Aizawa hates hospitals. It was either hectic and noisy or deafeningly silent and smelled of anesthetics. They bring Iridescent in through the emergency entrance and get him set up in a trauma room as soon as he's in the door. The vigilante was fading in and out of consciousness, protesting the whole time. Aizawa took a second to call Hizashi and let him know where he was and that he'd be late getting home. He knew his roommate would worry.
Hizashi met him at the hospital an hour after they had taken Iridescent to surgery and brought him a coffee and a change of clothes. Aizawa changes and fills him in about what had happened.
"It must be terrible." Hizashi mumbles. He was braiding his long blond hair and then combing it loose with his fingers just to start again. Aizawa recognizes it as one of his friends' nervous tics. "To be going through what he is."
"Losing your entire family and country because of one criminal." Aizawa rubs his eyes. "Ending up in a completely different country and having to adapt to it, not knowing what is happening at home. He has joked about being a crybaby several times, but honestly, I don't know how he's doing anything except crying."
"People deal with trauma and grief in different ways." Hizashi hums. "Some people become vigilantes after murdering a guy; others buy a neon sleeping bag and get addicted to caffeine. And we don't know what he does during the day; maybe that's all he does until he joins you for patrol."
Aizawa snorts. He knew Hizashi was joking to make him feel better, and it worked. He jabs Hizashi in the shoulder and relaxes into his seat in the waiting room. They wait another hour before a doctor with purple hair and bags under his eyes comes out of the hall and heads right for them.
"You're here for Iridescent, correct?" The doctor asks. His voice was deep, and his tone was flat. He almost seemed bored and tired, but his eyes were sharp and piercing. "I'll need to see ID before I give you any information."
"Yeah, sure." Aizawa sat up and pulled out his civilian and Hero IDs, handing them over. The doctor nods and gives them back, checking Hizashi's too.
"Present Mic." He chuckles. "Almost didn't recognize you with your hair down."
"That's the idea." Hizashi grins, shooting him finger guns. The doctor looks at Aizawa with a raised eyebrow. He shrugs. The doctor shakes his head and hands a bag to him. Aizawa takes it, looking inside the plastic. A dark pair of clothing with green lining and a clear visor. Iridescent's clothes.
"Normally, we'd destroy any clothing that comes in looking like that, covered in blood." The doctor says. "But I told the nurse you needed it for the investigation. He was only conscious for a short time before we had to put him under, but he was hysterical about keeping them. I figured it would be better to give them to you than leave them where one of the others might take off with them. Here."
He handed Hizashi the boots. They put them, and the clothes in the bag Hizashi brought in to take home and wash. They follow the doctor to an elevator and up to the third floor. They passed a nurses' station, where the doctor grabbed a clipboard and headed to a room at the end of the hall. Two police officers waited outside.
"Sir." One of them steps forward. "We need to get into the room. That man is a criminal and at the very least should be in handcuffs as he is a flight risk."
"He's unconscious." The doctor presses his badge against the door sensor. Once the door was unlocked, the other cop tried to push past the doctor, one hand on his gun. The doctor pulls the door closed on him, and the automatic lock engages again. The officer turns, glaring at the doctor.
"Open this door." He demands.
"No." The doctor ignores the police officer, pretending to be reading the chart.
"Excuse me?" The office roars.
"You're excused." The doctor points back down the hall they had come from. "Elevators are that way."
"I could have you arrested for impeding a criminal investigation." The officer scowls.
"You could." The doctor looked down at the officer, standing almost a full head taller than him. "But the detective assigned to his case has already told me that the only people allowed in his room, outside hospital staff, are him and the Pro Hero assigned to the case and anyone they bring in to help with the investigation. You are more than welcome to wait out here for the detective, but I'm legally not allowed to let you in the room, per orders of the police department."
The two officers fumed. "Why the hell are they going in then?"
"I'm the Pro Hero assigned to the case." Aizawa glared. "And I have no problem calling Tsukauchi to report you. I'll need your names and badge numbers now."
"Well, then he can let us in." The officer scowls, turning back to the doctor and ignoring the two men.
"No, I can't." They turned back, glaring at Aizawa. "I'm allowed to bring other Pros into the room, but I have no authority with cops. You'll have to wait for Tsukauchi."
