I meant to have this up saturday, but I had some technical difficulties.

Hitoshi's head is killing him.

The throbbing starts behind his ears and travels all the way through his teeth. He can feel each and every one of them because they all hurt individually, and he can count how many nerves are in his jaw for the same reason.

He's not sure what made that happen. The poison gas, or the giant magnet that cracked him in the forehead.

One or the other.

Either way, he'd like to go back to being unconscious very much now, thank you.

Except he knows he can't. He can't go back to being unconsious because when he peeled his eyes open briefly he caught enough of a glimpse to know he wasn't in a hospital, or in the forest, or in the Pussy Cat's center. In fact it looked like he was in a basement of some sort, surrounded on all sides by sealed crates. His hands are tied behind his back and there's a gag in his mouth.

The only thing that stops him from hyperventilating is that it's hard to panic when he can barely think a straight line.

He's not sure if he's concussed or if there really are three ceiling lights hanging overhead. Either way, the nausea that wells inside him makes him shut his eyes. Puking with a gag in his mouth sounds like about the worst possible thing he could do right then.

Hitoshi can't think straight, so in the end he shuffles to one wall like the worlds most disgruntled caterpillar and tries to figure ou if there's a way to get his arms free without breaking them. That blonde girl had been so insanely flexible she'd actually gotten out of Eraser Heads capture gear like it was nothing. They were lucky she hadn't known Hitoshi's quirk, but even once he'd frozen her in place they'd been under siege from all sides.

By more of her.

A copy quirk of some kind, and a bizarre fixation with blood and cute things.

Luckily for Hitoshi, 'racoon's are not cute'. Unluckily for Hitoshi, his ego was also about as bruised as the rest of him. After all his training, he'd still been trounced solidly by a girl half his size.

He was going to have to work harder, be better, when he got out of here. If he ever got out of here.

His chances were slim. He'd been taken by villains, tied up, his quirk rendered useless, and abandoned in a basement of all things.

It takes him a few minutes to work up the strength to push himself up onto his knees. When his head throbbed and his stomach roiled he stopped, and waited for his body to settle. He took a breath, counted to three, held it, and let it back out. Slowly, steadily, he willed his nausea to abate and his eyes to adjust to the poor lighting and the pain in his head. There was no reason it should work, really, besides that mind over matter meant something. He should know. His whole life felt like mind over matter sometimes. Or pure stubbornness over reality.

Why else would he have been in UA? Why else would he want to be a hero? Why else would he have ranked so high in the sp[orts festival, been invited to I Expo and helped stop terrorists twice in the span of a week? When the world had been so, so sure of his fate for year.

A villains quirk.

A cruel ability.

Something that he could use, and others would have used, for some of the most heinous things he could even imagine. He knew, because as young as eleven people have been begging him, joking or no, not to use his quirk on them. Not to make them his slaves.

As if he would.

As if any force on this earth could tempt him into doing some of the things that other people had suggested his quirk could be used for.

He wasn't like that.

He never would be.

And now, at last, it seemed like he was finally roun d people who understood that. Midoriya. Yusada. Kaminari. Aizawa. They all believed in him. Took him at face value and never once suspected he would do any of those awful things. None of them hesitated to answer a question on his, save his first bought with Yusada. And really, that was reasonable. They'd been competing but nothing about the decision had felt like a personal slight. Light she thought him capable of being a monster.

Finally.

Finally.

And just when things were starting to look right, just when he was making real, solid progress the camp was attacked. Everyone was split into fragmented groups, and some people had vanished entirely. Where had they gone? Who was okay?

(Who wasn't? )

Hitoshi took a breath.

In. out. Slow and steady.

He can still taste the toxic gas on his tongue, heavy and cloying. The blonde girl had had a mask on to filter it all out, and he had just been doing his best with his shirt and the capture gear. It hadn't been a fair fight, but he still wished he'd done better.

He'd worked so hard for so long just for a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the hero course kids. He'd put his soul into it, until his bones were creaking and his muscles sobbed and it was all he could do to take the next step, to throw the next punch.

And now he was here.

Kidnapped.

Useless.

Deadweight.

Aizawa had put so much effort into training him. He'd patiently untangled Hitoshi from his capture gear and adjusted his hold on it. He'd shown him how to stand firm, and how to dodge in equal measures, how to climb and assess the situation and adapt.

And here Hitoshi was.

Failing those teachings.

He knew Aizawa had pulled some string to get him on the Summer Camp trip with the rest of the hero students. He didn't know how many favors it had taken, he'd frankly been afraid to ask.

But he knew that he owed the man. And he knew he was failing that.

It made him as sick as the toxic gas had.

Hitoshi let out his breath and opened his eyes.

Finally, he got to his feet and started looking around. He still had to squint, and he had to slump against boxes to avoid falling when the world tipped periodically, but the longer he moves and the more his blood circulated the less dizzy spells he had.

