Chapter Text
It started on a night.
Shouta couldn't say it was a night like any other, because it wasn't. Normally, he spent his nights patrolling his territory and making sure that those under his protection were safe. He had started with that today, but then Miss Joke, a twilight hero who refused to take her work or the safety of those around her seriously, wandered into his territory. She was on the target list, and he would have been remiss if he hadn't taken the opportunity.
So he followed her, all the way until she approached a warehouse, startling like she had heard something and moving to poke around.
The warehouse wasn't a known gathering spot, so it was likely a rat or a homeless person she had heard. Neither would be a threat to him, so he prepared to enter and make it her final resting place.
That was when his comms unit, which he wore but seldom used, sparked to life without him switching it on.
"D-don't go in!"
The voice on the other end was undeniably young, and he knew instantly that this was a child, no older than 13 by the sound of it, that was on the other line. He glanced around, but he couldn't see anyone else around, even when he flared his quirk, so it was unlikely that the child was nearby. But that left the question: how did they reach him, and how were they seeing him?
For now, he decided to play dumb, as much as he hated doing so. "What are you talking about? Who is this?"
The child was silent, only the sound of stuttered breaths and frantic typing filling the line. After a moment, the child took a deep, shaky breath. "I k-know you're Eraser, an-nd that you're f-following Miss Joke, but it's a t-trap!"
His eyes sharpened as he heard that, and he let his gaze sweep over the warehouse with more scrutiny. "What makes you think that?"
"I saw them get there. There are t-ten heroes, and at least f-five of them have m-mutation quirks! You can't-t go i-"
He didn't see any sign of an ambush, but he knew that he had gone after some higher-ranked targets lately, so it wouldn't surprise him if the Hero Commission put more resources into his capture than they had previously. He was confident in his abilities, and his capture scarf wasn't for show, but even he could admit that ten against one, when he couldn't erase at least five of their quirks, would be difficult. He would probably still win, but he would get hurt in the process, and it wasn't really worth all of that for just Miss Joke.
He sighed, cutting off the kid's anxious rambling, but he turned to leave. "Alright, kid, thanks. You got a name and some pronouns?"
The child is quiet for a moment longer. "Uh, he/him. You can call me D-Dek-ku? I-"
"Nope," he cuts in, shaking his head despite not knowing if the kid can see him. "I won't call you useless," he denied. "Come up with something else."
The boy's breath stutters and "O-oh, but, I-everyone calls me t-that? So-"
"If you know who I am, then you know that I'm not everyone," he drawled, coming to a stop on a roof a good way away from the warehouse, but still well within his territory. "Give me another name."
"Well, uh, m-maybe, maybe Void?"
It obviously wasn't the boy's legal name, not that he would assume it would be, but he can work with it.
"Okay, Void. Why did you tell me about Joke's ambush? Better yet, how did you access my headset?"
"Uh, well, I, uh, gott-ta go!"
The line disconnected, leaving Shouta alone in silence. He huffed, shaking his head, and decided to call it a night.
His husbands would get a kick out of this.
---
He hadn't thought that he would hear from Void again.
He had looked into the information the boy had provided, and his inside source on the police was able to confirm that there had been a need-to-know operation involving about a dozen heroes that night, so it seemed like the boy knew his stuff.
He wouldn't deny that he was curious about the child who had decided to help a villain, but he wasn't interested enough to go looking. Hizashi or Orobo might have been, but they got busy soon after, so the child faded from their thoughts.
---
In fact, he forgot all about the child until he popped up in his comms about a month later.
"Eraser, there's a rival v-villain in the alley two blocks to the s-south," Void stammered, and Shouta could hear the tapping of keys on a keyboard.
"Hello, Void," he greeted, turning to his left and going to investigate. "Why are you contacting me?"
"He's bad, and you d-deal with bad people," the boy replied simply, as if it were common.
"So do heroes," he pointed out, lowering his voice as he crouched on the edge of the roof overlooking the alleyway in question. Sure enough, a lower-level, but very violent, villain was loitering, checking his phone like he was waiting for someone. Shouta knew that the man mostly sold drugs, often to kids or young adults, so he assumed it was his buyer. "So again, why me?"
