Chapter Text
Midoriya is running from villains for the third time in a week.
He sprints hard enough that he feels each impact with the ground in his knees, cursing mentally at the sounds of shouting being him. He rounds a corner at full speed, nearly hitting a wall, and leaps for an opportune fire escape ladder, catching it on the first try and scrambling up. He takes the metal stairs three at a time, heading for the roof.
In his defense, it isn’t really his fault.
“You’re gonna wish you were dead when we catch up with you, punk!” the lead villain shouts, turning into the alley. He’s still trailing fire extinguisher foam and struggling to light the wicks that protrude from his fingertips.
Midoriya cringes.
Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit his fault.
He has to use the railing of the fire escape to boost himself onto the roof, and it sends his heartbeat into his throat, but he doesn’t let himself hesitate, remembering all of Aizawa’s lessons on parkour and associated skills: the first step is to trust his body.
His feet find the roof without any particular difficulty, and he lets himself have just one moment of triumphant accomplishment before he’s booking it to jump across the narrow gap between one roof and the next.
Behind him, he can hear the villains clattering up the fire escape. They’re slower than him, but he hasn’t built up his stamina as much as he’d like, and if he’s not careful, they’ll catch up.
He crosses three more roofs before finding an open access door and bolting down the stairs inside of the building, hoping that it might be enough to throw them off of his trail entirely. He’s looking over his shoulder for any signs of pursuit when he bursts through the fire exit on the ground floor, which is why he runs smack into the man waiting there for him.
It’s one of the villains. He has the head and exoskeleton of a cockroach, and—now that Midoriya is close enough to get a better look—the same clawed feet, on a much larger scale. He could’ve been keeping up by walking on the walls of the buildings the entire time.
And he’d seen Midoriya go through the access door, and taken the opportunity to cut him off.
Midoriya tries to backpedal, but the door slams shut behind him, and he hears the lock click.
Cockroach hisses. It sounds suspiciously like laughter.
“Thought you’d get away, did you?” he says, stepping closer with a mean leer on his face. His antennae twitch and then trail down the sides of Midoriya’s face. The man laughs again when Midoriya jerks away at the touch. “You might be just a kid, but you ruined our hunt. That means we need to teach you a lesson.”
Midoriya’s pulse is rushing in his ears. He’s cursing at himself, trying frantically to think of a way out of the situation, but his phone is tucked away in his back pocket and reaching for it would alert Cockroach in an instant.
Another villain from the group runs past the alley and then backtracks, spotting the two of them. He slows to a walk, cracking his knuckles menacingly as he approaches.
Behind him, the door jerks open, and he manages to sidle a bit sideways before Cockroach moves to cut off the other end of the alley, which leaves him completely surrounded on every side by villains.
The last two members of the group, Candle-man and Rotation—the guy made of wax with candlewicks on his fingers that he can light at will (when he’s not covered in extinguishing foam), and the woman who can rotate her body parts—come through the fire exit door. Midoriya backs away from them until his back hits the wall on the other side of the alley.
“Do you regret what you did yet, kid?” Candle-man says. Midoriya had singled him out as the leader of the group when he’d first spotted them, which is why he’d targeted the man in the first place. The others don’t advance even as he does, remaining in place to keep Midoriya penned in. “You have no idea what you interrupted, do you?”
“I couldn’t let you hurt people,” Midoriya says. He’s equal parts surprised and proud when his voice comes out steady.
“We weren’t gonna kill anybody,” Cockroach hisses. He tilts his head. “Unless they got in our way.”
“You tried to set the cashier on fire,” Midoriya says.
“He wasn’t cooperating.”
Midoriya sets his jaw stubbornly. He doesn’t regret what he did. He can’t. Not when it means that the villains are here, with their attention on him instead of the store full of people.
There’d been a kid in the aisle next to him. He was huddled under his mom’s arm, big fat tears rolling down his face out of fear while she tried desperately to reassure him.
“I don’t care what you do to me,” he says. “I stopped you from hurting anyone else, and that’s what matters.”
“Tch,” Candle-man sneers. It almost reminds him of Bakugo.
He starts to reach for Midoriya’s face, and he finally manages to light the wick on his index finger. Midoriya tilts his head as far away as he can, but he’s already bracing himself for the burn.
“Those are brave words from a toothpick,” a new voice says.
The villains tense, looking around for the source of the voice. Midoriya spots him first—he’s hanging in the shadow of an air conditioning unit that protrudes from a window, using the frame as leverage. He blinks in surprise.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Candle-man says. He’s still looking around. Evidently his quirk doesn’t lend itself to better eyesight.
The man drops from the shadow and lands lightly on his feet in the middle of the alley. He straightens up and leans against the wall, pulling a knife from his belt and spinning it casually between his fingers.
“Really?” he says. “So if I leave, you aren’t planning on turning the kid into a pile of ash?”
“Not your business if we are,” Cockroach says. He folds one pair of legs across his chest. The rest of them wave in a way that he must think is threatening, but which really just makes him look like he’s at a silent rave.
“You’re villains,” the man says. The knife stops spinning, and he jabs it pointedly in their direction. “That makes it my business.”
Within seconds, the man is a blur of action. Cockroach falls first, then the villain blocking the other end of the alley. Candle-man tries to reach for Midoriya, presumably to take him as a hostage and use him as leverage, but without Cockroach blocking him, he ducks to the side, tucking and rolling as he hits the ground and coming up in a defensive crouch.
He needn’t have bothered. The last two villains are down in the space between heartbeats, and then the only people left upright in the alley are Midoriya and the man from the shadows.
