Chapter Text
JANUARY 8, 2031 20:03 HOURS
LOCATION: [REDACTED]
“He’s here,” Aizawa’s secretary informs him over the intercom.
Aizawa sighs, spinning his chair in a circle around and around. From his office’s floor to ceiling windows, Aizawa had seen Todoroki Enji pull through the gates of his facility, surrounded by armored trucks. You’d think this was war or something, given how serious Todoroki was taking himself. Aizawa smiles to himself.
Well. This could probably be considered war.
He stops the chair from its slow spinning. He looks over the papers strewn across his desk, headshots of people of every ethnicity with stamps across their files. FAILED. DECEASED. IN-PROGRESS. Aizawa presses the heel of his hands against his eyes. His stubble has gone from ‘reasonably attractive’ to ‘acceptable’ to ‘not acceptable’ and is now somewhere in the vicinity of ‘wild man living off the land’ and ‘lumberjack.’ His hair is matted and greasy. He hasn’t had a full night of sleep in six months.
“I’m not giving up on you,” he mutters to the faces peering up at him. “Even if Todoroki can pull off a miracle, I’m not giving up on you.” He’d invested far too many years in the Lycaon Project to even consider abandoning it. It’s not like Todoroki had had much success either, if the images of malformed masses of flesh and blood and scales and skin were anything to go by.
Aizawa stands up from his desk. Might as well get this over with.
He takes the long way to reach Todoroki, not really sure if he wants to see the “surprise” Todoroki had brought with him. If it’s anything like his most recent research attempts, Aizawa is kicking him out personally. Like he needed nightmare fuel with as little sleep as he was getting already. With luck, it was some kind of machinery, a new kind of irradiation chamber or a gene sequence that might keep Aizawa’s patients from dying or maybe a fairy godmother to wave her wand and wish the kaiju away altogether.
Todoroki Enji is flanked by the usual amount of security personnel for scientists of their status. Aizawa’s own security force is there as well. As entertaining as it would be to watch the blank-faced suits stare each other down through their sunglasses, Todoroki has a grin on his face that could prove the ‘mad scientist’ rumors true.
“Sensei!” he greets, voice booming through the open space of Aizawa’s lobby and reverberating against the glass walls. “What a glorious day it is!”
Aizawa regards Todoroki as he always does—irritation and just a hint of suspicion. He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his lab coat and descends the stairs slowly. “Sensei,” Aizawa greets with a nod and a frown. “What is it this time? You went to all the trouble of paying me a visit and you won’t even tell me what kind of gift you have for me.”
“Not just for you,” Todoroki says. “It is a gift for all humanity, the trump card we’ve needed every time we saw a Jaeger fall.”
He’s infuriatingly confident. Aizawa ups the strength of his scowl. “Spit it out, Todoroki,” he says. “But just know that if it’s pile of pink mush that breathes, I am terminating our partnership effective immediately.”
“I want to show you,” Todoroki says. “Believe me, I do. But first I must ensure that our partnership, as you said, will remain open and mutually beneficial.”
“Stop talking like a politician,” Aizawa snaps. “What do you want from me?”
“Unlimited access to your facility,” Todoroki says. “My own lab. And a kind word from you about my experiments to the Japanese government. I know you’re close with Toshinori. Of course, the reverse will be granted as well. You’re welcome to work in my facility as you please. We will share our findings instead of this petty quarrel.”
Calling Aizawa “close with Toshinori” was kind of pushing it. They were more of the reluctantly-paired-up, glare-at-each-other-across-the-room types who happened to argue long enough to become kind of friends. Aizawa still doesn’t like him, and the feeling is mutual. But anyway… “No.”
Todoroki, against all odds, smiles harder. “Why not? We both benefit from the deal. It’s only a step further than the agreement we have now.”
“No, because you’re a conniving, competitive bastard,” Aizawa says. “I can’t believe I heard the words ‘share our findings’ come out of your mouth, and I sure as hell don’t trust them.”
“I’m being honest with you,” Todoroki says. “I have something you want. I’m open to collaboration because you have the medical monitoring systems I want. Plus, I believe my research may provide insights on how to further your own research.”
