Work Text:
By the time that Izuku managed to fish his notebook out of the pond, everyone else had left to go home.
Shit, Izuku thought, carefully surveying his surroundings. Of all the fucking days, Kacchan. It had to be today, huh?
He’d clocked a couple of suspicious people following him earlier in the week, and he’d informed all Musutafu-area heroes, as was protocol. But with the incident at Tatooin Station this morning, he suspected that most of the daylight heroes were dealing with the aftermath of that arrest, and the inevitable smaller crimes that always popped up in the vicinity of a high-profile hero fight. And it was too early for most of the underground heroes to be on patrol.
Well, he had to get home somehow. He clicked the button on one of the many gaudy pins on his backpack. If he didn’t deactivate it in twenty minutes, it would send a distress signal to all heroes in the Musutafu area and ping the subdural tracker located in his right shoulder.
Just to be safe, he palmed the panic button he always kept in his pocket. This one would send an instantaneous signal to the heroes. You could never be too prepared. Izuku had learned that the hard way.
I knew it, Izuku thought, minutes later, as three men dragged him into a nearby alley. I fucking called it. Then a sweet-smelling rag was slapped over his face, and he knew no more.
When Izuku was 6, a new and improved form of Trigger hit the black market. Two months later, after Kacchan had shouted that he was a “quirkless weakling” for the whole neighborhood to hear, Izuku was kidnapped by an enterprising group of up-and-coming drug dealers.
It turned out that the key ingredient for the new Trigger was blood - specifically, quirkless blood. Something about the secondary metabolites in the absence of a quirk factor making the drug more effective - Izuku didn’t fully understand the science behind it.
But the upshot was that Izuku, small for his age and quirkless, something that was much more common in adults, suddenly became a very attractive target for any criminal who wanted to make a pretty penny.
That first kidnapping was traumatic in many ways. Izuku still has issues with needles and small, dark places. For years, he had to sleep with the door to his room open, and he still hasn’t reinstalled the doorknob. It had taken two weeks for the heroes and police to find him, but those two weeks had felt like months to a tiny, terrified Izuku. He’d been starting to lose hope that anyone would rescue him. He’d been one step away from despair when heroes had burst into the drug den.
The first one in the door had been a rookie underground hero, Eraserhead. He’d jumped into the fray, eyes blazing red, his bandage-like capture weapon flying around him. In one shining, crystal moment, Izuku’s definition of “hero” had been rewritten - with Eraserhead as the archetypal example.
Izuku’s mom probably would have preferred that a daylight hero had come to rescue Izuku that day, because along with Izuku’s focus on underground heroics came a determination to do his part in dismantling the drug cartels. Even as his skills in self-defense and counter-surveillance grew, the kidnappings continued. He’d admitted cheerfully to his mom after the fifth kidnapping that he’d let himself get grabbed - “better me than someone who isn't prepared,” he’d told her. That’s when she had agreed to the surgery to install his three subdural trackers.
Izuku may have fashioned himself into the ideal bait for drug stings, but that didn’t mean that once he was captured, he didn’t put all of his skills to good use.
This time, he woke up ziptied on the cold, cement ground of some kind of warehouse. Very original. In fact, Izuku realized, blinking the haze of drugged sleep from his eyes, he recognized this place. Wasn’t this the old Ito-En warehouse that had been the location of… he wants to say his eighth kidnapping? Ninth? It had been the one with the guy who could convert sunlight to muscle mass, which was a really cool quirk-
Anyway, point was, Izuku knew the layout of this whole warehouse, and his abductors had made several rookie mistakes. First, they’d left his shoes on. Izuku was sure the heroes had already gotten his first two distress calls, but he pushed the panic button on the side of his left shoe for good measure. No harm in being thorough.
Second, they’d tied him with zipties. This, combined with the shoes thing, meant that, with a little bit of wiggling, Izuku was able to loop his shoelaces through the zipties, and then to just… saw them off. This always took a bit of time, and a lot of leg strength (and endurance), but because they hadn’t thought to have anyone watch him (their third mistake), he just wriggled behind some boxes and set to work.
After he was free, he crept to where he knew the entrance to the manager’s office was. If any important documentation existed here, it was likely there. The office had a prime vantage point and you could see the entire warehouse from the main window. The leader of the group would have probably set up shop there. (This had certainly been the case during Izuku’s last “visit” to this warehouse.)
Izuku had just reached the base of the stairs when a cry came up from the warehouse proper. Ah, guess they finally realized he was gone. He ducked into the women’s restroom down the hallway (men rarely checked there first, he’d learned) and waited until anyone in the manager’s office responded to the alarm.
He didn’t have to wait long. He heard the frantic pounding of feet and raised voices from the other end of the hallway. After he waited for a long count of 20, he peeked his head out the door. The hallway was empty.
They’d even left the door to the office open in their hurry, he discovered. He kept low to the ground so no one could see him through the window. There were a few papers scattered here and there, but a glance was enough to reveal that they were just detritus from the former legitimate owners of the warehouse.
Any information about the current inhabitants was probably on the silver laptop, which had been oh-so-kindly left open and logged in. Izuku clicked the button on the side of his right shoe, and a little compartment in the thick sole sprang open. He grabbed the flashdrive inside and inserted it into the laptop, before starting to download the most interesting folders.
