Tbh this might actually be my least favorite chapter that I've written for this fic? if only because I had to keep reminding myself while writing it that Suzume only knows what she knows, and most of the fic is from her perspective. She's very smart but she can't actually read minds, she doesn't know the details of her dads deal with All Might, and she is, at her core, a very angry person.
On the flip side, I had a lot of fun writing mad scientist bae!
WARNING this chapter contains (2) allusions to suicide and a mention of self harm scars.
Also thanks to the folks who let me know the last chapter posted twice, I posted it from the app and I'm not sure what happened, but I did get it fixed ASAP.
Suzume leaves Ichigo's dojo with a few more bruises than normal, and her knuckles split and bloody beneath their new bandages. It stings, but it's a familiar sting.
The sun is starting to go down, and she should be getting home before she worries her mother.
But even after breaking through a half a dozen training dummies in the dojo and tearing through other students at a rate that had even Ichigo telling her to hold back a bit, energy still thrums under her skin and aches in her bones.
She's exhausted but not in a way that she can sleep.
It used to be whenever this happened I could just go find a dead body and start hunting.
Now, she hasn't got that option anymore.
Now she goes looking for trouble, and fights.
It's a good thing that you can't technically be a vigilante without a quirk, or else she might have gotten in trouble by now. She supposes she could go back home and see if Spinner and Dusty are online, they're almost done with their second portrait when she had to call it quits.
But a fight sounds better.
Suzume is on her way to a rougher area, her hands in her pockets and anger bubbling under her skin, when someone steps out in front of her.
A tall man, dressed all in black. He looks fairly bland, but his attention is locked on her.
Her shoulders tense.
Her pulse picks up.
"Hey. You're Yusada, right? From UA."
She doesn't respond. She stares at him, her jaw tight.
A smile touches his mouth, softening the rest of his features.
"Sorry, I don't mean to frighten you. My wife was going to talk to you if we saw you again, you were here the other day too, but she's at work," he waves to the side, where his wife is definitely not standing. If he even has a wife. His other hand is out in the open where she can see it, and she doesn't see any other extra limbs on him.
"We wanted to tell you how cool it was to see you out on the stage. With a bunch of people with quirks like that… We don't have any," he says, his voice quiet and self deprecating.
She blinks at him.
"Oh."
"I always wanted to be a hero. But back then they didn't let quirkless people into the hero courses. And even if they did, I don't think I could have made it in."
He rubs the back of his head. His sleeve rides up and she sees faint, healed scarring.
"You must think I'm silly. I'm a grown man but, I really admire your spirit."
It does sound silly, when he says it like that. He's an adult, and it's not got anything to do with her that he never became a hero. It's society's for not letting him get into the schools, and it's his for not forcing them to change anyways. By his own admission, he gave up on his dreams.
She knows that's not a fair thought as soon as she has it.
It it wasn't for Kaname believing in her, if it wasn't for people willing to teach her to fight, if it wasn't for her father doing everything he could for his family, she might never have made it this far either.
She might doing-
Suzume pauses, and tilts her head.
"What did you end up doing?"
"Hmm? Oh, nothing very special. I clean at the hospital. It was one of the only jobs I could get that pays well."
Suzume, or Suzanna, had spent more time in morgues than she had in hospitals, but she knows very well how important cleanliness is. Kai would weep thanking this man for keeping things sanitary.
…maybe not weep, but still.
"That's an incredibly important job," Suzume tells him all the same, thinking of Kai scrubbing his arms raw and pandemics. "And not one that I think I could do."
"It's not exactly glamorous," he argues, waving her away.
Suzume lifts her hands so he can see the bandages. One of them is already getting bloody already. She might need stitches again.
"Neither is what I'm doing," she says dryly. "That doesn't mean that what you're doing isn't important. It's more important than me picking fights in some ways. You keep people safe and a hospital sanitized. If you and your coworkers stopped doing your jobs, the world would come to a literal halt. And-"
She falters when she realizes that there are tears in his eyes.
Oh god.
What did I say wrong?
Why is a grown man crying?!
He takes her hands in his, gently.
"You're a good girl. Really a good girl. Please know that we're rooting for you!"
The itching under her skin eases. Her shoulders drop.
Oh.
"Thank you…"
He lets go of her hands and bows away.
Suzume, dazed and confused, turns around and goes home.
