Chapter Text
In a post-quirks world, fear of the Uncanny Valley has somewhat lost its power. With so many people having mutant quirks, or transformative quirks that affect their body or face, it has become harder and harder for the general populace to find inhuman forms unsettling.
Shouta, certainly, has never felt off-put by the almost-but-not-quite human. He’s built his career on being unshakable, on never flinching or faltering no matter how horrific his opponent’s appearance.
But his gut churns with a deep, primal discomfort when he looks at the face of the child before him.
A one-way mirror separates Shouta and the room where the slight body has been laid out on a medical bed. They’re sleeping still, relaxed and with all their sharp angles softened, but Shouta knows that will change the moment they wake.
Even slack with sleep, there’s something strangely familiar about the child’s face that prickles the back of Shouta’s mind. The features are caught at halfway points between two faces Shouta already knew, blurred along lines that were never meant to overlap. Their skin is tan but dry, and freckles are spread over round cheeks just beneath creases carved into the space around the eyes. Tangled hair that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to curl or fall straight is spread out over the pillow beneath the child’s head – a pale minty green, struck through by darker, grayer streaks.
There’s nothing wrong with the kid’s appearance, not really, but Shouta’s mind is telling him it’s wrong, and when they are awake and in motion he knows that the wrongness will only strike him harder. He’s never seen someone who looks quite so fake. Even while wrapped in bandages, bruises and scars, the child’s skin looks stiff and plastic; like a toy made of mix and matched parts, all put together haphazardly before they were abandoned on the ground by the careless child who created them.
Shouta doesn’t know when they will wake up. He’s not sure he wants them to. In a perfect world, the kid would sleep until this entire mess gets sorted out.
But Shouta has known for a long time that they live in anything but a perfect world.
“When can we expect them to wake up?” he asks.
Beside him, Recovery Girl sighs heavily. She hasn’t been very pleased about becoming the child’s one-woman care team. Until they were moved to UA, a whole hospital of resources had been available to keep them stable through treatment, but now, there is just the empty white room that the kid has been stashed in, and Recovery Girl.
She warned Nedzu that she specializes in quick fixes – in emergency first-aid, bumps, bruises, maybe a broken limb or two – but not limbs broken and mangled to the degree that the arms on the child had been.
They need to stay in the hospital, she had insisted. But even when she argued using medical jargon, she had been quickly overruled. Getting them behind UA’s walls and to safety had been determined to be the higher priority.
“Anytime now, really. There’s nothing keeping them asleep,” Recovery Girl says. “The report from the hospital says that they seized a few times while they were initially being operated on, but they’ve been sleeping fine without any irregular signs since then.”
Shouta grimaces. He’d read that same report, had been able to reign in his emotions through it, but to hear it said out loud – “they seized a few times” – causes his heart to clench.
Recovery Girl side-eyes him. "You look tired," she says.
She’s being generous. Shouta probably looks exhausted. The bags under his eyes feel like they could be heavy enough for All Might to use in a work-out – but at least Recovery Girl hadn’t suggested that Shouta take a break.
Right now, he needs to be here.
Still, that doesn’t stop him from sighing and giving his eyes a quick swipe to get the tired sand out of the corners.
He only has his eyes closed for a moment. A heartbeat. Something less than a second.
When he opens them again and looks back through the one-way mirror, the child’s eyes are open as well.
They aren’t looking at Shouta – of course they aren’t, they don't even know Shouta is outside the room – but that doesn’t stop Shouta’s breath from hitching. The color of those eyes aren’t anything he expected. They aren’t red, they aren’t green, they aren’t one red and one green. They are, as everything else with this child seems to be, a perfect mix in-between; green and red swirled together into a bright amber, that seems to glow from within with a warm but toxic light.
The child is waking up slowly, moving each limb in small twitches, as if testing how to use them. When they try to raise their arms, they wince, and that’s what draws their attention down to their hands.
For a while, amber eyes just stare blankly at the locked metal restraint keeping their hands cut off from the outside world, expression unreadable, and then, with an unexpected level of violence that Shouta has no time to brace for, they slam their arms down on the metal railing of the hospital bed.
The clang echoes like the ringing of a horrible bell, and it doesn’t even finish before the kid is reeling their arms back and slamming them down again, somehow harder than the first time.
“Shit!” Shouta hisses, already bolting for the door. “Call Midnight!” he tells Recovery Girl.
The kid doesn’t look up when the door opens. Their eyes are glazed over with an intense focus, as they work single-mindedly at trying to break the restraints off through sheer force.
If the banging is hurting their arms, there’s no outward indication on their face. But given the two people who have been forced together to form this person…
Shouta knows, very well, how much pain Midoriya can endure when determined. He doesn’t know as much about Shigaraki’s pain tolerance, but he’s not sure that any pain they are feeling matters to them at all right now, not when they are still swinging their arms so brutally down against the bar.
Midoriya and Shigaraki are on their knees already, but their body is shaking, as if it is taking everything they have just to hold themselves up. Those toxic amber eyes slide up and fix on Shouta, so he pauses his approach, not daring to move forward more yet.
Those new eyes don't blink.
Then, slowly, they tilt their head to the left. It’s a small, stiff motion, but it’s enough of an angle that messy strands of mint hair fall across their face. “... Eraserhead,” they rasp.
