Chapter Text
“So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am.
Kindhearted, yes, but knee deep in existential gloom,
except when the fog smokes the bridges like this—
like, instead of being afraid we might juice ourselves up,
eh, like, might get kissed again? Dwelling in the bones I go straight
through life, a kind of sublime abundance— cherries, dog’s breath, the sun, then
(ouch) & all of us snuffed out. Dear one, what is waiting for us tonight,
nostalgia? the homes of childhood? oblivion? How we hate to go—
Hitoshi sees himself as a sort of exterminator.
Working as a hero in the underground is a lot like working day-in and day-out tugging up the corners of mildewed, moldy, dry-rotted rugs to reveal all the muck and creepy crawlies hiding beneath. And for the past eight years, it's been his job to clean up the mess; to stamp out the pests and ensure they have no chance to find another dark corner to continue their festering.
This job often leads him to places most people wouldn't want to go to with a fully loaded gun. Tonight, this meant happily waltzing inside an abandoned apartment building that's become the abode for a specific type of vermin he's been on the hunt for the past few weeks.
The apartment building is small, more tall than it is wide, and stuck between two newer buildings that seem to have made it their mission to squeeze this place out of existence. Like any rat's nest, this place has been happily camouflaged by the overcrowded nature of the street— nestled under layers of huge, flashing neon lights and advertisements showcasing the many illicit late-night attractions this area is infamously known for. Not really Hitoshi's scene on a nice night out like tonight, but where the rot grows, Hitoshi is destined to follow.
Inside this shell of a building is where he’s caught the vermin he’s been hunting for, finding them chittering about with their lit cigarettes and near-empty bottles of alcohol in hand. These particular shit stains are of the kidnapping and human trafficking variety. This particular group’s MO is tricking people into thinking they've been hired to work an easy job for life-changing pay— a lie that's tempting for anyone hoping to finally pay debts, build up savings, or support their families. Little do the victims know— and far too late do they realize— that they’ve been tricked into signing their freedom away to the hands of people who couldn’t give a shit about anything other than drugs, money, sex or power; all of which they’re vying to get their grubby hands on by any means necessary.
Much like extermination, dealing with the literal dirt of humanity often times means getting a little dirty yourself.
“Gah! Fuck, fuck that hurts!”
Never really minded that little fact about this line of work, Hitoshi idly thinks as he shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Currently, he stands inside one of the apartments on the top floor of the building, scrunching his nose at the scent of dry-rotted wood and piss. Well. Maybe until now.
"Get off—!”
More specifically, Hitoshi currently stands on top of the shattered knee of the gang's leader who was occupying said dry-rotted, piss-scented apartment. The piss is definitely fresh, if the large puddle creeping closer and closer toward his other boot is anything to go by.
“Get off— please."
Hitoshi's gaze pans slowly over the rest of the place, squinting through the neon red lighting spilling into the apartment from the huge advertisement for a sex club next door through sole window of the apartment. His eyes play connect the dots between the bodies of this shithead's friends littering the floor— all of them bound, bloody, and in various states of consciousness and concussive-ness. The apartment neighboring to the left of this one is similarly decorated with bound criminals, as are all the apartments three floors below them.
Fortunately, the state of these apartments is so rotten that a few new blood and piss stains won’t exactly take away from the property value.
I would hate to ruin the interior design of the place. Hitoshi shifts again, stretching his head from side to side to try and release a knot that's irritatingly developed in his trap muscle.
"Gaaah!"
It took him a little under 20 minutes to make it to the top floor— not his best but also not his worst. The first few floors were practically a breeze as he stealthily snuck from room to room, brainwashing the criminals lurking inside into beating each other unconscious with their own weapons. Unfortunately, by the time he made it up to the third floor of the building, stealth had to be pitched right out the window when one of the men— some asshole built like a fucking tank and a solid two feet taller than Hitoshi— got a lucky shot and smashed Hitoshi through the wall straight into the neighboring apartment. A hell of a wake-up call for the rest of the criminals in the building.
That little hiccup ignited a good ol' fashioned brawl of the BYO metal pipe, wooden bat, and brass knuckle type. His opponents always fail to realize that their weapons against him can quickly turn into weapons against themselves when his Quirk gets invited to the party. That teeny fact, combined with the closet-esque size of the apartments leaving exactly no room for them to dodge the unforgiving grip of his capture scarf, eventually led him to the final apartment.
