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When Izuku came to, it was to the sound of dripping water and deep, even breathing.
He was on the floor, right cheek pressed into gritty, damp concrete and in an awkward, half on his front half on his side position, as if he had been just sort of dumped on the floor and left as he fell.
He tried to remember why that might be, and only felt the hammering pain of a migraine, or possibly a concussion - he wasn’t sure which.
He shifted slightly, feeling something painful and slightly sticky chafing against his wrists where they were kept together behind his back and a pressure around his ankles holding them together, and came to the conclusion that wherever he was, he wasn’t there willingly. It seemed, in fact, almost as if he had been kidnapped.
Well that wasn’t good.
He tried shifting once more, getting his right shoulder out from under him and his back against the floor, eyes now trying to focus on the ceiling. The movement hurt more than he had been anticipating, and so he took a couple of seconds to breathe deeply in and out through the pain and take stock of where he hurt most.
Ah yes. The breathing he had been hearing. He should probably figure out who that was.
He prepared for the pain, and then began to look around the room from his surprisingly comfortable position on the floor, neck aching as it moved. First, he spotted the familiar blond explosion of hair that belonged to Kacchan, slumped unconscious against a wall, head slumped down so he couldn’t see his face. Next, he spotted Iida and Uraraka propped up against each other in a corner, also knocked out, Uraraka noticeably more beat up than the other. He couldn’t look directly up from where he was lying, but he could feel the weird hot-cold air that he associated with Todoroki just about hitting the top of his head, so he was probably there too.
The room they were in was… strange. It looked much more like a medieval castle dungeon out of some fantasy anime than any room that actually existed in Japan, with walls that looked like stone and metal bars, but it felt modern; the ground, as he had subconsciously thought before, felt like concrete rather than stone, somewhere in the distance he could hear the distinct humming of something electrical, and he was pretty sure we was bound with duct tape. He looked back over to the others he could see, and confirmed this - it was a lurid green that hurt his eyes.
Oh yeah. The probable head injury. Maybe that was why his thoughts were so weird.
He decided he had done enough lying around, and, bracing himself for the pain he knew was about to come, rolled over onto his front so he could push himself onto his knees.
The pain shot through his neck and right shoulder, the rest of his muscles protesting less loudly but still not feeling good , but he managed to get himself up, and he began shuffling over to check on his friends.
Todoroki was first, as we was closest, and other than looking a little rumpled, he seemed okay, and as he managed to make his way round to the others, it appeared to be the same story; largely unharmed beyond a couple of bruises or scrapes, but breathing slow and deep, looking like they weren’t going to be waking up anytime soon.
He took the time to test his bindings, finding them unmoving and actually quite painful now that he had managed to stretch out the tape to something that felt more like a cord, and also to attempt to get One For All going. He felt as it built, buzzing through him like it always did, but then didn’t feel the spark of it fully activating. It was as if there was a barrier between him and his quirk, thin and fluid like fabric; enough to feel the shape of something but not actually touch it, and that was definitely concerning. He kept trying for a few minutes, but there was no change, and so despite his unease without the backup of his quirk, he decided to see what he could do.
He shuffled over to the bars, looking for some kind of weak point or easy escape, an noted the heavy, old-looking padlock on the barred door, decorated with a bafflingly cutesy chibi Ragdoll sticker, and now he was really starting to question whether whatever had knocked him out had done more damage than he thought, because nothing about this setting made sense to him.
Just as he was considering laying back down and trying to sleep because surely this must be a dream, and if he would wake back up at some point, he heard footsteps approaching, echoing down the hall.
He quickly shuffled himself away from the bars and against the wall, nearly knocking into Kacchan on the way, and trying to look like he was very incapacitated, which really wasn’t as hard as he would have liked.
A woman appeared on the other side of the bars, wearing a pair of tight shorts, bubblegum pink platform trainers and a baggy hoodie with a medieval looking cape over the top, chewing gum obnoxiously and twirling a lock of pink hair around her finger, expression bored and posture slumped.
She was NOT what Izuku had been expecting, but then everything about what was happening had been strange to say the least.
When she looked away from where she was twirling her hair and towards the cell, she made eye contact with him, and her bored look became something closer to annoyed.
“How the FUCK are you awake?” she asked, whole body becoming more alert and turning directly towards him, hands on her hips under the cloak.
Izuku just blinked at her, head still throbbing and words currently not working. The woman sighed before clicking her tongue and scanning over the others in the room, stance relaxing a little when she saw no-one else was awake.
“No matter,” she shrugged, “I fucked you all up real good so you won’t be able to anything anyway.”
She reached beneath her cloak and brought out five sandwiches that she threw into the cell, then did the same with five bottles of water.
“Came to give you these, now I’m fucking off. Don’t know when I’ll be back. I got shit to do.”
She turned to walk away again, and that finally jolted Izuku’s voice into working again.
“Um,”
She paused, glancing back over her shoulder, letting it be known that she was listening, but wasn;t happy about it.
“Wh- where are we?”
“Dungeon, duh. ”
“Uhhh… why?”
“Because it’s the best place to keep you.”
“Um…”
“You’re being held hostage, dumbass,” she scoffed, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, “so just sit there and wait until someone pays for your freedom, ‘mkay?”
She turned to keep walking out, but paused, apparently realising she had something left to say, and so looked over her shoulder again, mouth ticked up in a self-satisfied smirk, the most emotion he’d seen from her so far, and spoke.
