved into a corner, and a pile of clothes in another. 

Shouta tentatively peered around Magne, looking for the threat he knew was going to be on the other side of her. 

Sure enough, All For One was sitting in the only noteworthy article of furniture in the room, a clearly high-quality chair that was not unlike Shigaraki’s coveted recliner. Actually, on a closer look, it appeared to be the exact same brand and model. 

Shigaraki, as was becoming heartbreakingly familiar, was kneeling in front of All For One in almost perfect seiza, only with his head bowed too low and trembling fingers curled into his palms. 

“Tomura,” All For One’s voice was smooth and dark, and it raked over Shouta’s nerves like a knife tracing down his spine. 

“Sensei,” Shigaraki replied, a subtle tremble in his voice. 

“You’ve been making deals with other organizations,” All For One said, velvet smooth and unmistakably deadly. 

“Yes, Sensei,” Shigaraki admitted. 

“Kurogiri reports that you plan to betray me,” All For One noted, almost casual, as though remarking on the weather. 

“No, Sensei,” Shigaraki said, desperate. Shouta could hear the way his breath hitched, could see his shoulders shake with terror of the monster in front of him, and something in Shouta’s chest burned with helpless fury. 

“Then why am I still here, Tomura?” All For One asked coldly. “I should have no need to appear in your dreams. What are you waiting for, Tomura?” 

“I-I’m temporarily allying with Overhaul to get the resources to free you,” Shigaraki explained with only the faintest terrified stammer. 

“You doubt your training?” All For One asked, and Shouta was done, he was going home, he was retiring from being a teacher and never giving his students a pop quiz again, because that was the trick question to end all trick questions, and even at his most maliciously sleep-deprived, Shouta could never possibly measure up. 

Clearly, Shigaraki recognized that as well. Shouta couldn’t see his face, but he could hear him struggling to form words and he could smell the stress and fear emanating from everyone in the room. Well, everyone except All For One himself. 

“I believe that, to maintain resources that you have spent a great deal of time and effort on, the best course of action would be to have additional backup,” Shigaraki finally said, his words stilted and stiff, almost like he was reciting something. 

“Hmm,” All For One said dismissively, “perhaps. Just remember, Tomura.” He lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and swept it over the room in a meaningful gesture. 

“Everything I give you, all the comfort and assurance that comes from me, all of that is mine. If you break it, you cannot replace it.” 

Shouta was abruptly aware of the ugly patched holes in the floor and walls. Of the almost geometric lines coming out of the edges of the patches, faint cracks and divots in the remaining tiles exactly like the patterns that had been imprinted into his skin. The patterns of Decay. 

 The room, Shouta realized belatedly, had no door. 

How much of it was a dramatized dreamland creation, and how much of it was a faithful representation of a real location? Shouta could picture All For One keeping his ‘student’ in one huge, solitary, mostly empty room. He could imagine the man intentionally setting it up so that teleportation Quirks were the only way in and out. And the patched holes in the walls… most of them were too neat and regular to be accidents. 

Shouta could far too easily imagine a younger Shigaraki wielding his incredibly destructive Quirk with a methodical sort of desperation, hoping beyond hope that this next section, once Decayed, would reveal a way out. A small measure of freedom. 

Then again, he could also picture All For One intentionally crafting this set to use as a prop in his psychological warfare, targeted for maximum impact. 

It could even be a mingling of real experiences and dreamland manipulations. Shouta didn’t know, and he would likely never know. All he knew – and all he really needed to know – was that All For One was directly and blatantly manipulating Shigaraki, emphasizing a mostly artificial helplessness and dependence. ‘Everything good comes from me’ was one of the oldest lies in the book, and All For One had literally said it outright. 

It broke Shouta’s heart. It made him indescribably furious. 

That familiar, roiling fury, of someone intentionally and cruelly hurting his people, his students and friends and family. The fury that seethed in his chest until it boiled over, and suddenly Shouta didn’t fit behind Magne anymore. 

“Demon!” she yelped, and Shouta almost fell over her as his center of gravity abruptly shifted. He managed to steady himself without toppling her over, but the sudden motion and sound had drawn All For One’s attention and simultaneously snapped Shouta back into his mind, somewhat pushing the feral protective wildcat back down. 

“Your new ally would do well to control his Quirk,” All For One observed in a blatant threat that was still almost bland in its delivery. “Anyone else might have considered that a threat, and I don’t appreciate threats. Remember, Tomura. A powerful Quirk can be easily transferred to a more useful vessel.” 

“Yes, Sensei,” Shigaraki said shakily. 

