Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Chaoxiang kneels at the foot of the shrine, knees creaking with old age and hips aching. He groans as he arranges his legs into a crossed position, imitating meditation. He then rests his hands in his lap and bows his head—and prays.

Kozo, protector of the common people, I pray to you for guidance in troubled times. Our children are to be taken to fight in unjust war, even though they are barely old enough to marry. We cannot prevent this ourselves. They may die and we are unable to save them. We are told that it is honorable to die fighting for your nation’s cause, yet it causes nothing but grief to us. I ask for help, protector spirit, to rescue them from this fate, or a sign that the future is not so bleak.

Chaoxiang finishes his prayer with a deep sigh. The notice of conscription rests on the desk a few feet away, innocent looking for all of the sorrow it has brought and will soon bring them, and he can’t help but stare at it, silently wishing it had never existed in the first place. 

“Grampa?” A small voice calls from the open doorway. The old man turns and sees his great-granddaughter standing there, fidgeting with her shirt and eyes staring at the shrine. 

“What is it, Bug?” he answers gently. Her expression is neutral, but her lip is trembling and her eyes are downcast. 

The little girl walks over and climbs into his lap without a word, then buries her face in his chest. 

They sit for a little while, Chaoxiang combing through her long hair with his fingers until she breaks the silence. 
“…Brother said he has to leave soon.”

“Mm, so he did.”

“…what are you doing?”

Chaoxiang hums, “Praying to the spirit that guards our valley so that it may protect your brother and all who must leave tomorrow.”

She turns to face him and asks, “How do you do it?”

“First, you must sit,” he instructs, and she clambers off of his lap to sit next to him. “now, close your eyes. Do you remember the breathing exercises I taught you?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Good,” Chaoxiang smiles softly. “Next, you address the spirit by name so that they know who we’re praying to. Then, you ask for something, and explain why.”

The little girl is focused now, eyes screwed shut so tightly Chaoxiang might tease her about going blind if this were a normal day. 

“The spirit I am praying to for help is Kozo, the protector of the common people.” he says, and she nods, then shushes him. 

A few seconds pass. His great-granddaughter opens her eyes with a determined expression. “There,” she announces, “now Brother won’t ever get hurt while he’s gone.”

Oh, how I wish it worked that way, Bug, he thinks. He doesn’t say this, though. Instead, he ruffles her hair affectionately and sighs, “Good job, Bug.”

———🌊🪨🔥💨———

———🌊🪨🔥💨———

“I don’t want to go to jail!” the person sobs, words a little slurred from the alcohol. 

“You won’t,” Shōta assures them, “the most that’s going to happen is fines for the damage.” 

They nod, and hiccup, and curl up on their side on the pavement, blubbering apologies and gibberish. 

“Are they gonna be okay?” one of their friends—presumably—asks. 

Shōta replies, “Has this kind of incident happened before?” 

“No, this is the first time they’ve ever gotten drunk…” 

“Hm.” The Erasure Hero gives the drunk person a quick once-over, and can’t find any injuries. He sighs. “Make sure they get rest, and water. They don’t have any obvious physical injuries, but I’m no paramedic, so keep an eye on them just in case-“

In the middle of his sentence, there’s a sharp tug in his chest, and suddenly he feels like he’s falling. 

Crap, he thinks as he tries to orient himself, did I get hit with a quirk that I didn’t notice?

The dizziness abruptly ceases, and Shōta realizes that he’s lying on the ground. He quickly sits up (without any nausea, thankfully), and immediately recognizes that something is wrong. 

All he can see for miles are hills, no matter which direction he looks. 

“What the fuck?” he mutters as he gets to his feet. He’s definitely not anywhere near Musutafu. He might not even be in Japan, judging by the lack of many trees. 

Damnit. Patrol was almost over, too. 

With a sigh he activates the emergency beacon on his utility belt, and pulls his work phone out of his pocket to begin dictating an alert to the Hero network:

Teleported to an unknown location. No apparent cause. Could be delayed quirk effect.