He'd been right. He was in a basement, and that basement was full of crates that rattled with glass when he gave them a thump. The walls were lined with diamond cuts of wood, and full of wine bottles of all things.

Hitoshi would admit he didn't know much about wine, but he was pretty sure that what he was looking at were expensive ones. Some of the foil on top looked like gold, and the names were all difficult to pronounce and french. There were frosted glass sake bottles, and carefully put away drinking cups.

He saw dry goods too. Bags of spices the size of his fist, breading, all sorts of things.

He had to be in the basement of a bar, he figured. He didn't know what else to do. His shoulders ached and his hands were still tied, so he used his teeth to grab one of the bottles and pulled it out of it's slot until it tumbled to the ground and shattered.

Being as careful as he could, he knelt down and bent backwards to grope through the glass until he picked up the neck. The other side was jagged. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was the best he could do. He started sawing at the ropes around his wrists, trying not to cut his own skin in the process.

Hitoshi leaned against the wall and lay his head on solid brick.

When he got back, he was going to start taking chemistry classes. He'd seen Yusada make a bomb with tin foil of all things. Surely alcohol would be easier. It was flammable.

(He tried very hard not to think about what would happen if he didn't get back at all.)

As the coolness of the brick washed through his still aching head, he tried to look for signs that he wasn't the only person here.

It was almost certain that Yusada was here. She was the one who had gone missing first, after all. And that little boy too, Kota.

After they'd vanished before dinner everyone had split up into search teams. While the assumption then had been that they'd just wandered off, the teachers had decided to use it as a practice drill of sorts. So they'd been split into small groups, each one with a supervisor present.

Mandalay had stayed at base camp to show a larger group how to run relays and coordinate multiple people with Ojiro, Iida, Jiro, Shoji, Kamakiri, Kaibara, Kendo, Komori, and Tokage.

While those nine stayed stationary Aizawa had taken himself, Ururaka, Tsu, Kendo, Honenuki, Yaoyarozu, Awase, and Kuroiro to the west. Pixie Bob took Shiozaki, Komori, Sero, Sato, Koda, Kodai, Rin, Monoma, Shoda and Bondo to the east. Ragdoll went west with Kaminari, Ashido, Kirishima, Bakugou, TetsuTetsu and Yanagi. The rest went south with Tiger.,

Their group hadn't made it far before the gas started spreading across the ground. At first they'd though it was some strange mountain mist, but Aizawa had cottoned on quickly. They were all in grave danger, and they needed to get back to base camp as soon as possible.

He'd had Ururaka float Tsu high in the air to see the fastest way back, and to keep at least one of them from breathing in as much of the gas as possible while the rest of them climbed into the trees.

What she reported was bad. Their way back was blocked by a high wall of flame, so bright and blue that even the shadow boy couldn't make his way back the way they'd come.

They had gas below them, and flames behind.

With no other option, Aizawa had led them through the trees, further from base camp still.

And it was there that Awase had been stabbed.

He'd been bringing up the rear when suddenly he shouted in pain, and by the time they'd turned around he'd fallen from the tree he's been clumsily balancing on and was laying, bleeding in the roiling waves of toxic gas.

They were ambushed.

Ururaka had tried to float Tsu higher again, but a knife nearly look her head off and broke her concentration. Then the giggling from the trees had started and -

Hitoshi was broken out of his revere by the door at the top of the staircase slamming open.

Down from above came a broad shouldered woman with bright red hair and sunglasses. Her smile wasn't exactly friendly.

Hitoshi narrowed his eyes at her, but she didn't seem to care about his daggered glare. Instead she looked at the bottle of shattered wine on the ground.

"Well that was a waste," she scolded, although she hardly sounded upset. More amused.

Hitoshi redoubled his effort on his bindings, and turned to try to keep her from seeing what he was doing behind his back.

"Oh well. It's not like you're in any more trouble now than you were before," she joked. "Come on, boss wants to see you now that he's done with that girl of his."

Girl?

Yusada?

His voice came muffled through the make shift gag. His captor came forwards and reached for him. He stepped back, eyes wide, but her fingers hooked into the fabric and tugged it away.

"Are you going to cooperate with us?" she asked.

He tried to summon his Inner Aizawa, calm and collected even in the face of impossible odds.

What came out was purely Bakugou fucking Katsuki.

"Go fuck yourself."

The woman snorted a laugh.

"Shigaraki didn't tell us we were collecting spitfires! Come on now, we're going to ask you some questions, and you aren't going to do the same, got it?"

Hitoshi considered spitting in her face briefly. Any show that he wasn't completely cowed.

Then the glass skated across his forearm, slicing into the delicate skin at the same time that it broke the last layer of rope.

In what might have been the stupidest, more impulsive thing he'd ever done, Hitoshi swung the broken bottle at the woman's face.

She knocked his arm away and flipped him on his back like it was the easiest thing in the world.

As the world spun, Hitoshi turned and threw up on the floor.

Maybe the gas hadn't worn off as much as he thought it had.