“God—! Oh fuck that hurts, that hurts! Please!”
As if reluctant to obey his command, his eyes lazily drag back to the man writhing desperately beneath his boot. The man’s hands reach desperately for his leg digging his nails into his own pant leg like an animal trying to chew it’s way out of a bear trap. The efforts don’t get him very far, considering the fact that layers of capture scarf crush his arms into his torso, making his movements limited.
The man trapped beneath his boot goes by the moniker “Amanojaku.” It’s some arrogant attempt at being clever, naming himself after the evil spirits known to spread misdeeds like the plague. He's the head of this up-and-coming trafficking group; a man who's proven himself to be desperate to cement himself and his business into the market of the underground as quickly as possible. Amanojaku’s case file had to have been one of the most heinous that has ever crossed Hitoshi’s desk, filled to the brim with case file after case file of just how far this man is willing to go to satiate his greed.
Well, suffice to say that Amanojaku’s now knows exactly what happens to the criminals that cross Night Hide’s desk, and it looks like a deep gash carved from his right cheek bone to his left temple splitting his face open— courtesy of Hitoshi's tanto. The blood that flows from the cavernous wound paints his entire face a shiny dark red that looks nearly pitch black in the red neon light of the apartment. Tears, spit, and snot cut their own valleys through the blood as the man sobs beneath him, trailing back into his hairline and onto the floor. Then there's his left knee, which crunches and cracks beneath Hitoshi's iron-toed boot in a way that no human's leg should. And to add insult to injury, all of Amanojaku’s gang-leader fearlessness has been pissed out onto the floor.
"I won't ask you again," Hitoshi cuts pitilessly through the irritating begging, his voice distorting from his chords sitting snug around his face, "Where are all the people you've taken?"
Amanojaku’s scream ruptures through the apartment again as Hitoshi twists his foot, as if he’s putting out a cigarette bud beneath his heel. The tethers of capture scarf remain gripped tight in Hitoshi’s hands as the man aggressively thrashes and bucks against the wooden floor in an attempt to escape the pain. Every one of Amanojaku’s tugs and jerks in the scarf causes the loops around his torso grow tighter and tighter, constricting him like a boa.
“Gone!” Amanojaku shouts, spitting blood all over himself. His brown eyes stare up at Hitoshi pleadingly, wide and bloodshot and brimming with tears, “They’re— they’re gone, they’ve been gone! We, ah fuck—” he clenches his eyes shut with a wince, panting and writhing on the ground like a wounded animal. “We sold ‘em off just before you got here!”
It takes a bit more energy than usual to keep himself from rolling his eyes in irritation. Hitoshi's patience is quickly running thin and that answer was a heaping load of nothing with a side of fuck all. You'd think that more people that find themselves in Amanojaku's position would learn to just spill all the information they know to end their suffering sooner rather than later, but nope. It’s never that easy. Sometimes Hitoshi wonders if criminals like the back and forth nature of... pressing for information.
Hitoshi leans down until he’s looming over Amanojaku. As he inches closer, he wraps the capture scarf around his palms and pulls the man up off the floor. With a jerk, he forces Amanojaku to focus on nothing else but him, and the possibility of what he could do next.
“Now, what do you think my next question’s gonna be?”
Amanojaku blinks up at him stupidly, trembling as more tears fall down his bloodied cheeks. “Who— who we sold them to?”
A single tilt of his head has Amanojaku sputtering again like a failing motor.
“I don’t know— honest, I don’t know. They came in a grocery delivery truck, masked up and— guh,” he groans and gasps in pain, “And they only spoke through notes on their phone. Told us they were here to buy, they passed the money over and we gave ‘em the goods.”
“Hmm,” Hitoshi shifts more of his weight onto his right foot, just to get a bit more comfortable. “The ‘goods’ huh?”
“Gah! I—! I meant— the people— we gave them the— people!” the gang leader screams so loud in agony that it makes Hitoshi’s ears ring.
“How many buyers were there?”
