Chapter Text
“And coming in first place for three weeks in a row--Everyone’s favorite deprivation champion! Midoriya Izukuuuuuuu--GAH!”
Izuku bops Ren over the head with his notebook, not pausing on his way to his seat. “My eyes discolor easily,” he demurs. At this point, he should just bite the bullet and wear some foundation. It couldn’t be weirder than his other personality quirks.
Ren shrugs off the nonceremonial greeting, leaning back in her seat and ruffling her blonde hair. “That doesn’t change the rankings. Gnarly eyebags are just a permanent fixture on you.”
Izuku grimaces lightly. He rubs at his eyes, trying to stifle the ache hidden somewhere in his retina.
“I like them,” Ren declares. Her eyes practically glow with a manic edge that isn’t due to her quirk. Her exhaustion tends to manifest in off-the-wall declarations at hours entirely inappropriate for them. “It’s a brand for you now. Midoriya: Too Tired for Your Bullshi--”
Miko takes her turn to hit Ren, although her ‘hit’ is more of a pointed poke to the temple. “You’re too loud.” She sniffs, rubbing at the side of her face. “Besides, aren’t you feeding into the machine? If we make a tournament out of our institutionalized torment, aren’t we merely sowing discord amongst the masses we should seek to unite?”
Izuku blinks. He exchanges a pointed glance with Ren, who looks equally concerned.
Before either of them can ask, though, Miko slams her head against her desk. The act itself would be alarming if she hadn’t bothered to hold up a trembling thumbs-up. “I’m on so much Benadryl right now,” she breathes into her pristine homework. “Ignore me and please don’t gather any blackmail material.”
Izuku crosses his heart and then reaches into his backpack for his thermos, withdrawing his favorite mug and two disposable cups. “Chin up until lunch, Miko.” He pours for his two classmates first, and then the leftovers in his mug. When he glances up, Ren has legitimate tears in her eyes.
“Oh, sweet, sweet caffeine,” she whispers reverently, clutching the cup to her chest. She doesn’t even complain about a lack of sweetener. “Midori-kun, you are literally my hero.”
Izuku tries not to grimace and fails. Instead, he primly replies, “Obviously. You would have crashed and burned by now without my divine interference.”
When Ren squawks in offense, it actually does turn his grimace into a smile.
Miko picks her head up off her desk and accepts her coffee. “When did you get so sassy?”
“I’m not sassy,” Izuku says mildly. “I make only factually correct statements that I compose three weeks beforehand with proper references. The last time I ad libbed a conversation, I ended up killing a man.”
Miko’s existential despair finally breaks, and her wide mouth tugs into a wider smile. Their class president calls them to attention for their first class, but that doesn’t stop Miko from whispering, “Of course. How could I forget?”
Finals were hell for pretty much any high school, but Hebikyuden took pride in putting its students through the wringer. Ren believed it was psychological warfare. However, she considered a great deal of mundane things ‘psychological warfare,’ so Izuku subscribed to the more optimistic idea that their teachers wanted all students to understand the stresses placed on those in residency.
Izuku understood it perfectly. He had an intimate, profound, passionate relationship with his stress, which is why when he returned to his student apartment after class and found Kurogiri rearranging the contents of his fridge, Izuku caught his stress by the hand and declared, “We can fix this! I’m willing to put in the effort to make this work! I’ve never felt this way before!”
But really, he just scoffs and immediately goes searching for his first aid kit. “Is that my food?”
“Yes,” the mist villain declares. “I also brought several other nonperishable items to fill out your cabinets.”
The pushy nature of the gesture could possibly be misconstrued as helpful if it weren’t for the fact that Kurogiri thought Izuku was a security leak waiting to happen. Still, Izuku tugs his medical supply duffle bag out from the hall closet and doesn’t reject anything. He could bring snacks for Miko. She forgot to eat sometimes. “Which brand of coffee?”
Kurogiri turns towards him, his expression oddly intense for a thing that barely had eyes. “Garden Hiro. Medium roast.”
Izuku nods easily. “I’ll remember to get you bottled cat piss for Christmas, then.”