Aizawa grits his teeth. Bastard. He really did do it. He must have—it’s the only way he could be this confident. He had the one thing Aizawa had been struggling to accomplish for six years: a positive result. But if Aizawa agreed to this deal then he forfeited any claim to a success of his own. All his subjects—no, all his patients, people who would do anything to try and survive, even put themselves through the torture of Aizawa’s experimentation—would be lost.
“I don’t want it,” Aizawa seethes. “I don’t want your test tube baby. I want my patients to make it. These are real people, Todoroki. They deserve any chance I can give them.”
“Did I say you had to give up?” Todoroki asks. “I didn’t. You made that assumption on your own. If you want to research mine, you can. If you want to continue Lycaon Project, you can do that, too. All I’m suggesting is a little collaboration.”
He’s right. Aizawa needs his results. He needs to analyze the DNA of Todoroki’s success, needs to check his gene sequences and figure out what it is about that one organism that allowed it to survive when all of its brothers and sisters died horribly.
“Lycaon Project is mine,” Aizawa says, defeated. “Endeavor Project is yours. My name on mine, your name on yours. The only collaboration is in our collaboration project title, but the work remains separate.”
“Of course,” Todoroki says. “I would never take your research away from you. I know how much it means to you.”
Aizawa’s hands clench into fists in his pockets. What he’s not saying is that he doesn’t want any part of a project he knows will end in failure. He believes that Lycaon Project is dead in the water.
I really, really hate you, Todoroki Enji, Aizawa thinks.
“I’ve already put in the patent for mine, anyway,” Todoroki says.
“So you really did do it,” Aizawa says. “You managed to produce a fully functional hybrid.”
Todoroki nods. “Initially, I had some promising subjects, but once I created this one, they were promptly destroyed. There are none to compare to my success.”
“Alright, alright,” Aizawa says, rolling his eyes. “Enough of the self-righteousness. What does it look like? You must be keeping it somewhere.”
“Yes,” Todoroki says. “It’s right here.”
He steps to the side to reveal a child. A human child. Aizawa stares, then frowns.
He couldn’t be more than six or seven years old, eyes cast down. His eyes are dark, but his hair is a striking red and white, divided right down the middle. He doesn’t react to Todoroki’s introduction, nor does he look up at Aizawa. He just stands there, looking tiny and out of place in a massive biomedical research facility surrounded by electric fences and barbed wire.
Aizawa’s first reaction is that he’s been duped somehow. “What is this,” Aizawa says. “Is this your son? What do you want me to say? Congratulations? Where’s the hybrid, Todoroki?”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Todoroki says, downright gleeful. “Doesn’t look a thing like its kaiju side. You wouldn’t even know it’s not human without closer inspection.”
“Your idea of a hybrid is an almost entirely human child,” Aizawa says. He’s stumped. “You expect that to defeat Category Three kaiju? Hell, I’d like to see it—him—defeat even a Category One! What’s he going to do, growl at it?”
Aizawa forfeited the privacy of his facility for a baby. A baby that couldn’t even do anything. He didn’t have claws or teeth that Aizawa could see. He’d been had. Todoroki had fooled him with something one part kaiju, ninety-nine parts human.
“Shouto,” Todoroki says. “Look up when you’re spoken to.”
The child—Shouto—looks up at Aizawa. Aizawa can’t stop the flinch, or the half-step back in instinctive alarm. He can’t explain it. Why does a mouse run from a tiger? It’s the feeling of overwhelming danger encoded in the DNA of human beings, the fight or flight response triggered just by looking into the left eye of this thing.
Shouto blinks, a reptilian eyelid covering his eye, so blue it was painful to look at, slit like a crocodile’s or a leopard’s. And all around his eye, scaly skin, the black of a kaiju’s hide but with a red sheen to it unlike the green or blue Aizawa was used to.
“Jesus,” Aizawa says. “What did you do, implant a kaiju’s eye in him and call him a hybrid?”
“No,” Todoroki says, and for the first time, his mouth twists into a frown. “Our facility is dedicated to creating hybrids. We don’t have the funds to control and monitor them. We tried to guide it through its first shift, but—”
“His first what?” Aizawa sputters. “Shift? Shift. As in, shapeshift?”
Todoroki scowls harder. “For someone who named his project after the mythical werewolf, you don’t seem to be very knowledgeable about the application of shapeshifting.”
