A/N:: (Disclaimer) Implications of incest. Nothing graphic, but present.

Anyway, thanks for sticking around this far. You all are amazing.

Enjoy! Please R&R!

Chapter 15 Searching

He awoke to the warmth of lips on his defined chest, of morning-chilled fingers pulling his hair from his neck to allow for another kiss. The love bite near his collarbone, outlined red from her expertise, tingled from additional attention, and Shota's eyes peeled open against the sun, unwilling to be disturbed of the peaceful blankness that was sleep. Where Eri was not missing and where he could not see that she was gone. Outside, a rusty lawnmower served as an alarm for every house within a five-mile radius.

"Oh, you're awake." His eye slid over to the source of the voice he already knew. Chi. "You're so quiet. You were out out afterwards." Shota sat up as she spoke, running his hand down his face, then up to rake back his bangs. He looked down at his bare chest, at his naked thighs, and kicked his legs over the side of the bed.

I fucked up again, he thought, scowling.

"Not that I really noticed. I was beat."

He stepped into his boxer briefs, discovering more throbbing lip-marks on his inner thigh. Eri's missing, out there without me, and I go fuck my sister just 'cause Ma pissed me off. He rubbed his eyes.

Chi crawled over, brown hair slipping carelessly over her face. Her lips shone in the slit of sunlight creeping through window blinds. Hands gripped his waist, trailing up to graze his well-knit core. He looked at her over his shoulder. "Shower?"

"Yeah," was all he said before turning away again. The shower lasted for only a minute. When he got out, he looked just as exhausted and grief-stricken as before. Maybe worse.

Chi tied her hair up in an inch-long ponytail. "Thought I'd get started on some breakfast. Your stomach was growling in your sleep."

"I have to go," Shota replied.

"Already?"

"I have work."

"We all have work, Mr. Busy Body. Stay for a while."

"I have to get back to Musutafu."

"I have morning traffic to battle, too. You're not the only one."

Shota rolled his eyes. Classic Chi and her passive-aggressive shit. "It's urgent. I'm not in the mood to argue, Chi."

"I'm not the one trying to bounce right off the bat."

He ignored her. She would never stop berating him with guilt- and power-trips until he gave in. Ignoring her helped. Down the hall, he found his pants. At the foot of the stairs, his weapons belt. His shirt and undershirt on the banister. And by the front door, his boots and scarf, goggles tangled up in that mess somewhere. Uncaring to untangle and re-ravel the scarf, he stepped into his boots, tossed his goggles around his neck, bundled the scarf up under an arm. "Where're the twins?" He looked around for his keys where he stood.

His sister crossed her arms, watching him search. "At Dad's."

"That's lucky," he said, dipping his hand deep into his pocket. No keys there. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking last night. I just…" He barely met Chi's eyes for longer than a few seconds. "Never mind."

"Give Dad a call," was her simple answer.

Shota adjusted the scarf when a metallic slam startled the two siblings. When he looked down—keys. He snatched them with haste, wanting—no, needing—to get the hell out of the house. "Tell the boys Uncle Shota says hey."

Chi watched him in a manner suited for an insurance agent, with lingering consideration and reconsideration. Skepticism. "You still hate the old guy, huh?" Shota spotted his phone on the floor and rammed it down his pocket. "Well, tell the same to your girl."

"Yeah." He shut the door. The inside of his pocket was still damp from last night's rain, and the moisture chilled on his skin this chilly morning. Unlocking and sinking into his car, Shota ignored the piercing cold of the leather seats and tossed his scarf and wallet in the passenger seat. Blackstreet shrilled from the speakers the moment the ignition turned.

Your girl.

Chi knew nothing about Eri's disappearance, but she ought to have. It was almost mockery, how that phrase came out; and Shota nearly dove back into her to start up round four. He nearly surrendered his energy and time into their eight-year affair of familial sin just to rid himself of the agonizing knowledge that his little world had vanished.

He considered a thought: was Eri intermingled with the constant state of dreariness and loneliness he stored in his chilled heart? Had he been born with a predisposed sense of I'm-going-to-lose-someone-precious interwoven in his DNA, like a Quirk gene? Did tragedy become him, or did he become tragedy?

Could he overcome it?

His baby girl. Gone too soon.

But Shota had to will whatever amount of hope he had to believe he would find Eri. He was good at finding people, keeping track, and keeping distance. Today, he would have to go directly toward his target. Break his own logic. Take a swan-dive if he had to.

He sped down the freeway, maneuvering around the usual inconsiderate slow drivers in the fast lane and the gunners in the slow lane. When his resolve-search turned to self-depreciation, he gave pause and cleared his mind by listening to the lyrics of the song's tail-end.

Before I let you go away,

Can I get a kiss goodnight?

