The Price of Pain

Chapter 14: To Trust is to Risk Pain

Hizashi loved his husband, truly. He loved that Shouta loved cats. He loved that the underground hero would patiently wait for the most scared and stubborn and hurt of those creatures, until they came to eat from the palm of his hand. They had to find an apartment okay with him adopting several of them. Hizashi was more of a dog person, but he knew they required time, time he could not provide with the three jobs he was running at the same time. He knew it was getting bad when Shouta of all people told him he needed to slow down. But Hizashi enjoyed being busy, he enjoyed the hectic days full of boundless activities to get to. He didn't like sitting still and feeding cats like his lovely husband did.

So it was a pretty big deal when Shouta graduated from cats to a whole human child. Hizashi loved kids, as evident by his third job as a teacher at UA. He enjoyed igniting a spark of learning in them, giving them lively encouragements, and watching their youthful energies flourish into adulthood. It brough back happy and sad memories of his own time growing up. But that was just his job. He could nurture them without growing too connected to them, without being responsible for their well-being so wholly as a parent would. Being a teacher wasn't too dissimilar to being a parent, but there was a massive leap in responsibilities when it came down to it. A teacher was simply one adult in a child's life. A parent was their entire world while they grew up.

"Shouta, I love you, I do… but I don't…" he said, finding himself at a loss for words for the first time.

Shouta nodded, dark eyes softening slightly. Hizashi grabbed his husband's hands and grimaced. Shouta wanted more than just cats now. When they had initially gotten married, Hizashi was pretty sure children were off the table. Their work was dangerous, and they had very little time. But they had also been quite young then, and priorities changed with age.

"I won't take him in if you aren't on board Hizashi. I can find him a good foster home… but I don't trust myself anymore," he said.

Hizashi was briefly aware of one of the cases Shouta was obsessing over on the side, one he refused to lodge into the Agency he was contracted to. It was about a little girl, younger than even the first years he taught. A mercenary and a killer. It was hard to imagine one so young in a world as dark as that, not when he taught kids older than her who still got into all sorts of innocent shenanigans in class. Shouta had confessed he had sent her to foster care when he'd first started as a hero, and the girl who he'd promised would be safe, was mistreated and abused her whole life since. But it wasn't the girl Shouta wanted to adopt, although Hizashi was sure the man would do just that if given the opportunity. No, it was instead a boy who grew up with the girl.

Hizashi knew his husband often visited the boy under the pretence of training him to get into UA. He knew the real reason why Shouta took such interest. He felt responsible for Hitoshi. He was afraid if he stopped keeping tabs on the kid, that he'd somehow end up with another family who would abuse him. That fear had persisted until the only real course of action that could change his husband's mind was if the kid lived with them. If Shouta was in direct care, then obviously no abuse could happen, or so his thought process went.

That's why he loved his husband so much.

For someone so aloof and distant, Shouta cared so deeply and fully. He got attached more quickly than he liked to let people believe, and despite putting on a distant front, when Shouta cared for someone, the lengths he would go to for them were rather drastic. For that reason Hizashi considered changing his mind, if only to trust in his husband's decision. Hizashi himself was easily attached to people as well. Even if he didn't love Hitoshi right now, he had no doubt after a week with the boy, he'd die for him.

"Alright," he said.

"Alright?" Shouta asked, eyes raising.

"We can foster the kid. I know you've already mentally adopted him," Hizashi chuckled.

"Hizashi," Shouta breathed a sigh of relief, his expression softening.

"Now don't stop singing my praises! I'm a wonderful husband!" Hizashi boasted.

"You are… but stop fishing for praise," Shouta snorted.

Hizashi held his heart in mock hurt before Shouta placed his hand on his. Shouta's eyes looked serious, worried even.

"This isn't just a cat Hizashi. This is a whole human child we'll be bringing in, one with quite a bit of neglect and abuse he needs to overcome. You sure you want to do this?"

Hizashi really wasn't, but he trusted Shouta, which meant he would take a leap of faith. In a roundabout way that did make him certain of it.

"I'm sure."