Stendhal, he realizes, as the light from the street hits the man enough to silhouette his costume. One of Japan’s legendary vigilantes.
He stands up.
“Thank you,” he says.
Stendhal grunts. He wipes one of his knives on the end of his scarf.
“What you did was stupid,” he says. “But your heart was in the right place. Couldn’t let that go to waste on my watch.”
He puts the knife away and starts scaling the wall. His hands and feet find holds in the brick where Midoriya could swear there aren’t any.
After a few long seconds of hesitation, he heads out of the alley and turns around the back of the building.
Stendhal is on the roof when he swings up onto it.
“What are you doing?” he asks. “I’m not a babysitter. Go home.”
Midoriya sits down cross-legged and leans his hands on his knees.
“You’re Stendhal,” he says. “I know about you.”
“Good for you.”
“Why’d you save me?”
Stendhal turns a dead-eyed stare on him. Midoriya doesn’t waver. He doesn’t even dare to blink.
The thing is, he does know about Stendhal. And he knows that while the vigilante is quick to stop villain attacks, sometimes viciously, he rarely steps in to save a single victim, instead preferring to interfere with the largescale attacks that would result in multiple casualties.
The man shifts minutely. Then he drops to match Midoriya’s cross-legged pose, pulling one of his swords out across his lap and running his fingers along the edge.
“Heroes are fakes,” he says, almost spitting with sudden vitriol. “They’re in it for the money, the fame, the glory. They let innocents die when they know they won’t get anything out of saving them.”
Midoriya blinks. He’s not sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t that.
“What does that have to do with me?” he asks.
Stendhal tilts his head to regard him curiously.
“You stepped in when no one else did, even though you knew that it could get you killed,” he says. “You’re just a kid. And even when you were cornered, you didn’t change your mind. You were sure you’d done the right thing, just because you saved a few people who don’t even know your name from harm.”
“Of course I did the right thing,” Midoriya says. “Those people didn’t deserve to die.”
Stendhal raises an eyebrow.
“How do you know that for sure?” he asks. “Maybe one of them was a child abuser, or even a murderer. Maybe you just saved someone who pickpockets for a living, or someone who’s going to grow up to be a villain.”
Midoriya’s brow furrows. Stendhal isn’t what he was expecting. He twists his fingers into the fabric of his pants.
“That doesn’t matter,” he says. “Everyone deserves a chance to live. Everyone deserves to be saved.”
Stendhal rocks back a bit.
“Hm,” he says. “Seems you were worth saving after all.”
He stands, sheathing his sword and then stretching until his back pops audibly. He flicks a two-fingered salute in Midoriya’s direction.
“See you around, kid,” he says. “Don’t cross the line from vigilantism to villainism, or I’ll have to kill you.”
And with that, he leaps off the edge of the roof.
…………….
Midoriya is warming up for his Wednesday after school training session with Aizawa when the question slips out before he can stop it.
“What do you think of Stendhal?”
Aizawa turns to look at him. His arms are crossed over his chest, and he’s leaning against the wall while Midoriya warms up, face half-hidden in his scarf.
“Why?” he asks.
“Um,” Midoriya says. His brain screeches alarms at him. He hadn’t been planning on asking the question in the first place, so he hadn’t come up with a cover story to keep his late night escapades a secret. “Curiosity?”
Aizawa fixes him with a look that means, I know you’re lying but I’m too tired to care.
“He’s a vigilante,” he answers, a bit pointedly. “He operates outside of the law.”
Midoriya slumps a little bit in relief. He chews on his lip as he continues his routine, thoughts still nagging at him.
“Is that all?” he asks.
“That’s all that matters,” Aizawa says. Midoriya feels like he might vibrate out of his skin with frustration—he can tell that the man has more to say on the subject that he’s keeping to himself.
Aizawa sighs.
“Vigilantes have their place,” he says. “They get a bad rep with the media—and not entirely wrongfully, since what they do is illegal—but as an underground hero, I’ve worked with them a few times. You can’t always be picky about who you team up with when lives are on the line. If they don’t cross the line, and they don’t cross my path, I leave them alone. We have a mutual understanding that way.”
Midoriya turns that over in his head.
“And Stendhal?” he presses. “Have you worked with him?”
Aizawa’s mouth turns down in a flat line that’s almost an outright frown.
“Years ago,” he admits. “When he was new to the scene. But he’s different now. His methods are—harsher. And he never teams up with others.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“Best guess? Someone in the past betrayed him. Once bitten, twice shy, as the saying goes. Now, are you gonna finish warming up so we can get to work, or are you gonna keep wasting my time?”
“Sorry, sensei!”
………….
Midoriya stays up even later than usual that night researching everything he can find on Stendhal and vigilantes in general.
His own activities so far have mostly been an accident—he’d know the law for a while, that it didn’t apply to quirkless people, but he’d never seriously considered vigilantism. The law had just been another reminder of how useless everyone thought quirkless people were.
But.
According to what he can find online, Stendhal has been an active vigilante for around three years. Other than a few team-ups when he was completely new, he’s worked completely alone, and he’s been incredibly successful, considering the statistics on vigilantes and how often they end up killed or in prison within their first year of activity.
Despite being known as particularly vicious, he’s never killed any of the villains that he’s apprehended.
Midoriya thinks about how he’d nearly spit with aggression when he’d brought up heroes, but how he hadn’t been nearly as aggressive when addressing actual villains.
It should be a red flag, if anything.
But he just finds it—intriguing.