He shut off the radio and drove in silence. Just thinking. Reminiscing. Eri whined every time he made her walk around the market for more than five minutes or up and down the halls of U.A.'s buildings. But when they went to the park, or one of U.A.'s gyms, she could sprint miles around him. Chances are, wherever Eri was, she was not particularly wanting to be there.

But why was she there?

Worst case scenarios crashed into his mind, and he gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles cracked. A gray soccer-mom van beeped at him and the driver flipped him off. Shota steadied his drifting car and held up an apologetic hand to the other man, heat itching at his ears.

Details. Mental notes. They kept him calm. He had to focus on those mundane, important things. Eri liked raspberry sorbet ice cream, and refused mint chocolate. She loved Rapunzel and the color purple, but only the lighter shades. She always wiped her face with the flat of her left palm, squinted and bit her lip when she colored, sighed after sneezing, enjoyed hikes and running around on the beach. Recently, she had begged Shota for piano lessons so she could be just like him one day (he lacked the stomach to let her chaff her fingers on guitar and bass strings—not yet, at least).

Details and notes. He merged onto another freeway, headed west.

She learned how to slouch—which everyone blamed him for—and how to steam rice, and spark it into fried rice. She could fry eggs, but always scrambled them into grains. She knew how to pronounce her father's medications and that she absolutely could not go near them. She knew how to use a phone and what 9-1-1 meant. She was learning to type on her father's Surface. She had a natural singing voice—like her father. Another welcomed coincidence.

She has your nose. And your cheekbones.

He shook his head. He knew if people looked hard enough, even without the knowledge that Eri was adopted, they could see whatever they wanted. But that hardly mattered. Eri was his daughter, plain and simple. He had known that already. DNA meant little to the immense love he had for her. By the time he exited the high-speed lanes, he realized how hungry and exhausted he was. But he turned on the street that would eventually lead to Eri's school. Searched the same neighborhoods while briefly calling Principal Nezu that he would have to take a day. The principal expressed the utmost concern for the Aizawas, and voiced a fit of prayer that they would reunite soon. He also, though knowing Shota always did his best searches solo, suggested to have a few staff members come to the Erasing Hero's aid; and that, contrastingly, he did not want to announce the situation to everyone on-campus, either. Shota appreciated the sentiment, but declined respectfully.

Shota then searched for three hours straight before he gave in to fill his stomach with a fat triple-shot cold brew. He hardly gave a shit that he missed his morning meds. And his evening meds last night. One day could slide. He hoped Eri would turn up today. She had to—what child that was more baby than little girl could survive on a city's streets? At eighteen, he could barely survive. Behind the realms of his mind, he envisioned an alternate reality in which he had seen this coming, some sign or change in the wind that only a pro-hero, only a parent, could pick up on; in which he had made sure Eri was as 'fine' as she had said the night before; in which he could believe at length that maybe—for God's sake, if he had only listened—maybe he could be the daddy Eri never had, but always deserved.

When he traced such thoughts back to the core, where cold and shadow blended into towers too tall, where he often dared not tread, he could find no other resolution than to blame his mother—even better, his ass of a father who abandoned an unstable opera singer and their toddler bastard son, stealing away their first child out of their first attempt to marry. Their horrid ideas of parenting had now infected him, and Eri was paying for it.

No. Tempted to follow the drift into unforgivable waters, he paused. His mother and he had since made up, grown closer despite a whole childhood of mistreatment and neglect. She got clean for him, landed a stable job at a paper company. He got clean for her and Jig, and was doing his thing. Trying to re-stitch the family that had been shattered with sharp edges for too long. For everyone's sake—save for Yori, his father. By birth. But still, the blame for Eri's disappearance was not that asshole's fault, Shota knew.

The real villain of this story of him and her was him. He turned onto the next street with that heavy heart.

##

Eri wrapped herself into her father's—no, Mr. Aizawa's—faded red plaid shirt. If she continued thinking of him as Daddy, she'd never stop crying. Her tears might lead him to her. He always heard every noise she made. Wiping her eyes and nose on the soft white spots on the left sleeve, remembering the story he had told her about that particular sleeve.

Mama would put a drop of bleach on it every time I lied to her. When Eri had gazed upon the various spots on the sleeves, back, and bottom rims of the front side, he had laughed. Took me a long time to figure out how to save my shirt. And my butt. Like I said, Daddy was kinda a bad kid sometimes.

But that wasn't true. She knew it. Daddy was good, sometimes too good that it made it hard for other people to understand him, even his students and Uncle Mic and All Might. No one could see the kindness and love inside him. They only saw the Look and heard his grumpy voice. Maybe Deku's friend with the fireworks—the one Daddy called Katsuki, or Kuki, when no one else was around. But Eri could see it too clearly, so clearly that it revealed her natural badness. Daddy—Aizawa—showed her how loving he can be, even if it made him uncomfortable and stutter-y sometimes. But he tried. He pushed himself. He pushed himself too hard for her when she didn't deserve it.