"I'll have your license for this, brat." The older man growls, one hand going for the gun at his hip. Hizashi raises the phone that had been recording the altercation.
"And we'll have your badges." He states calmly. "Names and badge numbers, please. We'll need to make a formal complaint with the chief."
One of the cops goes to grab the phone, and Aizawa steps forward, glaring. "Don't do that."
"Sir, you need to back away." The cops step forward, pushing Aizawa. Aizawa had him in cuffs and on the ground before the other could grab his gun.
"What the hell do you think you're doing, officer?!" Tsukauchi roared, storming towards them with three other police officers. "Pulling your weapon on a Pro Hero; have you lost your mind?!"
The officer was still pointing his gun at Aizawa, kneeling next to the cop on the ground, staring at the gun.
The officer stammered, accusing Aizawa of attacking them and impeding an investigation. Hizashi stepped forward with his phone, claiming to have the whole thing on video. The three other officers stepped forward, taking the gun from the cop and pulling the other to his feet. Tsukauchi took their names, badges, and weapons and demanded they return to the station to receive a reprimand from the chief and the three cops escorting them.
Aizawa and Hizashi followed the doctor into the room while Tsukauchi made the phone call to the chief.
"Never a dull moment around here." The doctor muttered, still checking the chart.
Hizashi laughed. Aizawa stared at the man lying unconscious in the hospital bed. He looked like a child. Baby fat still clung to his cheeks, and they were covered in freckles. His hair was a green so dark it almost looked black, curly on top with an undercut that was growing back in.
"He looks so young," Hizashi whispers.
"We put him right around 18 to 20 years old." The doctor says. "He's around your age, maybe younger but not by much."
"Fuck." Aizawa sat down in the chair next to the bed. "What else can you tell us about him."
"Well." The doctor sighs. "We can't match any dental records because half his teeth are fake. He has a bridge and a couple of crowns. Normally that would make it easier for us to identify him since those are recorded by whichever doctor did them, but they're not even made with the right material dentists use for fake teeth. There's no record for them, and with half of them being fake, we can't even get an accurate match from childhood."
Aizawa pulled Iridescent's lips back to examine his teeth. They looked normal enough. The only thing he noticed that seemed off was the lack of a gap between a couple of them—the bridge.
"We ran a blood test and got somewhat of a match from a donor, but it's weird." The doctor says. "And his fingerprints come up to a different person too."
"Who?" Hizashi asks.
"Fingerprints come back for Takeko Yukio, a foreigner who came to the country illegally. Police think he was a victim of a trafficking ring, but he spoke very little Japanese, so they couldn't get a good idea of what happened to him. He's got a job at a quirk training gym in Matsufu. He claims to have a mild enhancer quirk that gives him slightly enhanced strength, speed, stamina, and extreme pain tolerance. I called them to confirm it, and the owner told me this guy dislocated his shoulder and challenged the staff to a one-handed pull-up contest. Guy won by 50 pull-ups, popped his shoulder back into place, continued the interview, and worked the rest of the shift as an assistant. They hired him on the spot."
"You sound impressed." Aizawa raised an eyebrow.
"Well, considering his x-ray, I am." The doctor put the x-ray photo against the window to show them. "I'd diagnose him as quirkless."
Aizawa had to get up to see it closer, but there was an extra toe joint. "Are you sure it's not just an abnormality or congenital disability?"
"If it was just the toe, maybe." The doctor hands him the file. "But he also has two kidneys, tonsils, wisdom teeth, and Adam's apple. His brain seems underdeveloped in a way like it's missing something. I checked it against some other imaging we have on file, and the part of the brain that lights up when we use our quirks always has a passive electrode current going through it, but that part of his brain is dark. So unless his quirk developed due to trauma, he's medically quirkless."
"Is that possible?" Hizashi asks. "To develop a quirk due to trauma?"
"It's more common than people think." The doctor says. "Normally, it's a quirk mutation; the quirk develops in different aspects because of a traumatic event. Situations like this are less common simply because less quirkless people are being born or make it to adulthood."
"How traumatic are we talking about for a quirk to develop on a quirkless individual?" Hizashi asks.