Suzume leans back against the wall of the elevator, her eyes closed. She holds her twisted wrist to her chest, a souvenir from her fight with Ojiro during class. She had been right. He was good at fighting hand to hand, and his tail was wicked.
She's tucked in beside the door when it swishes open and All Might, who was supposed to be overseeing class 1-B's, comes stumbling in.
His shoulders are steaming.
He turns, slaps the 'close door' button, and freezes when he sees her. The smile on his face is picture perfect and looks frankly painful.
"Young Yusada! I didn't see you there," he says brightly. There's strain in every line of his body.
She grunts, her eyes slitted open, and leans back against the wall. The light for her floor is still flickering, and he doesn't make to hit another one. He must be going to Recovery Girl as well.
She watches him from under long, dark lashes.
His cheek keeps twitching. His chest shakes with suppressed coughs.
He breaks before she does.
"Is your arm injured?" He asks.
"Yeah. It's not bad. I just need ice is all." She's hurt it much worse than this. She's hurt most of her body much worse than just a sprain at one point or another over the past decade or so that she's been training to be a hero.
He clears his throat. "You know, injuries like that are only the start of what you will face over the next few years. The hero course is incredibly difficult and dangerous. Many students don't make it through, and some do only to find that being a hero isn't everything that they thought it would be."
His smile is… kind, she thinks. Or it's meant to be. It looks fake, and she can see blood starting to leak from between his clenched teeth.
What is he doing? What's the point of this?
The smiling, the fake kindness. What's his angle?
She knows just before he goes on, and it makes her stomach twist and her chest clench tightly.
"There's not just glory. It's hard, and people will look to you for their safety. Without a quirk, you'll be hard pressed to keep up with the demands. And when you get older, you may decide that this was a mistake. You could get injured, even crippled in the field. What happened with the crowd during the sport festival was just-"
"Nothing new," she interrupts. Anger boils, hot and cloying in her chest.
His smile falters a fraction.
"I'm s-"
"What happened during the sports festival. It was nothing new. They didn't say a single word I haven't heard before. Even though I won. Even though I beat every goddamn quirk I came up against-"
She has to take a breath to keep from gritting her teeth.
"They still thought I couldn't hack it. That my classmates would go easy on me. That I needed to be protected. And in less than five minutes, when it looked like someone like me was going to win, or go too far, further than they wanted me to, they turned on me. I am very well aware that that won't be the only time that will happen, because it isn't the first time that it's happened."
His mouth opens, and she snaps at him.
"Cut that out. That smiling, glittery hero act. I don't know who you think you're performing for, but cut. It. Out! It doesn't mean anything to me. You, don't mean anything to me. You're just one more person who thinks I'm less than what I am because of how I was born."
For a minute there, she had actually thought that maybe he wasn't. That he was coming around.
He didn't treat her differently in class. He still gave her her award during the festival.
Being wrong stings more than she ever could have expected it to.
This was All Might, the man who had put an innocent man in jail. She should hate him. She's still angry for her father. Now that anger surges through her like fire. Now she thinks of a man, a stranger on the street with a scarred heart and body and an unglamorous job, weeping in the night.
"Even if something goes horribly wrong, I can live with that. Since the other options for quirkless people are poverty, endless harassment or taking a long walk off a short cliff."
The doors swish open and she flies out of them, her hands trembling once her back is to the man. Bakugou is standing outside of them, his hand stretched out to hit the 'down' button. His wrist brace is gone, and his red eyes are startled and wide.
The doors slides shut behind her without either of them moving.
She listens with a terrible sense of vengeance as All Might starts hacking in the elevator behind her while Bakugou swears.
Good. He deserves it.
She lets Recovery Girl fuss for a minute before she shuffles her into a side room with ice for her wrist.
"Rest a few minutes," she orders. "You'll be free once the swelling goes down, but I don't want you to return to class. It's just more combat training for the rest of the day, and you'll stress your wrist out more if you go back. Save that for when lives are actually on the line instead of just when you're training with the rest of those reckless youngsters."
She obeys, and sits in the side room.
The ice on her wrist is a cold comfort, and it helps her cool her heels.
She lays her head back on the wall, trying to focus on breathing.
She hates mentioning that kind of stuff outloud. It feels like if she acknowledges it it'll be even closer than it was before.
She knows the statistics. Her mother knows the statistics and she's constantly terrified of them, so Suzume does her best to pretend that they don't exist. Suzume hates the way she said it too. It sounded too much like a threat, and it wasn't. She likes being alive, however difficult life might be sometimes.