“Five, five of ‘em,” Amanojaku pants heavily, “One heteromorph fella— looked like a bull under the mask or something. Dunno about the rest— please, my leg—”
Hitoshi makes a toneless noise of dismissal, “And how many people did you sell?”
“Two each. Our whole— supply!”
‘Supply.’ ‘Goods.’ Even now while this bastard is being crushed like a roach does he still talk about ten innocent human beings like they’re nothing but sellable product to use to make a quick buck.
“Please, please! I’ll do whatever, just— my leg, fuck. Please get off my leg.”
Then to have the nerve to beg. To cry and scream and piss himself in fear as if he’s never inflicted this exact terror onto others— like he hasn’t inflicted worse. Vermin, begging to be seen as human.
This is where hero work and extermination split onto different paths. Exterminators get to kill their vermin. Hitoshi can only arrest his.
“You,” Hitoshi’s voice whispers through his mask, “Are going to tell the detectives at the precinct everything you just said to me. You are going to tell them every detail of the transaction that you remember— from the time of the deal to the fucking color of the shoes laces they were wearing. Do you understand me?”
The man aggressively nods his head, whimpering and gasping for breath as he does so.
With a final twist of his heel into the man’s knee, Hitoshi swipes his tanto across the strands capture scarf tethering him to the man. He catches the ends as they fall and he ties them into a tight knot, ensuring this bastard can’t go anywhere. Not that he’d be able to, not unless he wanted to squirm around like a worm through his own piss and blood. To each their own.
With his final rat caught, Hitoshi steps out of the apartment into the dimly lit hallway of the top floor and digs out his work phone. He presses call— it rings twice before it connects.
“Night Hide,” Tsukauchi greets.
“Just got done with the raid in Narshada. The missing people aren’t here,” Hitoshi growls like a dissatisfied wolf on a failed hunt, yanking his mask off his face in frustration. “They sold them off just before I got here, the slimy bastards. I need you and your team to be on the look out for a grocery delivery truck in this area. The people driving it may be masked— one was reported to have a bull heteromorph Quirk.”
“Noted. Do you know how long it’s been since they left?”
“About half an hour, maybe more,” Hitoshi starts to pace down the hall, stretching his shoulders back again to try and ease the soreness lingering there. He bites back a groan, already feeling the massive bruise brewing from getting thrown through the wall earlier. That’s going to suck for a while.
“I’ll send out a BOLO, hopefully if we send patrol officers out quick enough we can still catch them,” Tsukauchi says, his voice tired but determined. Ever the reliable rock, always keeping steady. “Cruisers are on their way now with some transport vans. Got a head count for us?”
“About 30, give or take. All currently tied up, most unconscious.” His feet continue to lead him down the short hall of apartments, needing to channel the remaining adrenaline somehow. “The first three floors were brimming with these guys, but the top floor was only occupied by the boss and a few of—”
Hitoshi spins around when he hears a suspicious noise, his lizard brain reacting quicker than he can think.
“Hold on,” he growls into the phone as he storms back down the hall, tugging a loop of capture scarf down in preparation of someone trying to make a break for it.
Except, when he turns around the doorway of the apartment, he finds all of the men exactly where he left them, all of the criminals still tied up and exhibiting no signs of trying to escape. His brows pinch together as he listens for the strange noise again, but besides the low whistling of breaths from one of the men's broken nose, he hears nothing.
Weird.
“Night Hide, you there?” Tsukauchi’s calls out from his phone’s speaker, concern evident in his voice.
Hitoshi nods uselessly, “Yeah, yeah I’m here. I just thought—”
His jaw snaps shut as the sound happens again, louder this time. The hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention as he hones in on the source of the noise: the bathroom door of Amanojaku’s apartment. “Tsukauchi, I’m gonna need to call you back.”
“What? Night—?” Tsukauchi's worried voice cuts short as Hitoshi hangs up and pockets his phone. Silently on the balls of his feet, he creeps toward the closed bathroom door— one hand reaching into the pile of capture scarf around his throat while the other removes a tanto from it's sheath on his belt. Once he’s in range, he leans in close against the wood of the door, listening hard for any signs of movement waiting for him inside.
Once again he's met with complete silence, so he takes a step back from the door and readies himself. If they won't come out, then he'll go in.
