Down the Rabbit Hole
Define Movie Night
The thump on her door came earlier than she expected, but she wasn't opposed to it.
Momo is known for being early to movie night but… she glances at the clock with a grimace. An hour is kind of pushing it…
Still, it isn't completely unusual for her to arrive this early and help with the prep work. Though, what prep work is involved when they have already agreed to order out, were having popcorn and chips with their movies is questionable but…
Nevertheless, she skirts around her kitchen counter humming to herself as she surveys the room again.
Couch is squared up in front of the TV, bowls of assorted chips are out on her little kitchen counter, and the door to her bedroom (i.e. disaster room) is closed. And an assortment of both Studio Ghibli and Disney movies are laid across her coffee table for them all to debate over.
(Momo would insist on the Little Mermaid because it was Todoroki's favorite. Mina and Tsu would overrule her, saying Spirited Away was better. And she would always stick to the tried and true- My Friendly Neighborhood Totoro)
"Momo~!" She singsongs, approaching the door. "You're awful early again!" She pulls the door open, but it's not Momo Yaoyorozu that steps in, instead it's a body that thuds onto the crème carpet and sticks there.
She screams.
She really does, and she's not at all ashamed of it.
Not when a dead body flops onto her floor and ruins her carpet and her evening plans.
She stops screaming when she recognizes the dark green hair, the familiar physique of the man, the tattered, bloody and burnt button up shirt and vest.
Her hands cover her mouth, eyes raking over his body because fear has frozen her in place.
He's a mess.
His back is burnt, skin pink or charred, strips of burnt fabric clinging to the wounds. And then there's the blood. Oozing out lazily from a hole in his shoulder, and another in his side. One of his hands is limply pressed to the one on his size, but the blood is still leaking around it, pooling on her floor.
He should be dead.
And that's what snaps her back to reality. Back to being a hero and not a dumbstruck civilian.
She bends, pulling him into her apartment and throwing the door closed. She'll clean up the blood later. She hopes he only just got to the door, because if not, there's no telling how much blood he lost there.
Her phone is in her hands, and she's frantically calling the first number on her speed dial. Another hand on his neck, checking for a pulse. She fumbles, then finds the artery.
Faint. There. Thready. Shit.
"Tsu tsu tsu come on come on…" She whines, rushing from her main room and into her bedroom, bursting through the door, knocking aside her scattered clothes and plushies.
Then into her bathroom.
The line connects, ringing.
She's flinging things out of her cabinets, spare toothbrushes and toothpaste, hair detangler and makeup. Where's her kit?
Where's her kit!?
There!
She nearly throws herself into the cabinet, heaving the heavy medical kit out of the back of her bathroom cabinet. She activates her Quirk, pulling it along weightlessly from her bathroom to the front room.
Distantly, she recognizes that her door is open again, and standing in it is the usual suspect.
Momo Yaoyorozu.
Thank God.
"Momo!" She yells. "Questions later, lives now!" And she throws the medical kit at her friend.
There's a moment of hesitation, a moment of fear in her eyes before she catches it, setting it on the ground and bending over Rabbit's unconscious body.
Rabbit isn't a hero.
Rabbit is a villain.
She shouldn't be giving him medical treatment in her apartment. She should be locking him up and putting him underwatch in some locked down hospital.
And Momo should be too.
But instead.
"Injuries are substantial, two gunshot wounds to the shoulder and midsection, burns on his back. Blood loss is unknown, but substantial." Momo's switch is flipped, and its no longer happy gal-pal time, but Hero Time.
"Ochacho? Ribbit?" The phone finally connects.
"Tsu! Tsu!" Uraraka parrots herself, then jumps into her demands. "Questions later, I need you to pick up a cake, and gauze. I have some here, but we'll need more than we have for this. Questions later, this is an emergency!" And she hangs up, fumbling through her contacts for the one she's needs the most but uses the least.
Recovery Girl.
She dials it, putting it on speaker as she joins Momo over Rabbit-Izuku's body.
"Shit shit shit." She curses, hands frantically jerking back and forth over his body.
"Calm down Uravity." Momo says, a pair of surgical scissors sprouting out of her palm and into her waiting fingers.
She's careful and delicate as she cuts away the rest of Izuku's shirt, peeling it off him and shucking it to the side.
They both hesitate once they see the wounds.
His shoulder is the worst, and the skin around the wound is puckering and pulsing. The wound on his side is better, but marginally, it's a clean through shot, and while it's bleeding, it's slower than his shoulder. The burns that decorate his back are another thing entirely, but they look mild.
"I'm going to call Shoto, see if I can't get him to come and freeze or cauterize the wounds. In the meantime-" She flexes out a hand, and a fountain of gauze blossoms from her wrist, pooling out over Izuku's back.
"Stuff it?" Ochaco guesses, and Momo just gives her a grim expression and nods.
They set to it, packing gauze into the wounds. Once they have, the bleeding slows, and from the medical kit, they slap on a pair of bandages.
"Front." Momo instructs, stepping over Rabbit to join her on the side. "We'll have to flip him again to clean his back, but until then… we need to make sure he's not leaking blood out of the front too.
They heave, and Izuku flinches, breath hitching in a way that makes her heart stutter and clench. It's hard to breath, and the lump in her throat only gets bigger when she sees the front of his shirt.
He wore the outfit before, the nice dress shirt, the neat black vest. Now it was all glossy with blood, and the white hopelessly lost behind red.
Again, Momo's scissors come in handy in removing the garments, and again they throw them to the side, joining the pile. The front is better, and gauze is peeking through from their job on his back.
"You have a towel?" Momo asks.
"I'll get it." She rushes up, back to the bathroom to grab one of her towels, knowing that after tonight it will be ruined. It's fine. It's fine.
