Katsuki isn't stupid enough to find out what the gauntlets on his hands are supposed to do if he tries to activate his quirk.
The things are heavy, cold, and feel too solid to be blasted apart. Nevermind that he's having an irritatingly difficult time trying to sweat in them thanks to their temperature. The room they've got him shoved in is little more than an industrial refrigerator. It's nearly the size of his bedroom, but the walls are lined with metal shelves bolted in place and covered in refrigerated food and drinks. Olives, pickles, tomato juice, fruits.
Nothing useful, in his case. Which just fucking figured didn't it?
Yusada made a bomb with tinfoil, but Katsuki didn't need that shit. He was a walking explosion and he could handle himself. He didn't need anyone.
Until he did.
Until he couldn't use his quirk anymore, and he was locked in a cold room in the middle of who the fuck knew where.
Ragdoll, that weird cat lady with the eye quirk, took him, Kaminari, Ashido, Kirishima, and two losers from 1-B. The shitty Kirishima rip off, and creepy telekinetic who couldn't aim for shit. He would have been better off with Ururaka and Todoroki, but no. They went somewhere else, and his group marched into the western woods.
Where they were, shocker, attacked.
It was the Nomu that was the big problem. The charred creep with the staples barely tried to roast them, he was more focused on the trees, but the nomu's hit them hard and fast, and in the blitz they'd been separated even further. As the temperatures got higher and higher his explosions got more and more volatile, until he felt his arm crack with one and knew he had to stop or risk breaking something more seriously.
It was stupid.
He let the fire and the nomu's herd him away like a stupid sheep, until a hand touched his shoulder and he found himself plopping into a bathtub of ice water. Someone crammed an oxygen mask over his face, and before he could blast them to hell he'd breathed in already.
When he woke up again, he was in the fridge, with his hands covered and his arms tied to his sides.
He had a pretty solid guess who was behind all this.
After all how many people had access to swarms of shitty villains and nomu's?
Just that fucker from the USJ of course.
And it was him that Katsuki was waiting to see.
It was him that Katsuki was going to kick the shit out of.
He'd probably grabbed Yusada first, while she was alone outside, or maybe she'd done something stupid like figured out what was happening and gone to confront him.
For a girl that smart, she was a fucking idiot sometimes.
And she was smart. Irritatingly so. Her grades were always high, and the way she looked at people and the world around her was…
Wrong.
Creepy.
Like everything was a puzzle for her to pick apart and ever question was a myster for her to solve. Like every issue had a solution if she could just look at all the pieces of it long enough.
He saw it in school, he'd seen in the airport and on I Island, and he was willing to bet his own quirk that she was doing the same thing here.
If she could.
Katsuki leaned against the wall and tried not to shiver as he went over everything he knew.
It wasn't much.
He didn't know how many other people that fuck in the top hat had snatched up. There were at least two of them, maybe more. They were in a restaurant for some reason. And they weren't dead.
Blackmail maybe?
Or just something as simple as a public execution?
Something to make the school look bad.
Something to make a point about 'hero society being shitty'.
He wanted to spit on the floor, but didn't feel like dealing with it later. Yeah, some people sucked. Some people were born better than other people. And life wasn't fucking fair.
But villains were losers who'd resigned themselves to that, who gave up and quit on the world.
And when he got his hands on them, he'd prove that. He'd prove that he was better than all of them. From the lazy fire fuck to the one who disolved whatever he touched.
The one who'd almost dissolved Yusada at the USJ.
Katsuki remembered the hole he'd put in her armor, and her body suit. If he'd made contact with her bare skin, he would have destroyed her lungs on top of it. She would have died in the first week of school.
The fact that none of them did wasn't anything as stupid as a miracle, the way the news tried to make it sound. It was sheer skill and determination that saved everyone in their class, even the people with quirks that were shit for fighting. Like the kid that could talk to animals, or the girl with the long earlobes.
They hadn't lost. They'd fought their way back to the center, took on the Big Bad until All Might got there and walked away without any serious injuries.
This was different.
They'd been separated there too, but it wasn't like this. He'd been dropped with Yusada and Kirishima. Here he was alone, with no quirk, no back up, and no knowledge of the area either. The door was locked, and he wasn't exactly a cracksmith.
So all he could do was wait for someone to come get him, and try to figure out a plan in the meantime.
There was no way for him to get the stupid gauntlets off, and no way for him to get out. No weapons for him to use, no-
He paused.