Tugging a loop of scarf down from his neck and tightening his grip on the tanto, Hitoshi takes a deep breath—
Three, two, one—
—and breathes out.
With a snap, a loop of capture flings forward and it wraps itself around the bathroom door handle. Then, with all his strength, he yanks. As the bathroom door splits through the doorframe and slams violently into the wall behind it, Hitoshi charges into the bathroom to attack whatever awaits him inside before it can attack him— only for… nothing to happen.
Hitoshi stands inside the bathroom like he’s lost. His adrenaline pumps through his system as pans his head to the left, finding nothing but a simple sink vanity staring back at him. After a blink he slowly pans to the right, only to see a lone toilet shoved into a corner of the bathroom. If they had eyes, he's fairly certain that the sink and toilet would be side-eyeing him like he's the neighborhood weirdo.
“Holy shit,” Hitoshi sighs out a bit of his soul, dropping his arms down to his sides in both relief and frustration washes through him. Eight years working as a Pro-Hero and he just let himself get all worked up over what’s probably just some noisy pipes in an old apartment building. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
As if it sensed his woes, the sound happens again, now easier identified as a high pitched whine that draws him to the cabinet beneath the sink. With an aggressive roll of his eyes, he returns his tanto back into it’s sheath on his back and crouches down to see the shitty pipes for himself. He yanks open the cabinet doors and—
Oh.
Round eyes stare up at him, misty with unshed tears. Impossibly tiny hands fiddle anxiously around a small pinched mouth, muffling the quiet whines and whimpers of... a baby.
“What… the fuck,” Hitoshi whispers, wondering if he’s hallucinating staring at an actual, real life infant right now.
Lilac eyes stare up at him in confusion, batting long brown lashes clumped together with tears against their round flushed cheeks. One tiny hand digs itself into wild brown hair splayed out around their head, tugging at the strands like it doesn’t know what else to do. The other flits around their mouth, wetting their fingers with spit as they worry them between their lips. They're dressed in a dirty yellow short-sleeved onesie, leaving their squirming arms, legs, and feet completely bare. Tiny whines break past their wet lips and fingers, sounding heartbreakingly distressed.
You were supposed to be squeaky pipes, Hitoshi dazedly thinks as one of his hands instinctively reaches out to catch one of their itty bitty feet in his gloved palm. His eyes widen in surprise when he discovers just how cold their little toes are, and they widen some more when the baby whines again. Their tiny foot in his grasp wiggles and presses harder into the bits of his warm skin exposed from his glove.
"Yep, you're a real baby," Hitoshi murmurs, staring at the foot he has caught in his hand.
His hero-brain kicks back in within seconds, reading the situation with quick, rational deductions. This baby was carefully stowed away in this mildewed bathroom cabinet, hidden away like they were someone precious worth protecting. None of the criminals he encountered in this building would do such a kind, painfully desperate act. Only a person capable of caring would make such a choice, do such an action. This means, he concludes, that this baby must belong to one of the victims.
One of the victims who were just here. One of the victims who were probably being held in this very room while they waited for a buyer to show up— Amanojaku keeping his ‘goods’ close by and kept under his watchful eye.
He can picture it clearly: Amanojaku sending the men tied up on the floor behind Hitoshi to come and round up the victims to take them to the buyers. In the chaos, the mother only has mere seconds to decide what to do— to decide how she can save her baby from having to spend another second around the threat of these men. She spots the sink vanity and she makes a choice. She places her baby inside, praying for the right person will find them when she closes the door shut.
"Someone obviously cares about you very much,” he whispers solemnly.
The baby flings their chubby hands away from their mouth with another loud, tear-filled whine, flapping at him frantically. The action practically screams ‘get me out of here already!’
"Sorry," he whispers awkwardly to them, letting go of the soft grip he had on their foot. Then, after a moment of consideration, Hitoshi sneaks a careful hand beneath the baby's head and another under their bottom to finally remove them from inside the stinky sink vanity.