“Next time we speak, it will have to be alone,” All For One instructed, “I have much to say that your… allies cannot overhear.” 

“I- Yes, Sensei,” Shigaraki said again. 

“Gather what allies you think you need, but don’t fail me again, Tomura.” 

The world was abruptly ripped away, and Shouta found himself sprawling over Magne, still in his oversized big cat form. He hurriedly tipped himself off her as she made a strained, breathless noise, and Shouta landed awkwardly in the space between the loveseat and the coffee table that was just a bit too narrow for a creature as big as him. 

His fur was standing on end, his tail puffed up like a pinecone and his hackles aching from how tense they were, but the necessity of getting off of Magne had somewhat mitigated the usual aftereffects of All For One’s dreamwalking Quirk. 

Shouta took a steadying breath and didn’t bother trying to blink. It wouldn’t work for a while to come. Instead, he glanced over at Spinner, who it appeared had only just noticed a change, blinking in surprise. Mist had shot up as soon as Shouta had landed and was clinging to the back of the couch with the claws on all four paws, his fur standing straight up and his ears flattened in shock, but Shouta figured he’d get over it. Shouta still smelled the same, even in his big cat form. Mist would probably figure it out faster than Spinner had. 

  Shouta’s tail flicked in thought as he sidled out from between the coffee table and loveseat and padded to the living room door. Spinner and Mist hadn’t noticed them missing, but Shouta’s physical form had still changed in both the dream world and the real world. 

He eyed Shigaraki’s door briefly, then turned right instead, shouldering his way into the boys’ bathroom. 

It still smelled strongly of hair dye and cleaning products, but Shouta ignored that for the moment. Instead, he propped his front paws up on the vanity and inspected what he could see of himself in the mirror. 

Judging by his size, Shouta had expected to see something like a black Bengal tiger. He was about the height of one, and there weren’t actually a lot of big cats that were in that same weight class. He couldn’t be a lion, since he had no mane, so he’d assumed he had just transformed into the biggest and most threatening big cat. 

That… wasn’t exactly true. 

Sure, he had the size of a Bengal tiger, but his head structure was all wrong. It looked more like a regular housecat, even though Shouta knew for a fact that he wasn’t just a scaled-up cat. He yawned at the mirror, tilting his head this way and that. His ears were pointy and triangular, and they had fluffy tufts on the end. Something like a serval or lynx. His tail was stupidly fluffy, though the rest of his fur was short and sleek. After a brief investigation he found that he did have a mane, it just wasn’t as impressive and in-your-face as an adult male lion’s mane would be. It made the fur around his head thicker and longer and even slightly curly like his own human hair, resulting in a look almost like a komainu. 

The most shocking part – the part that almost made Shouta startle away from the mirror – was once again his eyes. They weren’t yellow or black. No, now they were red. 

Almost instinctively, Shouta activated Erasure, just to make sure it hadn’t already been active. 

But no, when he tugged on the thread of potential in his eyes, he did push more red into the world, his hackles rising and his eyes flickering. The color of Erasure was almost exactly the same as the deadly natural red, and when Shouta’s reflection blinked at him, the deactivation was almost imperceptible. 

“Demon?” 

Shouta’s ears pricked, swiveling to the door. Even from all the way in the living room Shigaraki sounded… lost. Scared, confused, hurting. Shouta slipped out of the bathroom, noting absently that almost all the doors in the hallways were hanging open. He padded silently into the living room, where the League had already come together in their by-now-typical post-dream-contact cuddle pile. 

“You’re big again,” Shigaraki said dully. Probably realizing that tonight, Shouta would not fit on his lap. 

Honestly, Shouta thought Shigaraki was setting his sights too low. Shouta knew he had always wanted to pet a big cat. 

After checking that he was wearing his gloves, Shouta set his head in Shigaraki’s lap. Shigaraki’s rougher petting actually felt just right in this larger form, and Shouta was all for it. His tail swept in broad, contented arcs until it was caught by Spinner, who had a hand dangling off the side of the couch. 

“Kami, he’s soft like this,” Spinner marveled, running his hand over Shouta’s tail before letting it go again. 

Shigaraki only hummed vaguely, both hands buried in Shouta’s fur and scratching at the base of his ears. 

By this point, Shouta was beyond caring about it. He was a cat. Of course, people were going to pet him. Just as long as he picked who and when, it wasn’t that big of a deal. At least these students knew how to wash their hands. 

“I’m going to call Overhaul,” Shigaraki announced abruptly. 

That seemed to rattle Toga out of her daze, and her gaze darted up from her hands to jitter over to Shigaraki. “No!” 