"He doesn't talk about his past," Aizawa said. "But he had mentioned that his home country was in the middle of a civil war when he was brought here. The other side was using biochemical weapons against civilians. He lost most of his family and was trained to kill their leaders."
"That explains a lot of the scars, then." The doctor sighs. "Almost sixty percent of his body is covered in them. Burns, stab wounds, bullets, what looked like acid scarring on his leg, I'd even say his back was whipped at some point. The skin around his fingernails has scarring but not on his toes. He's probably had them ripped out at some point. He's had multiple head injuries that still appear on the scans, and he may be deaf in one ear from a ruptured eardrum. The poor boy looks like he was tortured."
Fucking hell. Aizawa felt like he was going to throw up. From the sounds across the room, Hizashi emptied his stomach into the trash can. "Definitely enough to cause a forced quirk activation."
"Some of the burns and cuts are years older." The doctor says. "I'd say the boy was tortured or abused most of his life. He probably grew up a child soldier."
"Son of a bitch." They turned to see Tsukauchi standing by the door, looking green.
"Been there long?" Aizawa asks.
"Long enough." The detective moved closer to the bed, eyes misty as he stared at the boy on the bed. "He's just a kid."
"He killed a man and tricked you, a police detective, into forging legal papers for him to be in the country." Aizawa points out.
"A smart kid." Tsukauchi chuckles.
"A terrified kid." Aizawa sighs, slumping into the chair again. "Far away from home, with kids of his own. The whole reason he's here was that the guy that pushed him through the portal was trying to kill his daughter."
"Doesn't mean that he's the biological father." The detective puts in. "In a war-torn country like his where the civilians are fighting and being killed, they're most likely orphans he took in, or even younger siblings he's taking care of."
"Speaking of families." The doctor cuts in, holding up a piece of paper. "The blood results. We got a match from a blood donor. It's not an exact match but close enough that we can determine the donor is most likely a parent."
"That's good, though, isn't it?" Hizashi asks.
"Under normal circumstances, it would be." The doctor agrees. "However, most thirty-year-old single women don't have both a nineteen-year-old and five-year-old son."
"What?" Aizawa took the paper.
"Midoriya Inko; 30, married, only child listed is a five-year-old Izuku. Her quirk is moving small objects, her husband's quirk is breathing fire, and Izuku was diagnosed as quirkless last year. She would have been what, eleven when she had him?" Aizawa gestures to the unconscious vigilante. The one who was staring at him, confused. Aizawa noticed his eyes were a dark green. He could see a physical resemblance to the woman and child in the file and wonders if Mrs. Midoriya has a younger brother or if she did have two sons.
"He's awake."
"He shouldn't be." The doctor moved to check his vitals.
"Maybe it's because he heard us talking about Inko?" Hizashi asks as he and Tsukauchi move out of the doctor's way.
"Mom?" His voice was raspy, "Mom's dead. They killed her, Mic."
Aizawa and Hizashi exchanged a glance. The doctor muttered something to himself, then turned to look at Iridescent, "Well, Yukio, you're not supposed to be awake yet, but I'm going to ask you a few questions so we can see how you're doing. Is that ok?"
Yukio looks up at the doctor, confused. "Shinsou?"
"I surprised you could read that well, having just woken up." Dr. Shinsou chuckles.
Yukio's brows furrowed. "But you're not Toshi?"
The doctor's eyes narrowed. His voice was stern. "Toshi? How do you know Hitoshi?"
"Yusuke." Yukio's eyes widened with sudden clarity.
"Yes- hey!" Yukio threw his blanket at the doctor's face, ripped his IV out, and jumped from the bed, rolling between the three other men and sprinting towards the bathroom. The machines he was attached to crashed to the floor and were pulled after him, making it difficult for the men to catch him before he could barricade himself in the bathroom.
"Who the hell is Shinsou Hitoshi?" Aizawa asked the doctor while Tsukauchi tried to get Yukio to open the door.
"He's my five-year-old son." Shinsou Yusuke answers, never taking his eyes off the door.
…..
Inside the bathroom, Midoriya was hyperventilating. His doctor was his husband's biological father, who had died when Hitoshi was a kid. He slid to the ground and covered his eyes, groaning. The man was rightfully concerned about a random grown man knowing his son. What a great first impression to give his father-in-law.