He sends it, but before he closes the screen, a notification pops up that tells him that the message was unable to send.

Shōta runs his hand over his face and groans. Of course it isn’t working.

He looks around again at his surroundings, which is all hills and no landmarks as far as he can see. Great. There is no way of telling where the hell he is.

Wait.

There’s faint gray smoke rising over one of the distant hills, which on one hand, means people and possibly finding out where this place is, but on the other hand, means walking several miles while being exhausted from patrol.

Shōta contemplates just climbing one of the nearby trees and going to sleep, and he can already hear Mic in his head questioning his intelligence for falling asleep in some random field out in the middle of nowhere. 

Honestly though, he’s so tired that the prospect of getting any sleep wherever he can would be better than none. 

Fuck it. I’ve slept in worse places before.

Just as he starts making his way toward the closest tree, he hears shouting from somewhere in the distance. It takes him a second to tell which direction it’s coming from, but it doesn’t sound like anything good. 

Instantly, he snaps awake, fully alert. If there’s a situation happening, he’s probably the closest person in this middle-of-nowhere field who can help. 

He laments the loss of sleep as he begins running, adrenaline fueling his exhausted body. 

It takes several minutes, but Shōta finally gets over the biggest hill in his path—and pauses. 

There’s a sprawling town laid in front of him, at the bottom of the steep slope of the hill. The roofs are curved and an odd shade of red, one that the underground hero doesn’t recognize from any of his many trips around his home country. 

There don’t seem to be any people in the streets or occupying the houses. They must all be at the other end of the town, where the noise is coming from. 

There’re at least three paths he can see that could lead him to the commotion: the roofs, the street, and the surrounding hills. The roofs are curved enough that he might have trouble moving across them as efficiently as the roofs in Musutafu though they will most effectively hide him, the streets would be the easiest but the most likely to get him spotted, and the surrounding landscape would be both easy and way out of sight, but take much longer…

Yeah, he’ll take the roofs. 

Shōta slips over the edge, sliding down the hillside and waiting for just the right moment to stop and leap directly on to the roof closest to him. He lands on the tiles without a sound, and realizes that he’s close enough now to hear the words in the shouts of the people at the other side of the town. 

“Give us our children back!”
“We won’t let you take them!”
“FALL IN LINE-“
“Leave us alone!” 
“Get out!” 

Shōta curses under his breath and starts moving again, running carefully across the rooftops to not trip on the points at each corner or the strange sloping build. With every step he takes, he listens harder to the sounds of the riot. 

The shouting is clearly coming from some form of mob, who, by the shouting, are trying to stop an outside force from taking their children, which can be attributed to several concerning situations… 

Either way, he expects that the people in the mob are not the instigators, though he knows to be prepared for anything. 

It only takes him a few minutes to glide across the rooftops and get close enough to see what’s going on. He stops at the edge of the final roof in his path and steps behind the large point, out of line of sight from the ground, before observing further, not wanting to risk being spotted by any possible adversaries. 

Shōta quickly retrieves his eyedrops from his utility belt and applies them in case he needs to use his quirk to diffuse the situation—they’re sore from the long night of patrolling and fighting he’s already done. He only uses a small amount, though, to conserve all that he can in case he doesn’t get access to more for a while. 

He slips the small bottle back into a pouch on his belt, pulling his goggles over his eyes at the same time and then poking his head around the roof’s peak. 

The first thing he notices is the strange dress of the civilians; it’s not modern, that’s for sure. It looks like clothes from those old films Hizashi bullies him into watching (he doesn’t actually care for the movies, usually the reason he agrees is to hide from his troublemaking class) (and the opportunity to hang out with his friend, but that’s something he’ll admit on his deathbed), but also… not. 

There are several armored people standing furthest away, in between the two buildings on the edge of the town, separating eighteen people from the rest of the group. Shōta notes that they all appear to be around the same age as his students, which lines up with the shouting he heard a few minutes earlier. 

