Chapter Text
The afternoon is perfect.
Later, Shouta will think about this. About how unreasonably, almost offensively perfect it was. The light, the temperature of the air, the way his students (his kids) were sprawled across the field, being lazy for once and just enjoying a day off. He will think about this and he will hate that he let his guard down just because of the simple fact that the afternoon was calm.
But that is later. Right now, it is just a perfect day, and Shouta is slumbering inside his sleeping bag.
He has a paperback in his hand— A Study in Scarlet. He’d read it at nineteen, and is rereading it now because Hizashi made a passing comment about it last week, and Shouta wants to have the facts freshed up for when they talk about again.
His eyes drift from the yellowed pages to the field.
He watches Midoriya and Iida, voices low and bent over one of Midoriya’s notebooks. A year ago, they were a mess of broken bones and anxious rules. Now, they fit together like clockwork, as most of these problem children do. He looks at Uraraka, asleep and calm for once, and Tsuyu, who’s softly stroking her friend’s hair as she too reads a book.
He thinks about how far they’ve all come, how they’ve stopped being a group of strangers with powers and started being a— well, a family for one another. They’ve grown so much it almost aches to watch.
Then, his eyes find the closer side of the field.
Bakugou is lying in the grass, face turned up to the sun. It’s a weird sight. The boy who was once a walking explosion of insecurity is…. soft. His hands are open beside him, palms warming in the sun. His face relaxed.
Beside him, Todoroki is sitting quietly, fingers playing with the grass at his knees. He isn’t looking at Bakugou, or at least pretending he's not, but his body is tilted toward him. He’s watching the field, hovering over Bakugou like a shield, protecting hisnlittle moment of peace. Todoroki, who started last year as a block of ice, is now the one quietly providing chilled sodas and a calming presence for others.
Shouta watches a small, really just tiny laugh escape Bakugou’s throat at something Todoroki says. Sees the way Todoroki’s face lights up a little.
Oh, Shouta thinks, a warmth settling in his chest despite watching these two idiots dance around each other for the second year in a row. You two. Still haven't gotten your shit together.
He looks back at his book, letting himself sink into the rare, fragile quiet of the afternoon.
He manages two sentences before the world tries to explode. Yes, tries…
It is, objectively, the most pathetic villain entrance Shouta has ever witnessed.
Purple smoke wheezes out of a canister behind the fence of the field with a sound of a dying ballon, catching the breeze and shredding into thin, unimpressive streaks before it can even reach the grass. The man who follows it is even less coordinated or impressive. He catches his boot on the top rung of the fence with a violent clack, sending him lurching forward. He spends a frantic second grabbing at the air before he manages a sort of stumbling fall into an upright position.
Then, with sheer unearned confidence, he throws his arms wide.
"Heroes of UA!"
The costume. Shouta looks at the costume. It is a coat that was once just normal and probably costume store bought, now modified with gears. Not real gears, that would have been somewhat interesting… decorative gears. The kind you buy in bags from hobby stores, glued across the lapels and one shoulder in a pattern. There is a cape. The cape has gears on it too. There are goggles pushed up above a hat that also has a gear on it….
This is getting ridiculous.
Out on the field, nothing happens. Class A regards the villain with collective boredom, they faced things considerably worse than this. They don't even stand up, just sit there in the grass like a brood of cicadas, a low hum of unimpressed commentary rising from the group as they watch the spectacle.
"Your era is built on LIES!" the villain announces, pointing at the sky for reasons that are unclear. "I am CHRONOS-MIND, and I have come to unmake your reality— to strip away the comfortable mythology—"
"I think he used a hot glue gun for those," Kaminari’s voice drifts over, sounding genuinely concerned for the man's aesthetic choices.
"Indeed questionable," Iida adds, not even bothering to adjust his posture from where he’s still sitting by Midoriya.