“It’s mythology!” Aizawa cries, hands fisting in his hair. “My patients are supposed to change permanently, not…You can’t honestly expect me to believe that—that—kid can change into a massive kaiju!”
Todoroki is silent. Aizawa’s eyes nearly pop out of his head. “My God. You do expect me to believe it.”
“We had no problem splicing the kaiju genes and introducing them into the human genome,” Todoroki says. “The alien DNA seems to inherently absorb and mutate other genomes, hence the different appearances of the kaiju. The problem has been getting one of our subjects to successfully complete a transformation.”
“So—he has?” Aizawa says, pointing at Shouto.
“Halfway,” Todoroki says, grimacing. “Like I said, our facility can’t control the amount of radiation output on its body. When it started breaking down, we reversed the shift and it was able to return to normal with minimal damage. All the other ones destroyed themselves regardless of whether we reversed the shift or kept pressing on. Shouto is the only one to survive.”
Aizawa leans back against the railing, running a hand back through his hair. “You want my help to complete the shift,” he says.
“Yes,” Todoroki says. “Your facility is the only one suitable for this unique project.”
“Why now?” Aizawa asks. “You’ve clearly been sitting on this gold mine for, what, six? Seven years? Jesus, if you’ve had him since before that last attempt to hit the Breach, then—”
“What are you talking about?” Todoroki says.
Aizawa gestures to Shouto. “The kid! He’s got to be five at his youngest, more like seven! The timeline makes no sense!”
“Shouto is a year old,” Todoroki says. “There’s no time to be sitting around on projects that could save the world. It grows like the kaiju—full grown in three years and remaining at its prime until it dies.”
Aizawa thinks of the bottle of tequila he keeps in a hidden compartment of his desk for emergencies. He thinks he’ll be needing the whole bottle, then possibly a bottle of champagne, then three more bottles of tequila before he wraps his mind around everything that has happened in the past ten minutes. Also, he’ll be needing every single report on the findings of the Endeavor Project, but first things first.
“Fuck it,” Aizawa says. “Fuck it all. Let’s do science.”
-----------------------
The theory is that, given the unique biology of the kaiju, the kaiju cells from infected tissue will react to high levels of radiation by mutating to protect the host organism, kind of like a super-powered, genome-warping parasite. With Shouto, the idea is the same. Throw a lot of dangerous radiation at him, and hope that the alien biology kicks in to save his life by turning him into a kaiju. Have him eat a block of uranium or something.
After all, science began by throwing Hazardous Item One at Hazardous Item Two and seeing if they went boom.
Except in this case, it involved a lot of cancer-causing, cell-destroying energy and human lives. Dying human lives in Aizawa’s case and a human rights nightmare in Todoroki’s case. Aizawa still isn’t sure about blasting a mostly healthy looking boy with the equivalent of an atomic bomb’s sneeze worth of radiation, but he is at his wit’s end. Shouto consented, anyway.
Shouto steps into the radiation chamber through a series of checkpoints to ensure the radiation stayed in where it belonged. Through the (thick, thick, nanobot enhanced) glass, Aizawa and Todoroki are able to observe the boy stepping inside the white interior of the chamber, shaped like a sphere. He stands for a moment, looks around, and then sits down, hugging his knees. He’s a tiny dot in the middle of a room designed to contain a Category Three kaiju comfortably.
“You said you could shift him back,” Aizawa says.
Todoroki nods. “Flood the chamber with a gel we designed to mirror the conditions of the womb of Otachi. The gel is filled with nanobots with mutation suppressants we engineered from the cells of our failed subjects. The combination of suppressants and the faux amniotic fluid suppresses the mutation and reverts the subject back to its original form. Shouto is the only true success.”
“And even that was dicey,” Aizawa says. “I don’t have any gel like that if things go belly up.”
“I brought it along,” Todoroki says. “Usually we paralyze the subject first so that they’re forced to ingest the gel.”
Aizawa makes a face. “You really don’t care about human rights, do you?”
“Shouto isn’t human,” Todoroki says. “It will save the world, but don’t for a minute confuse it with a real human.”
Shouto rests his head on top of his knees, cheeks pressed into his kneecap and too-blue eye lazily scanning the chamber.