"N-no hero would listen to m-me," the kid murmured, his typing going silent. That gave Shouta pause, and he wondered, for a moment, if the boy was like him, like Zashi and Oboro. If Void was ignored, neglected, and abused.
Before he could do much about the thought, the child sucked in a shaky but fortifying breath. "His quirk lets him m-make his hands into kn-nives. It's a t-transform-mation quirk, you can erase it. His right knee is sp-prained."
The line disconnected, and Shouta took a moment to calm himself before leaping from the roof and onto his target.
With the information from Void, he was able to target the knee, and it was all too easy to kill the man.
---
Void wasn't as easy to forget about afterward.
He would pop up a few times a week, always too late for a child to be up, to tell Shouta about some threat, usually with helpful information about their quirk or fighting style.
And the analysis was increasing at a frankly insane pace.
At first, it was simple, disjointed information that Shouta could see himself, not that he told the kid that. Then, over the course of about 3 months, as the child got more comfortable with him, it became near Nezu-level analysis.
Void was listing the details of their quirks, how to avoid them if he could not erase them, how to use them to his advantage, and then any other physical or mental weaknesses that he had noticed.
Shouta still wasn't entirely sure how Void saw everything, especially since some of the places the boy had directed him didn't have street cameras, but all he got was a cryptic "I have my ways, Aizawa-san."
Which was another thing. Somehow, Void had managed to find the legal names of his whole team, something not even the hero commission had managed due to Nezu's extensive protections. Once he realized that, Shouta asked Nezu to find the boy, even if it was only to make sure his cybersecurity was sufficient.
This request led to Nezu first cackling over his tea in his office, then slowly growing quiet and frustrated, until, eventually, he had to be dragged away from his computer before he destroyed it in a fit of rage.
Needless to say, the kid's cybersecurity was more than sufficient.
If Nezu suddenly got a new online chess partner after...well, none of them had the courage to confirm if it was Void or not.
Unlike the first few times Void had reached out, he began to stay a few minutes after, usually to gush about Shouta's fighting style or quirk, but sometimes Shouta was able to ask a little about the kid.
Through these conversations, he found out that Void's favorite color was green, that he loved katsudon but rarely ate it, that his favorite animal was cats, but he wasn't allowed one, and that school was not pleasant.
If he tried to push past surface information, to ask about things like his family or quirk, Void would shut down and disappear for the night.
Despite that, he was learning more about the kid, and passing comments left him-and his husbands-convinced that Void was not okay.
Now, if only they could find the Problem Child to help him.
---
His comm line connected, but the Problem Child didn't say anything at first, even the usual typing was absent. If it wasn't for shaky breaths, he would have thought no one was on the line. He allowed a few moments of silence before he spoke.
"Hello, Void," he greeted, shifting up onto his feet to survey the horizon from the roof he perched on. "Do you have something for me?"
The kid was quiet for a moment before he spoke. "Not...really?"
That got Shouta's attention. Void usually monitored his patrol area, and he didn't reach out unless he found something. So what did the boy want to talk about? "Alright, what is it?"
The boy was quite again, before sucking in a deep breath. "I k-know you have N-Nezu looking for me," he started. "B-but I don't know w-why. Are you m-m-mad? I d-don-"
"Whoah, Problem Child," he interrupted, making his voice soft in a way usually reserved for his husbands and kittens. "I'm not mad. It would be illogical to hide that, so I would tell you if I was mad, right?"
"R-right," Void agreed, though he still sounded a bit unsure. "B-but then w-why?"
Shouta sighed, sitting back on the edge of the roof as he thought about how to explain why he was so invested in the child's well-being. "Do you know why Screech, Storm Cloud, and I started this?"
"T-to protect the red-d light d-district, right?"
"Smart kid," he agreed easily, burying his face in his capture weapon to hide the fond smile growing there. "Do you know why we didn't become heroes instead?"
"Your q-quirks, r-right?" Void sounded much more hesitant, almost reluctant to say it, but he had still answered the question.
