Chapter Text
Their room was a glorified prison.
The walls pressed in by their very proportions - too tall, too narrow - rising like a silent surveillance that crowded his peripheral vision. Every corner seemed to observe him in return. Cameras nested high in the concrete, their lenses pulsing a muted red, fed by the constant, insectile hum of electricity threading through the cables. Beyond that single, unblinking light, the room collapsed into shadow. They were entombed far below ground, sealed into the lowest stratum of the compound, where windows were an extravagance denied and the outside world reduced to abstraction. Somewhere above, the moon continued its indifferent ascent and descent, marking the passage of days that no longer belonged to them.
But it was a shelter carefully disguised as a home. Toys were gathered neatly into a striped, woven box in the corner, arranged rather than abandoned. The bed sheets rose and fell with his sister’s sleeping breaths, washed in ombré greens and soft pinks - her favourite colours, chosen for her comfort. Above her head, a single drawing clung to the wall, one corner peeling free. Two simple crayon figures held hands beneath the arch of a rainbow, uncomplicated and earnest. Curled in her grasp, as it had been since he’d coaxed her into sleep, was a plush worn thin by time and by the love she gave it in the hours when he wasn’t there to rock her back to rest. One hind leg barely held on, stitches strained but enduring.
His side of the room mirrored hers, only rendered older - quieter. Educational texts were stacked neatly, their pages faintly warped from a humid summer when moisture seeped through a cracked seal and had nowhere to escape. A small lamp, warm and crystalline, sat untouched on the shelf, its batteries long dead. His analysis notebooks were kept from slipping only by a digital clock pressed against their spines, its glowing numbers possibly wrong - another subtle mercy, or another of Overhaul’s quiet distortions of time.
The dresser bolted into the floor held the remnants of routine: his comb and Eri’s set aside until morning, stray hair ties, a small figurine forgotten and left where it didn’t belong. His phone lay beside them, inert and locked, waiting for permission that might or might not come. Two plastic cups, water-stained and mismatched, rested against the wall - one half-full, the other empty - catching the faintest shimmer of light even here, in the deepest, most lightless reach of the Shie Hassaikai.
And yet, for all the care taken to make it resemble a home, neither of them mistook it for one. The unfamiliarity lingered. The danger, unsoftened by routine.
Izuku leaned forward, elbows braced against his thighs, fingers woven tight. Down the corridor, the guards’ voices slurred together in drunken laughter, a coarse sound dampened but not erased by the thickness of the concrete. They were intoxicated beyond doubt - but he did not move, did not take the invitation the night so brazenly offered. The ghost of a key hung against his chest, a pale glint of silver suspended from its ribbon, close enough to feel like a promise. Close enough to be cruel.
The door was unlocked. It always was, despite the ever-present watch of their benefactor’s men.
He could have walked out. He could have staggered down the corridor singing, voice cracking with effort, and not one of Overhaul’s lapdogs would have noticed. They were careless, unfocused, and useless in their certainty. Escape would have been effortless. Child’s play.
He didn’t.
He rolled his shoulder, irritation flaring sharp along his spine as another burst of laughter echoed down the hall, somehow louder for the emptiness it filled. In the corner, Eri shifted in her sleep, stirring but not waking, and Izuku stayed exactly where he was. Gun in hand.
He hadn’t tried in years - not since the first and last attempt, when he had nearly lost more than freedom ever promised.
It wasn’t worth it.
Izuku stayed, and the door remained, in all ways but literally, open.
When the moon rose again - if the quiet offering of a third meal could be trusted - Izuku slipped from the room on soundless feet. Beneath the loose fall of an oversized hoodie, his gear lay hidden and familiar, clipped tight along the loops of his cargo trousers, each piece weighed and accounted for.
“You know the drill.” Izuku murmured, voice kept low as breath, to the presence that caught him just outside the door.
The adult loomed above - broad, immovable, hewn from shadow - his expression a blank plane of stone, worn smooth by years of unspeaking duty. Chronostasis.
“Yeah, yeah…” The response came unaccompanied by a glance. Somewhere behind them, metal kissed metal, the lock’s quiet rattle sealing the room once more. When he was gone, it was their custom to secure it, Chisaki’s approval implicit. “She’s safe here. As always.”
Izuku did not trouble himself with a reply. The assurance had been repeated into translucence, its meaning thinned by constancy. He received it with a fractional nod and sank his hands into the hollowed pouch of his hoodie, fingers disappearing into the warmth pooled there. A few unruly curls strayed free, ghosting the edge of his hood as he drew the beaked mask into place, the straps tightening like a promise he did not remember making.