He’s done this before, Aizawa realizes. He’s done this countless times. Countless times he’s been stabbed and scraped, examined and pulled at, pushed to his limits and endured trials no one could get away with performing on a human. All because he wasn’t born a human child. All because a fraction of him was alien.
“You disgust me,” Aizawa says. “He’s sentient. He understands Japanese. And without an excess of radiation, he’s just as human as you or I.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Todoroki snorts. “You would have done the same in my shoes. And even if you wouldn’t have, you need the data from my tests and experiments to make yours work. Be grateful that I didn’t treat it like a human.”
“He’s a male, isn’t he?” Aizawa snarls. “Stop calling him ‘it.’”
“It, he, it doesn’t matter,” Todoroki says. “Just do your part and you’ll get a chunk of the glory.”
“If this works,” Aizawa says, “the PPDC will take him from you. He’ll be trained as a soldier and you won’t get to torture him any longer.”
“That’s fine,” Todoroki says. “By the time they get their heads out of their asses, I’ll have gathered enough data from him and he will be the first hybrid in combat, carrying my name to greater fame than even the pilots of All Might. I can always make another one.”
Aizawa grits his teeth, looking at the lifeless boy at the bottom of the chamber. I’ll save you, he promises the kid. I will put you in Toshinori Yagi’s hands. You’ll be safe with the military. Aizawa has to hold in a hysterical laugh that he’ll be saving Shouto by handing him over to the military. What a life—born a test subject, die a soldier. Perhaps it was best not to think of Shouto as human.
But no, as agonizing as it was, Aizawa had to. If he overlooked Shouto’s painful humanity then he was no better than Todoroki using him like a lab animal, untouchable by law. Shouto should haunt him. Aizawa could look forward to another six months of sleepless nights at this rate.
“Do it,” Aizawa tells his technicians. “Slowly.”
“That won’t work,” Todoroki says. “You have to go full tilt immediately, or it—he—won’t shift.”
“We’re doing things my way,” Aizawa says. Force a mutation? Yeah, right. That would kill Shouto in a matter of minutes. “8 Gy.”
After forty minutes or so, Shouto begins to look uncomfortable. He’s shifting in place, tightening his grip around his arms and scratching at his skin. Aizawa’s entire body is wound tight. This is even more than he’d dose his own patients with, but amazingly, Shouto wasn’t showing any of the symptoms of high level radiation exposure. His skin is still pale and unburned or blistered. He’s not bleeding out his nose or ears. He’s not vomiting. He only looks uncomfortable.
“I can’t believe what I’m looking at,” Aizawa croaks. “How is he—”
“The kaiju cells are already mutating to protect him,” Todoroki says. “He won’t keel over and die like your patients. He can survive this easily. But you’ll never get a shift playing it safe. 50 Gy, at least.”
“Fifty?” Aizawa snaps. “We’ve never even attempted thirty Grays! Are you trying to rip him apart from the inside out?”
“Just do it,” Todoroki says.
“30 Gy,” Aizawa says firmly. “Bump it to thirty.”
It takes under ten minutes for Shouto to react to the radiation. He topples to the side, shaking on his hands and knees. He clutches his stomach. The biometric scanners show elevated heartbeat and erratic breathing, but Shouto is somehow still alive. He retches, entire body shuddering, and then coughs up blood, thick and red across the white floor of the chamber.
“That’s enough,” Aizawa says. “That’s enough, turn it off.”
“No,” Todoroki commands, grinning wickedly. “Watch.”
Aizawa’s technicians hover indecisively over the controls and Aizawa glances between Shouto, still coughing up blood, and Todoroki, leaning forward and watching his agony. Aizawa is just as indecisive as his technicians.
“There,” Todoroki breathes. Aizawa looks through the window.
At first, he doesn’t see anything. Shouto quivers weakly, spitting up red mouthful after red mouthful after blue mouthful after red mouthful…
Blue mouthful?
Aizawa presses his face against the glass, staring at the small puddle of blood in front of Shouto. In amongst the bright red of human blood, he sees a swirl of metallic blue, thicker than the red. And from Shouto’s ears, shiny blue blood.
“It begins,” Todoroki says.