He’d managed to copy most of the contents of the desktop onto the drive before he heard the door swing open. He cursed, rising to his feet and throwing out a roundhouse kick in the same motion.
His heel connected with the man’s face. Izuku saw a flash of pink hair and red eyes before the man stumbled back and tumbled down the stairs.
Izuku winced as the man cried out and crashed into the walls on his way down. That was loud. Too loud. And it was sloppy of him to get caught in the first place anyway! He was lucky it was just one guy.
He disconnected the flashdrive and slipped it back into its compartment. If his abductors hadn’t found it before, they probably wouldn’t find it if he was recaptured.
He dashed down the stairs two at a time. The pink-haired man (no visible mutations, likely an emitter quirk, maybe something with attention, or quiet footsteps?) lay collapsed at the bottom. There was minimal blood, and even though one wrist looked a little twisted, Izuku didn’t think he had any major injuries.
There was a lot of very aggressive noise coming from the main warehouse - raised voices, crashes, etc., so Izuku slipped back towards the women’s restroom.
“Hey kid,” a voice growled out suddenly from behind him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Izuku turned to face a familiar man. He was one of the three who had jumped Izuku - the most distinctive of the three, since he had some sort of bear-like mutation quirk. “I was just going to the bathroom,” Izuku said, without any hint of a stutter. He can’t talk to his classmates without stammering over every other word, but talking to a criminal who kidnapped him is fine, actually. Thanks, social anxiety.
The man growled, low, deep, and threatening. He brandished his hands, which grew long, sharp claws. A mutant quirk with a transformational aspect then! How cool!
“You won’t be going anywhere,” the man snarled as he advanced on Izuku. “You’re going to come with me, nice and gentle-like, and maybe I won’t cut you, huh?”
“And if I don’t?” Izuku asked, retreating back a few steps.
The man bared his fangs. “Then I’ll finally get to have some fun, little- urgh!”
He choked and flailed backwards as a bandage-like cloth wrapped around his throat and slammed him to the ground. His thick, menacing claws disappeared.
“Eraserhead!” Izuku cheered. “That was so cool! I didn’t realize you could erase transformational parts of mutation quirks! Or maybe his actual quirk was the claw transformation, and his physical appearance is a vestige of an ancestry that included a bear mutation quirk,” he mumbled.
“Problem Child,” Eraserhead sighed as he cuffed the man and handed him off to the two police officers hovering behind him. “This is the second time this month.”
“In my defense,” Izuku replied, “these guys were really incompetent.”
“How is that a defense?” Eraserhead asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “You should have avoided being grabbed in the first place, then.”
“I tried!” he protested. “But Kacchan and the others went home right after school -”
“You couldn’t have taken another route?”
“But they would have known I was onto them! Oh!” Izuku brightened. “And you wouldn’t have this!” He popped open the compartment again and proudly held out the flashdrive to Eraserhead. The hero took it with another long sigh.
“Can you tone down the recklessness a bit?” It was the closest Izuku had ever heard Eraserhead get to begging. “Just until you reach high school, and then maybe you’ll be some other hero’s problem.”
“UA’s my top choice!” Izuku informed the hero brightly, ignoring the man’s groan. He fell into step with him as Eraserhead led the way out of the warehouse. “I know I don’t have a quirk, but I know we can register support equipment, and I’m going to register my shoes, of course, because I’m not going anywhere without at least one panic button, or you and mom will kill me -”
A hand ruffling his hair abruptly cut him off. “You’ll do fine, Problem Child,” Eraserhead said. He wasn’t looking at Izuku, but his voice (and his hand) were warm. “You just need to keep your wits about you. And from what I’ve seen, wits seem to be a specialty of yours.”
Izuku might have teared up at that, and Eraserhead quickly made his escape. (The man is allergic to tears, Izuku swears.)
Tsukauchi and Sansa greeted him as Eraserhead took off and hustled him into a police cruiser. It was dark outside, which means his prediction about the poor response time of heroes in the area was correct. Eraserhead was probably called in when none of the daylight heroes on duty responded.
His mom met him at the station, and after the usual procedure of giving his statement to Tsukauchi, drove him home.
“Again, Izuku?” she asked, glancing in the rearview mirror to look at him. “Why do these things always happen to you?”
Izuku shrugged, and stared out at the passing houses. “Just another part of being quirkless, I guess.”
Bonus:
“The League of Villains have kidnapped Midoriya Izuku and -”
Aizawa groaned and slammed his head down on the table. All the teachers turned to stare at him.
“Yes, Aizawa-kun?” asked Nedzu, cocking his head to one side. “Something to share?”
“Just contact Tsukauchi for the tracking info,” Aizawa replied, not even bothering to lift up his head. “If they find the one in his shoulder, there’s also the one in his hip and his-”
Aizawa’s phone pinged. He glanced down at it and sighed again.
“And it looks like they didn’t check his shoes, so it’s a moot point. Let’s go before he gets too far into their servers.”
“What,” Present Mic whispered emphatically, “the absolute fuck.”