His breath escaped at last - a measured, unwilling release, air long imprisoned, seeping free as though some sealed inner vault had fractured just enough to bleed itself empty.
He moved into the concrete labyrinth of the yakuza without leaving an imprint. Izuku did not linger. He did not falter as he cut corners and ascended stairwells, his steps fluent, instinctive. The walls blurred into sameness - scarred by years of neglect, etched with the sediment of violence and decay - as his green gaze skimmed their accumulated histories. He knew this place by muscle memory alone. By now, it had become a second hearth, a borrowed home carved from stone and silence.
The higher - and deeper - he travelled into the building’s core, the more familiar faces surfaced from the gloom. Names that carried weight. Egos that filled rooms. Personalities sharpened to cruelty, many of them convinced he belonged among their ranks. Some lifted hands in mock camaraderie; others dismissed him entirely, a mercy Izuku quietly preferred. Most regarded him with open hostility, eyes bright with the desire to see him erased.
He returned none of it. Not the gestures, not the contempt. He would not debase himself by answering.
Izuku halted before the infamous metal door, its surface cold and scarred. His foot scuffed as he nudged the red carpet that inexplicably ran the length of the base, a garish artery threading the concrete. He raised his hand and knocked, soft and deliberate, waiting for the gravelled voice within to grant permission -
“Come on in.”
He pressed the knob down and entered with brisk intent. His eyes rose immediately to the figure seated with his back to the room, folded into a chair never meant to bear the gravity of his station. The furniture looked almost apologetic beneath him, as though aware of its own inadequacy.
The coat announced him before his face did. Violet feathers stirred as he turned, slow and ceremonial, the movement measured to the point of indulgence. A case file rested between his fingers, cradled with a care that bordered on devotion, as though its contents were alive and listening.
“Overhaul.” The name left Izuku without ornament - no warmth, no challenge - paired only with the shallow inclination of his head, a bow rendered by habit rather than deference.
“Nullpoint.” Chisaki echoed the name as the door sealed softly behind Izuku. He advanced toward the desk, each step measured and unhurried, until he stood opposite his superior, the space between them measured and exacting.
Izuku smothered the instinctive wince that surfaced at the alias stitched to him. Nullpoint - a word that meant nothing, that meant zero; the silent axis the world insisted on turning around. It meant quirkless.
He had made his peace with that truth long ago. He had stopped wishing for alteration, stopped entertaining the ache of what if. And yet the name still worried at him, an invisible abrasion, the way sunburn tightens skin you try not to move.
Overhaul delighted in riddles and quiet cruelties, in meanings layered like traps. Of course even this - his name - had been folded into the game. A quiet torment he was made to ingest anew each time the name was spoken - and one the yakuza boss delivered with deliberate precision.
“You sent for me, Sir.”
“I did.” Chisaki confirmed it with languid indifference as he rose from his chair, circled the desk, and came to rest against its edge opposite Izuku. Even then, even at a slant, he managed to loom - an inescapable verticality. His gaze traced Izuku from crown to sole, slow and clinical, before he extended the sheaf of papers between them.
“I need this handled."
Izuku turned the file in his hands, the weight of it familiar, expected. A grainy, slightly pixelated photograph stared back at him from the cover - an unremarkable man rendered sharp by intention rather than appearance. His features were forgettable in the way dangerous people often were: clean lines, neutral expression, a face built to disappear into crowds.
Beneath the image, a concise summary laid out the essentials. Name. Age. Known aliases. A quirk noted in clipped, impersonal language - function, range, limitations - nothing more than what was necessary to neutralise it. A skeletal history followed: affiliations, prior arrests that never stuck, a pattern of movement mapped through dates and locations. Izuku skimmed it with practiced efficiency.
He flipped the page.
The back held what truly mattered. Daily routines reduced to bullet points. Confirmed residences, secondary safe houses, and the windows of time where the man was most exposed. Surveillance stills marked with timestamps. Notes on security measures - escape routes, contingencies already anticipated and neatly boxed. At the bottom, a line denoted priority and consequence, written in Chisaki’s precise hand.
And yet, in all its calculated eternity, something was missing. The man was, in many ways, ordinary - an average face on the street, armed with nothing more than a degree in legal hacking and a career in statistical analysis. For all the planning, for all the threat implied, he was just a man.
Izuku absorbed it all in silence, committing the stranger to memory - not as a person, but as a problem already halfway solved.