All of the kids look scared, and as he watches, one of them tries to make a move, maybe to bolt away or duck around the armored men and women yelling back at the angry crowd. They almost make it, but one of the soldier-like people grabs them by the back of their shirt. She holds a hand up to the young person’s face. “If any of you,” she announces slowly, “tries anything… the army won’t miss one soldier.”

Oh. Oh hell no. 

Shōta sees her hand ignite with flickering orange fire that causes almost everyone in civilian dress to full-body flinch. Fire quirk, then. He only allows the flame to last for half a second before he activates Erasure and extinguishes it, moving around the roof’s peak to throw his capture weapon from his fingertips and catch it on her armor, dragging her away and wrapping her up like a mummy in one swift, practiced motion. 

“What the-!” 

Several people, both the soldiers and the crowd, gasp as he leaps off of the rooftop, angling his foot just right to slam into another soldier’s shoulder on landing, knocking him to the ground. 

One of the others runs at Shōta and throws a punch. He dodges, and though it would have been a good opportunity to land a blow to their stomach, up close he can see that the armor has clear quality to it, and doing so would only mess up his hand. So instead, he allows the soldier to tip forward from the momentum while he swings around behind them and knocks their feet out from under them before they can catch themself. 

Three more of them (he counts ten—two on the ground, five in front of him, one sitting on some sort of rhinoceros creature and two behind everyone else) lunge forward, surrounding him, and he ducks, having glimpsed a spear in one of their hands. 

The other two try to attack him while he’s low to the ground; one sends fire from their fists, the other with another spear, so he weaves around the fire and punches the second one in the face, the only unprotected part of them. 
The first spear wielder sends his spear at Shōta again, so he steps in close, disarms them, sends his capture weapon around their wrist and snaps it, throwing them into their two fellow soldiers. 

“Look out!” Someone behind him calls, and Shōta whips around just in time to see and avoid a blast of fire, much bigger and more akin to a flamethrower than the quick bursts from the other one.

He notes how strange it is that so far three of the soldiers he’s faced have had pretty much identical fire quirks. These days, there’s such a wide variety of specific quirks that finding ones that are similar to your own requires yours to be extremely general in function, and more often than not, already knowing each other via family connections. 

Also, he thinks as he ties up two more soldiers and roundhouse kicks one of them in the face with the momentum of pulling them toward him, what army did the one earlier in the fight mean? The armor all looks similar enough to be believable as uniforms, but no army in the world uses full suits of armor like this. 

Shōta stores that information in his mind for later questioning. 

The two he hadn’t tied up upon knocking down get up and tag team him, but their movements, while well-executed, are predictable, and he manages to duck around and loop his capture scarf around their heads to smack them together when he pulls. One of them springs back up, but he flashes Erasure and startled them into backing away. 
Not fast enough to avoid his scarf though. 

There’re five left standing now, either having the skills to realize that they’d need a plan to even touch Shōta, or getting back up after sustaining an injury inflicted by the underground hero. 

This fight has already gone on longer than Shōta likes, so he decides to pull out all stops to wrap it up (metaphorically and literally) quickly. Less time fighting will lessen the chance of his dry eye acting up.

He takes several steps back and scales the wall of one of the buildings with ease, only turning around for a second before his quirk-infused glare prevents another soldier from shooting fire at him. He pulls at his capture scarf, creating several loops and sending them rushing at the soldiers, binding the four on the ground with efficiency. 

The one riding the rhino thing is further away, and they attempt to command the creature to do something, but Shōta is too quick for that. He snags them with his scarf and drags them right off the saddle, bundling them up with the rest of their nine allies. 

He leaps off of the roof of the building and onto the dirt road, keeping his grip on his capture weapon tight and eyes trained on the soldiers as he approaches. 

“Who-! What in Sozin’s name are you doing! You can’t just-!” One of them yells. 

“You shouldn’t have messed with kids.” Shōta growls at him with a glare and a flash of Erasure. 

All of the soldiers go pale, and he finally blinks, allowing his eyes to rest. 

“Now don’t even think about trying anything. I only have so much patience as it is.” he warns. Once they are thoroughly scared, he turns to face the crowd of previously upset civilians. 