His hands start to feel jittery as he pulls away from the sink, trembling in a way he hasn’t felt since he was a fresh-faced hero. The sign of weakens awakens the disparaging voice nestled deep in his mind, enticing it to echo don’t fuck up, don’t do the wrong thing, don’t hurt them as he rises back to his feet. Once he's standing up straight again, Hitoshi pulls the baby tight to his chest as the baby squirms and wiggles in his grasp, fighting to get a good grip without hurting them. He tries to adjust his hold as best he can to make them comfortable but the attempts are futile— with every adjustment the baby just seems to wiggle some more.
It's now that Hitoshi near-frantically realizes that avidly avoiding any iota of interaction with children throughout his life may be coming back to bite him right in the ass. Kids are chill, but from a distance. A good long distance. Ideally somewhere not directly in Hitoshi’s vicinity where he’s forced to take on the role of making sure they don’t die.
Maybe he should've taken up at least one of the offers he got to hold his classmate's brand new kids. Maybe that would’ve given him a better idea as to how to properly hold a tiny wiggling human. It's all about supporting the head and neck, right? Something like that?
“Can you tell I have no idea what I’m doing?” he mutters to them uselessly, “‘Cause I certainly can.”
The baby mumbles in response, their little face a bit pinched in a way that Hitoshi can't quite read. To say that he feels a bit overwhelmed would be an understatement to the nth degree. He’s never realized just how tiny and— round babies can be until now. How can human beings be this small? Was he ever this tiny?
His heart jumps as the baby whines again in his arms, their eyes still wet and face still flushed pink from distress. Hitoshi sucks in a nervous breath, not entirely sure what to do. Usually in moments like this, Hitoshi refer to the ol’ reliable WWAD— What Would Aizawa Do? Except, in this case, Hitoshi distinctly remembers never having seen Aizawa interact with a child below the age of five, so that’s not helpful in this moment.
None of his textbooks or rescue simulations at UA prepared him for something like this, and as much as Aizawa tried to prepare Hitoshi for literally anything and everything that the underground has to offer, it seems the man forgot to mention finding babies hidden in bathrooms while on raids during their work studies and their short stint working together as a duo.
“Babies are super in tune with our vibe, y’know. They’re like tiny little sponge-mirrors,” his brain supplies as the next best thing in the form of a memory of Yamada bragging about his self-anointed title as ‘baby-whisperer,’ “If you’re scared, they’re scared. It’s their instincts to rely on us to tell them if they’re safe or not, so they watch and listen for a whole bunch of subconscious cues. It’s an easy code to crack— if you’re super chill, then they’ll be super chill.”
“You’ll be okay,” Hitoshi whispers a little reassurance for them both, not quite ‘chill’ but hopefully a little less ‘I’m way too out of my depth here’. He risks slowly lifting his hand up to gently wipe away the traces of tears dried to their soft cheek, “I’ll get you out of here. You okay with that?” As they say, fake it till you make it.
Miraculously, as though the baby understood exactly what he said, they slowly start squirming less in his grasp. Seeming more settled, they blink up at him as they press their head into his capture scarf and suck on their fingers, their breathing leveling out with a small huff. Wow. Seems Yamada isn’t always just talking out of his ass.
Hitoshi huffs a small laugh at the thought, “Guess I’ll take that as a yes.”
Minutes later, Hitoshi’s left the top floor apartment to wait outside the dilapidated entrance of the apartment building, holding the baby probably too tight in his arms as he waits for back up to arrive. Thankfully the baby doesn’t seem to mind his terrified death-grip— or at least, he doesn’t think so. Surely they’d be crying if they didn’t?
Soon enough, the calvary arrives in the form of a hoard of police cruisers and transport vans pulling to a stop just outside the building, their lights flashing and sirens blaring. The baby makes an unhappy sound in his arms at the noise, so he pets a few fingers through their feathery, impressively soft hair in hopes of calming them. Things have been relatively smooth sailing with the baby since they left the dingy apartment together, and Hitoshi would very much like to keep it that way.
Much to his surprise, the baby calms again. Hey, maybe he’s actually kinda good at this—
“Hohoho! Look at you kid!” a familiar voice cackles. When Hitoshi darts his gaze up, he spots Sergeant Tamagawa slamming the door to his cruiser closed with a herd of officers following suit right behind him. The man steps confidentially up to him and the baby, his tail swishing as his golden eyes lock onto the baby in his arms, “Decided to give fatherhood a try, huh? Did the stork decide to stop by tonight? Who’s this?”