“Yes,” Shigaraki said grimly, “Sensei already- he told me to.” Shigaraki’s hands tightened somewhat painfully in Shouta’s mane, but he just flicked an ear with a silent huff. Shigaraki needed a fidget toy. Shouta had run into a similar problem with Midoriya; when he was stressed or angry – so basically all the time – the kid tended to twist his own fingers without even thinking about it, which was really hard on his ruined joints and nerves. Shouta had been trying to get him used to using fidget toys, but it was a long process to change habits like that. 

“So, I- I have to.” Shigaraki sounded like he was barely holding himself back from tears, and Shouta discovered that, despite being a mixture of a bunch of big cats, he could still purr. 

“We might…” Shigaraki started with a frown, “have to join him for a bit.” 

The other League members grimaced, and Magne rubbed her forearms nervously. Shouta flicked his ears back and his purr took on a decidedly threatening air. 

“It’s what Sensei is expecting,” Shigaraki said dully, “so I have to do it. After that… Overhaul’s Quirk is impressive, but he doesn’t seem like the sort of person Sensei would want to keep on.” 

No, he didn’t seem like the easily-manipulatable, driven but directionless sort of person that All For One was inclined to surround himself with. Much as Shouta was loathe to agree with anything Overhaul said, he had to admit that the yakuza leader was right about one thing. A goal without a plan wasn’t just foolishness, it was practically an invitation for someone clever to step in and twist said goal to their gain. 

 That was what All For One had done. In essence, that was what Shouta was doing himself, though his goals just so happened to be the League’s best interests. 

“So, what’s the plan?” Dabi asked, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees. 

“I’ll meet him alone this time,” Shigaraki hummed absently, and Shouta was glad to note that Shigaraki’s hands, which he would usually use to scratch at his own neck, were instead buried in Shouta’s fur and scratching at the base of his ears. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but giving him something else to do with his hands was a good start on the path to changing his habits. 

“Alone?” Toga demanded, “why?” 

“Other people cloud your judgment,” Shigaraki muttered, “I need to be able to focus.” 

Shouta would bet anything that what he really meant was ‘people who I care about cloud my judgment’. He was just about as willing to admit it as Shouta was. Although, considering what Shouta knew of All For One, Shigaraki actually had a good reason to never admit to caring about anything ever. 

And hey, what do you know, there was that furious overprotective rage in Shouta’s chest again, good to know that was still around. He growled low in his throat, momentarily interrupting his purring. 

“I’m with Demon!” Toga huffed, “you need some kind of backup!” 

“No,” Shigaraki said shortly, “I don’t need to keep track of some other liability while I’m trying to deal with Overhaul. I’m going alone.” 

“Well, if you want someone you don’t need to worry about keeping track of,” Dabi put in thoughtfully, “you could just take Demon.” 

Shouta had been anticipating a few different reactions to that suggestion. Maybe Shigaraki realizing that was a great idea and agreeing to bring Shouta along. Maybe him thinking about it and deciding it wasn’t worth the hassle. Maybe even an immediate rejection for honestly quite understandable reasons, like Shouta’s tendency to rapidly and uncontrollably change forms. 

He had not been expecting Shigaraki to clamp his arms like a vice around Shouta’s neck and screech “NO!”, seconds away from a full-blown panic attack, like someone had just suggested he load a gun, point it at his own head, and pull the trigger. 

Shouta froze in shock, his ears tilted at a baffled angle, and – though he couldn’t see anyone else now with his face pressed against Shigaraki’s shirt – he could hear the others make startled and confused noises behind him. 

“Demon stays in the house,” Shigaraki insisted, voice shaking, “I can’t- he’s just a cat- what if- he can’t even talk.” 

Shigaraki was scared. For Shouta. 

It undoubtedly didn’t help that they were already having an emotionally charged conversation after All For One had been messing with his emotions and artificially inducing an untethered sort of fear that tended to latch onto whatever it could. But, still. Shigaraki was trying to keep Shouta – a licensed Underground Hero who had more years of experience than Shigaraki had fingers to count them on – away from just the potential of a fight. 

He was bordering on a panic attack from the idea of Shouta leaving the house. 

Shouta had some bad news for him. Once Shigaraki had loosened his grip enough for Shouta to see Dabi, Toga, Twice, and Spinner – and Mist, who was spread over the laps of the first three like he was trying out for the Guinness World Record for longest cat – he could tell they were all thinking it, too. 

Well, it wasn’t like Shouta could say anything about it. After all, he was a cat. He’d just have to see who caved first. 

His money was on Spinner.