Chapter Text
Erasurehead pov:
It was a cloudy night, the kind of night that Shouta knows something was bound to go wrong. And unfortunately for him, he had a job tonight.
A dangerous one.
He was assigned to raid and rescue victims from one of the largest child trafficking laboratories still in operation. Shouta knew this was among the worst crimes a person could commit.
Human trafficking alone was monstrous, but children? No. No one—especially not children—should ever be subjected to that kind of brutality.
Fortunately, cases like these had declined significantly over the past five years, though no one seemed to know why. This lab was one of the last known to still carry out such atrocities. But “few” didn’t mean “none.”
And Shouta wasn’t the kind of person to ignore what remained.
He and his husband had always had a soft spot for children—and, oddly enough, cats—so taking this job wasn’t a question of if, but when. Tonight, they would go in and save as many lives as they could.
As the raid began, Shouta moved first—fast and decisive—rushing in alongside Death Arms, Edgeshot, and Midnight. Behind them, a network of underground pro heroes fanned out like shadows given purpose. They were the rescue team, their mission clear: find the children, free the victims, and get them out alive.
Coms for the rescue team:
Death Arms:
“We’ve cleared ten cells. No signs of living victims. Hate to say it… but it looks like they knew we were coming. They may have already moved some of the kids.”
Edgeshot:
“…Damn it. I’ve got multiple unresponsive children here. I’m starting emergency treatment—trying to save as many as I can.”
Midnight:
“How does anyone even do this? Experimenting on children… killing them… for what? This is sick.”
EraserHead:
“Shit. I’ve got movement—two possible hostiles and a Nomu. Could be scientists, could be something else. Either way, they’re not victims. I’m engaging. Send offensive backup to my location, now.”
Midnight:
“A Nomu? Of course there is. I’m on my way—and I’m dragging Mirko with me. Sit tight, Eraser.”
The lab smelled like antiseptic and something underneath it — something biological and wrong that Aizawa had learned, over the years, meant don’t breathe too deep.
He’d swept the perimeter in under four minutes. Two scientists. One portal, purplish and humming at the far wall like a bruise that hadn’t finished forming. And a child.
Fuck.
A boy. Couldn’t be older than seven. Bunny ears — white, limp, pressed flat against his skull — and wings, small and tattered, folded against his back like something that had been handled too roughly too many times. He was standing between the two scientists with his wrists bound, and he wasn’t crying. He wasn’t struggling.
He was just gone. Eyes open, somewhere else entirely.
"Eraserhead," the boy whispers. "Shouta Aizawa. Underground hero. Quirk: Erasure, temporarily nullifies other quirks by line of sight. Weakness: dry eye syndrome, requires eye drops, cannot blink during activation and possibly insomina, but not comfirmed."
Saying shouta is shocked would be the understatement of the week, the kid literally just spit out his entire hero file which isn't even public due to him being undergroud. But whatever he needed to focus on the fight first, question comes later.
Aizawa moved before he thought about it. Capture weapon out, the familiar weight of it singing through the air — it wrapped around the child’s torso and he yanked, pulling the boy across the room and into his side in one smooth motion. The scientists stumbled back, startled.
“Get behind me,” Aizawa said. Low. Steady. He angled his body between the boy and the portal without looking down. “I’m a hero. You’re safe.”
The child pressed himself against the back of Aizawa’s legs and said nothing. His small hands found the back of Aizawa’s capture weapon and gripped it. That was all.
Stay there. Stay right there.
Scientist No. 1 — shorter, wearing latex gloves still stained with something Aizawa refused to think about — let out a thin, nasal laugh. “How are you going to fight us and a Nomu? Your time has come, hero. How sad.”
The wall behind them exploded inward.
The Nomu was massive. Not just large — wrong. Too many joints. Breathing through something that wasn’t quite a mouth, wet and slow, like it had been built past the need for air and kept it anyway out of some grotesque mechanical habit. Its black sclera swept the room without urgency. It had no reason to hurry. It already knew how this ended.
Aizawa’s jaw tightened.
Alright. Quirk’s useless on it. Capture weapon is all I’ve got. Think.
Scientist No. 1 was still laughing when Aizawa crossed the room in three steps and put his fist through the man’s face. The uppercut snapped his head back and sent him through the ceiling tile above — not enough force to kill, enough to put him down hard. The laughter stopped.
“Shit — Nomu!” Scientist No. 2 scrambled backward, voice cracking. “Kill that hero! Bring me 0012! Go!”
0012.
Not his name. A number. They’d given a seven-year-old boy with tattered wings a number.
Aizawa breathed through his nose and threw the capture weapon.
It sang out in a wide arc, wrapping around the Nomu’s torso — legs, arms, the whole massive body — pulling tight like a net. For one half-second it held.
Then the Nomu flexed, and the nanofiber tore.