So they went to sleep, and the very next day, Hizashi found himself filling out an adoption form and legally filling it in for one Shinsou Hitoshi. The nerve-wracking part came after as their paperwork was approved quickly due to their foster licence and pro-hero status. They visited the boy's foster home, and Hizashi understood why Shouta wanted the kid out of there. The foster parent had to keycard Hitoshi's door to even let him out. It seemed more like a prison system than anything, but when asked about it Shouta sighed in defeat, stating he'd gone to all sorts of legal lengths to shut down this place, but it was all above board. Any kid deemed to have a dangerous quirk was meant to continue quirk therapy, psyche evaluations, and be kept under strict lock and key by their guardians. All Shouta could manage to do was give Hitoshi's guardians a slap on the wrist for their use of muzzles and apparently blindfolds too, though they weren't able to get them on the last one for a lack of evidence.

Hizashi felt bad for all the other kids stuck there, but they couldn't exactly adopt them all. The system needed to change, and for that to happen, Shouta would be fighting this in court for a long time to come. For now they could help one soul, and that was Hitoshi. The kid was surprised to see them it seemed.

"You're here inside… why?" Hitoshi asked.

"You're coming to live with us from now on," Shouta said.

"R-Really?"

"We've officially signed your foster release over to them," Hitoshi's current guardian chimed in rudely.

Hitoshi ignored the man, to look up at Shouta and Hizashi with a stunned, awed expression. Hizashi took everything he said back. It wouldn't take a while for him to fall in love with the kid, he already was. Shinsou Hitoshi was going to get all the good things in the world if it was the last thing Hizashi did.

Hitoshi was having a difficult time trying to get into the routine of living in a foster house that didn't micromanage him like he was a criminal to be herded into a cell. For one thing, there was no no-speaking rule in his new home. Both Yamada and Aizawa looked at him like he belonged there, and not like he was filth beneath their shoes, or a villain about to attack him. Despite this, he sometimes still couldn't get himself to speak. Instead of berating him like he had expected them to do, Yamada instead brought out a book on sign language, and explained how he was a little hard of hearing and there was no shame in learning it.

Hitoshi felt… loved. This was a far cry from his foster care situation, and even better than what he had with his parents who weren't much better than a prison sentence. Sometimes he woke up afraid that now he had a taste of this kind of life, it would be mercilessly ripped from under him. In those moments he would withdraw from their affection to save himself the pain. But the longer he lived with the two men, the less those bouts of anxiety hit him. Hitoshi found himself letting Yamada hug him and Aizawa pat his shoulders proudly whenever he did something right.

The months had gone by, and he had switched schools, and though he hadn't found any new friends, there was no bullying for once. And to top it off Aizawa and Yamada helped him train to take the UA entrance exam. For once in his life the dream of being a hero, proving he wasn't a villain, didn't actually feel far out of reach.

Life was good, but in the back of his mind were dark eyes, slouched shoulders, and mousy brown hair. Kuroishi Akiho was ever there in the peripheral of his thoughts. After all, the search for her had kick started his new life. He would have never met Aizawa or Yamada without Akiho's disappearance. Hitoshi always remembered the day the quiet, almost lifeless girl snapped. She burst with such violence, dislocating one of his bullies shoulders, and then proceeding to decimate the other much larger boys with such ease. In the moment he thought she had to have been going all out, but the more he replayed the events in his head, the more he remembered her hesitating to throw a hit somewhere else. Her unexpected violence was not uncontrolled. He had a feeling she could have killed those boys, and with that quirk of hers, there was no doubt.

But she hadn't.

All Kuroishi had done was hurt the boys bad, but not bad enough for them to not be able to recover. And after that, it seemed she'd gotten restless. Hitoshi hated that he hadn't been able to spot the shift in her behaviour. What had been a docile girl, who kept out of the others way, had stopped looking at the floor but rather out the window. She'd had enough, and she took matters into her own hands, whereas Hitoshi knew he wouldn't have had the same courage to do so. But in the end, he won right? His patience and values had led him to a home with people who genuinely cared about him, and Akiho… well she wasn't so lucky.

It was a small relief to have Aizawa confirm he intended to bring her back, that he wouldn't leave her where she was in her growing darkness. There hadn't been much progress as far as he knew, but as he watched the news, his heart sank.

"Kuroishi Akiho, and Rokuro Nomura, a man formerly known as Pro-Hero Rock, are suspected to be the perpetrators of this violent murder. The former is a 14-year-old runaway from her foster home at the Shiyu Prefecture, with a known history of violence. Her quirk known as Black Out, can kill a target with retained eye contact. However reports of Rokuro Nomura's involvement is far more worrying as the man was said to have been defeated 4 years ago at the Naruhata Prefecture by the escaped Vigilante the Crawler."

