Archive of Our Own

"Would you like help?"

The old woman stood hunched, shawl pulled tightly around her shoulders. Slowly, she turned her head to stare at Ochako's upturned hand, uncomprehending.

"With your groceries," Ochako explained, starting to feel awkward.

"O-oh, yes please," the woman said. Then she reached out her arm, depositing the single bag into Ochako's palm.

The load was light, enough that Ochako didn't feel the need to use her quirk. Normally she wouldn't even have inserted herself into a situation for something so easy. But the woman had been standing in one place for a long time, staring at the ground. Ochako was worried that she was confused, that she didn't remember where she was.

"If you'll just—come this way," the woman said, and began to hobble down the street.

Ochako followed her, glad that she'd been startled out of her revery, ready to catch the woman with her quirk if she tripped.

The old woman's house was farther than Ochako had been expecting, or else, maybe Ochako just wasn't used to walking this slow. They were certainly making some kind of progress—the sound of waves folding over on themselves grew steadily louder. They must be heading south-ish.

"You walked a long way from home to go shopping!" Ochako said, trying to keep her tone light. This woman hadn't proved to be particularly good with small talk. Ochako hadn't even managed to get a name out of her.

The old woman stopped, staring down again. At first Ochako thought she needed a rest, or that she was trying to think of something to say. But the silence stretched on, and the woman made no move to start walking again.

"Are you—doing okay?" Ochako asked. She followed the woman's gaze, checking to see if she'd dropped something, but there was only the sidewalk, the raised planter and bench, the curb and the manhole cover.

"Give me my bag," the old woman said.

Quietly, Ochako opened the cloth grocery bag and looked inside, wondering if the woman had picked up medication, or some other pertinent object. But the bottom of the bag was covered in an absurd number of zip-ties, still in their packages. "Here," Ochako said, finally handing over the bag.

The woman reached to take it—then she reached farther and grabbed Ochako's wrist.

Instantly, Ochako's sight cut out, a television accidentally unplugged. She took a deep breath—unfortunately, this woman was even more senile than she'd been expecting, if she didn't have control of her quirk. But Ochako could handle this. She was a hero.

Carefully, Ochako twisted her wrist, pulling it away, to see if the quirk effect would drop. She couldn't tell if it worked. Another feeling had come over her, the weightlessness, the lack of grounding that came from her own quirk. This was different though—she couldn't feel the ground, the pull of the earth—but she couldn't feel the rub of her clothes, or the hand of the old woman either.

"Excuse me," Ochako said, planning to just ask the old woman to drop her quirk. But she couldn't hear the sound of her own voice, couldn't feel her tongue and lips and teeth moving together. It was impossible to tell if she had spoken or not, and if any response came, she didn't hear it.

That was when Ochako started to panic. Was she dead? Maybe the woman's quirk had just killed her, and that's why she was in this void. But no—she could reckon clear. This wasn't non-existance. And she remembered too much of her old life for this to be her next one. The quirk must have just cut off her perception.

Somehow, Ochako hadn't imagined that could be so debilitating.

She tried to think back to the things Deku had said in his many mumbling quirk analyses. Through the generations, quirks were growing steadily in power, but they were still tied to people. They still had physical limits. An old woman, with a quirk from a prior generation and a weak body, probably couldn't hold a powerful effect for a long time. Surely this would end soon.

It was hard to tell time with no frame of reference.

All at once the world returned, too overpowering to interpret. Something smelled rancid. Her body was still floating, but she wasn't flying away. It was darker than before, but not impossible to see. Her feet were wet.

A few paces away, facing her, stood the old woman. She was breathing heavy, exhausted, but her back was straight, her eyes focused. Her shawl and bag had disappeared.

"My daughter was named Emina," she said.

Ochako blinked. What happened, she tried to ask, not sure if she meant to the woman's daughter or to herself, but she couldn't get the words out. There was something in her mouth.

"She liked crabs," the old woman continued, "She never made her bed. She was married, with two children. They lived between Gunga and Jakku."

Ochako's breath caught, half from understanding, half because she was inhaling cloth. She needed to assess the situation yesterday—they were in a large tunnel, rounded and dim, water flowing down the center. She couldn't move her limbs.

"I was still planning," the woman went on, half-smiling, "I wasn't sure how to isolate one of you. And then you came right up to me. Guess this is my lucky day."

Ochako tossed her head, trying to leverage the gag off with the metal behind her. She needed to be able to speak, to reason with this woman, to try and save her. But the cloth wouldn't budge.

"See you," the woman said, stepping backward, "Never." Then she reached up, began climbing the ladder on the wall.

