Warning for some non-consensual touching. Nothing particularly graphic but it's still here and present so be wary.

Pain. Throbbing, swollen, perpetual pain, pounding at the inner walls of his skull like a drum. It was unfortunately a familiar sensation, almost an old friend at that point. He felt dizzy, disoriented, sickly and wrong, so very wrong, like he was missing something.

"Wake up, Deku. We've got some talking to do."

Izuku Midoriya awoke slowly, blinking blearily as he tried to clear away the haze of unconsciousness. He brought a hand up to his face, and found that he couldn't quite reach that far, something cold and hard around his wrists preventing him from actually moving much at all. A ragged moan escaped his lips as the insides of his skull throbbed in protest at this failed attempt at motion, along with the sudden light filtering into his vision. He slammed his eyes closed again, but then wearily forced them open. His whole body ached, but his head was the worst of it, with his brain feeling like it was pressing against the walls of his skull, trapped, confined in a space too small for it.

All of this felt familiar, the pain and the throbbing, and yet something was wrong. He saw in front of him Shigaraki, grinning with all the malice of the devil, and the emaciated form of Toga, who was still naked and strapped to a metal table. Her ankle was still a swollen mess, his makeshift splint having been removed. The sight sent a quick surge of anger through him, but he still felt hollow and distant and his head throbbed all the worse when he tried to channel One For All into his body. Shigaraki snapped his fingers in front of Izuku's face, and he winced.

"Pay attention." the villain commanded. "I'm only gonna say this once."

Shigaraki stared him down for a long moment, that leering smile vanishing from his face and leaving behind something a lot more terrifying; a strange, empty expression, like he was bored already of both his captives. As far as Izuku could tell, they were alone; it was just Shigaraki, Toga and himself. Toga was conscious and looked quite afraid and far more alert, evidently having been taken off whatever sedative had been used to keep her so docile in the warehouse. Shigaraki's hands came up and cupped Izuku's cheeks, one finger raised on each side, his red eyes narrowed as he looked deep into Izuku's green.

Then he let go, and turned around. One hand flexed and twitched; the one with the broken finger, the left one. The right was fine, and it too was rapidly clenching and unclenching, forming a claw shape and then letting it fade into an open hand before tensing again. Shigaraki's breathing was slow and heavy, like he was forcing himself to breathe, to stay calm. Slowly those hands came up and he began to scratch at the scarred sides of his neck, inflaming the pre-existing red lines and making them swell up brighter.

"I'm not going to kill you." he said, voice a low rasp, far from the bemused snarling and laughing of the warehouse. "No, no, no I'm not going to kill you. That'd be too easy… no. No killing."

Izuku looked down at him, dangling from the wall, and Shigaraki twitched violently, a spasm running through his body. He looked down at Toga, who was watching him with terrified eyes, and Izuku couldn't quite make out what changed on his face to make Toga's fear turn to horror until Shigaraki turned and he saw the smile was back.

"No, what was it you said in the warehouse?" Shigaraki put a finger to his chin and cocked his head to the side like a child. "You didn't say anything about killing me. You were going to put me down… but no, I liked the other one better. The part at the end before Eraserhead shot you. What was it you said?"

Izuku felt ice water run down his back and a trembling break out all across his body as Shigaraki took a step closer. He tried again to spark One For All but nothing came of it, none of his inherited power would answer his call. Shigaraki leaned in closer, that smile fading again and a look of pure, unbridled hate filling his expression instead.

"Right." he said, with a voice like graveyard wind. "I'm going to break you."

Then he turned, and brought a finger up to his chin again.

"But how best to do that?" he wondered aloud. "I can't hurt you. You hurt yourself enough that you probably wouldn't even mind. I can't kill you… that's too easy. But!"

Shigaraki turned again, spinning in place and throwing his arms wide. His smile was back, his expression the look of the cat who had caught the canary. Predatory, vicious, an absolute lack of mercy made plain by the light in his eyes as he spoke his next words.

"I can hurt her." he said, and Izuku pulled at the chains holding his arms over his head desperately. "Oh, you wouldn't like that at all, would you? That would just be awful… you wouldn't be able to do anything to stop me! You'd just have to sit and watch as I took away something you loved…"

His voice dropped octave by octave as he spoke, until it was nothing but a cold whisper that sent shudders all through Izuku's body.

"Just like me."