It has to be fine.
Because he has to be fine.
Because if he's not fine she can't be mad at him.
If he's not fine, then that means he's dead.
And if he's dead then she's not sure if her heart can take it.
Why is it to hard to breathe?
Tsu has arrived, a mountain of stuff in her hands, and even her tongue is in use, balancing the cake as she steps through the door.
"Cake to Momo, gauze to Izu-Rabbit, and fill in Recovery Girl." She's not sure when the dialtone switched to Recovery Girl anxiously asking what was wrong. Time isn't working right in her head. It's too cluttered, frantic. Uraraka drops to her knees to wipe the sticky blood free from Izuku's chest.
It's messy work. It's fearful work.
They clean up his chest, dabbing peroxide into the wounds, and flinching at every one of his hisses of pain. But the response means he's alive, and at the moment, that's enough.
They pack both wounds with more gauze and seal them, flipping him over again to clean up his back.
She doesn't even realize thirty minutes has past until Mina is grabbing her by her shoulders, escorting her to the couch and dabbing her hands clean with a paper towel.
She doesn't even realize there are other people in her apartment until Shoto joins her on the couch, fingers bloody, expression grim as he examines the movies, pointedly ignoring the body on the floor.
"Sweetie." And it's another hand on hers, holding it steady and forcing her to look up, give attention to the voice it belongs to.
Recovery Girl. "He's going to be alright. Just needs some rest now."
She lets out a breath she doesn't realize she's been holding, collapsing back into the couch. And she's crying. Hot tears spilling out of her eyes and down her cheeks. She covers her face, trying to suppress them, mush them back where they belong, but she can't.
"Uraraka-
"Ochaco-
"Sweetie" A chorus of voices assure her, a dozen different hands dropping onto her knee, her shoulder, anything that's not intimate, anything that lets her know her friends are there for her.
"Uravity."
She flinches at the voice, knows who it belongs to because an hour before it had been rattling off reasons in her ear about how Rabbit was dangerous.
"Lemillion." She whimpers.
The hands on her clear, and she can hear them shuffling, hear the grunt of effort as she assumes they pick up Rabbit and carry him into her mess of a bedroom. She can hear Recovery Girl's gentle instruction, then quiet murmuring.
And the door close, leaving her with Lemillion, and her friends one room away with a man that shouldn't be anywhere near her, much less being taken care of in her bedroom.
"I'm sorry." She murmurs. "He was, I just. He…" She trails off and shakes her head, letting her hands drop to her lap. "He was just there. At my doorstep. And I just… I reacted. God I was just so scared. And you... I know you don't like him. I know he's a villain but-"She looks up at him.
And he's smiling at her.
She hesitates.
"He cares for you." Lemillion offers softly, another flash of a smile. "Really. In a manner of speaking he told me himself." Then the man stands up, towering over her in his hero costume, the proud '1,000,000' on the front of his chest right in front of her nose.
She can understand why people are calling him the Symbol of Hope.
"Just be careful." Lemillion murmurs. "And he's lost a lot of blood. So…" He shakes his head. "I'm going to bring Eri over later," Ah- Eri-chan. His adopted daughter. Right. "but for tonight, try to get some rest. He's stable."
And he leaves, takes a few steps back to her door, and instead of bothering with the handle, just drops through the floor and out of her life in a blink.
The door to her bedrooms bursts open, and all her friends spill out to the floor, a half dozen of her closest companions all called in to take care of one man they should be trying to capture, not care for.
She's shaking again as they join her on the couch, Mina and Tsu taking either side sandwich her between the two. Momo and Shoto slide to the floor, hand in hand as they fill the space in front. Kirishima doesn't let any of the intimacy bother him, and instead just slips into the kitchen, picking up bowls and carrying them over to the table, stacking the movies up and setting her party snacks in their places.
And Recovery Girl just smiles, lingering at the doorway to her bedroom with a watchful gaze.
It's too much to handle.
And by grace alone, her friends understand, snuggling up to her as they fall into their normal banter, accepting her shaky silence as they discuss movies.
"Little Mermaid." Shoto demands unapologetically.
"If you're here to speak your mind, then I want Arisocats." Momo grins, elbowing him sharply.
They glare at each other, humming softly as they claim the bowl of pretzel sticks as their own.
"Totoro." Tsu recommends, and Mina agrees.
It's almost comical how it takes a bleeding body and a not-quite-but-probably-villain to make them agree on a movie.
"Uraraka?" Kirishima asks, holding up the three movies. His smile is tentative at best, but genuine and she simply nods. "Totoro it is."
Shoto huffs, but doesn't reply, grunting as Kirishima loads the DVD into her player, turns up the volume and drops back into the loveseat he's claimed as his own. It's almost humorous.
"I'm okay." She whispers into their ears, forcing the words to come out steady.
"We know-Ribbit" Tsuyu assures, her gaze flickering to the opening scene. "We know."
"I'll be taking my leave now dearies," Recovery Girl announces, tottering to the door. She gives the bloodstain on the carpet a long look before stepping around it. "I'll send Aizawa over in a bit to look after the boy."
Somehow that's not as comforting as Tsu and Mina staying over, but she doesn't deny her, or tell her not to send him. She's likely already called him. And he's likely already on his way, or already in her bedroom watching Rabbit.
So she settles in, content in the fact that Recovery Girl has tended to Izuku, made sure he wasn't going to die, and her friends are here, holding her tight and close and doing their best to make sure she feels loved and safe.
And if a few random tears leak out from her eyes as she thinks about it, thinks about how much better it might be if a certain green haired man belonged among them, filling the gap on the couch that Kirishima isn't inclined to take-that's her business.