Diana was running on the beach, enjoying the time she had. So far the record of her existence was five minutes. She liked just… doing things. Running on the beach, sorting smaller trash around her, playing silly games on Hitoshi's phone (he had the best cat games), listening to music on Izuku's phone. She couldn't wait until she could exist for longer amounts of time. Then she could meet Inko-san and stop Kacchan from calling Izuku a non-fuser… Or maybe not. Maybe keeping herself a secret would be better.
Something in her was hesitant to trust Kacchan to have even a bit of decency and understanding. Something told her that she would be ridiculed for existing anyways.
With that thought Diana fell apart.
"We should really practise unfusing," Midoriya-kun murmured, rubbing his head. "We can't just fall apart each time we fuse, it can be harmful."
"Harmful how?" Hitoshi asked, stretching his stiff back.
"Harmful to my head. We keep falling. Literally." He punctuated his words by pointing to his head where a big bruise was forming. Ah. Right.
"Fair enough."
They kept having conversations like that. Little things they wanted to practise, some things they wanted to improve on. It was a good usage of their time.
They hoped to get better and better, until one day they could become fusion masters.
It was unspoken, but through their fusion they understood each other's goals perfectly. Or well. There wasn't much to understand. The main one was 'become a hero' in both of them. And then 'become a fusion master' was a means to an end.
Because fusion masters could apply for hero licence just like hero school students.
It was a loophole. One they'd use if it came to it.
Of course they wished to attend a Hero School, capital letters. But… well… From unofficial channels Midoriya-kun found out that the entrance exam was fighting robots. Hitoshi wondered for days how they hadn't heard about that from media coverage or something, before Midoriya-kun found another little detail. Everyone signed an NDA before entering even the written exam. Which was crazy in Hitoshi's opinion. Posts about it were taken down in a matter of hours, and the bearer of news presumably sued to hell and back.
Hitoshi didn't know what scared him more, UA's speed or Midoriya-kun's proficiency in dark web. At 11 and a half years old.
He had no idea what other skills Midoriya-kun was hiding from him and he didn't want to ask. He was better off not knowing. The boy was the kind of genius that clearly had had unrestrained internet access since he was very young. Hitoshi was the exact opposite, with not being let on the internet for long because it was a valuable resource that shouldn't be wasted on him, at least in the opinion of most of his foster parents.
Currently? He caught Midoriya-san looking at laptops, for him, since Midoriya-kun had his own computer and she wanted them to be equal.
Man, life was weird now.
Not that he was complaining. He was not. He was very not. Despite his slight doubts flaring up from time to time this was the best family he's had the luck to be in, he wouldn't want to lose it.
Speaking of losing it, he was starting to lose his mind, or maybe Midoriya-kun was, he thought, as he entered the boy's room and found it littered with small trash heaps.
"What—" It was the weekend. They were supposed to sleep-in, go to Dagobah around ten, and spend the day fusing.
"Okay, so, I couldn't sleep, and I thought, what if I learnt how to make support equipment?" Midoriya-kun emerged from a pile of, on second look electronic, trash, with a screwdriver in hand. "So I decided to take up tinkering!"
Hitoshi ran his hand through his hair and looked at the piles of trash, no doubt coming from Dagobah, with an edge of desperation closing in on him.
"You just decided that. Overnight." He stated flatly, and Midoriya-kun nodded vigorously.
"Yeah!" He punctuated his yell with a twist of the screwdriver on some poor screw. "And I was thinking, we could train something else today!"
"What exactly do you wanna train in this environment?" Hitoshi gestured widely to the room.
"Distance-fusing," Midoriya-kun replied unbothered. "We haven't tried that yet and most guides say that you can start training it as soon as you start fusing."
"Why would we waste time on that?" Hitoshi crossed his arms. "Only so many people can fuse with distance involved."
"Well with that attitude you won't." Midoriya-kun smiled cheekily. "I've read up a study that states that anyone with a specialisation can distance-fuse, and we both seem to have one, therefore we both should be able to distance-fuse," he finished, clearly proud of himself. His eyes spoke of mischief though. "Imagine what we could use it for, especially with forced-fusion! Just zapping from place to place!"
Hitoshi was about to protest, that it would not be cool if they could force-fuse from a distance, that would be a nightmare, how to get consent in that situation, how anything works even— but Midoriya-kun interrupted his thoughts.
"Imagine, Kacchan is walking down the hall and sees me, he's mad at something, I text you, you force-fuse me from across the building, I'm safe!" For a moment, taken by euphoria, Midoriya-kun seemed to live in a world where forced-fusion wasn't a crime. Not that it stopped him before.
But… something in his face was so earnest, that Hitoshi couldn't be mad at him for overlooking key elements wrong with the plan, or for switching their plans at the last minute.
"Okay, what do we do then?"
"Just sit there and meditate."
Hitoshi sits down, closes his eyes and focuses.
He imagines the buzz that comes with fusing spreading from his heart outwards, he read somewhere that this sensation is a key to distance fusing, but he never thought he would be trying it out himself.
When nothing happens he cracks open an eye and sees Midoriya-kun tinkering, completely focused on the task at hand.
It makes him irrationally angry.
"Are you even gonna try or…?" he snarks, and Midoriya-kun almost jumps, then smiles at him sheepishly.
"I am trying, I'm just also tinkering," he claims.
Hitoshi scoffs, "Yeah, sure."