“Is there anywhere to put them until authorities are alerted?” he asks, sliding his goggles off of his eyes with his free hand. 

Nobody speaks for a solid five seconds, until one of the teenagers near the edge of the town mumbles “they… kind of… are… the authorities.”

“Hm,” Shōta grunts, “they’re not very good at it then.” What kind of place is this?

“Who… are you?” One of the crowd members asks tentatively. 

He goes to reply, but one of the soldiers interrupts him. “You are committing treason against the Fire Lord. You will let us go at once, or we will have you taken to the boiling rock!” 

Shōta thinks that sentence is supposed to be threatening, but the name holds no recognition, so he shrugs it off. Fire Lord does sound like the title of someone important though, so he adds that to the rapidly growing mental list of “Things to ask someone about after he gets some damn sleep”. 

“I have no idea what that is.” He tells the soldier flatly, and he’s met with shock from not just the bound soldiers, but the civilians as well. 

“How do you not know what The Boiling Rock is?” A man asks, expression confused. 

Shōta sighs. “Look, is there somewhere to put these idiots or not? I don’t want to stand here holding them all day.” 

An old man steps to the front of the crowd. “There’s a prison that was recently built near the town’s center. They can stay there.” 

“Perfect.” The underground hero mutters, tone bordering on sarcastic as he whips out his tanto knife to quickly sever the capture weapon connecting the soldiers’ bindings to the rest settled on his shoulders. He thinks he hears an “oh, Agnis” whispered by someone in the now calm mob. Which is just strange enough to add to the list. 

He resheathes the knife and steps back, allowing the old man to beckon some of the townspeople to step forward and be assigned the task of transporting the downed soldiers. 

“But what do we do about the komodo-rhino?” Another person standing there asks, though it’s directed toward the old man this time, to Shōta’s relief. 

He doesn’t care to listen to the answer. The adrenaline, while still buzzing through him, is beginning to give way to the cloud of exhaustion that’s been hanging over him since he started the fight with the drunk civilian. Basically, sheer determination and being surrounded by strangers are all that’s going to keep him from crashing in a few minutes. 

Gods, all I want to do now is sleep, he thinks as he leans against the wall next to him. 

“Excuse me.” 

A voice catches his ears, and he snaps back to attention, looking up to see the old man approaching him, curiosity on his face. 

“Hm?” He grumbles. 

“Thank you for saving our children. We are indebted to you and your bravery.” 

“You are defying the will of Fire Lord Ozai!” A soldier shouts again, face twisted in anger.

“We don’t care what the Fire Lord wants!” a woman from the crowd yells back, and the remaining townspeople cheer in agreement. 

The underground hero turns his head back to the man in front of him and shrugs. “It’s my job.” 

The old man raises his eyebrows. “What may we call you?” 

I do not have enough energy for this.

“Aizawa.” He mutters. 

The man smiles. “Aizawa. The spirits must have been feeling gracious to send you to us for help. Thank you, once again.”

“Spirits?” Shōta grunts, begrudgingly curious. Is that this town’s name for quirks? It isn’t uncommon for people to believe that quirks’ origins are divine in nature so it’s possible…

The old man chuckles. “Yes, the spirits. We prayed to them for aid, and it seems they answered.” 
So more like yokai, then. Huh. 

“Hm.” 

Shōta should probably leave if he wants to get out of this social interaction, but the man seems determined to talk to him. 

“I am Chaoxiang, the mayor of Lushao. I can see that you are tired, and I would like to offer my home as a place of rest to repay you.”

Shōta internally finds the statement mildly amusing. He looks tired all the time, so he’s told by literally everyone he talks to. 

Despite feeling dead on his feet, he’s worked in worse conditions and not died (He has passed out before, but it was never for more than a few seconds). He very much longs for sleep, but he knows that it’s not a good idea to be unconscious in a stranger’s home. 

“Thank you, but I’m fine,” he says, and Chaoxiang squints at him in clear disbelief. The expression is very familiar. 