"—the fundamental architecture of heroic society, which is built not on justice but on manufactured—"
Shouta doesn’t even reach for his quirk, too much effort for a man who looks like he’s wearing a craft store's clearance aisle. He simply unzips his sleeping bag, steps out, and is across the grass in under a second.
He just reaches out, grabs the back of the man's gear-laden collar, and sweeps his leg.
It’s a dull, heavy thud. Chronos-Mind is face-down in the dirt before he can finish his monologue about… whatever. Shouta keeps a firm hand pressed between the villain's shoulder blades, pinning him to the earth. The single gear on the man's hat pops off upon impact, rolling a few inches away before wobbling to a pathetic stop.
"Is he still talking?" Jirou asks, leaning her head on her hand. "I can still hear vibrating."
The villain is, indeed, still speaking into the dirt.
Shouta looks at his class. From the grass, almost twenty pairs of eyes look back at him with mild appreciation.
Bakugou hasn't even opened his eyes. He just let out a sharp snort and went back to baking in the sun. Todoroki has finally taken a sip of his soda, his eyes tracking the rolling gear with some interest. Not much though.
It is, Shouta thinks, exactly the kind of peace he has spent the last years fighting for.
"Didn't even need to stand up," he hears Bakugou mumble from across the field.
Shouta looks down at the villain again. He grabs him by the collar, hauls him up, and calls back over his shoulder, "Todoroki. Bakugou. Gate. C’mon, enough lazying around."
They get up with twin groans and come at a lazy walk.
That's the thing he'll remember later as well, how unhurried they were. Hands loose, no urgency, because there was no reason for urgency. He'd handled it. They were just helping with simple shit like opening the fucking gate because they were closest to him when he called.
Bakugou has his chin slightly up, the way he carries himself when he's in a good mood and won't say so. Todoroki is a half-step behind, which could be seen as deference but probably (definitely) isn't. Most definitely it's just that Bakugou sets a slightly faster pace and Todoroki has never felt the need to match it, just follows at his own tempo, and somehow they always arrive at the same time anyway.
Shouta adjusts his grip on the villain's collar—
That's when Chronos-Mind's hand brushes his forearm.
The contact lasts two seconds. Maybe less. The villain's hand is flailing, he's been gesturing this whole time, still performing despite the restraint, and the bare skin of his palm catches Shouta's arm. The villain's eyes snap open, and suddenly they are gold, irises spinning with something that looks like clockwork.
"Oh," Chronos-Mind says softly. He stops gesturing amd flailing. His whole energy changes, becomes very still and very focused. "The Eraserhead. Reading classics about murder in the sun, huh?" A sound that's almost a laugh escapes him, wet and uncomfortable. "What an interesting mind."
Shouta's grip tightens on his collar, his own eyes glowing red now. "Quirk erased. Don't even—"
"Already done," the villain says pleasantly. "The anchor's already placed."
He looks past Shouta.
His golden gaze finds the two boys approaching. He looks at Todoroki. Then at Bakugou.
Something in the villain's face turns colder.
"The number one hero's boy," he says, almost to himself. It's quiet enough that only Shouta can hear. "And the festival champion. And here they are, just.... walking around in a school field on a Tuesday afternoon and being all jolly." His eyes move back to Shouta. "Doesn't that seem careless?"
"Stop," Shouta says, a low, dangerous warning.
In that moment, the relaxed air around the boys just— shatters.
Todoroki stops mid-step. His hand goes to his chest, his fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. He looks confused, still unguarded and genuinely puzzled by whatever's happening. "Sensei?" he says, and his voice is small, lacking its usual steady calm.
Bakugou’s next. He stumbles, his knees buckling for a split second before he catches himself. His hands twitch against his own chest, small, erratic pops of light flickering in his palms. "What—" he starts, his voice rising with a sudden spike of panic. "Sensei, what is—"
He reaches out toward Shouta, his eyes wide, the pupils blown—
And for the first time in a year, Bakugou looks genuinely terrified, his breath caught somewhere in his chest.