She probably shouldn't have thrown them at All Might like that either. It was probably cruel.
It was cruel.
She knows that.
But he had been cruel too.
Suzume shuts her eyes tight, and drags the sting of betrayal and fury into a hard stone inside her chest. The burn settles like a coal alongside every other word of discouragement she's ever heard. Every other memory she has of people trying to make her quit. Some with words. Some with violence.
They sit in the furnace of her chest, something to draw on if she ever starts to forget why she's broken her bones and bled.
Once the ice in her hand is melted she stands and goes to the other room, quiet on her feet.
All Might is there, or rather Toshinori Yagi, all skin and bones.
If he had said what he said to all of her classmates, not just her, she wouldn't have reacted so poorly. He's been hurt terribly as a hero, and he's the strongest of heroes on the planet.
But it wasn't to the others.
It wasn't to them as a group.
It was just to her.
When she passes him by he makes a startled noise that turns into a fit of bloody, hacking coughs. It's hard to feel guilty for startling him. It's not her fault he didn't hear her coming.
She can feel his eyes on her when she sets the ice pack down on the table and twists her wrist, testing it. It doesn't crack or pop.
Suzume glances Yagi's way before she turns to the door. Recovery Girl comes in, tapping her syringe cane along the tiled floor, and holds out her hand expectantly.
Suzume gives her her wrist.
The old woman twists it a few times before she nods.
"I still want you out of the rest of today's class, but you should be fine by tomorrow. Come back if it acts up. Gummy?"
Suzume takes it with a smile. "Thank you ma'am. I need to go to talk to some of the support course student's anyways."
"Oh? You're going earlier than a lot of your classmates. I can't say I disapprove, but don't let them rope you into anything… dangerous."
Suzume blinks at her.
"That's ominous. Okay."
Recovery Girl pats her hand and Suzume takes her leave.
Let Recovery Girl deal with the bloody cough of All Might.
It occurs to her halfway down the elevator to the Support Department that she might want to tell someone that One for All was still alive.
…They've probably figured it out by now, what with the Nomu and everything.
And the Nomu. What is she supposed to do about those? The doctor is mass producing them, somewhere, somehow.
(She doesn't know the where, but she could figure it out if she had a few more resources. She doesn't know how, but she has theories.
Suzanna Hemmings had hunted people like this for a living.
Yusada Suzume has never even seen a dead body.)
It's enough to give her a headache, and it only opens the door to the same problems she's already got with Stain and Hosu, and the ones she had for the USJ.
She doesn't know how many anonymous tips she can give out before someone actually does manage to track her down, and that is a conversation she has no interest in having.
I just want to be a hero. Why does everything have to be so complicated? If I was a few years older I wouldn't have to deal with all this bull shit!
Why couldn't she have been in Mirio's year? He was nice. She likes him! And his class doesn't get attacked by villains every two days!
Suzume skips the elevator this time and instead jogs down the stairs. She should have taken them in the first place. They were good for her, even if they took forever and a half.
On her way down to Support she swings by her classroom to grab her hero suit, in its shiny metal case.
When she reaches the door she pauses. The Support Department is pretty separated from the rest of the school. Each course has its own tower of glass and steel, making four in total. They're all connected by long walkways, which coincidentally form their iconic 'H' look from the outside. Heroics stands between Gen Ed and Support, but even then Support is different from all three other courses.
For one thing, every door she comes across is reinforced. And the walls aren't the same stone as the rest of the school either. She can see places where plaster has been knocked aside to reveal more steel beneath it. The whole building looks like its bomb proof.
She thinks of the feral look on Hatsume's face during the obstacle race and nods to herself.
Definitely bomb proof.
Now she wonders, just how much of the support department was like her? Was she going to go in there and see death robots fighting swarms of genetically modified bees while a roomba made entirely of knives did donuts in one corner and a 3D printer printed thousands of smaller copies of itself in a futile effort to overtake humanity?
It's already been a long day. She feels tired after her little explosion at All Might, one that was witnessed by Bakugou of all people.
Joy to the fucking world. And what's with him and eavesdropping? For a hot head, loud mouthed jackass he's unnervingly quiet when he wants to be.
It takes her a few tries, but eventually someone points her to the classroom that Power Loader is teaching in, and hands her a fire extinguisher for protection.
Just in case, she knocks firmly on the steel door when she reaches it.
