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Shouta gritted his teeth as the stranger pressed his face into the ground. He was getting real tired of villains doing that. His arms were taut behind his back, tied together with his own capture weapon like he was some kind of baby hero not yet out of his training pants. The man’s knee dug into his lower back as he shifted into a more stable position and began riffling through Shouta’s pockets with one hand, the other wrapped securely around Shouta’s bindings.
He found his phone and his emergency gauze, neither of which seemed to interest him as he tossed them to the wayside. His flashlight was equally unenticing, the metal clanking against the wall of the nearby building when he chucked it. And then he found Shouta’s hero license.
Stupid. He’d been so stupid. He should have called for backup. What had he been thinking?
He was able to turn his head enough to see the man smile out of the corner of his eye. A bright, happy thing that might have been reassuring in other circumstances. Instead, it filled him with a specific sort of dread that could only be described as knowing you’d gone looking for a Labrador but ended up finding a wolf.
He supposed this is what villains felt when the hero smiled.
“I thought it was you, Eraserhead,” the man said, voice full of child-like excitement not unlike that of his students, “Those moves of yours really are distinctive. Even without your quirk, your fighting style is amazing. I almost couldn’t keep up with you!” Almost. Just almost.
Shouta had been so stupid. A rookie mistake.
“Of course, I couldn’t be certain it was you without this.” The man dangled his hero license in front of his face. “I never like to go off assumptions. Too much risk of being wrong these days. What with all the heroes and vigilantes All Might inspired. I mean, take last Tuesday. I ran into two separate people who both had the ability to harden their bodies!”
Shouta closed his eyes. Only one of those heroes had survived that night.
He jerked his head away when fingers brushed his hair.
“Relax. I’m removing your communicator.” True to his word, the man pulled out Shouta’s earpiece. “They’ve started putting tracking devices in these things, haven’t they? Smart.” The sound of something crunching told him that backup wasn’t likely any time soon.
“Normally I’d crush your phone too, but I don’t think we’ll be here that long.” He said it less like a threat and more like a given fact: something they both knew to be true.
“Yes. Your little game. You like to mentally torture your victims by forcing them to talk about their quirks before you kill them.” Not exactly accurate, but if he could buy some time then perhaps-
The man tsked. “We both know that’s not true, Mr. Aizawa. May I call you Mr. Aizawa? Or do you prefer to leave that name to your students?”
Shouta stiffened. His hero license didn’t list his name. None of them did. And it certainly didn’t list his secondary occupation.
Fingers brushed his hair again, and this time the man was doing it on purpose. “Does your husband like running his fingers through your hair? He must. It’s very soft.”
“You have gloves on.” The words were weak, barely making it past the lump that had formed in his throat.
The villain never went after heroes outside of their patrol, and Hizashi wasn’t on patrol tonight. Therefore he was safe.
Safe.
He held the word up in his mind like a beacon, calling forth the coolheadedness that had not failed him yet. He would lose this battle if he let his fear make his decisions for him.
“I can still tell,” the man said, drawing Shouta’s attention back to him, “It’s got a certain texture to it.” His fingers threaded themselves deep into Shouta’s hair, pausing only briefly to detangle a particularly stubborn batch of knots near the base.
“Call me Eraserhead. After all, it’s my hero persona you want, isn’t it?”
The man stopped. He withdrew his hand. “That’s true. I assume you know how this works?”
Yes. And that’s why he’d been an idiot not to call for backup the instant he’d even suspected the man might be who he’d thought he was. He’d waited to get confirmation, and now look where that’d gotten him.
On his stomach in a dirty alleyway, helpless beneath one of the most notorious villains in recent history.
“I get to tell you something about my quirk. If you like what I tell you, you let me go. If not, you kill me,” he answered.
It was a game with simple, matter-of-fact rules and a clear-cut outcome. No tricks. No gimmicks. Shouta might have appreciated the man’s style if his own life hadn’t been the prize.
“If I don’t know what you tell me,” the man corrected.
“Isn’t it the same thing with you?” Shouta asked, already tired of this charade.
“Oh no. I like everything I hear. I think quirks are amazing in general. Even if I’ve studied a quirk before, it’s always so interesting to go back over the possible applications, especially when it comes to you heroes. You guys are always coming up with amazing new ways to use your quirks in battle that I never would have even thought of.”
Shouta found that hard to believe. By what few accounts they’d gathered, the man was shatteringly bright.