Both boys are gasping for air, and Shouta doesn't know why!
"Let's see how heroic they are," Chronos-Mind says. His voice is almost kind. "On their own."
He looks directly at the boys, whose bodies are beginning to shimmer strangely, their forms vibrating against the air as if they're being shaken by an invisible hand.
"Say hi to Jacky for me. Find the one they never found, boys."
A sound.
The sound is wrong. Like a mirror shattering.
"Sensei!" Todoroki cries out, his hand reaching into the empty air between them, his eyes locked onto Shouta’s in a desperate, silent plea for help that Shouta cannot give. He's trying! Really! Erasure, it's not—
Bakugou too lets out a choked scream that dies in his throat.
There is a ripple in the air, the light bending—
Then, nothing.
The grass behind them is visible.
Where Todoroki and Bakugou were standing, there is simply nothing. Shouta is left holding a gear-covered collar, his fingers trembling, eyes burning.
For a moment— one half-second, maybe less— he stands very still.
Then it all comes crashing down on him.
He reaches out slwoly, his fingers closing on nothing but the warm afternoon air, toward the empty space where two of his children were just standing.
"Sensei!" Midoriya’s voice cracks across the field, high with a terror that wasn't there a second ago.
The rest of the class is up. The "cicada" hum has turned into a swarm of panicked shouts and worry. They are running toward him.
No.
No this is—
What is even—
"STAY BACK!" Shouta roars. Because he doesn't know what else to do.
His voice instantly stops them in their tracks, better than any Quirk could. He doesn't look at them. He can't. If he looks at their frightened faces, he’ll lose the thin thread of restraint and clear head he has left. Instead, he spins on his heel and lunges for the villain again.
"What did you do!"
He has Chronos-Mind tighter by the collar, slamming him against the perimeter fence so hard the decorative gears rattle against the metal. He knows, distantly, that this is not the right approach, that this is not what a professional does— but rational thought is very far away right now, hidden behind the sight of a patch of empty grass that was not empty ten seconds ago.
"Bring them back!"
"I can't," the villain says. He doesn't say it with pleasure or that weird triumph villains usually feel, which almost makes it worse. He says it with a flat honesty, like a fact he genuinely can't change. "The anchor is placed. It's—"
"You placed it, you can remove it—"
"It doesn't work like that—"
"Then tell me how it works!" Shouta’s grip tightens until the villain’s face begins to pale. "Tell me exactly how it works right now!"
Behind him, the field is a chaos of whispers and stifled sobs. He can hear Uraraka asking where they went, he can hear Iida trying to keep order with a voice that is shaking. But mostly, he hears the silence from the corner of the field where a cooler bag sits with two cracked soda cans, still cold, waiting for two boys who aren't there to drink them.
"The condition," Chronos-Mind wheezes, his golden eyes dimming as the Quirk seems to lessen. "The anchor only releases when the story is finished. I gave them the end— they have to find it."
Shouta’s blood runs cold. "What story?"
The villain smiles, a tiny, pitying thing. "The one you were reading, Eraser. The one where the killer walks away."
His eyes widen with horror.
~
The interrogation room has fluorescent lighting that buzzes. Shouta has been staring at it without seeing it for the past several minutes.
Tsukauchi is running through it again, his pen moving across the notepad. Chronos-Mind is seated across from him with the gears on his coat catching the fluorescent light, looking less smug now than he did on the field. Something in his performance has deflated slightly, being locked in a room with Shouta.
He explains it again.
Literary Anchor, that's the name of his quirk. The surface image, the loudest thing in the mind of whoever he touches— he builds the anchor from it and it sends people into the echo of that imagery. And Shouta, when the villain touched him, was just done reading about Victorian London. About the Whitechapel murders. About the autumn of 1888 and the things that happened in it.
