Chapter Text
Kids Izuku’s age wake up slowly. That’s what he’s heard. They wake to soft light through curtains, to a parent leaning over them with a gentle smile. A kiss pressed to their forehead. A warm hand cupping their cheek. A quiet voice telling them it’s time to get up, that breakfast is ready, that they’ll be late for school if they don’t hurry. They stretch. They complain. They roll over and steal five more minutes under the blankets. Somewhere in the house, plates clink and something warm sizzles in a pan.
That’s what normal mornings are supposed to be. Izuku doesn’t remember the last time he slept without fear.
He’s sitting upright when it happens. He doesn’t really lie down anymore. He’s learned that sleep is dangerous, that it leaves him slow and foggy, and /they/ don’t like that. So he rests instead, back against the wall, chin tipped toward his chest, drifting in and out of shallow half-dreams. His body never relaxes. His mind never fully lets go.
The metal door slams open.
The sound cracks through the room like a gunshot. Izuku jerks so hard as his heart leaps into his throat. He gasps, like he’s been underwater too long. For a second, he can’t see straight, spots in his vision as adrenaline floods his veins.
“Wake up.” A white coat stands in the doorway. “A hero needs you to heal them. They’re in critical condition.”
That’s all the warning he gets.
Izuku swallows. His mouth is dry. His body is already trembling before he even stands. He’s not really awake, not really asleep either. They’ve trained him into something in between. A living alarm system. He can be summoned at any hour, day or night. The lights can slam on. The door can burst open. A hand can grab his arm and drag him out before he understands what’s happening.
So his body never feels safe enough to rest.
His legs wobble when he steps forward. They feel like jelly, weak and unreliable. The concrete floor bites at the soles of his feet, cold. He isn’t given shoes most days. Shoes aren’t necessary for someone who doesn’t go anywhere but from his room to the medical wing and back again.
Kids his age walk to school in neat uniforms. They talk about homework. They argue over snacks. They have friends waiting at the gate.
Izuku doesn’t get that privilege.
He follows the scientist down the sterile hallway. The air smells like disinfectant and metal. His fingers twitch at his sides, small sparks of nervous energy he can’t release. He counts his steps because counting keeps him from thinking too much. One, two, three. Don’t fall. Don’t be slow. Don’t make them angry.
They stop at a hospital room that looks cleaner than the rest of the facility. The door slides open with a soft hiss.
And then Izuku sees him.
The man on the bed is barely recognizable as human. Blood stains the white sheets in dark, spreading patches. Limbs are twisted at angles that make Izuku’s stomach lurch. Bruises bloom across pale skin in violent shades of purple. Tubes snake from machines that beep and hum in uneven rhythms.
If it weren’t for the long scarf around his neck, Izuku wouldn’t know who he was looking at.
Eraser Head. He’s heard the name whispered in passing. A pro hero. The kind who erases quirks with a stare. Izuku has never seen him in person before.
The sight is gruesome in ways no child should ever have to witness. But Izuku has seen worse. They only bring him the worst. His quirk isn’t for scratches or sprains. It’s for shattered bones and ruptured organs
They say his healing quirk is one of the best in Japan. They say he should be proud.
Izuku fidgets with his fingers, rubbing them together to bring back feeling. The room smells wrong ,his small nose burns with it. He’s learned not to gasp. If he gasps, he’ll gag. If he gags, he might throw up. And if he throws up, they’ll be angry.
He’s trying to remember what he’s heard. That he works alone. That villains fear him. Before he can gather his thoughts, a shove hits between his shoulder blades. “Let’s go. We don’t have all day.”
He stumbles forward, nearly slipping on blood smeared across the floor. He catches himself at the last second, heart pounding so loudly he can hear it in his ears. He doesn’t look back at the scientist. He knows better.
Step carefully. Don’t fall.
He reaches the bed. The hero’s hand lies limp against the sheets, fingers curled and slick with red. Izuku hesitates only a second before stepping over a dark stain on the tile and reaching out.
His hand looks impossibly small against the larger, battered one. When their skin touches, Izuku’s breath catches. The hero’s skin is cold. Too cold.
As he adjusts his grip, something glints near the man’s collarbone. A chain. A ring hanging from it. Gold, streaked with dried blood.
A wedding ring.
Izuku stares at it for half a heartbeat too long. He wonders who’s waiting at home. If someone is pacing. If someone is staring at a phone, praying for it to ring. If someone told him to come back safe.