He weighed his next words for a moment before figuring ‘what the hell’ and plunging right in. “One would think, if you find them so ‘interesting,’ you’d put more effort into studying them full time and not spend your nights attacking random people in alleys.”
“What makes you think I’m not already studying them full time?” The man’s voice had lost its child-like wonder and replaced it with something far more cold. “You’re not the only one who can work two jobs.”
Shouta stored that information. If he lived through this night, it might just prove useful to the police assigned with tracking down the man’s daytime whereabouts.
“When you talk about quirks, you speak as if you don’t have one yourself,” Shouta said, switching tactics. The man wasn’t likely to give him more information about his job, but maybe this he would talk about.
It was a theory they’d had for a while now. The man had never been seen using anything other than the various gadgets he carried on his person and, on the rare occasions in which he found himself in trouble, the ‘suit’ that seemed to burst forth from nowhere, covering his entire body in opaque green light that couldn’t be penetrated even with the heaviest artillery. It made the green hoodie and cargo pants he normally wore look like some sort of knock-off cosplay.
And, of course, there was the fact his own quirk hadn’t done a damn thing to stop him. His nose ached from where the man had casually shot his goggles off his face when he’d tried.
“I’ll make you a deal.” Something cold and slim slid underneath Shouta’s chin. A knife. “Tell me one thing about your quirk that I don’t know, and I’ll tell you about mine. Tell me a second thing, and I’ll let you leave with your knowledge.”
“Am I allowed to turn down this bargain?” Shouta wanted information, but not at the cost of his life.
The hair on Shouta’s neck prickled as the man ran the blade across his stubble. He rested it against his Adam’s apple.
“You changed your mind already? I thought you wanted to know about my quirk.”
“I don’t believe in stacking the deck against myself.” Shouta spoke through half-parted lips, his throat moving as little as humanly possible as he responded.
“That makes sense.”
The knife lifted enough for Shouta to risk a steadying breath.
“I suppose it wouldn’t be fair to force you to tell me an extra fact when none of the others had to. Especially when I already know so much about you.”
“And why is that?”
“Why do I know so much about you?”
The knife disappeared completely. Shouta glanced over his shoulder. It glinted in the dim glow produced by a nearby streetlight as the man tapped the flat end against his chin.
Shouta jerked as hard as he could. The knife slid off the man’s skin without so much as a scratch.
Well. Couldn’t say he hadn’t tried.
“I suppose I deserved that. It was foolish of me not to assume a veteran hero wouldn’t take any advantage given to him. Guess I still have a lot left to learn, huh?”
The man held the knife with two fingers as he dug through the pockets of his pants. He pulled out something that could have easily been mistaken for a hockey puck and pressed it into Shouta’s back. Shouta stiffened as something not unlike electricity surged through his body. Or maybe fire was more accurate. Red, hot fire preventing him from so much as twitching his pinky if he didn’t want pain to blister underneath his skin.
“Sorry. I don’t like to use this if I don’t have to. I know it hurts.”
The man released Shouta’s capture weapon and stood, stepping over him and coming around so that they could talk face-to-face. Shouta gritted his teeth and raised his head, ignoring the pulses of agony sent out by the small disk for every centimeter he moved.
“I know so much about you because you were there when he died.”
Shouta’s heart stopped.
“I used to want to be a hero, you know. Like you. Like him.” The man stared into the knife’s reflection as he flipped it over in his hands. His eyes were impossibly sad for someone who’d killed as many people as he had. “I met him once. We didn’t speak long but he told me something very important.” The knife stopped flipping. “He told me I could never become a hero.”
The man gave him a breathtaking smile that was breathtakingly wrong in every way possible. “So I didn’t.”
It would seem All Might had always been a terrible teacher. Shouta couldn’t say he was surprised.
“You researched me because I survived and the world’s greatest hero didn’t.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. Reporters had swarmed into the school after All Might had fallen. Like vultures, they’d descended upon anyone who’d so much as breathed on U.A. that day. Unsurprisingly, they’d had a particular unending interest in the man who’d had a front-row seat to All Might’s death.
The man didn’t answer. He just continued to smile.
His eyes slid to Shouta’s phone. “I think you’ve bought enough time.”
Not likely.
Shouta wasn’t one to allow false hope to fester. Not even in himself.
“So then, Eraserhead-” The eyes slid back to him, all hints of a smile now wiped clean from his face. “-tell me about your quirk.”