Reacting quickly wasn't working. Ochako tried to look down at herself, though it was hard to get the right angle. She was attached to a metal grate that stretched to span the corridor, pinned there with row after row of the old lady's zip ties.

Ochako almost laughed. You could get zip ties from any store. They weren't real villain gear. She could definitely break out.

Metal slid across metal, and Ochako looked up just in time to see a sliver of light from the ceiling close and disappear. Ochako was alone.

She sighed. That woman seemed like she was after anyone who had been involved in the Paranormal Liberation Battle—and that included most of Ochako's friends. It would have been nice to have a name, or any way to track her down. But Ochako didn't think she was gonna escape quickly enough to catch her.

Aizawa Sensei had gone over this kind of situation with them. If she could break the locking mechanism in the ties, it would be easy to escape. But she didn't have something to stick inside, and with her hands pinned back, she wouldn't be able to reach anyway. She'd have to try to tighten them, then use force to snap them.

Ochako spent the next five minutes trying to get the right momentum, but it was no use. The woman had turned Ochako's own quirk against her, probably because she wasn't strong enough to carry Ochako here on her own. And with the way Ochako's arms were pinned, she couldn't reach her two hands together and release it. Without weight, she couldn't generate the force she needed.

She was starting to feel nauseous, a combination of the kickback from her quirk and the stench of the tunnel. Ochako took slow breaths, trying not to salivate. She really didn't want to throw up into the gag.

It was the weekend. Ochako lived alone. Nobody would expect to see her until Monday. Her friends might text, but Ochako had to go and log in to her messaging apps at the library computer to get emojis and gifs to load. It was hard to follow a conversation otherwise. Her friends would expect her to be unresponsive.

Her friends could save her. But they might not come looking for a while.

Slowly, the light from grew dimmer and dimmer. The back of the tunnel must be open to the sky, the sun slipping away.

Ochako could make it. She could make it until Monday. Her quirk wouldn't kill her—she suspected that if her body couldn't handle it anymore, she would just pass out, and it would shut off on it's own. And for now it kept her bonds from digging into her skin, kept her too nauseous to be hungry.

For now, she just couldn't throw up. She needed to conserve as much fluid as possible.

After a lot of twisting, Ochako had managed to get one hand free. Her arm was still pinned, but she could turn her palm and press five fingertips to the grate if she wanted. But that would only make her sicker, and she couldn't think of a way it would help. The grate was attached to the wall.

Water lapped at her knees. Ochako frowned. She could have sworn that it had been shallower before. Was she near enough to the ocean that the tide would reach her?

Ochako's first thought was relief—if ocean water could reach her, then the drainage water coming through this tunnel had already been treated, would be decently safe to touch. Then a though struck her, and she looked up at the tunnel walls, searching for the mark in the grime, the line the water stopped at.

It was well over her head.

Ochako's stomach sank, a stone in her gut. She might not have until Monday.

Hours and minutes and seconds weren't real anymore. Ochako kept time by the way the water rose against her, slow and inevitable.

She renewed her thrashing, trying to find a weak point in her bonds. She absolutely couldn't drown here. How would her parents ever smile again? And her friends would never forgive themselves, even though it wouldn't be their fault. It wasn't something Ochako could accept. She hadn't been reckless—she'd only been helping an old woman. That wasn't a habit Ochako was willing to give up. So it wasn't gonna be the thing that got her killed. She wouldn't allow it.

If the water understood her reckoning, it didn't seem to care.

Ochako tried calling for help, but she wasn't particularly hopeful that it would work. The water made noise, she couldn't form words, and by now it must be the middle of the night. If no one had heard her in the daytime, it was unlikely that anyone would walk close enough to notice now.

Suddenly, the farthest zip tie on one side slipped up over her wrist. Ochako held her breath, carefully shimmying her free hand through. She had to draw it under the next tie as well to get the right leverage, but that one had been fastened a little farther down. It was hard to see through the water lapping at her forearm, through the corner of her eye, but she could feel it, ever so slightly looser.

Slowly, plastic scraping skin, the two ties came over and off.

Excited, Ochako tried to slip her arm farther. Her arm got wider as it went. Surely, the farther along she got, the easier it would go. But immediately, she ran into a problem. Her arm was bent slightly, and the ties above her elbow kept her from pulling it any farther down.

Ochako started sobbing. She hadn't been expecting it, didn't start it on purpose—it was almost like she was watching it happen to someone else. But it was her, really. It would be her parents, sad in the same way that old woman had been, sad because Ochako had failed—to save at Jakku, to save herself, here.

From behind, a swell broke against her head. Ochako sputtered. For just a second, her face had been underwater.

"Hello?"

Ochako went totally still, listening. She was half-certain she'd imagined it.