She tucked her head between her legs, hugging herself into the shirt that still smelled like his hair, his coffee addiction, and had some stains of flour that he had spilled on himself at the market. Together, they laughed hard at Aizawa's "butter fingers" after a short, gaping silence. The workers sighed and reached for brooms and dustpans and mops, and Aizawa had offered to help them, face still red from uncontrollable laughter. Eri had hardly processed it all from behind her pinched cheeks and laugh-watering eyes.

She drew the shirt close to her nose again, and this time made out the savory scent of the chicken-leek stew he had made that evening. He had been speed-chopping and speed-mincing when Eri came in after her nap, still rubbing her eyes. He had his usually apron and bandana on, and when he turned to her, she saw his face was a tad flushed from the work. Over some heavy rumbling song with a bunch of men and a lead singer who sounded like a girl at some parts, Daddy had said, "Piglet alert!" He had swooped her up to sit on his hip, and gave her a sweaty kiss.

"What'cha doing?" Eri had asked, a hand on his chest as she held tight onto him.

Daddy looked back at his busy work, undid his bandana with one hand to swipe his face, and said, "Well, I'm chopping the chicken and potatoes into chunks, mincing white onions and leeks…" He had sighed as Eri wiped some of the stew's sauce from his cheek, glancing at the huge open cans of beef base it had come from. "Daddy had way too much coffee today." Eri had no idea what that meant. He had sat her on a stool by the unused dishwasher—Daddy preferred to do everything himself—and explained each step to her. When he wasn't teaching her, he was exaggeratedly singing to whatever song came from his phone, making Eri giggle each time. "Bobby Brown is such a whiner. But Daddy likes his songs."

She had heard one of their songs blasting from one of the cars that ripped down the street. For a moment, she thought it might have been her dad—her old dad. But the car was rusty blue. He had a too-shiny black car that made a sighing sound whenever it slowed down.

Eri stood from her hiding place in the back corner of a park she had never been to. The sound of ducks had drawn her in yesterday evening. Their quacking and shaking made her feel less alone and scared. But by night, they went silent and instead crickets made their twitchy sounds that made her shiver. She remembered this one time Daddy froze, napkin in hand, trying to kill a huge cricket in her room. He had screamed uncharacteristically loud when it twitch-turned to him and nearly ran over Eri in the process. In the end, he was about to kill it with Clorox, but Sushi came over and ate the cricket just in time. All Daddy could do was turn to her with a quivering grin and half-hearted say, "Uh… Ta-da…?"

Thinking of that time, Eri almost smiled. But then she scolded herself for thinking about the fun times. The overbearing worst times when she made… Aizawa upset or worry or caused him to suffer because of her were her incentive to get away from him as soon as possible.

She snuggled close in the shirt, wrapping herself in it when her eyes started to water again. The morning sun was warm at this time of year, but she didn't care. Her stomach growled loud in the silence of the park. She had not eaten in a day. The snacks she had taken from home and filled her tiny purse with had run out already. At least the park had a water fountain. She checked her purse for the crumpled dollars and coins she had saved up. When she saw a crisp twenty-dollar bill, the one she had swiped from Aizawa's wallet the night before she had planned to run away, her eyes filled with more guilty tears.

She really was a curse. Bad behavior was natural to her.

She walked the streets, keeping her head down in case any other adult would recognize her and bring her back to Aizawa. Eventually, a minimart appeared on a corner of two streets. She went in, making sure to appear as if she belonged there like a responsible big girl, and picked out some doughnuts and cookies. When she went to pay, like she saw adults do, the cashier rose her eyebrow at her.

"You old enough to be out here by yourself?"

Eri nodded. "Yeah."

"Where's your parents?"

"In the car." Eri winced at how easily it came out. Who was she out here? She was transforming before her own eyes. If Aizawa came, or if she missed him too much to run home, would he even want her like this? "I do this all the time." That one brought tears to her eyes. She prayed the cashier wouldn't see.

The purple-haired woman tapped in the items and scanned them. "You're more responsible than me at twenty-six. Eight twenty-nine."

Eri gave her the stolen twenty.

"Want a bag?" Eri glanced at her tiny purse, and nodded. The cashier handed her the change. "Here ya go, girly. Don't get a stomachache."

She nodded again, muttered a thank-you, and left. Daddy would've said something gross in a funny way. If you barf, I'm putting it over rice and calling it dinner. She shook her head hard, and started to dig into the bag of doughnuts. No matter what she did, or how she thought, or what she thought, he was everywhere. No even Chisaki had that influence on her. This was worse, this distance, this trying-to-forget. She noticed too late that she had cried into the powdered fried dough. Wiping her face, she clutched the plastic bag to her chest and ran back to the park that had become her new bedroom. She refused to surface from the bush screen, no matter how hot it was.

When she woke from her exhaustive nap to the night sky, she noticed how heavy her head felt, how rough her throat became, and fell back asleep, coughing. It was so cold…