His chest tightens. He can’t afford to get distracted. If he takes too long, if the hero dies, if the machines go flat— He squeezes his eyes shut.
Focus.
He draws in a deep breath through his nose. The air tastes metallic. His hands begin to glow, faint at first, then brighter. A soft green light spills from between his fingers, crawling up his wrists, illuminating the room.
The machines spike in response.
Inside the hero’s body, bones begin to mend with snaps and shifts. Torn muscle knits together. Ruptured vessels seal. Internal bleeding slows, then stops. Izuku can feel it all, like tracing invisible maps beneath skin. Every fracture, every tear. Healing isn’t painless for him. It never is.
He grits his teeth but doesn’t make a sound. He needs to help this hero. He needs to.
Because this hero probably has a family. Someone who will cry if he doesn’t come home. Someone who will sit at a table set for two and stare at an empty chair.
Izuku has seen pictures of families before. Not in photo albums. He doesn’t have those. But in the scraps of newspaper that sometimes wrap his food. Torn headlines about school festivals. Articles about heroes visiting elementary classrooms. Advertisements with smiling parents holding their children’s hands.
He smooths those scraps out after he eats, even when they’re stained with oil or sauce. He reads the same stories over and over until the paper falls apart in his hands.
Family.
More bones slide into place under his palms. The glow intensifies. Sweat beads along Izuku’s hairline. His legs shake from the strain, but he doesn’t move. He can’t. Not yet.
He wonders, in the corner of his mind that still dares to dream, what it would feel like to wake up to that warmth. To have someone brush his hair back from his face. To be told he did a good job and actually mean it.
Would they kiss his forehead? Would they tell him to rest?
Izuku holds on, pouring everything he can into the broken body beneath his hands.
Maybe if he saves enough heroes, somewhere out there, someone will save him too.
*
*
It takes thirty minutes.
By the ten-minute mark, his calves are trembling. By twenty, his vision swims at the edges. By thirty, the green glow pouring from his hands flickers like a dying lightbulb.
Thirty full minutes of standing without a break, without sitting, without even shifting his feet for too long in case it interrupts the flow of his quirk. Thirty minutes of holding together a body that had already begun to fall apart.
He keeps going anyway.
Eraser Head’s chest rises more evenly now. The worst of the internal bleeding has stopped. Bones are aligned. Organs are no longer failing. The machines start to take over, their rhythm replacing the frantic alarms from before. Izuku feels the moment the hero’s body stabilizes enough that he can finally let go.
And when he does, his legs give out.
He drops hard to the floor, knees hitting first, then his hands, barely catching himself before his face smacks against tile slick with drying blood. He gasps like he’s been running for miles, lungs burning, throat raw. The cold floor seeps into his overheated skin. The blood beneath him is still wet in places, and it cools his palms as he presses them flat against the tile. He doesn’t even have the energy to recoil from it.
“Good work.”
That’s all he gets.
It’s a different scientist this time. Not the one who shoved him forward earlier. This one doesn’t sound impressed or concerned. Just detached. Like Izuku is a machine that performed within expected parameters.
Doctors rush in around him, stepping carefully over his small body as they gather around the now-stable hero. Orders are exchanged. Equipment is adjusted. Someone wipes blood from Eraser Head’s face. No one looks at Izuku.
“There’s been a big fight today,” a woman says somewhere above him. “Everyone’s been working hard. So expect more heroes to come.”
Izuku stays where he is, cheek almost touching the floor. His chest rises and falls in shallow pulls. He hears her heels click closer.
“You need to work and also do your part, okay?”
He doesn’t answer. He isn’t sure he can.
The room still smells awful. Open wounds. Burned fabric. Gunpowder. It sticks to the inside of his nose and makes his head pound. His fingers twitch uselessly against the tile.
The woman frowns at him. “You’re tired?”
He nods once. It’s small. Barely there. Hands slide under him, lifting him up.
Izuku’s body reacts before his mind does. He relaxes into the hold almost instantly, limbs going slack as if he’s been waiting for this. The woman’s uniform is stained in places with blood that hasn’t fully dried. She’s wearing gloves. Layers of fabric. Protective gear.
It doesn’t matter.
It’s still touch.
His whole body thrills at it, even if no one here would care. Being picked up, even clinically, even just to move him out of the way, makes something deep inside his chest ache and settle all at once. Some days, some weeks, this is the only contact he gets.