"For Screech and I, absolutely," he agreed, because it was true. "We grew up in the same group home, and we were both abused pretty badly for our quirks. After all, no one wanted a kid who could deafen them, let alone one who could take away their quirks. We survived and applied for hero school, but when we were denied the chance to even sit the exams, the home kicked us out." Void gasped through the comms in outrage. "But Storm Cloud doesn't have a villainous quirk, just a 'weak' one, according to most. He was in the hero course for a few years, at UA. Until his mentors let a villain knock a building down onto him. They didn't even look for him afterward, just assumed that he must have died."
"Loud Cloud," Void breathed Orobo's old hero name down the line, like it was a secret. And he supposed it was, not that he doubted the Problem Child already knew it, since he called Oboro 'Shirakumo-san'. "B-but then how d-did he survive?"
"Screech and I found him," Shouta admitted, shaking his head a bit. "We had been nearby, being homeless youth and all, and watched the fight. We couldn't leave him there, so we dug him out. He didn't want to go home, said that his parents weren't around often and didn't want to see him when they were-" the boy's breath caught "-so he was better off with us." He heaved a sigh, forcing the rage at his partner's former situation from his lungs. "Then it was just the three of us on the street, and we saw so much cruelty. We had all lived so much cruelty, and we couldn't keep watching it happen. Nezu and Midnight found us along the way. Our methods may seem extreme, and in some situations, they are, but they're more effective than any hero has ever been in this area."
The boy sniffled, and Shouta could hear the rustling of fabric on the other side. "I'm s-sorry that happened t-to you," he murmured, and Shouta could tell it was genuine. Genuine in a way that spoke of understanding, of similar circumstances.
It was that confirmation that gave him the courage to continue.
"And I'm sorry that it's happening to you."
The line was silent to the point that Shouta worried that Void wasn't even breathing. Then he was rambling stuttered denials almost too fast for Shouta to make out.
"Void," he spoke, keeping his voice soft but firm. "You know I don't like liars." He gave the child a moment to calm himself. "Now, don't lie to me. Are you safe?"
The line was once again quiet, save for quiet sniffling. Eventually, Void spoke, his voice shaking. "I d-deserve it-t."
The one sentence, something he and both of his husbands had said countless times, confirmed for him that the child was anything but safe, and he resolved to do something about it.
"No one deserves abuse, Void. No one." Shouta may be a villain, by the definition of the law, but he wasn't heartless, and he couldn't leave a child in a bad situation. Especially not a child that had grown on him so much.
The boy sobbed, a sound that ripped at Shouta's heart. "I d-do! You would ag-gree if you k-knew m-m-me, I-"
"No," Shouta denied, shaking his head emphatically. "I don't care what you've done or what your quirk is. I would never abuse or neglect you. I would hope you would know me better than that by now."
"It-t's not my qu-quirk," the boy choked out through sobs. "It's m-m-me. They hate m-m-me. Ev-very-yon-ne hat-tes-s-"
"I don't," Shouta cut in, interrupting the child's downward spiral. "Nezu appreciates your chess matches-and yes, I know that's you-" at least that earned him a chuckle, wet as it was. "Screech and Storm Cloud adore you, and they keep asking me when I'm bringing you home."
"B-but I've n-never talked to th-them?" Void said, voice ticked up in a question, heaving breaths calming as he no doubt focused on the absurdity of his husbands.
"Oh, I know," he snorted. "But they hear about you from me all the time, and you've got them both wrapped around your little fingers. Pretty sure either of them would kill someone for you, no questions asked." He was lying. He knew they would, and he knew they were going to, once they found the boy. "They're worried about you; we all are. That's why Nezu is looking for you. Will you let us help you?"
Void sniffled, but didn't protest again. "I-I'm not r-ready yet, b-but, b-but I'll tell you when I am-m, o-okay?" He yawned around his words, and Shouta took a moment to glance at his phone, finding that it was just after 3 AM.
"Sure, kid," Shouta agreed, though he knew that he wouldn't be calling off the search anytime soon. If Void was half as smart as he thought he was, the boy would know that as well. "It's pretty late, and I'm sure you have school tomorrow. Why don't you go get some sleep?"
The boy chucked but agreed and, with a quiet goodbye, left Shouta to finish his patrol alone.