Hitoshi had to let the information sink in. The news anchor warned of the following images being disturbing, however the gore was a little bit more than that. Blood had painted the walls and floor of the crime scene, like someone decided to go ham with a bucket of paint. It was blurred out for viewer discretion, but Hitoshi didn't think it needed to be detailed in 4k for him to see just how brutal the murder had been. The victim wasn't anyone special, just a 22-year-old part time worker who'd just graduated her college. Hitoshi knew Akiho would never kill someone like her for no reason. He just knew… and he hated that all he had to go off was a hunch or a gut feeling.

"Hitoshi, kiddo are you okay?" Hizashi asked, walking into the living room with dinner in hand.

He didn't trust himself to speak, so he simply pointed at the tv with the remote. Shouta walked in not a moment later to join. Hitoshi watched the man's face sink into worry as the news segment continued.

"She didn't kill her," Hitoshi said firmly.

"She's still a suspect now… there's no keeping her out of the public eye anymore," Shouta sighed.

"But there's a rehabilitation program or something like that right?" Hitoshi ventured.

The tight look on the heroes face spoke more than he could say. Hitoshi felt his heart sink in his chest. Of course it wouldn't be so easy. Of course someone with a quirk like hers would be considered too much of a risk to bother spending resources into rehabilitating. Just because there were a few good people who had taken him in didn't mean society wasn't rotten at the core. Hitoshi hated that he needed a reminder of that these days.

Still, he couldn't let her continue whatever it was she was doing. He felt responsible in some way for what happened to her. He had been the only one she opened up to and instead of confronting her when he had the chance, he kept his distance from her because he was afraid on some level of her. She had the look of someone very familiar with violence, someone who didn't tether herself to bonds and people. She was dangerous and she'd said so herself when they first talked. But at the end of the day she was just another teenager like him, a kid no one gave a chance to. Hitoshi remembered all the good things she did, from giving up her own food to another foster kid who was eating too little, lending another girl her pants after she had a period accident, and even standing up for him when no one else did. She kept her distance, but for someone who proclaimed to be so cold, she did good things without any payment in return. Hitoshi wanted to save that part of her.

"I'm going to bed," he said.

"You're not eating?" Hizashi asked, concern lacing his voice.

Hitoshi felt guilty about turning down the man's food when he put so much effort into making it. But not only wasn't he in the mood to eat, but he felt desperately like he needed to be doing something.

"I need some time to think," he said apologetically as he excused himself.

"Okay kiddo but remember you can tell us about things that trouble you. We're here for you," Hizashi said.

"I know, thanks Hizashi," he said, biting back calling the man his dad.

He wasn't sure they were there yet, and it felt especially wrong to say that when he was going to do something reckless. Hitoshi walked into his room, but as he listened to his guardians go to their rooms to sleep, he opened his window, key and note in hand. The first real gift anyone had given him.

Aki didn't know how they got into their apartment without anyone catching onto them. Maybe people were less than enthusiastic about confronting someone drenched in blood and viscera. She walked numbly into her apartment with Six. The man helped her out of her coat, which on a normal day she would have not allowed him to do. Today she was all fried nerves and scattered thoughts. She hadn't had such a bad day since… that night. She almost forgot it until now, the feel of someone ripping out the last bit of her humanity from her.

She looked down at her hands now drenched in blood once more and felt disconnected from her own skin. The world was blurry around the edges, so much so that she barely registered Dabi's presence until he was right in front of her face.

"Aki, you're not all here, are you?" Dabi asked.

She blinked, forcing herself back to this reality and she slowly nodded. "I'm here."

"I saved you the painting… though it is pretty ruined," Six said.

"Forget the painting, why do two look like you took a shower in someone's innards?" Dabi asked.

Aki found herself laughing mildly at that, earning an extra concerned look from the scarred man. She supposed it was weird to see someone like her laughing.

"Sorry, sorry, but you're not wrong. Six popped a woman's head like it was a balloon and now we're probably wanted criminals. I didn't have the time to hack their surveillance," she said, leaving out the part where she didn't because she could barely think straight this entire day.

"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Six said, shrugging as if it didn't make a difference to him.

Then he took the painting to her room and hung it above her bed. Aki sat down on the couch and buried her head into her hands.

"You look like shit," Dabi said.