The terrifying part of it is that the villain himself is a passenger to hisnown power. Looking at him now, he’s just a man in a craft-store costume with hot-glued gears, a pathetic wannabe who wouldn't have the stomach to consciously send two teenage boys into a slaughterhouse. But the quirk doesn't have a conscience, it’s the downside of that power. It took Shouta's thoughts, dropping two modern, "loud" teenagers into a world where that could kill them easily.
"So they're in 1888," Tsukauchi says.
"Yes."
"In London."
"In London."
"Without quirks," Shouta mutters with no energy left. He's been against the wall since they arrived. He has not moved.
The villain looks at him. "The mutation hadn't occurred yet during that time, Quirks are a newer discovery. The ability isn't— it doesn't exist there, in that time. So yes, but I didn't suppress it. It's just absent, the way it would be absent in any person during that time period."
"They're quirkless," Tsukauchi clarifies.
"Two ordinary teenagers," the villain confirms. "In Whitechapel. In autumn 1888."
The buzzing of the fluorescent light fills the pause, all of them trying to understand what exactly they are fighting with. Or against.
"The return condition," Shouta starts. "Walk me through it. Exactly."
"The anchor creates what I call a fixed loop. The echo holds until the condition I made is met. The verbal command is necessary for my quirk to work. Find the one they never found, that was my condition. Bakugou and Todoroki need to catch Jack the Ripper— the anchor releases and they come back."
"And if another quirk user—" Shouta begins.
"It doesn't—"
"But. If someone with a temporal quirk—"
"The echo isn't temporal," Chronos-Mind says, patient. "It's not accessible from outside. It's not a point in time someone else can go to. More like a sealed space, and the only key that opens it is fulfilling the condition."
"There are people with quirks who work with investigative—"
"Eraser—"
"There are sealing quirks, reversal quirks—"
"I'm not holding anything back," the villain says, and now he sounds tired. Shouta studies his face and finds, to his deep displeasure, that Tsukauchi's quirk has been running this whole time and he hasn't been signaled. The man means what he's saying. "I'm telling you what it is. It sends whoever I direct the command at. I didn't choose Todoroki and Bakugou specifically for— the point wasn't to strand children in—" He stops, taking a deep breath. "The loop is the only way home. That's the truth."
Tsukauchi puts his pen down and picks it up again. Clicks the cap once, twice. Writes something.
"If they die?" Shouta asks.
He has asked this before. He will ask it one more time because the first time might have been a mistake, might have been… He needs the real answer.
Chronos-Mind meets his eyes and does not look away.
"They die there," he says.
Shouta holds his gaze for a long time. Then he walks out of the interrogation room.
The hallway of the police station is humming with the background noise of a building full of people doing different things. Shouta walks until he reaches the far wall where no one can see him, stands with his back against it and waits there. For what? He doesn't know.
He thinks about the other kids, back at the station's waiting area, holding themselves together while they wait for any news of what happened to their friends. He thinks about calling Hizashi, who will hear his voice and know immediately, who will get into his car and drive here and ask useful questions and then hold his hand if he lets him.
He thinks about Todoroki Shoto, who at the beginning of the year sat in his classroom like something carved from ice, a boy who held himself with a stillness that was less about composure and more about a refusal to occupy space. Shouta watched him learn, slowly and painfully and with great determination, what it felt like to be part of something larger than his own shadow. He remembers the first time Todoroki had fallen asleep in the common room, his head tilted back and his guard completely down, because he finally felt safe enough to be unconscious around other people. He remembers the afternoon he’d seen him in the middle of a cluster of his classmates, his expression still neutral but his eyes following the conversation with a quiet interest, and the way he hadn’t even blinked when Ashido reached out to ruffle his hair at something he said.
He thinks about Bakugou Katsuki, who is possibly the most exhausting student he has ever had in terms of sheer energy management. and who is also one of the two or three people who, when Shouta were actually in danger, would react before anyone else does. He remembers the USJ. And Kamino. He remembers watching this kid crawl back from every single thing life has thrown at him and come back faster, come back angrier, come back better, and thinking: whatever he becomes, it's going to be amazing.