"Come i- Wait, no! Wait just a min- five minutes!" Power Loader shouts from the other side.
An explosion rocks the room beyond, and shakes the floor beneath Suzume's feet.
She grips the fire extinguisher tighter.
Just what have I gotten myself into?
She listens, but no one is screaming in pain so they either died fast or no one was hurt.
Finally, Power Loader shouts for her to come in. "Should be safe!"
Should be, he says.
Suzume squares her shoulders and pushes the door open with a grunt before walking in. Smoke billows towards her, smelling distinctly like dust burning off of a heater that hasn't been used in a long time.
She wrinkles her nose.
When the smoke is sucked out of the room by a fan in the ceiling that has to be there for that purpose exclusively, she gets to see Hatsume cackling like a hyena and looming over a ball of flaming metal while two other students on either side of her clutch their projects protectively to their chests. A boy who looks like he's made of clouds in the corner swears in portuguese over a small table of new broken glass.
"...I can come back later?" she offers, eying them warily.
Power Loader, who up close isn't that much taller than Suzume is with his helmet on, comes over to her.
"That's fine, you came on a pretty relaxed day. Oh hey, the new fire extinguisher."
"I was told to give it to you," she hands it over.
"Thanks. Now, what can I do for you, Yusada?"
It's weird that he knows her name. They've never met. But it's also something she's going to have to get used to, isn't it? She wasn't exactly subtle when she took over the Sports Festival. She's surprised she hasn't been approached by more than a few people on the street, but she's so plain looking and she wears her uniform so seldomly outside of school, she's probably lucky.
"Yes! Actually I was hoping to talk to Hatsume? I saw some of her gear during the festival and-"
Suzume is cut off when someone grabs her hands in rough leather gloves and yanks her around to face the bright goggled eyes of one Hatsume Mei.
"It's you! The girl who won the festival! And you're here to talk about my babies!"
Suzume tries to take a step back, but Hatsume's hands are like steel traps.
"Yes?" her voice comes out in a startled squeak.
"Yes! What did you like best? My hover soles? The jetpack? The hydraulic bracers? Or the capture gun?!"
"None," Suzume finally pries her hands away. "Well, no, the capture gun was cool, but I'm here about the wire things?"
"My wire arrows! You have excellent taste, First Place Girl."
Suzume… has been called worse things in her life.
"Well, you saw that grappling gun I had- actually, I have it here too," no sooner has she lifted her costume case than has Hatsume snatched it from her hands and snapped it open. She starts rummaging through her gear, checking the grappling gun, stun gun, smoke pellets, bolas, pepper spray, caltrops, flash lights, and a butterfly knife. Some of it she uses way less often than she thought she would.
"It's not bad gear," Hatsume tells her, turning the stun gun over in her hands, "But I could make tons of improvements! Like this, we could change the voltage and turn it into a stun gen, EMP emitter combo and-"
"Actually," she interrupts, "I was going to drop that. I never really use it, so I thought I might switch it out for something better, or something I would use more often. The grappling gun I use all the time, but I lose time when I have to take it out of the holster and put it back in. Something like your wire arrows would be way more effective."
"You've come to the right place!" Hatsume beams at her. "Let's get started."
Hatsume snaps her case closed and marches off towards her work table.
Power Loader leans over to say, quietly, "If she gets too rowdy just give her a good tap on the head."
"... Like knock her out?" Suzume squints at him.
"If you could, that would be great. I get the feeling she hasn't slept in a while," he says cheerfully.
"Okay so. This whole department is crazy? Or just her?"
"Nope, whole thing. She's just extra loud about it. You should hear some of the stuff people scream at rubber ducks."
"I get the feeling I don't want to," Suzume mumbles, and goes after Hatsume.
"So!" Hatsume spins to face her, holding what was once her unused stun gun in her hands. It's little more than a pile of wires and metal with a battery pack now. "What were you thinking about replacing it with? My capture gun, maybe? It's such a cute little baby!"
"Mhmm. Vee cute. That one I was actually thinking of replacing with a small field medical kit. Something simple, mostly just assessment tools and basics. Hemostatic dressings, bandages, suture kits, antibacterial sprays, bandaids, tape, a PCK," she tacks off. "If I keep everything organized it should all fit fine with a few adjustments. And my other holster, I could free up as well if we can incorporate your wire arrows into the design."
