Chapter Text
He was running and he didn’t know why. He knew his way down each street, and he could sprint breathlessly between the distant roving spotlights, but apart from the chill of fear wrapping around his heart, he didn’t know what made him run.
He paused a moment, tilted his head, and verified: the slap of footsteps and the shouts behind him confirmed someone was chasing him, at least. He kept running, noting as he did that while he was getting tired after each leg of a sprint, it only took him five breaths to go from panting and shivering to fresh again.
He knew that was important, whyever it was happening. But right now, he had to get to safety. His mind raced faster than his feet, and rather than ducking down the next alleyway, he darted left, into the middle of the empty street. All of the cars on the side of the street weren’t going anywhere - firebombed, rusted out, or stripped down - and between that and the moonless night he supposed it wasn’t a shock that there was less traffic than he expected.
His goal was in the middle of the darkened street, midway between the nearest searchlights - a manhole cover. Impatient, he reached down to tear it out of the pavement - and instead, cried out in pain, wrenching his back and pulling one fingernail half out where it snagged, but not budging the lid in the least.
That - that really wasn’t right. He should be stronger than this. He was stronger than this, ever since - since what? How could he remember being stronger when he couldn’t remember anything specific, not even his own name?
He sobbed once, desperately, short of breath, and forced himself, still hunched over, to duck into the cover of the nearest burned-out hulk of a car, pressing his back to the cold metal and wincing at each inhale, each exhale. The voices got closer - but even if they were chasing him, he realized, they weren’t tracking him. They just knew which direction he’d gone. He could hear the distant yells, the crackles of radio as some of his pursuers coordinated by radio. He wondered if it might be better to duck into or under the car, to hide there. For a moment his mind worked the angles and probabilities, until a memory flared clear.
You need to remember at least this much, Izuku. You have to keep moving until you find it.
“Yes, O-nesan,” he murmured aloud, then straightened in sudden shock.
He had a big sister? He did. He was sure of it, that’s who told him he had to remember things. What was the other thing she told him? The question flowed naturally from the vestigial memory, even if he didn’t know why he was so sure this sister even existed, let alone how he knew she’d given him two instructions. But whatever the other instruction might have been, if it was even real, it didn’t surface, so instead, he gritted his teeth, coiled his muscles, and pushed off from the car, continuing to run. Somewhere behind him there was a shout - someone had heard him. He shuddered, lowered his head, and ran harder. Somewhere around here - yes. There was a bridge up ahead, a familiar one, and he dashed for the underpass, then folded himself against the concrete, curled up, and waited, thinking - Izuku. His name was Izuku.
He had to keep moving, but he didn’t have to be stupid about it. He heard his pursuers coming down the street, two of them, without any flashlight or other illumination except the paranoid scan of the spotlights that seemed to have replaced the streetlights he remembered on this block. The spotlights couldn’t reach him here. And - there - yes, there was another manhole cover.
He didn’t try to yank this one up. Instead, he scanned the ground nearby, especially the curb and gutters, looking for anything he could use as a lever, and not finding, well, anything. A thought struck him, and he looked back at his hands again. There was still dried blood on them, but there was no pain. His fingernail - as he watched, the broken shard of nail dropped loose, painlessly, and beneath it was a fresh, healthy nail. His fingertip felt warm, but it was otherwise fine. His back - it didn’t hurt anymore either. He flexed, carefully, stretching his shoulders.
They felt fine, too. It baffled him. He was sure rapid healing wasn’t his Quirk. He couldn’t, of course , remember what it was… but it wasn’t this.
That made no sense.
He could see the silhouettes of his two nearest searchers now, half a block away, coming right for him but slowing down. He was positive the shadows of the underpass hid him at this distance, but his plan had been to pry up the manhole cover with some improvised tool and slip down before they got here. Now… he was probably too late. Maybe he could ambush them - or maybe he could stay out of sight and find a way to mislead them about which direction he had gone.
“That way,” said the looming, bulky shadow, enough taller than the other that at first Izuku had thought it was much closer than the other. The voice was deep, creaking, full of undertones and harmonics that must run all the way down to infrasound - just the voice itself, its simple declaration, was terrifying.
“No,” said the other figure, patient but flat, speaking in a way that made him sure she had heteromorphic traits affecting her mouth. “That’s the border. That’s her turf.”
The larger figure shuddered. “But… the runner went that way.”
Something about his voice was plaintive, mournful - and almost childlike. Even at his size, Izuku thought, better to attack him first - drive him away with a sudden shock, rather than give him time to orient.
“Then the Aldera Regia will have him,” the heteromorphic woman said, firmly. “Just in case he turned - you go left, I’ll go right. But don’t go under, over, or past the bridges, Pan. Don’t . Okay? Do you remember the Queen?”
“... Re… remember,” the larger shape admitted, reluctantly, body language hunching and tightening in a way that made Izuku ache with familiarity. Somehow, he knew that kind of fear, that kind of pain. The echo of being helpless against a threat, of learning how futile it was to defy it. His own breath caught in his throat, and very carefully, he breathed out, slow and silent, as the two pacing figures split, still across the crosswalk from this underpass, going both ways.
Judging by the silhouette against the stop sign, the larger figure was more than three meters tall. Izuku shivered.
… The stop sign. That was what he needed. He waited a full three minutes, making sure no shouta or footsteps were drawing closer, then darted out. It took far too long to find the right hex bolts, unscrewing a long section of signpost, but once he did, he had his lever. More than before, he thought, getting down into the sewer was the right call to get out of sight, rather than cross to the other side of the underpass and find out what Queen had intimidated the looming pursuer so thoroughly.