Shigaraki turned back to Toga, who was squirming weakly in her restraints, and reached out with a hand. He traced a single finger along her chest, making a little figure eight before pulling downwards, as if searching. He stopped on her navel and pressed the finger a little deeper.

"Maybe I'll start here, take away her chances at any more little bundles of joy?" he asked, before his finger went lower and traced between her thighs. Toga whimpered, a quavering sound of fear that made Izuku's fury burn even brighter.

"Shigaraki, stop." He tried to put an authoritative spin on his voice, but it just rasped out less like a command and more like a plea. "Don't do this."

"I could just grab right here… her screams would be incredible…" Toga whimpered again, Shigaraki's hand tracing a little lower down her leg, to her knee. He didn't even acknowledge Izuku's voice, ignoring him completely. "Or maybe here, take away a leg. A leg for two kids, that's fair trade, right?"

"Shigaraki…" Izuku tried again.

Shigaraki's finger wandered further down, touching Toga's swollen mess of an ankle, and she let out a pained groan. He pressed harder with that one finger and the groan grew louder, Toga's arms straining at the straps holding her down before Shigaraki stopped.

"I think I'll leave that there…" he whispered, as if sharing a secret with the two of them. "I wouldn't want to make things better… but…"

"Shigaraki!" Izuku cried out this time. "Just hurt me! She was on your side, remember? She was with you!"

"I KNOW." Shigaraki snarled the words, before his finger began tracing the shape of Toga's other ankle, slowly dancing around. "That's not what this is about. What she did doesn't matter anymore, Deku. I don't care about her… I never did, and I never will. She was an NPC who disobeyed commands, and now she's just a toy."

He put three fingers and a thumb around Toga's intact ankle, a white-knuckle grip, but his pinky finger still hung above the rest, yet to come down. Izuku pulled with all his strength at the chains over his head, but it was no use. He was still weak from the tranquilizer, and One For All wasn't working. His shoulders and elbows screamed as he pulled, particularly on his right side where any more damage would render that arm entirely unusable. He wanted to scream himself, but he bit his lip and kept pulling.

"Shigaraki…" The villain didn't even turn around.

"And I never took very good care of my toys." The pink finger came down, and Toga screamed.

It was a slow process, turning a human ankle to dust. At least, it seemed to be, however many seconds it was turning to a hundred eternities in Izuku's mind. He watched, he had to watch, he couldn't look away and he couldn't fight free and he couldn't save her, so he watched as Toga's face twisted, as skin, muscle and bone disintegrated under Shigaraki's cruel touch, as she bucked and twisted in her restraints.

He watched as her foot fell to the floor, crumbling away to nothing, and she was left with a ragged stump some two inches above where the ankle had been. He watched as she tried to pass out from the pain, and then tried to knock herself out by slamming the back of her head against the table. The strap over her forehead prevented her from even granting herself that small mercy.

Then he watched as Shigaraki stood up, and turned around, and smiled at Izuku with a hand covered in dust. He shook the particles that had once been Toga's ankle off his hand and then patted Izuku on one straining shoulder with it, one finger raised to prevent any accidental disintegrations.

"I'll be back," he promised. "Try not to fall asleep on me again."

Izuku didn't even look at him. He stared at Toga, pitifully sobbing on the table from the pain and despair and everything else he could feel bubbling inside his own chest, and he let out a single choked sob with her before swallowing it back.

"Why?" he asked Shigaraki's back, and to his surprise the man turned around and answered with a simple, almost friendly smile.

"Because I can." he said, before closing the heavy metal door of the cell and disappearing from Izuku's sight.

There was a morbid silence in the cell after that, the sound of Toga's cries the only thing to fill the room besides Izuku's slow, steady breathing. Eventually she stopped, or at least muffled the sound by biting her own tongue, and Izuku looked at her.

"I'm sorry." he said, too weak to speak in anything more than a dry whisper. "Toga… I didn't want this."

"It's okay…" she murmured, between sobs. "Deserve… it…"

"No!" Izuku shook his head frantically, pulling on the chains without thinking in an effort to reach out toward her. "Toga, you don't deserve this! Nobody deserves this!"