And he thinks, against his will, about the two of them in the grass this afternoon. The small sound of Bakugou's laugh. The thing in Todoroki's face when he looked at him. Two kids who have no idea what they're doing yet but are doing it wholeheartedly and without words for it. The world is full of things that could hurt them and Shouta has spent a year trying to make sure it doesn't, but right now it's 1888 and he cannot get there.
He takes out his phone.
He calls Recovery Girl first. Then the quirk registry. Then Nezu, who picks up before the first ring finishes, because Nezu always knows. He will call every temporal quirk user in the registry. He will call every person with a sealing or reversal or dimensional ability in the country. He will call all of them and get the same answer and he knows that. Will do it anyway, because there is doing something and there is doing nothing, and Shouta will be dead before he does nothing.
Find the Ripper, he thinks at no one, at the linoleum and the buzzing light, maybe. I know what you're capable of. Both of you. Find that person— and come home.
꧁──────ஓ๑♡๑ஓ──────꧂
The warmth disappears.
This is the first thing Shoto registers: the sun is gone. Between one breath and the next, the pleasant heat on his neck vanishes, replaced by a screaming, wet cold and the terrifying absence of the ground beneath his feet.
They are falling.
Through a darkness so thick it feels like liquid.
"Katsuki!" Shoto tries to shout, but the air is ripped from his lungs. Beside him, he hears a panicked sound— Katsuki, thrashing in the void. Shoto reaches for his right side, for the ice that is as much a part of him as his own breath, and finds a hollow, terrifying emptiness. He reaches for his left, for the fire he spent years mastering, and finds— nothing.
Beside him, he hears the frantic rubbing of Katsuki’s palms, trying to find a spark.
"It’s not working!" Katsuki’s voice is pure panic, carried away instantly by the wind whipping past them. "Shoto, it's not—"
The obsidian sheen of a river and the skeletal, black silhouette of a bridge suddenly rush up to meet them like bared teeth. They are falling directly at metal beams.
Shoto’s eyes blow wide, his lungs locking as he reaches for a wall of ice that doesn't come. Beside him, Katsuki's hands claw at the empty air, searching for a blast to recoil himself upward.
They are gonna hit it.
They are gonna get impaled and die.
The bridge is close, the river yawning wide open—
The air suddenly thickens.
It’s a elastic tension catching them just feet above the jagged iron below. The sudden stop is a violent jerk that snaps their necks forward and leaves their stomachs somewhere back in the sky. For a split second, they hang there, gasping for air, staring at the rusted surface of the bridge just inches from their faces.
Then that elastic tension breaks.
Shoto slams into the beam with a sound like a wet sack of flour, the air punched out of him in a single, agonizing burst. He can hear Katsuki hitting the iron below, a heavy, metallic thump followed by a pained wheeze.
"Katsuki!" Shoto gasps, his vision swimming.
"I'm—" Katsuki starts, but then comes the sound of hands scraping desperately against wet metal. "Shit! I'm slipping!"
Shoto is already moving. He flings himself flat against the beam, his stomach pressing into the freezing iron. He wedges his left hand into a gap, the edge of it slicing into his palm, and his right arm swings out into the dark, reaching for the sound of Katsuki’s struggle.
For one terrible second, there is only the sound of the wind and the enormous sounds of the black river below. Then, his fingers find a wrist. He lunges, his hand locking around the bone with a strength born of of pure adrenaline.
The weight of Katsuki jerks Shoto’s shoulder at an angle that makes his vision white out for a second. He grinds his teeth, locking his grip until his knuckles go numb.
"I've got you," he gasps. "I've got you. Don't— don't let go."
Below him, Katsuki goes still. Pulse drumming like a hammer against Shoto's palm.
Shoto lifts his head from where he had pressed it into the beam, blinking back the stinging rain. His eyes adjust just enough to see the nightmare they’ve landed in. They are hanging on the skeletal ribcage of a bridge. Below them, a black abyss smells of salt and rot.