Not frayed. Tore. Clean through, like it was nothing. Shredded ends of the capture weapon fell to the concrete and Aizawa felt it in his chest — not fear, just the cold arithmetic of a fight getting harder. That cloth was rated for things that shouldn’t be able to break it.
Okay. Quirkless. No capture weapon. One Nomu, regenerative, built to kill pro heroes.
Fine.
He went in with a kick — heel to the temple, precise, the kind of strike that dropped grown men in under a second. It connected solid. The Nomu’s head moved with it.
And then it stopped moving.
It turned to look at him. Slow. Patient. The dent his heel had left was already filling in, tissue knitting back together in real time, and it regarded him the way something regards a noise that isn’t worth investigating yet.
Shit.
Behind him — a sound. Small, rhythmic. The boy, rocking heel to heel against the far wall, palms pressed flat over his ears, eyes fixed on a point somewhere past the ceiling. Still gone. Still holding on to whatever dissociation had mercifully carried him somewhere else.
Keep him alive. That’s the job. Keep him alive.
The Nomu lunged. Aizawa dropped, let the swipe pass over him — it cratered the concrete wall hard enough that chunks of it hit his shoulder — and slid between its legs. His hand closed around a fallen metal tray. He jammed it into the creature’s knee joint, not to wound, just to interrupt, and it stumbled half a step. He used it. Grabbed the boy in the same motion, rolled them both behind a steel support pillar, and pressed the child against it.
“Don’t move.” He looked directly at him — not at the fight, not at the Nomu, at him — willing the boy’s eyes to focus. “Don’t make a sound. I’ve got you. Do you hear me?”
The boy’s lips moved. Nothing came out.
He can’t hear me. He’s somewhere far away and the sounds of this room are just — noise, to him. Something happening to someone else.
Aizawa pressed his hand once, briefly, to the top of the boy’s head. I’ve got you. Then turned back to the fight.
The Nomu ripped the support pillar from its moorings.
A chunk of rebar caught his cheek on the way down. He felt the bloom of heat, the trickle of blood, filed it under irrelevant and kept moving.
“Eraser.” Midnight’s voice crackled in his ear, half-static. “We’re thirty seconds out. Miruko’s ahead of me. Hold on.”
Thirty seconds.
He looked at the portal — still open, still humming, Scientist No. 2 backing toward it with a hard drive clutched to his chest. Whatever was on that drive — intake logs, other numbers, other children already fed through that purple mouth and into wherever it led —
No.
He threw the shredded remains of the capture weapon like a whip. The frayed end caught the scientist’s ankle and Aizawa yanked. The man hit the concrete face-first with a sound like a bag of wet laundry.
Two down. Only the nomu remained.
The Nomu roared — guttural, wet, a sound that came from somewhere deep in a body that wasn’t supposed to make sounds like that — and charged.
Aizawa ran at it.
He dropped at the last second, let his momentum carry him under and through, came up behind it. His hand closed around a chunk of rebar from the rubble. He drove it into the back of the creature’s knee with everything he had.
It buckled. It howled.
Then the ceiling came apart.
Miruko hit the Nomu like a demolition charge — landed on its shoulders, thighs locked around its head — and twisted. The neck snapped with a sound like wet wood. The creature crumpled, paralyzed, regeneration already working but too slow to matter right now.
“Took you long enough,” Aizawa said. He wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his hand.
“Had to find the entrance.” Miruko hopped off and kicked the Nomu’s head into the floor for good measure, apparently on principle. “That the kid?”
Aizawa was already moving.
The boy hadn’t moved. Still against the wall, exactly where he’d left him — palms over his ears, rocking, eyes fixed on nothing. His wings were trembling so finely it almost looked like stillness.
Aizawa crouched. Slowly. He kept his hands open and visible, dropped himself to the boy’s eye level, and waited.
“Hey.” Quiet. No urgency in it. “You’re safe now. My name is Eraserhead.”
The boy’s eyes moved. Slowly. Found his face.
Something in them — not focus, not yet, but the beginning of it. The faint recognition that there was a face here that wasn’t hurting him. That's progress right there
“Nobody’s going to hurt you again,” Aizawa said. “I promise you that.”
Down the hallway, Midnight’s voice echoed back to them: “Rescue team to central lab. We’ve found the main holding cells. Thirty-seven children alive. Twelve — not.”
Aizawa closed his eyes.
Twelve.
He opened them.
He unhooked what was left of his capture scarf — torn, bloodstained, barely recognizable — and wrapped it around the boy’s shaking shoulders. It swallowed him. He was so small.
How long was he in here. How long did they have him.
He didn’t ask. Not yet. Not here, in this room that smelled like antiseptic and wrong.
“Let’s go,” he said softly, and held out his hand.
The boy looked at it for a long moment.
Then, slowly, he took it.