Shouto’s arm gives out and he falls to the floor. No, his arm hasn’t given out it’s—it’s flopping around like a live being, the skin rippling and stretching, bone crunching and cracking, extending out. Shouto throws back his head and screams, silent through the reinforced glass. His human skin flakes off, but instead of red blood, it’s all kaiju blue, black scales rising from blood clots, a red sheen on them like the scales around Todoroki’s eye. When Shouto punches the floor of the radiation chamber, it is with an inhuman arm and a fist tipped in talons, and it shakes the whole chamber as he pounds the ground in pain.
“Quickly,” Todoroki snaps. “Up the dosage before he starts to lose control of the shift! It has to stay balanced or he’ll be ripped apart by it!”
Aizawa doesn’t know if he can trust Todoroki. But he does know that Todoroki is the one who knows the most about this miracle happening in front of them. “Listen to him!” Aizawa tells his technicians. “70 Gy! Come on, we’ll push him through!”
Shouto’s other arm changes even quicker than the first one. His chest is expanding, his body lengthening, and his face growing outwards and into a snout, eliminating the last of his humanity. His hair falls out and his clothes rip apart. From his vertebrae, long black spines grow, too many vertebrae to be the length of a human body.
“120 Gy,” Todoroki says. “One last push.”
The radiation emitters whine at the strain put on them, but bathe Shouto in radiation. His skin boils and his body snaps outwards, growing and reshaping itself. In a final show of rippling muscle and internal structure, Shouto’s body heaves and then collapses.
“Kill the radiation,” Aizawa says, voice raw.
He’s afraid to look. He’s afraid not to look. Even the technicians stand from their stations to look through the glass at the hybrid.
Shouto rises from where he had collapsed, shaking his head as if to shake off what was fifteen times the lethal dose of radiation. The biometric scanners are going wild, reading something alive, but not calibrated to say what was alive. Shouto is the size of a large Category One kaiju and all black with a red sheen glinting off his scales where the light hits them. He’s got heat pouring off of some niches beneath his back spines, but when he exhales, frost lights over the floor of the radiation chamber. He turns to look straight at the glass.
“Oh,” Aizawa says in a tiny voice. “That’s weird.”
Of his six eyes, the three on the right are human, the dark grey-black of Shouto’s natural eye color, and the three on the left are all kaiju, electric blue and piercing.
“Didn’t expect that,” Todoroki admits. “And the heat waves and frost—”
“Specialty kaiju weapons?” Aizawa breathes. “I never dreamed we’d have a real hybrid, let alone that—”
“He’s going to get bigger,” Todoroki says. “He’s only a year old, he’s going to grow.”
“We need a bigger radiation chamber,” Aizawa says. “We need blood tests and a field test and analysis of his abilities and a communication system.”
“We need a bigger budget,” Todoroki says.
“The military will fund it,” Aizawa says. “If we can weaponize Shouto, they’ll buy into it. This will change everything.”
Before Todoroki can make a move to stop him, Aizawa presses the com. “Shouto, can you hear me? It’s Aizawa-sensei.”
Shouto reacts to the voice by tilting his head and eyeing the glass. Then, slowly and deliberately, he nods his muzzle awkwardly. Aizawa goes weak at the knees. “Human comprehension,” he says. “No brain damage. He’s functional.”
Aizawa presses the com again. “You’ve done a great job, Shouto,” Aizawa says. “Do you hear me? You’ve done a great job. You’re going to save lives. You’re going to be a hero.”
“This can work,” Todoroki says. “The Endeavor Project works. The Lycaon Project can work, too.”
“We’ll make it work,” Aizawa agrees. He lets out a soft laugh and holds out his hand.
“As a man, I despise you, Todoroki Enji,” Aizawa says. “I intend to take this project to the military and get these hybrids out of your hands. But you don’t care about that, do you? As long as you get the glory, it doesn’t matter what happens to them.”
“You’re right,” Todoroki says. “I’ll get the credit for the first hybrid and I own the patent. I’ve changed the world and will never be forgotten. I intend to live out my fame for the rest of my life.” He shakes Aizawa’s hand. “It’ll be a pleasure to steal the glory from you, Aizawa Shouta.”
“Then we’re in agreement,” Aizawa says. “All we need is a name for the project.”
“Already done,” Todoroki says. “Let Project Metis begin.”
Behind them, Shouto lets out a soft rumble and flares his spines.