"Is somebody there?" the voice went on, faint with distance, muffled by the waves.

Here, Ochako tried to shout, but it came out garbled. She tried to shift enough to rattle the grate, but her body was still weightless, and she couldn't get the momentum. Finally she slammed her head back into the bars, over and over to make up for her limited range of motion.

Her ears and the metal rang together, but no one came climbing down the ceiling ladder. Ochako sputtered, trying to breathe through wet cloth. She didn't think she had imagined it, but it seemed too unlikely. She'd known the voice—Deku's.

The tunnel lit up behind her. This time, instead of soft, filtered daylight, it was a sharp light. Neon green.

Ochako melted, every muscle slack with relief. It was just enough to put her nose under the next wave. She went tense again, trying to keep her face up.

"Hello?" Deku repeated. This time the sound echoed. He was inside the tunnel.

The swells were at just the perfect height now—she could have taken breaths between them, but the wet gag made it hard. It was too much work. She couldn't waste air responding again.

The water got louder. Deku was wading through it faster—he must have gotten close enough to see her.

All of a sudden, the gag tore away, split down the back. Ochako gasped in air.

"Miss Uraraka?" Deku said. It was unclear if the question was is that you or are you okay.

"Stuck," Ochako choked. Then she closed her mouth, anticipating the next wave.

She was expecting Deku to feel around for the zip ties. It wouldn't be hard for him to break them. Instead, the whole grate lurched upward, dislodged from the ground, metal bending against the ceiling.

Now Ochako was six inches or so above the waterline. She coughed, spit out water, and took a deep breath of rancid air. "Deku."

"Hang on," Deku said. He was working down the ties on her right arm, breaking them against the metal so they wouldn't rub.

Ochako waited, fighting back one last bout of nausea, until he'd gotten down to her elbow. Then she straightened her arm, pulled it through the larger loops, and brought it around to her bound hand. Her fingertips tapped together.

For a split second Ochako felt intense relief. Then gravity pulled her head and shoulders into the water.

Ochako floundered, trying to grab the bar behind her and pull herself up. Instead, Deku grabbed her forearm and yanked her back into the air.

"Sorry!" Ochako sputtered, grabbing the grate again. She'd made his job harder. "I can hang on."

"It's fine," Deku said, too distracted for his hero tone to come through. He was focused on her other arm now, snapping the zip ties with one hand, holding her shoulder steady with the other.

Ochako hated to see him using so much of the ember for her, but she didn't try to stop him. She reckoned he would regret not using it way more.

When her other arm was free, Deku moved on to her legs. He had to let go of her, duck under the water to reach his feet. Ochako was struck with the irrational fear that something would happen to him while he was out of her sight, that after everything, they would both drown here. It was only because she was exhausted. She knew Deku. He would save her.

Finally, Ochako's ankles were free enough that she could pull her legs out of the string of loops. It would have been hard in the air, but the water made her lighter. She turned around—something that felt almost magical—and bobbed there, facing Deku, holding the grate between them.

"I can swim under," Ochako said, steeling herself.

Deku shook his head. "Wait." Then he pushed through the water to the curved tunnel edge. Bracing his shoulders against the wall, he pushed the grate inward. The metal warped, folding over itself, making a space. Deku reached through the hole, holding out his hand.

Ochako took it, careful of her pinky, and Deku reeled her in.

When she reached him, stepping through the opening, Deku kept hold of her hand. He drew it up, over his head, so that her arm rested across his shoulders. His other arm came across her back, holding her waist. Ochako recognized it as one of the ways Aizawa Sensei had taught them to carry injured people around.

"Come on," Deku said, and began dragging her forward through the water, toward the semi-circle sky.

They came out into the ocean, the water shallow. Deku turned them around to wade back to shore. There above them was the same city Ochako knew, blinking in the dark like a swarm of brighter, larger stars. Like always, it made her miss home.

When they stepped past the surf onto dry sand, Ochako bent over and hurled. She was mostly surprised that she'd made it this long.

Deku reacted efficiently, holding her there until she was finished, then pulling her back, a bit farther down the beach, before he helped her sit down.

Ochako leaned forward, elbows on her knees, forehead on her arms. She heard Deku sit down beside her, the side of one red shoe slipping into her vision.

Abruptly, Ochako sat up. Deku's iron soles were missing. She turned to him, ready to ask, and realied that he was in full civilian clothes.

If he'd come out on a purposeful rescue mission, then it hadn't been authorized.

"How did you find me?" Ochako asked. That seemed diplomatic.

Deku had his hand in his hair, shaking out the water. "I heard you."

He was good at this—answering your question without answering it. Sometimes Ochako wasn't sure if he even knew he was doing it. "How did you get here?" she tried again.