The lever worked. He made himself just enough space, eased the signpost down the shaft and let it drop, and then slowly, climbed after it down the ladderway, reaching up to slowly pull the manhole cover back into its socket.
Down here it was pitch black. He couldn’t see anything, but with shuffling steps and slow, searching hands along the brick and concrete, he found his signpost-staff, and using it as a cane, scanned the space ahead of him for obstacles he might trip over. There was a broad tunnel here, with a narrow maintenance sidewalk and a recessed canal for wastewater. Moving slowly, he shuffled forward, away from his pursuers and into Aldera Regia territory, whatever that meant. He took his time, but like his Onesan told him, he kept moving - crossing one block, then a second, occasionally orienting himself with keyhole-glimpses of light as searchlights swept across manholes and drains up ahead.
He began to relax, began to bring his mind back to the task of unlocking the mystery of where he was, and what was happening.
When the darkness of the tunnels gave way to the darkness of unconsciousness, there was no pain, and no warning.
***
Everything was blurry. There were lights shining in his face now, and voices, coming from a great distance.
“That nitrogen trap of yours is still scary, Alchemy,” said one voice - a woman’s voice, a light and familiar voice. “What if we hadn’t found him in time?”
“The gas sensors work,” another woman’s voice came back. It sounded wrong somehow - strained, cold. That wasn’t how she was supposed to sound, was it? “He wasn’t going to suffocate. The same vents that let the nitrogen in make sure it’s only enough for half an hour of hypoxia, like mountainclimbers on Mount Everest. Do you have information on him yet?”
“I don’t thiiink he’s anyone’s spy,” said the first voice - the one who wasn’t Alchemy, the one who sounded comfortably right, warm, kind. “Necessity and Kintsugi had all their ronin out looking for him, and neither of them bluff like that. I’m still running his scan - he doesn’t have a DTN chip - but we’ll get a result way before he wakes up.”
How did he know them? As he wracked his brain, feeling started to come back to his body, one tingling limb at a time. He couldn’t get up or fight yet, but his Regeneration was helping him recover faster than they expected. If he could use that to surprise them…
“No DTN chip, and you think he’s not a spy?” The colder voice sounded arch, almost amused, but still too distant for that, with an edge that he thought meant curiosity , not anger . “Why wouldn’t he have a chip? For that matter, why would he be on the run near here ? Kintsugi…” Her voice slowed down, hesitant, cutting herself off before whatever she’d been going to say.
“I know,” the warm voice said, and then chuckled. “I kind of thought the reason was obvious, though. Did I really reach a conclusion faster than you?”
“Would you explain what you mean, Ripley?” the cold voice asked, and this time it was glass-brittle and glass-sharp.
“He’s barefoot,” Ripley said, almost delighted. “Look at his feet , Class Rep.”
They were in their twenties, Izuku thought - too old to be in class anymore - but nonetheless, as Ripley said it, he knew the cold voice had been his Class Rep, too. That was where he knew them from. From school…
Had he gone to school in Aldera? That sounded right, that would explain how he knew these streets…
“...Oh,” Alchemy said, and the frost thawed in her voice to reveal a brief, pent-up tangle of misery. “Oh, poor man… but whose territory can he be from? It can’t be Necessity & Kintsugi… and if he’d come all the way from Musutafu Central, there’s no way he’d have survived this long without more scars…”
The raw grief in her voice was too much. He couldn’t keep his eyes closed to it. He had to see what was going on… very carefully, he raised his eyelids the barest sliver, not squinting or moving fast. He was strapped to a table in a brushed-metal lab or surgical theater, lights overhead, countless monitors encircling him.
There were two women standing over him. The nearer one with patchwork skin, pink and purple, lilac and white, beneath a shock of white-streaked pink hair enclosed by a latticework gold crown, like a framework diagram of a chess queen. Her eyes, gold with black sclera, were focused on a readout on one of the screens, set at an angle he couldn’t read, even if his eyes were wide open. Her build was lean and athletic, and she wore a black bodyglove with plates of gold armor at the joints - not battle armor, he thought, but crash armor.
The other woman was half a foot taller, her lush, rounded form cloaked in a deep crimson labcoat, her hair shaved to grey stubble except for an uneven black mohawk, a criss-cross of scars on her face and scalp making her look far more dangerous than her curves - an impression backed by the flat set of her lips and the flint-like sharpness of her gaze. She, too, had a crown on her head - a heavy twist of gold braid with faceted jewels at the tip of each twisted spike. The distress in her voice seemed to only make her expression harder, as though she was defending against it, her posture stiff but poised.
The crowns, if nothing else, made him sure - these were the Aldera Regia his pursuers had been afraid of. One of them was the Queen. And he was strapped down to a table in their laboratory.
“Hunh?” Ripley asked after a moment, her face scrunching in confusion as she punched a button beside her readout. “ That can’t be right…”
“What does it say?” The mohawked woman - Alchemy - asked, shifting her balance slightly as if preparing for a fight, but not moving over to stand by the patchwork-pink woman even though only two steps would have positioned her to look over Ripley’s shoulder.
“Well, he was registered as Quirkless, and he did come from Musutafu Central… his name is Izuku Midoriya. The last record of him is from right on the Tatooin-Aldera border where we found him. But it says here says that Hedoro caught and killed him there… just over ten years ago. How is that possible?”
“That’s just one of two questions. How is it possible?” Alchemy’s voice was tight and controlled again, frigid as it had started. “Izuku Midoriya. Answer if you can. Tell me either that… or how it’s possible you’re already awake?”