"Ko-Ko was… a bad… bad girl…" Her eyes seemed far away in that moment when she whimpered, shaking her head and closing her eyes. "Papa… be mad…"

Izuku blinked. This… wasn't what he expected from Toga, not in a million years. Some sort of muddled, incomprehensible nonsense about her twisted 'love' for him, maybe, but this helpless, traumatized, child-like fear? It almost reminded him of Eri when he first met her in the street, clinging to his leg and quietly pleading for help. But this wasn't Eri. Eri was blameless, innocent. This was Toga, who had killed who-knows how many innocent people, who had done terrible things, who had killed Izuku's own mother…

And yet, Izuku couldn't hate her.

"Toga… Himiko." he called her using her name, her first name, and that seemed to do the trick as her body jolted a little. "Himiko… it's me. It's Izuku. You know me. You… we…"

His chest tightened, his eyes watered and he forced out the next words, because now that all his anger and frustration and sheer, undeniable hatred of Shigaraki and everything he stood for had slipped away, all he was left with was despair and the realization that he was trapped in a room and would be forced to watch a girl he should hate but couldn't be slowly killed by a psychopath. She shifted a little, head turning to one side, to face towards him. Her eyes still told him she was far away, however, the reaction likely an automatic one in response to her own name.

"We have two children." he said, clinging to that truth as a last scrap of hope. "Al baby boy and girl. They… I came to save them… to save you. Do you remember?"

The way her eyes were glazed over, the delayed reactions… a head injury, it had to be. Some sort of brain damage, likely caused by either some blow to the head he'd missed earlier in the warehouse or something that had been done to her while he was unconscious. Looking at her more closely he could see the definite signs of a beating; bruises along her arms and legs that hadn't been there before, he didn't think, and the way she was shifting her head made him suspect she was trying to keep part of it from touching the metal of the table.

She stared up at him, blinking slowly, before a tentative smile slowly stretched across her face, a genuine look of joy tempered by fear and hesitation. She was like Eri, so much so it hurt… had she regressed to some prior mental state? Was that even scientifically possible? He'd done plenty of research on injuries to the arms and legs, but little involving the head. Perhaps it was the effect of some Quirk? That didn't make any sense; he'd never heard of a Quirk that could do something like this.

"Babies…?" she repeated, before her eyes flashed, and she swallowed. "Izu-kun?"

She blinked, and looked at him like she was seeing him for the first time since he had woken up. That mad gleam in her eyes was back, the red orbs no longer watery and innocent. She had recovered her killer's instinct, that harsh light behind the crimson of her irises, and for a moment he shivered before he remembered that she was bound even more strictly than he was.

"Izu-kun… the babies… Izu-kun's babies… are they safe?" she asked him, and he nodded.

"I… I think so." he replied. "Shigaraki would have… would have threatened us with them, he did it before. He mentioned not having them, I think… Himiko, I'm… I'm going to get us out of here."

"I can't walk…" she reminded him, wiggling the stump of her right foot, and he winced at the sight. "Izu-kun… how are we going to…?"

Izuku thought for a long while about that. If he were being honest with himself, escape sounded almost impossible at the moment. They were in the League's clutches, hopelessly outnumbered, and they had a Quirk-nullifier. A badly injured Quirk-nullifier, but still, the point stood. He wasn't sure if any backup was coming, and if there was it would likely take them some time to find wherever the League had warped them to. The only real option he could see was breaking them out himself, escaping… with a crippled Toga.

He could leave her.

The thought came in a flash and instantly he swatted it aside mentally. No. That wasn't an option, that was… he wasn't a villain. He wasn't going to go and abandon somebody to the hands of a madman like Shigaraki. It wasn't going to happen. He had to stay strong, stand by his convictions, now more than ever.

He thought of his friends, of Iida and Uraraka and Todoroki and even Bakugou. He thought of All-Might, to whom he owed so much. He thought of his mother, who would never have wanted him to choose the path of a villain. And then he nodded once.

"I'll… I'll think of something." he reassured her, still scrambling to do just that. "Just… hold on."

Toga watched him for a little while, before smiling. It wasn't her smile. At least, it wasn't one he had seen before. Toga's smile was akin to that of a predator, all sharp teeth and cold eyes, hungry in the way she pitched her head forward and twisted her lips. But this… this seemed more like a smile of fondness, of hope… of love. Izuku had seen his mother smile like that before, while discussing his father. And for once, when he met her eye and she smiled like that, he didn't shudder or cringe away. It didn't make him afraid. Izuku wasn't afraid of Toga. Not any more.

