Midoriya Izuku walks up to the receptionist of the hero agency.
"Hello," he greets her. "I'm here to fight, uhh…" he looks at smudged writing on his hand. "Hunks."
The lady squints at him, then shakes her head. "Sparring room's on the third floor, you can follow the signs from the elevator, I'll tell Hawks you're waiting for him." She points at the elevator.
"No, I need to fight him." Izuku clarifies. "Like, die."
"…huh," the receptionist says, and reaches around her back for something. Izuku never finds out what it is, though, because a man with very large bird wings pops around the corner to Izuku's left.
"WHO WANTS TO FIGHT ME?" He says, coming to a stop. He has two very calm teenagers trailing behind him, and Izuku wonders if they're used to him or if that's just how they are.
"Me," Izuku holds up one of his hands. The receptionist relaxes in the corner of his eye. "I was thinking we should take it outside, though."
Hawks puts his hands on his hips. Izuku refrains himself from asking about his hero name. "Make an appointment, kid!" He suggests. "I have interns to take care of." He juts his thumb at the kids behind him.
Izuku can't make an appointment. "I'm a villain."
Hawks' brows furrow. "You're a kid."
"I multitask."
The hero makes the letter Y with his hand and waggles it by the side of his face, looking at the receptionist. Popo? He mouths. The woman nods. "Okay, let's go!"
Izuku walks out of the lobby first. Behind him and Hawks, he can hear the interns privately conversing. "Is this a common occurrence?" The one with the bird head asks the one half encased in ice. Izuku looks between him and Hawks for a moment, wondering if the birds are related.
The ice one doesn't sound very sure when he says, "No?"
Only once their procession reaches a crosswalk does Hawks realize a pretty important thing. "Got a place for this fight?" He was probably too busy tracking his every move to think about where they were supposed to do this sooner.
"Any open area will work." Izuku muses. "I don't have a destructive quirk." The quirk he does have, the absolute worst twelfth birthday present ever, was called Bulletproof Heart. It made all his vital organs pretty much indestructible, so he could be trained to his superiors' content without dying on them, as long as no one choked him or let him bleed out. It also frustratingly enough made it difficult to let them down for good on assassination missions like this by getting killed. He made up for it by executing them the absolute worst way possible, like, say, announcing to his target's receptionist that he wanted to fight them to the death.
He catches the flash of confusion on Hawks' face before it's wiped clean. It might have shouted his thought process from the roofs for how well Izuku could read it: Why is this kid giving away information that would be useful to him kept secret until we fought? He must be a rookie, or a veteran acting like one to get my guard down. Izuku wants to laugh as Hawks double-checks his face of scars and hardens his features.
"So, what's your rank?" Izuku says to keep the conversation flowing as Hawks leads them to whatever location he has in mind. Izuku will brofist him if it's a police station.
"Number three," is Hawks' answer.
Izuku raises his eyebrows and huffs, impressed. Wow, Kurogiri must finally be getting sick of me. Alright, that's cool.
Going by the face Hawks is wearing, he said that out loud. He shrugs at him.
They use a park close to the hero agency to fight. Even though Izuku came with three knives up each of his sleeves, has his modified brass knuckles secured under his fingerless gloves, and actually tried a little near the end there, he loses.
Hawks is pinning him to the ground pretty solidly with his own knife pressed against his throat lightly enough to leave the skin intact. Izuku loves the irony; the bold challenger brought down with a final blow from his own weapon. Hawks has his wings splayed out and puffed up, and he looks seriously huge. A bit of his hair is matted with blood from a lucky shot, and it's also dripping a bit down into his visor. The knife rests right between the ends of the scar Father gave Izuku that makes it look like someone tried to saw his head off with a small knife but forgot to keep the knife at the same height all the way around, so one end was lower than the other. That's only a little far off from what actually happened. It would be funny if the hero holding him down completed the circle.
Hawks, seeing this as a win, starts to pull the knife away from Izuku, who momentarily panics. This is a perfect opportunity; he can't just watch it slide by. Complete the circle!
"Finish the job, bitch," he snarls first, but Hawks doesn't listen. He resorts to ripping his arm out from his hold and yanking the blade back to its rightful place. Hawks looks shocked, and somewhere in the back of Izuku's mind, he doesn't blame him. The knife splits his skin. "They're fucking watching." Always watching. "Please, just do it." He says. "You'd be saving me a lot of trouble."
Hawks releases the knife from his grip and it takes a second for it to fall out of the little incision on his neck to the ground. Izuku lets go of his white-knuckled grip on the hero's wrist, and scrabbles for the knife himself so he can keep fighting and make him have to finish him off–
Hawks almost doesn't catch Izuku's hand fast enough, but he does, so he starts thrashing underneath him, eyes wide and angry and teeth bared.