“He was once linked to us through a secondary channel,” Chisaki said, idly toying with the edge of his gloves. “Mimic flagged an irregular withdrawal from our research accounts. After a little… informing, we confirmed the source.”
The elastic at his wrist snapped back with a sharp report. His gaze lifted, cold and settled. “I want him removed.”
Izuku swallowed, throat tight, as a small boxed notation at the very back of the file snagged his attention - probable motive neatly cordoned off like an afterthought. Family ties, it read.
“Several files were also copied and extracted,” Chisaki continued, his voice tightening by degrees. “Classified material - data under my sole authority, shared only with the doctor and Mimic.” A low growl bled through his words, the first fracture in his composure, heat radiating from anger kept too long contained.
“I need you to retrieve it,” he said. “A rooftop execution won’t suffice this time.”
And still - despite the years of conditioning, despite the catalogue of names already erased at Chisaki’s behest - Izuku went still.
His finger caught on the paper’s edge, the thin slice of pain registering belatedly as it burned across his skin. He stared at the mark without seeing it. Something else had lodged beneath his ribs, cold and sudden, and it refused to move.
He had killed before. From rooftops and shadowed windows, from distances measured in meters and wind. A squeeze of the trigger, recoil into bone, and then absence. He was always gone before the body finished falling - before gravity completed the sentence, before red could bloom and sink into fabric, into tile, into someone else’s life.
This was different. This demanded closeness. Breath. Heat. The sound a body makes when it realizes it is no longer alone. The wet finality of it.
“Y‑You want me to…?”
The words slipped out stripped and breathless, his spine drawing taut as though braced for impact. Cold sweat gathered at his hairline, his pulse loud in his ears, as the reality set in - not of death, but of being there when it happened.
He had managed to bury it before, to ignore it, because it had always been distant. But now -
Chisaki’s brows drew together at the hitch in Izuku’s breath. “Did you assume the luxury of distance would last forever?” he murmured, leaning forward with a predator’s ease. The faint warmth of his breath hovered like smoke against Izuku’s face, and the sharp gleam of his beaked mask caught the overhead lights, a cruel reflection that made every line of the Shie Hassaikai leader’s face feel impossibly close.
“I can’t favour you anymore, Izuku. I won’t let it happen.”
He flinched at the name he barely remembered. The boy who used to dream of heroics, who’d been oblivious to the underground world, who’d been naive, bullied, but somehow happy - now gone. Dead. And the hollow weight of that loss pressed in, sharp and immediate.
When Izuku did not respond, Chisaki’s shadow seemed to deepen, his presence coiling tighter around the room. “I don’t need to remind you why it’s vital this is resolved, do I? What might happen to your sister?”
His hand clenched, crumpling the pristine paper that had once felt freshly born from the printer. It trembled, and his wide, unsteady eyes flicked up to meet Chisaki’s. A silent, abstract mockery seemed to hang in the air over him, as his nails drummed a tense, uneven rhythm against the tabletop, each tap echoing like a heartbeat caught in his chest.
And he did understand. It had been etched into him, burned into his bones like a permanent mark.
Yet even now, it felt impossibly beyond him.
“Chisaki- I… I don’t know if-” His words stumbled out, stuttering against the black beak of his mask, lined in sharp green.
But Chisaki would tolerate no hesitation. He slammed his fist against the table, the shock of it reverberating through the floor and up Izuku’s legs. The boy’s body tensed instinctively, almost thrown backward by the sudden force.
“Do you understand what you have to do?”
Blue-and-off-white hair, red eyes - faces from a world he used to imagine, lives he had only ever touched from afar - flashed before him, ghosts of people who would never feel the heat of his hands or the weight of his presence.
“Yes, Sir. I do.” He inclined his head, each motion weighted with reluctant acceptance. An invisible lodestone pressed against his chest, each heartbeat hammering like a tolling bell: if he failed, another would enact it. And if he faltered, his utility - the tenuous tether to the life he still clung to - would dissolve.
They would take him away from Eri.
“Good.” Overhaul exhaled, a low, deliberate hiss, as though extracting the answer from the very air. “I shall await your return with satisfactory tidings.” The dismissal was absolute, leaving no comfort, no reprieve, only expectation.
Izuku returned the dossier and pivoted to leave.
“Hey-” Chisaki’s voice arrested him. He cast a sidelong glance at the man, rising and reclaiming his seat with measured authority. “The first time is always the worst. You’ll get used to it.”
If only it were that simple.
“Right…”