But he was afraid for her.

And for a time they lingered in silence, Izuku dangling from the wall and Toga shivering on the cold metal table, still smiling at him. Her eyes closed after a time but the way she shifted a little now and then told him she wasn't asleep. Like as not she was trying to be, but with the pain of a ruined ankle and a missing foot… sleep was unlikely. So Izuku stared at her, really looking at her for the first time. Not as an analysis, not to see what was wrong, not to discern how best to fight her. He just wanted to see her. See Toga. See the girl who had taken so much from him, who had hurt him.

It was strange. This waif of a girl, so delicate looking, with such a childish mannerism, had done more to hurt him than Shigaraki or Stain or Overhaul. They had attacked him, tried to kill him, but she had killed his mother. She had… used him, forced herself upon him, and for a moment that sickly sensation of disgust and horror built up in his throat like bile before he forced it back down and closed his eyes.

"I should hate you."

The words came unbidden to his lips, a dry croak that over the course of four simple syllables made her smile fade and her eyes open up, so wide with something that looked so much like fear it almost made him regret the words. And yet he didn't apologize; instead he met her gaze with one of his own, unblinking and inviolate.

"You took my mama from me," he continued, but his voice lacked any accusatory tone. It was a repetition of facts, something they both knew to be true. "You killed her. Used her face. Used her to get to me, to hurt me, to use me like a toy…"

"Killed her?"

Izuku choked. Not on spittle, or on air, but on his own words, because he was well associated with liars by now. All he needed to do was look in the mirror, to speak to anyone who tried to tell him they thought nothing less of him after what had happened. Toga didn't look like them. She looked confused, baffled even, like what he said made zero sense to her. He stared back, and then she shook her head weakly.

"I didn't wanna kill Izu-kun's mama…" she continued. "I poked her a little with a needle and made her go to sleep, but she was breathing. She wasn't… she was breathing. She was gonna… she was…"

Izuku felt something awful then. Dread, perhaps, or guilt. Shame. He wasn't sure, this felt an awful lot like all of them. But looming tall and ominous over it all was basic, plain confusion. If Toga was telling the truth, if she hadn't killed his mother… who had? Why? How? She was beaten to death, bludgeoned with a heavy metal object until she died of internal bleeding. Aizawa-Sensei had told him so, and he'd read the file.

But then he remembered.

"You hit me with a rolling pin." he said aloud, eyes wide as he flashed back and remembered Toga's smile and the heavy thud of the kitchen implement striking his head. "From the kitchen. But it was a crowbar, she was killed with a crowbar, they said… I thought… but you had…"

He had forgotten. He had forgotten until it was right in front of him. Bludgeoned over the head to the point of near-catatonia, drugged and violated, of course he had forgotten! He could barely remember a single moment of that night as anything other than a hazy, dreamlike vision of something horrible and twisted. But…

"You never had a crowbar." he said the words aloud. "You didn't kill her. You wouldn't have beaten her anyways, you would have stabbed her. You only hit me so I couldn't fight back. But… you would have stabbed her. You didn't. You only took blood and… but…"

His mind raced, his headache forgotten in the wake of all these revelations. Who had done this then? Who had taken his mother from him? Why? What was happening? Why did any of this happen to him?

He stared at Toga, who stared at him, and asked again the question that had defined his life for months now.

"Why?"

Because she's insane, his mind immediately provided. Because she's a crazy girl who gets off on blood and pain, because she thinks you're cute when you bleed and suffer, because she's Himiko Toga and you're Izuku Midoriya and she thinks you're destined to be together for some reason.

"Because you cared." she said, and his mind immediately fell silent because apparently it was a liar. "When mama and papa didn't. You told the blonde boy to stop. Nobody else would, because I was Leech and Bloodsucker and Freak. But you stopped him. And he hurt you."

She looked at him with that faraway glimmer in her eyes again, and he realized she was seeing what had happened to her, much like how he constantly saw what had happened to him. But she didn't shiver or shake or curl up on herself (not that it was an option). She just laid there, still as stone, and remembered.

"And you were laying there on the grass." she continued. "And you had blood on your lip, and I kissed you because the pretty girl always kisses the hero, that's what the storybooks say. And it tasted so good… and you asked if I was okay even though you were all burnt and bruised, and every time the blonde boy tried to hurt me you stopped him and he hurt you instead. And you never hurt me."