Kurogiri slumps. Izuku valiantly restrains a snort as he pulled his shoes back on. The villain had an odd sort of pride in being a dignified butler to a bunch of psychopaths. Kurogiri could mix any number of drinks and prepare all sorts of fine teas, but he had a gaping hole in his resume. Izuku exploited his lack of familiarity with coffee for shits and giggles mostly, but the steady stream of different coffee brands also broke up the monotony of eating only human flesh. Even when he brought in shit brands--which Garden Hiro was not, but Izuku didn’t feel the need to tell him so--the scent itself was a nice addition to his apartment.
Still. Kurogiri didn’t come here for pleasure even if he was polite enough to wait until Izuku would feasibly be home. The congenial actions on his part were a form of strict professionalism. Izuku was a client and an ally. This visit meant that he was needed.
“Who got injured?”
Kurogiri swells into his gate form, and Izuku steps though, pulling on a medical mask.
“Toga Himiko requires stitches beyond my capability.”
The transport portal takes Izuku to the bar he has visited quite a few times, but Kurogiri had tried to conceal that. They are in a closed room with no windows. The flooring was different than the bar proper, but Toga’s perfume and bloody trophies couldn’t disguise the scent of astringent alcohol and heady decay that characterized the League of Villains hideout. Izuku gives no indication of noticing.
Toga is lying on a cot. A woozy expression drags at her fine features and the bandages around her thigh are soaked through with blood. Izuku doesn’t trust it for a second. He calls upon the barest fraction of his quirk as he pulls on his gloves and disinfects his supplies, even if it makes the wound lining the side of Toga’s thigh into an enticing siren song. He didn’t need to give himself stiches if the girl got a little frisky.
The caution turns out to be necessary. Toga pouts when the blade she flashed towards his neck fails to break the skin.
“Rude,” she sing-songs, falling back with a faint sheen of sweat spotting her forehead. “I feel so vulnerable here--all bloody and weak and helpless. . . I showed you mine,” she declares, failing to hide her grin at his flash of discomfort.
Toga liked to press his buttons. Izuku liked to hide his buttons under several tons of polite behavior. These two factors meant that there had been a terrible escalation of passive-aggressive conflict that Toga had no issue taking to nuclear level on a whim. Being on the passive side of the equation meant Izuku didn’t exactly have an avenue to respond
It had done wonders for Izuku’s poker face, and terrible things for his bedside manner.
“Please respect doctor-patient boundaries,” Izuku says flatly, pulling slightly harder than necessary on his next stitch.
Toga doesn’t flinch, but she does bite her index finger in a manner that borders upon obscene. “Oh, Deku, please be gentle with me.”
Even Kurogiri coughs at that, and he handled Shigaraki’s tantrums without being phased.
Izuku grimaces behind his face mask and wraps up this affair as quickly as possible. That’s still plenty of time for Toga to try to stab him twice more. He doesn’t manage to dodge the second one. He will need to sew up his uniform pants--he should have done more than just shed his school jacket before coming. Annoyance at the inconvenience makes his voice flinty. “Inform Kurogiri immediately if you see discoloration, odd discharges, or develop other symptoms. Don’t do anything strenuous for the next two weeks.”
“Two weeks? So long,” she complains.
Izuku hums and gives her a close-eyed smile. “Perhaps you shouldn’t be so incompetent next time.”
Toga sticks her tongue out at him, and then grabs him by the tear in his pants leg and hauls him forward. “Deku-kun, I didn’t know you wore boxers,” she cooed while worming her hand up his leg.
Izuku jerks back and trips over his feet, ending up sprawled out on the floor for a split second before he jumps back up. Toga eyes him with a glittering smile from her filthy cot, tugging at the neckline of her oversized sweater. Her flushed face feels incredibly violating.
Point to Toga, he admits bitterly.
Kurogiri does him the honor of wordlessly opening another portal, and Izuku stalks through in an attempt to recover his pride and composure. When he ends up not in his apartment, that attempt is for nothing considering that the giant slash in his pants clearly shows that he is wearing broccoli-patterned gag boxers that Ren had bought him as a joke.