She felt like it too, and she had no idea why. She'd seen murder and death from when she'd been able to crawl as a baby. As for something like innocence, she could barely remember having it in the first place. She'd grown numb to violence, numb to taking it and inflicting it, but sometimes this clawing feeling of disgust, desperation, terror, and humiliation resurfaced all at once turning her smooth emotionless face into something twisted. She bounced her legs repetitively as her anxiety grew. She barely realised she was biting her own hand until it was bleeding… until Dabi pried it from her mouth.

"Hey, you're not having a breakdown, are you?" Dabi asked.

Aki shook her head, denying the reality of it. Six wanted something from her and she didn't know what. It may have been sex, but that wasn't all. He wanted something else, something she didn't think she could give. She wasn't sure if she had anything left to give at all. Everything had already been taken from her. What more could the world want? What about what she wanted?

"I want my brother," she said.

Dabi quirked a brow. "You have a brother?"

Had. She had a brother, a two-year-old toddler who had his throat slit in front of her. Riku and Nezumi weren't hers to have. Their mother had made that very clear. Aki wanted to bring back her dead brother, she wanted to escape to a world where she could have watched him grow up. She most of all wanted her sensei, she wanted the man to raise from the grave, she would even pluck him from the Pure Lands for one more selfish word of advice, for his reassuring presence. She wanted her team, she wanted them to spar with her, wanted them to challenge her to stupid reckless contests as they tried to one-up each other in friendly competition.

Aki found herself wishing she was dead, so she could be up there with them instead of here covered in an innocent woman's viscera, with a man next door who she was afraid would push her truly over the edge.

"I'm scared," she admitted.

"You've killed before," Dabi said, voice uncharacteristically gentle.

Aki shook her head, wondering how she would explain what she meant. She was unsure why she was even being so vulnerable to begin with. All that composure she prided herself on… gone. It vanished with whatever stability her world had been built on.

"I'm not going to be a person anymore Dabi. If I give him what he wants… there will be nothing of me left. I've given everything else I could give. Can't I keep this one thing?" she asked, voice cracking.

"Six?"

Aki nodded.

Dabi scoffed. "Then don't fucking give it to him. Just kill the fucker and do what you want."

If it were that easy, she'd have done it by now. But Six had been her responsibility for so long. She nurtured him back to health. She'd helped heal life instead of taking it away for once. Aki didn't think she could kill Six, even if he killed her, even if he ripped out every last good thing from her. She'd threatened him with death so many times, but had she really meant it?

She had told Six he had been a calculated risk. She'd taken a chance on him, but her track record had never been good. She'd gotten her team killed and then herself. Now Six knew her deepest fears. He wanted her to face it willingly, no matter how wrong it was, no matter if she'd be giving up a part of herself she could never have back. Her mother had warned her she'd kill him… and Aki realised why now.

Six and her mother wanted the same thing.

"You're spiralling. What you're going to do is take a long shower, and then go to sleep. Clear your head and come to it in the morning," Dabi said.

She let him help her up and drag her to the bathroom. He shuffled through her clothes, throwing her a set of her pyjamas. She caught it numbly, nodding a silent thanks his way before she entered the shower, trembling with nerves. The water ran scalding hot on her skin until the constant pressure of it on her scalp eased away her aches and disappeared the red staining her skin. Aki changed and walked into her new bedroom.

The walls were bare apart from the one painting of the oranges splattered with blood. Six must have put it up for her while she broke down from her own weakness. She closed her eyes and despaired.

In the end she wasn't so dissimilar to this painting.

She hated how much it suited her room.

A/N

Hope you enjoyed this chapter, even though it was quite a bit shorter than most of my usual chapters. I will do occasional POV shifts to other characters completely outside of Aki's perspective, and this will become more frequent as she changes more canon events and more perspectives need to be explored to explain changes. Whatever happens in canon can just be chucked out the window after a certain point since she'll be changing a lot. Also hope you like the art and thanks to everyone who commented.

Comments

Aki is a pragmatist so like you said she's sympathetic to the meta liberation army, but understands that the logistics behind making quirks public usage would bring about way too much chaos and require more laws to ensure people aren't misusing it. Six is definitely one of the devils on Aki's shoulder. He was raised to value strength above all, and that being Aki's fatal flaw means he's feeding the worst part of her. Six himself is complicated since he is still a follower despite wanting to be powerful himself, hence why he keeps calling her a boss despite essentially bossing her around.