She sniffled, and he realized that those same distant eyes were clouding with tears as she spoke, and her fingers were curling as if trying to reach towards him. But the leather straps were resolute, pinning her down.

"And I wanted you so much, because mama and papa were awful." she said. "Your mama was nice and patted me on the head and you didn't touch me or hurt me or yell at me when I started shaking like a bad girl… and when I cried under the tree you hugged me. And you cared. Nobody else cared. Nobody else but you."

She spoke the words as if making a confession, and Izuku too remembered as she said them. He remembered a messy blonde girl with yellow eyes and a pallid complexion, practically swimming in a dirty beige hoodie far too large for her tiny form, hiding from Kacchan behind a tree. He remembered Kacchan finding her, calling her Freak and trying to explode her. He remembered standing between them, the burns on his body, Kacchan yelling at him to stop being such a useless Deku and getting in his way. He remembered Kacchan's fist striking his lip, the coppery taste of blood on his tongue.

He remembered the girl coming back, kissing him. His first kiss at age seven, maybe eight? The girl said her name was Ko-Ko, that he was her hero.

Her hero.

Himiko Toga's hero.

"I didn't want to be like mama." Toga continued. "To drink and smoke and shoot things into my arm to feel better. I didn't want… I didn't want to be with someone like papa, I didn't want to feel him touching me and holding me and…"

She made a noise, a choked sound that was all at once sorrow and misery and fear, and Izuku winced to hear it.

"You wouldn't be like him." she said. "And I wouldn't be like mama. We would be good, and happy, and your babies would be happy too and I wouldn't call them freak or monster and you wouldn't touch them or hurt them and we could be good because Izu-kun is good."

"You wanted a family." Izuku said, a realization dawning on him. "You wanted me. So you could start a family. Why… why me?"

"Because Izu-kun is good," she said, as if the answer were obvious. "And because I love you."

"But you… used me." he replied. "That isn't… that's not love. That's evil. It's villainous. Why would you…"

She sniffled again.

"Because nobody could love a monster." she told him. "Nobody could love a freak. Nobody could ever love Ko-Ko. Mama said so. But if I made babies for you, you'd be happy and you'd love them and… and maybe you'd love me, eventually."

Izuku wasn't sure what he felt at that point. It was something. Something angry, tired, hateful, sorrowful, pitiful. Something that felt like fire in his stomach. Something that made him tremble, because he didn't know how to express it. Something he had felt before, something that was uncomfortably familiar.

"Your mother was wrong," he said, and Toga… no, Himiko looked at him with disbelief and confusion plain on her face. "She… she was wrong, Himiko. You aren't a freak. You aren't a monster. And if you are, it's because she made you into one. Your mama and papa are monsters. You're…"

What was Himiko Toga? A villain? Maybe. A murderer? Definitely. A rapist? Well, he knew the answer to that question well enough. And yet how much of that was even her fault? Her Quirk made blood a dependency, like food and water, something she needed to intake. It also made her an outcast, someone to be feared and shunned. Her parents were… if even part of what she was telling him was true, they were practically villains who had shaped her into what she was now. Of course she has latched onto him. His standing up to Kacchan to protect her, protect the scared little girl with the watery yellow eyes and the scars on her back he only saw by accident… he was the first person who seemed to care.

So what was she then?

"You're Himiko Toga." he decided. "And I'm Deku."

He smiled then, because he thought he might finally understand what he had to do. It was an awful plan. It was a foolish plan. But it was all he had. That awful, foolish plan and his drive.

"Your Hero." he declared, before his eyes flared green and his right arm lit up with red lines and green lightning. "So don't worry."

She smiled, hopeful, awestruck and for once free of that killer instinct. He pulled with his arm and felt the concrete of the wall give way along with the bones in his arm, but in the moment the pain didn't even register as he brought his arm and the shackles and the piece of wall down and obliterated the edge of the table she was bound to, multiple straps breaking off instantly and freeing her. The sound was loud, the crashing and banging enough to wake the dead.

But Izuku didn't care. He looked at Toga, who was already scrambling to free herself, and pulled his other arm free, dragging even more of the wall along. Nothing broke this time, though his right arm was a mess. But he didn't care. Because he was a hero, and here was somebody who needed saving. So he smiled at her, and spoke those words that had driven him to tears so many times and watched as she did as he always had.

"I am here."