Shigaraki, due to what Izuku expects is immense amounts of trauma, doesn’t really notice or care. The decaying villain had an odd level of disregard for normal social customs. Tattered clothes, or weeks-old clothes, or actual human hands were fine in his book. However, Magne audibly snorts, Spinner’s throat makes an odd garbled sound of restrained laughter, and Izuku wishes his face didn’t have to be so red.
Kurogiri is definitely getting something foul for Christmas. A glitter bomb, perhaps. With a special emphasis on the bomb aspect.
“What’s so urgent that I couldn’t change?” Izuku questions as he tugs off his latex medical gloves and drops them carelessly to the floor. Kurogiri doesn’t exactly twitch, but his exhale is slightly more forceful than usual, so Izuku counts it as a win.
Shigaraki ignores the question in favor of glaring. “How long until she can fight?”
Izuku narrows his eyes, but he has no desire to start a fight. He has his surgery practicum final, and he needs a good night’s sleep if he wants to do well. He also needs his body in one piece, and no one coming to ruin his life, and Kurogiri’s practicality could only override Shigaraki’s temper so much. “I’ll be back in a week to remove her stitches. She didn’t lacerate any muscles, so she should be back to full health in about three weeks with proper care.” Izuku feasibly could shorten the time with some more intensive drugs and treatments, but he wasn’t about to waste his top-shelf medicine on a simple surface injury.
An ugly grin spills over Shigaraki’s cracked lips. “Good. We have a raid planned, and you’re going to come.”
Izuku ignores the spike in his blood pressure with a clinical detachment. Showing emotion to the league had screwed him before. He needed to be logical, short, and unaffected. “That wasn’t in our arrangement. I have a civilian identity I cannot afford to compromise.”
“Then wear a disguise,” Shigaraki drawls, leaning back on his bar stool. “I want all hands we have. Largest party possible.”
“That doesn’t negate the terms of our agreement,” Izuku replies flatly. His quirk stirs at the base of his spine, bubbling and shaking without his consent. He lets it remain that way. It’s a comfort to know that he has at least one weapon. “I would be happy to remain at a secure location to provide immediate aid, but anything beyond that is unacceptable.”
Shigaraki bears his teeth, but before he can throw a tantrum, Kurogiri steps in. “What can we offer that would make you amenable to joining us a combatant?”
Nothing in hell. Izuku drew the line at directly helping the League, and he had to have some fucking lines in his life. His morality was shot to hell by his quirk, and he was holding on by his fingernails at this point.
“There is nothing. My quirk is too volatile to control in a combat situation.” Izuku allows himself a grim, close-eyed smile, even as he keeps his hearing sharp and his quirk coiled up. “’Evil cause, evil affect.’ It’s unlucky for a medic to draw unneeded blood.” Even if he didn’t believe in the superstition, it gave him a less emotionally charged reason to refuse.
“’The weak are meat; the strong eat.’ An idiom is not a valid argument, Deku-sensei,” Kurogiri replies, his overly-respectful title failing to negate the veiled hostility in his words. “Certainly there is something we could offer. There will be plenty of fresh bodies for you to--”
Izuku holds up a hand, cutting Kurogiri off mid-sentence. His right eye burns, and the world seems so much more cutting. Shigaraki’s pulse thuds at some level of his awareness, and Izuku inhales through his mouth to escape the unbearably wonderful scent wafting off the villain--the open scratches on his neck, the unstifled, unwashed aroma of sweat. “As I said when you first approached me,” Izuku says quietly, staring the warp-gate villain down, “I am not a member. I am a contact and a client. Unless you were lying when we negotiated my involvement with the League, it is incredibly disrespectful to attempt to strong-arm me into this.”
Shigaraki hisses through his teeth. Izuku firmly refuses to look at him, even if he is pushing this towards nuclear. Perhaps he’s just sublimating his anxiety about being near Toga. Perhaps he grew a spine in the last few months. Perhaps he so fucking sick of this shit that he’s willing to go beyond the point of no-return and fuck every single consequence on the way down. “If this is a deal-breaker for my involvement, it is my obligation to terminate our working relationship.”
“And if we were to kill you?” Kurogiri asks casually. “I do not wish for it to come to that, of course.”