“Very well.” The old man concedes. “Perhaps there is some other way we can repay you?”

”Information,” Shōta replies immediately.

Chaoxiang’s expression didn’t change, but he tenses. “I see. In that case, may we discuss this over some tea?” 
Shōta hums. He would very much prefer coffee for some caffeination, but maybe they have black tea, or something similarly energy boosting.

“Sure.”

Chaoxiang smiles, lips a little thin, and gestures for the underground hero to follow him down the main path through the town, where most of the townspeople have since dispersed, with the exception of a younger man and woman, one of the teenagers, and two people interacting with the “komodo rhino”.

As they walk, the two adults and the teenager follow. They must be family, he concludes. If they weren’t, Chaoxiang probably would have shooed them away after a few seconds.

The house that the mayor leads him to is noticeably larger than the other houses, with some ornate detailing carved into the stone that the wooden house sits upon. It certainly looks fancy enough to be a mayor’s.

Shōta steps into the first room, looking around curiously. The decor is… strange. It all looks familiar, but feels like it comes from a different century altogether, from even before the dawn of quirks, if he’s remembering his long-since-past history lessons from grade school correctly (It’s frankly illogical that classes don’t consider the pre-quirk era as important to learn about as the two hundred something years after). 

The frames on the walls all hold drawings instead of photos, there aren’t any lights in it hanging from the ceiling—there are sconces on the walls and doorways, unlit and upon closer inspection, probably not even meant to be electrically powered. 

Logically, Shōta knows that there are places in the world that don’t use or have access to electricity, but something still feels odd about the way the home is constructed. 

“Sit, sit.” Chaoxiang says to him, gesturing to the table in the center of the room. The hero hesitates, but then sits down. 

It only takes a second before the teenager that followed them plops down in the chair next to his, gaze full of curiosity.

Ugh. I’m going to have to talk to the kid, aren’t I, he thinks, mentally preparing himself for conversation that he doesn’t have the energy for.

Sure enough, they ask, “So, why are you out here? Most people don’t come here for any reason but to deliver news about the war, or something.”

Instantly, Shōta has questions. War? Is there a war going on? He can’t think of any currently ongoing wars off the top of his head. 

damn, The List is starting to get long…

“I… don’t know.” He answers truthfully to the kid’s initial question. 

They look surprised. “Oh. Then, where did you come from?”

“Don’t pester our guest, Aizha, it’s rude.” The woman chides, but Shōta can see the glimmer of curiosity in her eyes. 

He sighs. The faster he starts talking, the sooner this will be over, and the sooner he can figure out how to contact someone to get him back to Musutafu. 

“I was in Musutafu before I came here. It’s a city in Japan, where I’m from.” 

“Japan?” Chaoxiang, who’s now holding a bubbling pot of water, and accompanied by the man, who’s holding several cups that he sets on the table, “I don’t believe I’ve heard of that province. Is it in the Earth Kingdom somewhere?” 

“The… Earth Kingdom.” Shōta repeats. Where the heck has he been dragged to? “No, Japan is a country.” 

Now, most of the eyes in the room are on him, and all of them—including himself—are confused. 

“A country?” the middle-aged man serving the tea muses, “I may be fire nation, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a place called Japan so large that it’s considered a country. The largest place as far as I know is Ba Sing Se, and that’s the biggest city in the world.” 

Ba Sing… What? 

Shōta pinches the bridge of his nose and groans quietly. There are so many things already wrong with those sentences that he has to take a second to catalogue them all. First, Fire nation? That sounds like something from a television show. Second, what the fuck is Ba Sing Se? He knows the names of all of the largest cities in the world (he has no idea why, but it is a fact burned into his brain from something), and Ba Sing Se sure as hell isn’t one of them. 

Also, how do these people not know what Japan is while they are speaking Japanese? Shōta must be really, truly exhausted for not questioning how he could inherently understand them despite clearly being nowhere in Japan and with the new knowledge that they don’t even know what that is.

This is all going to give him a headache, isn’t it?

“Okay,” he says slowly, “where the hell am I?”