"I went for a run."

Ochako looked around—there was no hint of sunset along the horizon. And she hadn't had a great sense of time passing while she was trapped, but an entire tide had come in. "You went for a run—in the middle of the night?"

Deku nodded. From his expression, he didn't seem to see an issue with this.

"Does your Mom know where you are?" Ochako asked.

"I left a note," Deku said. Then he reached into his pocket, pulling out a phone. "Here, I'll call the police, and you can—oh."

The phone wouldn't turn on.

"Sorry," Ochako said.

"It's my fault. Deku said, getting to his feet. He tried to brush sand off of his wet shorts, and then gave up. "I should have left it on the beach before I jumped into water."

Ochako hummed. She couldn't quite imagine it—Deku pausing before rushing to save someone to take care of his phone.

Deku's ember had petered off while they walked, but now it exploded into light again. He reached his hand down to her. "Come on—I'll carry you to the station."

"Can we walk?" Ochako blurted, mind scrambling to find a reason. There was no danger now. She couldn't let him use his power for her any more. "It's just—the villain left a long time ago, so there's no need to rush, and I know they'll ask me questions and—I think I need a minute."

"Oh, sure," Deku said. He dropped full cowling, but his hand stayed motionless, outstretched.

Ochako took it, careful not to touch all five fingers, and Deku helped her up. They started up toward the road, hands still clasped.

Over the years, Ochako had noticed a lot of things about Deku. He didn't flinch so much at loud noises, or sputter when he was asked questions, but he still didn't initiate hugs. He still siddled away, almost subconsciously, whenever a friend tried to throw an arm around his shoulders. She'd once watched Ashido try to teach him and Todoroki how to do a snail pound it. Both boys had moved slowly, like they were handling chemistry tools, and Ochako could have sworn they left an entire three centimeters of space between their hands.

So Deku was still worried about her, still trying to save her. He wouldn't still be touching her otherwise.

Ochako took a deep breath, trying to lighten the load in her chest. It was like a stick of ice cream, like the end of summer. She'd enjoy it, for as long as it lasted.

By the time they made it to the street, Ochako was lagging. She tried to rally—she didn't want Deku to give up and use full cowling again—but she didn't think it was going to work. She'd had her own quirk active for too long.

Deku led them directly to the nearest bench. "Excuse me," he whispered, leaning over the backreast.

From the shadows of the seat, someone sat up.

Ochako nearly shouted. She hadn't been expecting it.

"Who's there?" the woman accused. She was middle aged, greasy-haired, and wearing a faded blue jacket.

Deku took a step back. "Miss Wakamatsu—it's me, Midoriya."

Miss Wakamatsu pulled out a pair of glasses and put them on. She squinted through them, trying to make out Deku's face in the dark. "Oh—you're Yagi's boy."

"I'm really sorry to trouble you," Deku said, "But I actually need to call Yagi Sensei—could I borrow your phone?"

Slowly, Miss Wakamatsu shook her head. "I haven't paid the data plan. Sorry."

"Oh, that's fine!" Deku said, almost excited, "We can still call emergency services—my friend needs an ambulance."

Miss Wakamatsu looked over, noticing Ochako for the first time. "Sit down," she said, slapping the bench, "You look pale."

Before Ochako could decide if this was a good idea, Deku let her around to the front of the bench. Miss Wakamatsu moved her backpack to make room. Then she dug around in the outside pocket, pulled out a flip phone, and stood up to make a call.

Ochako sat down. It seemed like Deku knew this person, and she was starting to feel woozy.

"I used to train here," Deku said, quiet. He must have noticed Ochako's confusion.

"On the beach?" Ochako asked.

Deku nodded. "With All Might. Miss Wakamatsu spent a lot of time nearby. This is her favorite bench."

Ochako nodded. There were a lot of thoughts fighting for the first place in her mind—Deku, restless at night, sneaking out to run where he'd worked to become a hero—Miss Wakamatsu, standing as the counterpart to that first woman—for everyone who hurt on purpose, another to reach out their hand.

"Her daughter was named Emina," Ochako said.

Deku frowned. "Miss Wakamatsu?"

"No," Ochako said. She started to shake her head, but it hurt, so she stopped. "The villain. Emina was a civilian casualty in the Paranormal Liberation Battle. There'll be a record of her death."

"Smart," Deku said, rubbing his chin.

"And I can describe her," Ochako said, speaking as the thoughts came, "And I saw her quirk, and she told me about her motives. She'll be going after anyone involved in that battle."

Deku nodded, determined. "We'll definitely catch her. We'll save her."

Ochako smiled. She was glad she didn't have to explain, that Deku already understood.