Katsuki is dangling over the edge, one boot barely hooked onto a rusted pin, his other leg swinging over the void. His face is turned up toward him, and for the first time in Shoto’s memory, he looks helpless.
"I'm going to pull," he says, trying for calm even if he feels anything but. "When I pull, you push. Get your knee on the beam. Do not look down."
"I... I can't feel it," Katsuki whispers, and the lack of anger in his voice is more terrifying than the fall. "Quirk. It's just— gone."
"I know," Shoto gasps, his grip tightening until the bolt cuts even deeper into his hand, warmth slicking his palm. "Mine too. We’re doing this the hard way. Ready?"
A short breath. A nod.
"Yeah."
Shoto pulls.
He hauls upward with a guttural grunt, his shoulder screaming at the joint. Below, Katsuki’s boots finally catch a stable edge. He lunges, his fingers digging into Shoto’s shoulder for leverage, and he scrambles over him like a ladder.
Katsuki collapses heavily across his back, pinning him face-down against the freezing iron. For a long second, they just lie there in a heap, gasping. The only sound is the wind and their own ragged lungs.
"Get.... off," Shoto wheezes into the metal when he eventually becomes to heavy.
Katsuki rolls to the side with a pained grunt, flopping onto his back on the wider platform. Shoto pushes himself up, his vision swimming.
"You okay?" He asks.
"Shut up," Katsuki whispers, though there’s no heat in it. He’s staring at his own hands, his chest heaving. "What happened?"
"I don't know."
Katsuki still isn't looking at him. He’s rubbing his thumb across his palm, again trying to spark an explosion. There’s nothing. His hands are just damp, shaking, and covered in grit. He slams his hands together once, then twice, the impact making a dull thud.
"Why isn't it working?" Katsuki's voice is rising with every passing moment. "Shoto, why can't I feel it?"
Shoto tries to reach for his own quirk again. He searches for that familiar pull, but nothing. It doesn't feel like Aizawa’s Erasure. Erasure feels like a door being held shut, this feels like the door was never there. He’s just a boy with two hair colors and a jacket that's starting to soak through with rain, no fire to dry him off.
"It’s gone," he says quietly. "I can't feel anything."
"The hell it is," Katsuki snarls, though his hands won't stop trembling. He finally looks around, his eyes darting from the rusted bolts to the thick, yellow-grey fog pressing in on them.
That fog is not like anythimg Shoto has ever seen. It's yellow where light catches it, gray where it thickens, and it doesn't move or thin with the breeze. Through it a city takes shape in pieces. Rooflines at uneven heights, none of them matching any skyline Shoto has ever learned. Chimneys are everywhere, dozens of them, all exhaling the same yellow murk into the murk above. And below, a river so wide and dark that the word river feels wrong. On it, shapes are drifting through the fog. Ships, massive and slow, with tall masts and sails. The lights on them are small and warm and orange. Nothing electric in sight. Gas.
The air has a taste. It coats the back of the throat.
There is no engine noises. No hum of infrastructure, no distant highway. Only water. Rain. And far away, the low, slow toll of a bell.
"Where's the school?" Katsuki asks. "Where are the buildings?" He's looking out at the fog, at the gaslit embankment, at the ancient ships. "Where is—" He stops, biting down on his words. "This isn't Japan."
"No," Shoto agrees quietly.
"This isn't—" Katsuki head swirls around with rising horror. "This isn't— this isn't now."
The rain falls on them. The river still screams below.
And then from somewhere beneath them, carrying through the fog and the rain, a child's high voice raised to carry above street noise:
"Extra! Extra! Horrid murder in Whitechapel!"
English. Old English.
Shoto and Katsuki turn and look at each other.
They sit on the wet iron beam and they stare at each other in the dark, wide-eyed, and do not speak.
Because what is there to say?
The bell tolls again somewhere.