New vocal cords cause the voice that comes out of their throat to sound rough, but it is still undeniably young. Although not as young as Midoriya is, it is neither as old as Shigaraki is. It falls somewhere in the middle; the voice of an older teen, still growing.
“Yeah–” Shouta starts to respond.
Midoriya and Shigaraki cut him off, mouth twisting and back hunching over in a sudden jerk. “A-Aizawa… sensei?”
Some invisible force shoves ice into Shouta’s chest.
Shit.
He had thought their personalities would have mixed together and merged as well. So far, it seemed as if everything else about them had. But those sharp eyes are softening into something familiar, wide and pleading, and Shouta knows the tremble in that tone… that’s all Midoriya.
“Yeah,” he says, somehow keeping his voice steady, “It’s me.”
The kid wheezes, breathing heavily and trembling, like all their energy was used up by just those few words.
Then, they start trying to get out of the hospital bed.
“Hold on,” Shouta says. “Stop, you need to stay there."
The kid looks up at him sharply, and the abrupt stop makes them sway forward with the weight of the metal box around their hands. They nearly pitch head first off the side of the bed before catching themselves, and the I.V. line that is anchored in the crook of their elbow goes taut.
“No,” they say once, flat and hard. Then when they try to say more, try to force out other words or build sentences, their face seems to twitch, like they’re fighting with themselves, and nothing but a horrible, rasping clicking sound comes from deep within their throat.
Despite saying no, the kid sits back heavily on their heels, releasing the tension in their knees. The straining I.V. line slackens again, and Shouta breathes an imperceptible sigh of relief at that. “Thank you.”
“No,” the kid says again. They raise shaking arms, and glare with bruised, angry eyes. “T-Take off.”
Shouta frowns. No one has any clue what might have happened to Midoriya and Shigaraki's quirks in the mixing, so they can't take any risks without knowing how strong or harmful it might be now. “You need to keep those on.”
He’s barely finished speaking before the kid is slamming the metal box against the bed railing again, face screwed up with frustration.
“Hey!” Operating just on reflex, Shouta throws out his capture weapon. It catches around the metal restraints, and Midoriya and Shigaraki jerk back with an animalistic cry.
"No!" Seems to be the only thing they can say with any clarity, and it pours from their lips now with increasing panic as they thrash against Shouta's hold on their injured arms. "No no nonono!"
Where the hell is Midnight? Shouta thinks with grit teeth. He tightens the hold of his capture weapon, and sends out another loop to try and keep the kid secure.
"Don't w-want– am not– No! – s-stop– nonnnoo no!"
Their breathing is only getting faster, ramping up into something ragged and dangerous, and their expression keeps flipping, going back and forth between pleading and a vicious snarl. Shouta is watching, in real time, the kind of collapse that happens when two very different people are shoved together into the same headspace.
He can’t even imagine the chaos going on inside their mind right now. Shouta can barely just conjure up half-hazy ideas of jagged edges stabbing through each other, but he knows he’ll never truly know what it’s like to be joined with someone so different to himself in the violent, forceful way that Midoriya and Shigaraki had been joined. He had only been able to watch distantly through the News feeds pointed at Kamino as the villain known as All for One grabbed both Midoriya and Shigaraki so ruthlessly by their throats, and then crushed their bodies close together until they melded like clay into one another.
Shaking the horrible memory away, Shouta recenters himself in the present. He decides to take a gamble, and wraps another length of his capture weapon around Midoriya and Shigaraki before pulling it tight, applying just enough pressure to stop their thrashing. “Take a deep breath,” he says firmly. “Follow me, c’mon kid, in… and out…”
To his surprise, they actually seem to listen to him. There’s a single moment where they go completely, unsettlingly still, before their loud breathing noticeably starts to slow.
It’s then, of course, as Shouta is finally getting them to start calming down, that Midnight arrives.
She enters with the urgency of someone who expects to be putting an end to a bad situation, fingers already curled into the sleeve of her bodysuit. Shouta can’t blame her for her quickness, but that isn’t what she’s walking into.
The opening of the door again and Midnight’s sudden appearance startles Midoriya and Shigaraki into motion once more.
It’s not a controlled motion, though. It’s clumsy, chaotic, a jumble of directions acting on their body all at once. They seem to spasm, before jerking backwards sharply and tumbling right off the other side of the hospital bed.
Shouta reaches out to pull his capture weapon towards himself to stop their fall, but for once, he’s too slow. He’ll blame it later on the strangeness of the situation, on the unexpectedness of Midoriya and Shigaraki falling backward instead of forward, but the end result is the same.
The bed, on the other side, is too close to the wall. Midoriya and Shigaraki’s head smacks against it with a loud thwack! that immediately is followed by their eyes rolling back and their body going limp as it crumbles to the floor.
For a moment, Shouta just stares, aware that behind him Midnight is just as baffled. It’s shocking how quickly all the frantic and violent energy that had been flowing through Midoriya and Shigaraki’s body dissipated, so easily snuffed out by a hit to the back of the head.
Shouta goes to them just as Recovery Girl toddles into the room as well. Together, they quickly and efficiently maneuver Midoriya and Shigaraki until they’re in a safer, more stable position, before Shouta steps back to allow Recovery Girl to look the child over.
“What now?” Midnight asks quietly, breaching the silence. Shouta turns to look at her, and sees nothing but an endless well of worry in her eyes.
Shouta sighs heavily. “Now, we go back to waiting for them to wake up, and we hope we can calm them down faster next time."