Tamagawa's teasing is bit like when a cat makes biscuits right into your thigh: you grin and bear it out of fondness. It doesn't help that Tamagawa has known Hitoshi since he was an awkward, spindly teenager eagerly following Aizawa around like he lived in the man’s shadow. While he’s now a 25 year old man and a well-established underground hero known internationally for his work— he’s long outgrown the moniker of 'kid'— Tamagawa would sooner cut off his own tail before he ever gives up calling him kid.
And if a tiny, itty bitty, minuscule, practically microscopic, practically insignificant part of Hitoshi finds the nickname endearing, then that’s between him and no one else.
“I found ‘em in an apartment under the sink. I’m pretty sure they were left behind by one of the victims,” Hitoshi says as he follows Tamagawa’s gaze to look down at the baby and finds them glancing curiously up at Tamagawa, lilac eyes bouncing back and forth between what he suspects to be is the man’s ears.
“Mm. That’s no good,” Tamagawa says softly, more to the baby than to Hitoshi. “I’m surprised they’re not throwing a fit. They must know they’re safe and sound in the arms of the almighty Night Hide, huh? Yeah?” he coos as he pets a gloved finger gently down the chubby cheek of the infant.
The baby squeals and flaps their hands in response, then tiny fingers soggy with spit reach out to tug on Hitoshi’s capture scarf. The first non-distressed noise Hitoshi’s heard them make since they abandoned that damn apartment. Progress!
A smile tweaks the corner of Hitoshi’s mouth at the cute sound. He guesses human babies can be just as cute sounding as kittens, though he could do without the spit-covered capture scarf.
His ear twitches as he notices Tamagawa’s gone suspiciously quiet. With his bullshit meter blaring in his head, Hitoshi glances back up to find the sergeant smirking knowingly at him. “What?”
Tamagawa simply shakes his head at him as his grin widens, the smug bastard. “Nothing. Take the bundle of joy over to my cruiser and call in an ambulance to have them checked out. We’ll handle the arrests.” He finishes with a friendly slap on Hitoshi’s shoulder before turning and flicking his fingers at the group of officers waiting for a command. At once they start to file into the apartment building, some heading straight for the apartments on the first floor while others make their way up the stairs to the next floor.
“Right,” Hitoshi nods, leaving Tamagawa with one last suspicious glower before striding over to his cruiser and sliding into the passenger seat. He carefully shifts the baby to lay on his lap so he can free one hand to use the radio. His other hand works on gently tugging his capture scarf out of their grasp as they try to put it in their mouth. They have a surprisingly strong grip for someone so tiny.
“Don’t think that’ll taste good, sorry,” he apologizes softly when the baby whines, a frustrated pinch curling their brow. “Night Hide to dispatch,” he calls into the hand-held radio.
“Dispatch,” responds from the radio.
“Arrest in progress at an apartment building in Narshada. One infant recovered on scene. Need medical,” he reports as his other hand tries to check the baby for any injuries. Definitely something he should’ve done as soon as he found them, and far more difficult with one hand and an insanely wiggly baby.
“Status of the infant?”
“Um…” Hitoshi mutters to himself, unsure what to say. From his meager searching, he can’t spot any blaring issues with the baby besides being a little dirty. There’s no visible wounds, no bruises. They don’t look malnourished, and with the cruiser blasting with heat they’re no longer cold and pale. At least on the outside, the baby seems unharmed.
“What do you think?” he asks the baby. He stares down at them and they stare back, mumbling as they continue mouthing at their hand. Seems answer enough.
“Non-critical,” Hitoshi replies into the radio.
“10-4. Medical en route to Narshada.”
“10-4,” he signs off before putting the radio back.
Hitoshi falls back against the leather passenger seat with a sigh, tugging the gloves off his hands and stuffing them in his pockets before carefully bracing the baby to ensure they don’t wiggle their way off his legs. They seem happy enough to just lay there on his thighs and kick their feet into his gut at full force over and over, like he’s their very own trampoline. Hitoshi cracks another smile, immensely amused by the surprising strength behind the kicks that do nothing more than tickle him.