Izuku hears the other bar inhabitants stir and shift. He wishes this had been a private audience. He had subverted Shigaraki’s authority openly and that kind of insult could not slide. Still, he refuses to budge. “Nor do I. However, if that should occur, I assure you that it will be a mutual destruction. I firmly believe that I can make that avenue too costly to attempt at the moment,” Izuku says. “So I would be happy to merely part ways.”
He would lose out on a lot of things. He would need to return to doing his own dirty work for food. Izuku would freely admit that life went by a lot easier when he wasn’t starving every day. He would also rather swallow broken glass than use his quirk against innocent bystanders.
“All that power,” Shigaraki spits, “and you’re too fucking dumb to use it.”
Izuku doesn’t reply to that. He merely meets Shigaraki’s gaze and finds rage. His quirk could kill him Shigaraki before the man could touch him. It would damage his tail, but Kurogiri is too invested to allow that potential scuffle to happen.
Izuku is less confident that he could navigate Kurogiri’s quirk in the man decided to aid Shigaraki, even with all the analysis on ‘Warp Gate.’ The villains behind him didn’t have quirks that could affect him beyond Compress--and the magician would need to get in close enough to make that work. Izuku factored those odds as relatively low unless Kurogiri coordinated with Compress beforehand. By how Shigaraki expected Izuku to just roll over, Izuku doubts that is the case.
In all honesty, Dabi is probably the worst match up for Izuku. Thankfully, he isn’t among the scents and noises of the bar. And the man seems too proud to act as an attack dog without reason.
However, Izuku’s racing thoughts prove unnecessary. Shigaraki doesn’t start screaming or trying to pick a fight. Kurogiri is committed to playing the pacifist. They must really want him there. They are willing to swallow Izuku’s refusal and disrespect.
He’s not valuable enough to warrant that kind of patience. It gives him a bad feeling.
“Please let me know if this is where we part ways,” Izuku says. “There is nothing that you can offer me to change my mind.”
Shigaraki stands suddenly, and Izuku takes an instinctive step back. However, the man only scratches at his neck, and stares Izuku down with piercing eyes. “Then get out.”
Kurogiri looks mildly conflicted. Then he sighs. “Allow me to escort you home.”
Izuku nods his head in respect, but he keeps his quirk active until the Warp Gate villain returns him to his apartment and leaves. Izuku discards his shoes in the entry way and tosses his medical mask in the garbage. He opens his fridge to see brown paper packages, all nearly cut and wrapped for his convenience.
Kurogiri must have some skills as a butcher. Or perhaps Toga enjoys dismembering her kills even after death. Or maybe this meal is from one of the freaks that the League liked to grow out of test tubes. Those monsters always burned his tongue like a mouth full of table salt.
His phone buzzes with a text message. Ren wanted him to join her and Miko for a movie at the Hebikyuden dorms.
Izuku shuts down his phone and grabs a portion. There’s no time like the present to find out who was butchered for his convenience.
He bites into the raw meat and gnaws on it. He shudders at the bite of Nomu flesh. It reminded him vaguely of pineapple. Sweet. Prepared to digest you even in its death throws.
Izuku laughs at the idea that he’s merely eating a fruit. As he does, he grabs the rest of Kurogiri’s gifts and sets them out on the counter to warm. However, even when he throws a portion in the microwave, he can’t stop laughing. Even though he doesn’t find the idea funny anymore. In fact, he finds the idea of fruit sickening. Before he got a clue about his quirk, he had tried all sorts of fruit. They invariably tasted like bleach.
Izuku throws the half-eaten remains of the Nomu in the sink and tries the hunk of flesh he had burned in the microwave. It’s still cold on the outside, scalding on the inside. It’s human. That’s almost worse. His apartment smells like Dabi now. He can’t remember where Kurogiri put the coffee. He never seemed to notice that Izuku kept it on the counter for easy access. Kurogiri always had to put it away.
Panting, his heart racing with adrenaline, Izuku allows his quirk to bubble to the surface. The weight and exhilaration makes his ensuing panic attack and binge meal feel a lot less like a nervous breakdown than usual.