Hatsume looks over her belt and holsters. "You've already got a lot of weight on your hips, and my wire arrows fit in a harness on the chest. I watched you fight in the festival, and you keep your elbows pretty close to your body in a fight. Let's get the harness on you and see if you can still move with it on before we make too many other plans."
It's a startlingly sensible suggestion from someone who is absolutely ten pounds of crazy in a five pound bag.
Hatsume fetches the harness and helps Suzume into it. It weighs more than she thought it would, and when she throws a few punches and flips around the room a few times she sees that Hatsume was right. With the way she fights, the canisters that hold the arrows only got bumped by her arms, and threatened to twist in a way that was way too distracting when she went upside down. If they move them down onto her hips, it'll add to the weight on her belt and might still get in the way.
Suzume hands them back, dejected. "I really liked those…"
She could have flown around, like she was in Attack on Titan or something!
Hatsume picks up her forearm armor and turns it over in her hands.
"Say, just how attached are you to these?"
"Uh, not very I guess?"
"Perfect!" Hatsume shoves her uniform out of the way and whips out a piece of paper and a pencil. Suzume creeps closer while she starts drawing so fast Suzume is surprised it doesn't start smoking.
Before her eyes, in just a few minutes, Hatsume designs a pair of vambraces with small grappling hooks in them. The outside are reinforced to keep from getting damaged if she uses them to block an attack, and the hooks are similar, if smaller, to the ones she already has.
"There! Look, this part will go around your hand, and we can put a button here for you to hit, when it won't be in the way when you make a fist."
"You figured all that out so fast!" Suzume gapes at her.
Hatsume flaps her hand in dismissal. "All I did was redesign something I already made, its easy. If you're getting rid of your stun gun, you should get something else long ranged to replace it. The grappling braces, my precious little babies, won't be good for shooting eyes out-"
"Does everyone know about that?!"
"-Since they're so much smaller, and the weight distribution will be different."
"I'll need some hidden chambers in them for lock picks. Like these," she pulls out the picks from her scrunchie and shows them to Hatsume. They're pretty simple, but versatile. Hatsume scratches a few new lines on the designs. There's not a space for them in the body suit itself. Hatsume tests the material of that too. It's flexible, but woven with Spectra Kevlar blend that makes it hard to cut through.
"There's something else. I was looking into training weights a while ago, but they always ended up being really bulky and obvious, or too light to do me much good. Ich- my sensei told me that I would do well with ones on my wrists, ankles, and chest, but she didn't have any better than what I found."
"Also super easy. I've been working on high density metal for a while now," Hatsume pulls open a drawer and shuffles around, producing a handful of thin metal bars. When she drops one on the desk, it makes a hard dent in the wood. "I'll have those babies ready by tomorrow!"
Hatsume picks up one of her weighted throwing disks.
"I use those more than I use the stun gun," Suzume tells her. She'd nearly given Aoyama a concussion with one the other day.
"They remind me of Sir Nighteyes Hyper Density Seals."
"Yeah! They're based off of them. I was hoping that eventually I'd be able to adjust and improve them, or get different types than just ones I throw. Like, some that deploy smoke, or quick drying foam for capture, or explode and- What's with that face?"
"Challenge accepted!"
"What challenge?"
"Those will make beautiful babies!"
"What is happening here."
"The explosives and the smoke deployment will be easy. We'll have to upgrade your belt to absorb shock so they don't go off accidentally if you get knocked down," while she talks, she pulls out another piece of paper and starts drawing at lightning speed. "I bet I can even incorporate aspects of your stun gun into them. Oh! And an EMP in at least one, those can be useful. I'll put a faraday cage around the electronics pouches, we can put your phone here and add foil lining to your hoot here and- Quick drying foam could be made using a variation of expanding insulation, but I'd have to adjust it so it doesn't leave chemical burns and expands further to trap a full grown person. It'll probably have to be water soluble, so you'll need something else for water villains- Oh! Freezing explosions! I can make those a thing!"
Suzume watches Hatsume spiral down a rather terrifying rabbit hole as she starts talking about the permeability of human skin.
Well.
In for a penny?
"I was also thinking of adding a visor or a cowl of some kind to it. One with some tech included. My brother had a visor that shows heat signatures, night vision, and syncs up to his phone for communication purposes, and has a camera built into it. I'm pretty sure I can get the specs for it."
Hatsume grins with all her teeth.
"Consider it done. I'm gonna make so many cute little babies!"
God this day is exhausting.