The smile quickly wilts away as the reality of tonight's raid quickly slips in through the back of his mind. The job here is far from done. There are still victims out there waiting to be saved, horrific criminals in need of hunting down. As soon as he gets this baby transferred to the care of the EMTs, he’ll join in the chaos of hunting down that van. There are people still waiting to be saved, this baby’s mother included.
Hitoshi can't even begin to imagine the terror this baby's mom must be feeling right now, or the sheer desperation she must've felt to risk leaving her baby behind. He’s not a parent himself, but he’s seen the way that Yamada and Aizawa get worked up when it comes to his and Eri’s safety. He’s seen enough parents toss their kids out of windows of collapsing or burning buildings to try and save them to, distantly, understand the instinct to put their children’s lives before their own.
He can only imagine the distress she must be going through right now, hoping that her child is safe who knows how many miles away while being in danger herself. He hopes beyond hope that she’s still alive, that there’s still a chance to save her and reunite her with her baby. And fuck, he hopes that it’s not too late.
Regret is a familiar tar pit that Hitoshi quickly finds himself sinking in. Any hero worth their salt knows it’s incredibly fucking stupid to dwell on things going bad on missions that they had no control over, or so Aizawa has stubbornly tried to bash into his brain at least a billion times. That Aizawa-trained rational side of his brain tells him that he couldn’t possibly have known the traffickers would sell the people they’d kidnapped tonight. The fact that he just missed the sale was simply due to unfortunate timing, and there’s already efforts in progress trying to find them as he sits here and ruminates. He’ll get back to it, just as soon as he follows through with getting this baby to safety.
The other side of his brain, known mostly for being the major source of his catastrophizing and self-depreciating thoughts, tells him that he should've gotten here quicker. That if it was Aizawa on this case, he would’ve stopped them, would’ve saved all the victims and sent them home safe and sound, and this baby and their mother never would’ve had to part in the first place.
It taunts him with various ways this could’ve gone better should he have been better: that if he had taken a different route, maybe he would’ve stumbled onto the delivery truck just as it was leaving and he could’ve stopped it. That maybe if he entered the apartment building through the roof instead of the front doors then he would’ve been able to beat some answers out of Amanojaku sooner. Maybe if he spent less time torturing him then he could’ve called Tsukauchi sooner, gotten the BOLO out sooner.
He sighs again, grabbing the baby’s feet in his hands.
“At least I saved you,” he whispers to them, his voice so quiet it sounds more like an exhale, “I’ll make sure you’re all safe and sound, then I’ll go find your mom.”
Flashing lights of an ambulance catch his eye in the cruiser’s rear view mirror and Hitoshi sucks in a deep breath, then slowly lets it out as he wiggles the baby’s feet. “You ready?”
The baby’s foot slips from his grasp and kicks his stomach again, this time hard enough for him to flinch a bit.
Hitoshi huffs, “Alright, taking that as a definite yes.” Without further ado, he lifts the baby back up into his arms and carefully shuffles out of the cruiser back into the cold night air.
As he walks over, one of the EMTs meet him halfway while their partner opens the back of their rig. The EMT carefully takes the baby from his arms while he rattles off a summary of how and where he found the baby. The EMT gives him a few nods while he listens and leads them straight back to the ambulance. Hitoshi follows right on their heels, suddenly nervous to hear if they find anything wrong with them that he missed.
“Hand me the stethoscope,” the EMT says to their partner as they step up into the ambulance and gently lays the baby on the gurney. Hitoshi forces himself to not follow the EMT inside, instead forcing himself to linger right by the door and give them space to work.
From his awkward angle outside the tall ambulance, Hitoshi can only see the baby’s arms and legs swinging in the air as the EMTs continue their assessment. He watches dutifully as they move the baby around and shuffle their clothes, muttering information back and forth to each other. Going off their body language and the bits and pieces he can lip-read from their mutterings, they don’t seem to be too worried. Probably a good sign, maybe good enough for him to leave them to it and he can be on his way.
He opens his mouth to ask about the baby’s status and get the all-clear to head off when he nearly jumps out of his skin at the sound of a sudden, sharp whine cutting through the air. Between one second and the next, Hitoshi finds himself going from standing beside the ambulance door to leaning over the arm of a gurney inside the ambulance and carding his fingers through the baby’s soft hair.