When he was even younger, smaller than this, they used to hold him down for tests. He remembers being lifted onto cold tables. Hands adjusting collars around his neck. Devices strapped to his arms. He never fought it. Because between the cold instruments and the sharp needles, there had been hands. Arms around him. Pressure against his back.
It hurt. But it was still touch. He presses closer without meaning to, small fingers bunching into the fabric of her sleeve. He doesn’t cling hard. Just enough.
She pats his back. It’s not gentle. It’s the same way someone would pat a dog that followed a command correctly.
“Give him the medicine,” she says to someone else.
Footsteps move quickly away.
“You can’t get tired on us. People are depending on you.” Her voice is firmer now. She shifts him slightly, and then she shakes him lightly, like a parent trying to keep a child awake before nap time. Except Izuku doesn’t get nap time. He doesn’t get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. He doesn’t get warm meals made for growing boys.
He gets summoned. He gets praised when he performs well.
“You are very important to us.”
Izuku forces his heavy eyes open and looks up at her mask. He can’t see her full face. Just the curve of fabric and the faint outline of eyes behind protective lenses.
“We wouldn’t know what to do without you. I~zu~ku.” She says his name slowly, almost sweetly.
Something in his chest flutters at that. He likes hearing his name. He likes being needed. It feels good, in a small, desperate way, to know he matters here. That if he disappeared, they would notice.
But even with his tired, muddled thoughts, he knows something is wrong. He is small. They are not. He is a child. They are all adults. Important adults with licenses and authority, and families waiting at home.
He turns his head slightly and looks past her shoulder at the hospital bed.
Eraser Head lies still, machines breathing quietly for him. He has a wedding ring hanging from a chain. Everyone here has somewhere to return to when their shift ends. Someone to call. Someone who would look for them if they didn’t come home.
Izuku doesn’t know if his mother ever loved him.
He doesn’t know if she’s looking.
He doesn’t know if anyone is.
The thought creeps in, if he stops being useful, if one day he can’t heal fast enough, if his quirk fails or his body gives out…Will they send him back to her? Or will they throw him away for being broken?
The medicine is delivered through a syringe pressed into his arm. He barely flinches—he’s long since grown used to the sting. Exhaustion and chemicals knot together in his bloodstream, and he feels even more awake than before.
*
Hours later, he’s pushed back into his room. The door shuts behind him with a heavy THUD. The lock clicks into place.
“You can rest for a few hours,” someone tells him. “Before we need you again.”
Unless it’s a real emergency, it’s almost always a real emergency.
Izuku doesn’t even make it to the thin mattress in the corner. He slides down against the door instead, back pressed to cold metal. His legs splay out in front of him. He’s too tired to crawl. Too tired to cry. His head tips forward.
He doesn’t sleep. He just drifts.
Time passes strangely in the quiet. The hum of distant machinery vibrates faintly through the walls. Then— A voice, deep, close.
“Why do the rooms in here look like prison cells—and where am I?”
Izuku’s eyes snap open. For a second, he thinks he imagined it. But no. It came from the hallway. Not from a speaker. Not from a scientist.
From someone else.
He frowns, pushing himself up slightly despite the protest in his arms. His heart starts to beat faster, not with panic this time, but with something unfamiliar. Curiosity. Who was that?
Izuku stares at the door for a long moment after the voices begin, his heart beating faster with every word that drifts through the thick metal, because that voice is not like the others, not clinical and detached, it’s rough and confused
The square window set high into the door lets in a thin slice of fluorescent hallway light, and even that is covered with crisscrossed bars. He knows he’s too short to reach it. He’s tried before.
Still, he pushes himself up off the floor, legs shaky from exhaustion, and looks around for the little stool they sometimes leave in his room so he can reach the sink when they want him washed up before a procedure. It’s old and scratched, and one leg wobbles slightly, but he drags it across the floor anyway, the scraping sound loud in the quiet of his room, and he winces, hoping no one hears, hoping the voices outside continue.
He sets the stool beneath the window and climbs carefully, bare feet slipping a little against the wood, and even then it’s not enough. The window is placed for adults, not children. He rises onto his tiptoes, fingers stretching, straining, and finally, his eyes just barely clear. Through the bars, he sees a familiar scarf and tired black hair, and his breath catches in his throat because it’s /him/, it’s Eraser Head standing in the hallway, upright and alive, facing one of the white-coated men. Izuku’s small hand lifts instinctively, curling around the cold metal bars.
“It’s for heroes who are in critical care,” the scientist is saying in a calm tone.