One of the interns, who had been watching for villainous backup from a distance with the other, intervenes with a very fast jet of ice, engulfing the knife and creating a partial barrier between the foes. It's an educated guess that leads him to the conclusion that it's the ice one. He hauls him to his feet by his uninjured arm. Oh, how considerate.
This close to the ratty teenager villain, Shouto can see how greasy his hair is and can smell exactly how strongly he reeks of dried blood. He looks up at him, and Shouto know it's wrong to feel kinship with a villain, however shallow, but… those scars. They remind him of his own, currently hidden.
Relating with villains leads to stupid decisions, and he demonstrates this by melting off the ice on his head. The villain's deadpan expression melts away with it, and it's quickly replaced by a lopsided smile. It only looks that way because of the scar on its left side, whose tissue grew stiffer, like the villain had spent the duration of his recovery without smiling once. He doesn't fight Shouto's grip. Hawks walks towards the road and Tokoyami, somehow trusting him with the villain.
"You too?" He says, tapping his eye with the sagging eyelid and a scar through it.
Shouto hadn't expected him to point it out right off the bat. "…Yeah."
The police arrive, parking their cars in quick succession along the road Hawks and Tokoyami are going towards. Shouto moves to follow them with the villain in tow, but finds himself upside down? His gut wrenches, remembering how the villain hadn't utilized his quirk in the battle, at least in a way that he could see. He coats the first thing he touches with his right hand with a solid layer of ice, but then there's a crack and someone's laughing, and he comes to his senses. The villain's whisking him away somewhere. He finds his leg and digs his fingers in and locks his knee in another, thicker layer of ice, but then there's another crack and the ice is falling away. The villain continues to run.
He tricked him with that moment of friendliness. Fucking bastard. The next time he gets ahold of his body, he sends a sheet over his entire person. That also fails to hinder him, and there are probably civilians or at least something that needs insurance in the vicinity, so he can't conjure a glacier like he had multiple times in the Sports Festival not long ago. Shouto cranks down his temperature on his right and cranks it up on his left, melting off his ice. He can endure the ache down the middle of his body where the two extremes clash.
He is soon dropped.
Shouto scrambles to his feet while the villain amicably settles down on the concrete. He'd brought him to an alley, and he can see the trees of the park out the end, so not a teleportation or portal quirk. "So what was it? Dad, Mom, accident?" he asks, like he didn't just kidnap him. He's ignoring the frost crusted on every inch of him save for his right arm, which is bright red and visibly burnt because the sleeve's gone. Shouto only lets himself feel a little bad. He glares at him. The villain holds his hands up in mock surrender. Shouto marches over and tries to pick up the villain like he had in the park, but he goes dramatically limp in his grip.
So Shouto does the reasonable thing, and grabs him by the hand and starts dragging him back towards the road. The villain laughs, again, and that was another weird thing. Even though Shouto knows most villains don't have a villainous laugh, it's somehow more unnerving when they have a totally normal one, like the kids in his class or the people in the street. He knows villains are students in classrooms and people on streets, everyone is, but it's just a clash of mindset.
In hopes of getting him to cooperate, Shouto replies, "Mom. My father drove her mad."
The villain huffs a smaller laugh, still not helping at all in the transportation department. "I think Endeavor'd drive anyone mad if they were in his presence long enough."
Shouto fights off the urge to smile.
"Well, for me," the villain continues, "it's my dad," he points at his eye again and his neck, "my brother," he gestures to his chin, "and my brother's babysitter," he finishes, touching an old laceration on his cheekbone and then pushing back his longish hair to make his mottled ear visible. Shouto, a reasonably sane human being, is vaguely alarmed by this. It sort of makes sense that he's a villain, if that's how he grew up. The fucking babysitter got in on the throttling?
They make it out of the alley, the villain still being dragged, and a police officer running from the direction of the park spots them. They start running towards them.
The villain, probably seeing this, keeps going. It's starting to sound like he's a little desperate to talk. "You know, being killed by a hero is the best way to go."
Shouto waves at the officer. "And why would that be?" He indulges him. He's really starting to worry for this guy.
"I can't be blamed, so they can't kill anyone I care about."
…What.
The villain abruptly stands up of his own volition, and Shouto sees the trail of blood he was leaving for the first time. He grins at Shouto again and readjusts his dragging hand to… entwine their fingers. This is way too intimate for this situation. Shouto's trying to get him arrested.
Then he disappears.
At first Shouto thinks that the villain's hand warmth lingers in his strongly, but then the hand that's somehow still in his squeezes, so he looks down. His arm disappears about halfway between his elbow and wrist into a purple warp gate. It's just like the ones at the USJ –
It's the same as the ones at USJ.
Shouto drops the hand like a hot coal and yanks it out of the gate, clutching it to his chest. The warp silently blinks out of existence, and the officer comes to a stop in front of him.
"What the hell just happened?" They ask the empty air Shouto's hand just came out of.
As if he knows.