“Hey now,” he says over their whining, his voice low, “You’re alright. They’re just checkin’ you over ‘n makin’ sure you’re okay.”
The baby grumbles and whines more in discontent, but eventually they settle a bit under the attention. Hitoshi continues petting his fingers through their hair until he clocks the heavy stares coming from the EMTs standing beside the gurney.
“What is it?” he looks worriedly between them. One EMT with devil horns simply smirks at him in amusement while the other one looks like they could desperately use a nap— and that’s saying something coming from Insomnia’s favorite long-term bitch.
“You can help keep ‘em calm, but I need you to not push me out of my way while I’m doing my job, please and thanks,” the tired EMT drawls lamely.
Hitoshi feels the tips of his ears burn with embarrassment. Get a grip. “Oh. Right, sorry.”
Without another word, the EMTs get back to work looking the baby over. They check their diaper, press on their belly, then they check their eyes, nose, ears and mouth. The baby groans and grumbles throughout the check, but they seem content enough to grip onto Hitoshi’s finger for comfort as the EMTs work.
“Alright,” the EMT with the devil horns announces as they finish up their assessment, “BP and pulse are normal. Well hydrated, obviously well fed. No wounds to be found on her.”
Her. So he found a little girl. A baby girl.
“So, uh, nothing’s wrong with her? She’s okay?” Hitoshi looks back down at her, watching her fiddle with his fingers with spit-soaked hands.
“Her general assessment looks good, but we’ll still need to take her to the hospital just to be sure,” the EMT that could kick Hitoshi’s own eye bags a run for their money says, their voice completely dead to the world.
“Right,” Hitoshi replies, but the rest of the words he intends to say freezes in his throat. He should be saying ‘I’ll leave you guys to it’ or ‘I gotta get back to work, safe travels’ but he finds he can’t shake the feeling that he’s… abandoning her again. She’s so tiny on the stretcher, taking up barely even a foot of space on the foot of it, and her grip on his hand is begging him to not go.
But he still has a job to do. There’s that damn truck, the dirty buyers who still have the victims that still need saving. Night Hide is needed elsewhere, and yet…
“Is it— hm,” he clears his throat, “Can I go with her? You know, um, in case she almost freaks out again like before?”
There, a happy medium. He escorts her to the hospital, makes sure that she’s safe and sound in the care of doctors, and then he can head back into the thick of it.
“Sure!” Devil-horns— Hayakawa according to her name tag— says with a wide smile. “Are you done with the scene here? Because the sooner she gets checked out, the better. Better safe than sorry, y’know?”
“Right, uh,” Hitoshi peers out the back of the ambulance, searching the swarms of cops and cuffed criminals for a familiar face. Eventually he spots Tamagawa overseeing other officers moving the criminals into a transport van. Once they make eye contact, Hitoshi waves him over.
“How’s the kid?” Tamagawa asks as soon as he reaches the ambulance, eyeing the baby on the gurney. Hitoshi doesn’t miss the way he smiles at the sight of the girl’s fingers death gripping his hand.
“She looks great, but we’re taking her to get a more thorough check-up at the hospital just to be extra safe,” Hayakawa says while getting the gurney ready to strap the girl in for transport.
“And I’m going with them,” Hitoshi adds quickly, “Am I needed for anything here? I’ll be back after I escort her to the hospital.”
“Nah, go ahead,” Tamagawa waves a shooing hand, “We’ve got it covered here.”
“Okay, great. Any news on finding that delivery truck yet?”
Tamagawa’s ears flick, bending down into airplane-mode before straightening back up. Damn, that’s the bad-news ear flick.
“Nope, nothing so far. But Tsukauchi will keep you in the loop, you go ahead with the girl,” Tamagawa steps away from the doors to give the other EMT room to jump down. The sergeant gives Hitoshi a final wave before the doors close with a loud click.
“Buckle in,” Hayakawa points to the seat belts located on the bench he’s sitting on. He carefully eases his hand out of the trap of grabby hands to obey the orders, much to the girl’s chagrin. Thankfully she doesn’t explode again during the ride to the hospital.
As the ambulance starts up and they slowly drive off the scene, Hitoshi watches as the apartment building slowly crawls out of sight through the back windows of the ambulance.