“Oh yeah. Don’t even try to escape. Your quirks won’t work in my dungeon, ‘cause I make the rules here.”
With that, she walked out, cloak swishing triumphantly behind her as she left, and the distant slamming of a door giving way to eerie silence, only interrupted by the distant drip, drip, drip of a leaking pipe.
Izuku let the tension leak out of him, looking back over his friends now that they were alone again. They were still unconscious, but their breathing was picking up and eyes moving under their eyelids, so he thought they might be waking up soon.
He decided to take a few moments to take stock of his surroundings once more, noting all the incongruities and oddities, running over every hint she might have given, no matter how small, trying to piece together either a way to get out in the state everyone was in now, or to get his quirk back up and running, to break the hold of what he was suspecting was the woman’s quirk.
He settled down, closing his eyes and waiting for the others to wake, and letting his mind wander.
—
When he woke from the daze he had fallen into, it was to the sight of Uraraka’s concerned face, Iida’s worried lecturing and the familiar rhythm of Kacchan’s angry tirade about how they should just up and leave.
He smiled slightly to himself at the familiarity, watching as Uraraka’s face relaxed slightly when she realised he was conscious.
Once he’d managed to get his bearings and shrug off his friends’ worries, he explained what he knew about their situation, and his suspicions about the nature of their captor’s quirk; some sort of ability to enforce restrictions in a given space. He still didn’t have an explanation for the whole dungeon thing yet, except that maybe the woman from earlier really liked fantasy stuff?
Regardless, after a while where Kacchan was his usual uncooperative self and a round of checking each others’ injuries (Izuku was the worst off, as usual, with strained shoulders and a bump to his head the others were concerned about, even if he felt fine now and didn’t tell them he had suspected he might have a concussion earlier), they took to inspecting the room, occasionally testing to see if their quirks were working again.
All of them had the same experience there; the feeling of activating but not quite managing to use their quirks, getting the build up without release, and feeling as if there was some kind of layer between them and their power, present but not quite there.
After what was probably a few hours, a few of which were intensely boring, Izuku perked up at the sound of footsteps once again coming from the hallway outside the cell, and the obnoxious lip smacking of someone chewing gum without trying to mask the sound. The woman appeared in front of them, face blank and convenience store bag in hand, acting unsurprised at seeing them all awake.
“‘Sup nerds” she threw a peace sign with her free hand, face still blank and cloak flipping dramatically as she moved, “brought you dinner.”
She shoved the bag through the bars, having to force it through when she realised too late the bars were too narrow, clicking her tongue in frustration and trying to act like she wasn’t flushing slightly in embarrassment. When she was done, she flipped one side of her bangs and cocked one hip, trying to look nonchalant.
“The guys are taking longer than expected so you’ll just have to sit tight for a bit, ‘mkay?” she began checking her nails, cloak shifting as she did, “I just came to make sure you guys don’t starve, so I’m gonna leave now. Have fun guys.”
She threw another peace sign, backing away and ignoring anything they tried to ask or yell at her, disappearing once more down the corridor and, presumably, into the normal world.
The students stared after her for a minute, before Uraraka went to the grocery bag and began handing out its contents, resigning themselves to simply gathering themselves and observing for now.
As he ate his spaghetti sandwich (odd choice, but again, everything was odd right now), Izuku thought over the few things the woman had said, and coming to the realisation that she was probably not very experienced as a criminal, given her attitude and the fact that she had tried to shove and entire bag through narrow cell bars, and thought maybe they could use her own inexperience against her.
As he took a sip of the water he had taken, he tried once more to activate One For All, and while it still fell short of sparking to life on his skin, he could have sworn it felt like the barrier between him and his quirk was thinner, and so he sat with his friends, quietly thinking and still not quite grasping the answer.
—
It must have been at least a couple of days of this routine before everything happened, the only thing even remotely different the night of the first day, where the woman had reluctantly shoved an eclectic collection of hero-themed blankets through the bars (Izuku took the off-brand All Might one of course, even if All Might did look like he had been victim to some kind of incident with the wrong end of a bus), and the few times they were lead to the bathroom, a closet-sized room directly next to the cell, and jarringly modern and purple when compared to their cell.
The whole time they had been there, the woman had only said the bare minimum, ignoring any questions and continuing to bring random stuff from the same convenience store. Every day she wore a different bright pink, blue and purple outfit with the same cloak, and had only confirmed through her continuing basic mistakes that she didn’t really know what she was doing.
As time went on and they got used to the situation and more confident that their captor was maybe not the sharpest tool in the shed when it came to holding people hostage, their quirks got closer and closer to actually working until sometime not too long after they had all eaten their most recent meal (a selection of puddings eaten with plastic spoons), Kacchan went on another tirade about how much he really couldn’t stand being here anymore, and sparks popped around his fingers, instinctual and painfully loud after days of only their own voices.
That seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, and over the next few hours, everyone managed to get their quirks working. They were still weak and a little unreliable, but they were there, and that was all they needed to come up with a plan to escape. They started with the padlock, managing to warp it enough to break using Todoroki’s quirk and Kacchan’s sparks, and then gathered as many items as they could in the room, giving them to Uraraka, ready to de-gravity and throw as projectile weapons (most of what they had was the packaging from their meals, and while chip packets would only work as a distraction, a One For All powered bottle cap would probably pack more of a punch).
Then all that was left to do was wait.
They waited until the now familiar sound of their captor’s footsteps echoed down the hallway and she appeared before them.
It was time for them to escape, in spite of the rules she had set.