“I’ve never heard of this place,” Eraser Head replies. “I’ve been in critical care before, and it was never in a building underground with scientists who look like /you/.”
Underground. So that’s where they are. He had guessed, maybe. There are no windows in the rest of the building. No sunlight.
“S-Several factors are taken into place, that’s all,” the scientist answers. “If you had gone to those hospitals, you would have died, hence why you are here, where it is more focused on quirk healing rather than medical devices. That is all. No need to panic. You were just healed with a quirk.”
There’s a pause, and Izuku can almost see the way Eraser Head’s eyes narrow.
“Then I want to see the person who healed me,” the hero says. “I should at least give them my thanks. No?”
“I’m afraid he’s busy at the moment,” the scientist replies too quickly. “Besides, you shouldn’t be here. This is the test— I–I mean, the lounging area for said doctors. I’ll guide you through the exit.”
Test. Izuku catches that word. He always catches that word.
Eraser Head doesn’t look convinced. Even from this distance, Izuku can see the tension in his posture, the way his shoulders square slightly as if bracing. But he hesitates, he almost died. He must be exhausted. He probably wants to go home. There’s someone waiting for him. Someone who would cry if he didn’t return. His gut might be telling him something is wrong, very wrong, but what reason does he have to imagine a child locked behind one of these doors? Who would ever think that?
Izuku grips the bars tighter.
No.
No, wait.
His mouth opens. His lungs expand. His whole body feels like it’s screaming at him to say something, to call out, to do anything before the scientist leads him away and the door closes and the hallway falls silent again. But the scream has no shape. It doesn’t form into words. It just rattles inside his ribs, desperate and confused. What would he even say? Help? I’m here? It’s me?
If he makes a sound, they’ll punish him. He knows that as surely as he knows how to breathe. Disobedience means consequences. Consequences mean extra testing, harsher training, and less food. Cold rooms. Long nights. And who’s to say the hero would even stop? What if he walks away anyway? What if Izuku calls out and nothing changes except that he suffers for it later?
But he wants to talk to him.
He wants to see him up close, not broken and bleeding on a hospital bed, but standing and alive. He wants to hear a hero speak to him, not through scientists and orders but directly. He wants to—
His foot slips.
The stool tilts.
For a split second, he flails, small hands grasping at air, and then he tumbles down, landing hard on his side with a crack of elbow against concrete. The stool clatters beside him. Pain shoots up his arm. “Ouch!” The sound escapes before he can swallow it back.
Silence floods the hallway.
“What was that?” Eraser Head’s voice cuts through the air.
“I heard nothing, sir—” the scientist begins.
“It sounded like a child,” the hero presses as heavy footsteps move closer.
“I—well—sir, what are you doing?” the scientist says, panic creeping into his voice now.
Izuku can’t speak. He wants to. He really does. But his throat closes. The fear is too big, too heavy, pressing down on his lungs. He can’t force air past it.
But he can cry.
The tears come hot and sudden. He’s so tired. So hungry. His elbow throbs where it hit the ground. And now he knows he’ll be punished for making a sound. He knows it. He can already picture the disappointed smiles and the soft voices explaining why this is necessary. He can’t stop the tears. He’s trying to be brave, but he’s just a child. Just a—
The footsteps stop directly outside his door.
Izuku looks up.
Through the narrow gaps between the bars, a pair of red eyes stares back at him. For a long second, neither of them moves.
From Eraser Head’s perspective, the sight is impossible to justify. A small room with concrete walls. A thin cushion on the floor that barely qualifies as a bed. A toilet in the corner with no partition. A metal bucket. Broken crayons were scattered near the mattress. Scraps of newspaper crumpled beside them, stained with grease, like they’d been used to wrap food. No toys. No books. No personal belongings.
And in the center of it all, a child.
A bloodstained child with tear tracks cutting clean lines down his dirty cheeks. Barefoot. Shaking like an animal cornered in a cage. There is nothing about this that looks medical. Nothing about this that looks temporary. Nothing that can be explained away as an accident.
Eraser Head slowly turns his head toward the scientist. His expression changes, the confusion burning away into something colder.
“What is the meaning of this?” he asks, and his voice is terrifying.
Izuku isn’t scared of that tone. Not the way he’s scared of gentle smiles and kind words that hide needles. This anger feels different. It isn’t directed at him. It isn’t wrapped in fake warmth.
Is someone going to finally save him?
TBC