"What, I am! It's meditative," Midoriya-kun has the gall to get defensive.
Hitoshi really wants to chew him out but he refrains. This will get them nowhere.
Midoriya-kun stops looking him in the eyes and goes back to tinkering.
Hitoshi's anger, somehow, rises even more.
"Are you even taking it seriously? Us fusing? Because maybe if you did you'd know how to stop listening to my thoughts whenever we fuse!" he hisses out, and Midoriya-kun gasps, offended, and looking betrayed for some reason.
"It's involuntary! You should know that, Mister I-Almost-Force-Fused-Kacchan!" he goes for the throat.
Hitoshi recoils, guilt and anger mixing in his stomach into an ugly thing. He feels a buzz of nerves in himself and takes a deep breath.
He wants to say more, wants to aim where it hurts. He's only distantly aware of the consequences of pissing off his foster parent's son. But even if he was more aware of it he wouldn't care.
He feels hurt and he wants to hurt and the emotions buzzing in him overtake him… but he doesn't say anything. He doesn't get a chance before he glows white and Midoriya-kun does the same and as suddenly as it started it ends with them being… something.
He's… No, they're something new, something disjointed and dangerous and very, very bitter.
Fusions are beings of emotions, and anger is an emotion too after all.
They look down on themselves and cringe. Their clothes are mismatched, fused incorrectly patch to patch, upon a closer look their arms look the same, in a less noticeable way, but their sharp eyes are looking for imperfections in one another and they're fused so they're looking for imperfections in themselves.
"What am I?" they whisper and cringe at their voice, scratchy and unpleasant, and very much reflective of what they are. "No, what are we?"
They feel like two creatures sharing a mind. They are two creatures sharing a mind. But it feels so good when they're Diana and it feels so different and bad right now.
"How do we stop?" They ask themselves. It dawns on them, "We're… We're disjointed."
They both heard plenty of horror stories about disjointed fusions. People who didn't fully fuse, or fused wrong, or did other fucked up things that led to a fusion that is wrong and hurting.
And of course they're idiots that launched themselves into one.
The feeling of irritation overtakes them and they claw at their arms, grounding themselves in pain. They're unsure which one of them is at fault for the feeling, it doesn't matter. They're forced to both deal with it anyway.
There's a hint of fear too (aside from irritation, anger, guilt and pettiness) because one of the most frightening qualities of a disjointed fusion is its ability to turn into a permafusion quick.
"I don't want to look like that," they say, unsure which of them actually said that. "Okay. We. What do we do though?"
A thought belonging to Izuku immediately appears: Go to mom. She'll figure something out.
They get distressed at that thought. What if she won't be able to help? What if she kicks Hitoshi out? No, she won't. How do you know that? She might! No! She's a good person, she wouldn't! Good people do bad things sometimes!
The distress, apparently, is enough to get them to split.
Hitoshi gasps, still faintly glowing as if ready to get right back into the fusion, and forces the buzzing down. He closes his eyes forcefully, and tries to count his breathing like his old therapist told him.
On the other side of the room Midoriya-kun gets his bearings too, Hitoshi can still feel the emotional connection between them and so he keeps himself as closed off and unreadable as possible. No worded thoughts and an iron grip on his emotions.
"She wouldn't." Midoriya-kun eventually says in a whisper. "Kick you out. Not unless you did something seriously wrong. And this… this was an accident. She wouldn't be mad."
Hitoshi snorts, doubt flaring in his heart. Midoriya-kun winces at that, feeling the emotions as his own.
"No seriously. She wouldn't. She likes you."
"Please, it's going to change at the first mistake I make," he says, and then feels as Midoriya-kun's anger flares. It takes him by surprise.
"Don't you dare insult my mom like that!" he says loud enough that Midoriya-san can probably hear it from another room, and he feels mortified.
"I'm— I'm not—"
"You are! By insinuating she wouldn't try to understand, wouldn't try to help, would be so heartless as to kick you out for nothing— You're insulting her. And I won't stand for that!"
Hitoshi feels flabbergasted and very, very ashamed. He didn't really think about what his words painted his current foster parent as. And after what Midoriya-kun said it made perfect sense why he got mad.
Still, Hitoshi couldn't get that inkling of doubt out of his heart.
"Listen, I didn't want to insult your mom. I just don't trust her to take my side above yours," he explains gently. It's Midoriya-kun's time to feel taken aback.
"What do you mean?"
"Imagine, you're a parent and your child and not your child says 'hey, we got so mad at each other we created a disjointed fusion. also he's been force-fusing me for days', wouldn't you be horrified?"
"I wouldn't say that to her," Midoriya-kun says, and Hitoshi can't feel a lie. "Besides she would ask for an explanation, she would listen to your side of the story before taking a drastic action. Please, please believe me."
Hitoshi still feels doubtful… but he's willing to let it go for now. Midoriya-kun must feel this because he exhales and looks at him with sad, pitying eyes. At least it's better than anger.
For a few minutes they just sit in silence, neither of them willing to break it first.
Midoriya-kun caves first.
"Wanna try this again? But, uh, without the bad blood?"
Hitoshi nods.
They both close their eyes and actually meditate this time. Midoriya-kun isn't tinkering, and it puts Hitoshi at ease. He thinks this might actually work with muted optimism.
The familiar buzzing starts again in him, and he lets it spread through his body.
When he opens his eyes again, it isn't him. It's Diana.