The fridge had a metal wire handing down, with a metal capsule at the end of it. Like the thing people put in fish tanks to check the temperature, except it was industrial and solid.
And his gauntlets were held in place by screwed with philips heads.
Katsuki narrowed his eyes.
He went to the wall and took hold of the wire. The metal gloves kept it from digging into his skin as he yanked it brutally, trying to rip it out of the wall.
It gave with a groan of metal being torn from its fixtures, and something in the wall itself popped. Something on the other side fell to the tiles ground with a clatter. ]
Katsuki folded the wire and tied it to one of the metal shelves on the walls before he grabbed the other end and held it tight. He slotted the wire in the curve of the screw holding his gauntlet shut on the opposite hand and tried to keep it still while he rotated that hand. Like a make shift, shitty screw driver.
It skipped off after only half a turn, and didn't move the screw at all.
But he lined it up and tried again.
Still nothing.
Over and over he repeated the effort until he had to admit it was useless.
He slammed his covered hand against the wall and shouted a curse when the pain lanced through his already damaged arm. The bone was probably cracked, and if he did that again it was going to break entirely.
He cradled it to his chest and kicked the wall.
Which was just as good of an idea as punching it.
It was only when he'd finished swearing that he realized that he'd dented the gauntlet. And one of the screws was now slightly higher than the metal.
Katsuki stared at it, then got to work looping the metal wire around the screw. Once he had it was tightly tied as he could get it, he started yanking against it with all his might, trying to stip the screw and tear it out.
If he could just get his hands free, he'd be able to fight back. Find Yusada, and whoever else was here, and kick the shit out of every villain who had caught them, and every person affiliated with the League of Villains.
He just had to get his hands free. Even just one and he could probably blast the gauntlet off the other. The problem was he couldn't even make himself sweat, and he was dehydrated to boot.
Dehydrated in a fridge full of juice and fruit.
He wanted to smack his head into the wall, but he was busy right then. He didn't have time to curse himself, he was too busy throwing his weight against the wire until the shelf protested and screw moved a whole centimeter out of it's home.
This was it.
He could do this.
He could get himself free and start his rescue operation.
Save himself, save Yusada, and blast the face off of everyone who got in their way!
The big woman led Shinsou of the basement and up the stairs, where he blinked in the still-low light of a kitchen. He could hear vague thumping coming from behind one of the industrial doors set into the wall, a freezer or a cooler or something, and in the other room music plays faintly. A dishwasher sat in the corner, steaming from the heat of the water inside it and along one wall was a prep station.
One that was equipped with knives.
Shinsou eyed the little pearing knives and the thick, serrated bread knife. He didn't like the fact that he had to consider which one would do more damage to a human body, but this wasn't exactly a normal situation he found himself in. His life was on the line, as well as whoever was in that locked door and anyone else they had here. Who all had they taken? Him, and who else? Was it just students, or was Aizawa here too, being held captive with his eyes covered and his hands bound.
The woman cuffed him lightly on the back of the head.
Of course, give him earlier issues, this 'light scolding' sent him bolting to the wink to hurl.
The woman cringed at that.
There wasn't even anything left in his stomach to throw up. It was just bile and pain, pain and bile.
The woman came over and started running the water.
"Sorry," she said, and genuinely sounded contrite. "I forgot about your head. Just saw you looking at those knives you know?"
Hitoshi grunted at her over the spinning in his head. She tossed his now ruined gag into the water and put a cup, a plastic one this time, in Hitoshi's hand. He rinsed his mouth out at best as he could, trying to get the acidic taste of vomit out from between his teeth without a tooth brush or any mouthwash.
It was easier said than done.
But the woman, Magne, was oddly patient with him as long as he wasn't trying to stab her.
Villains were weird. She'd been talking to him like he was a guest or something since he'd initially thrown up downstairs, even if she complained about how gross that was. He didn't know why. Reverse Stockholme syndrom? Was that a thing? He was going to go ahead and say that was a thing.
Finally, once his mouth was clear, she handed him a washrag. At some point she'd grabbed a first aid kit too, and she took the time to wash and dress the cut on his arm from the broken glass. Only then did they continue on their way. The thumping continued from the cooler, and the thermometer attached to the wall popped out and clattered to the floor.
Shinsou eyed it. Just from the violence alone he had a pretty good idea who was in there. Either one of the hard headed hero hopefuls, Kirishima and Testutetsu. Or Bakugou.
His money was on Bakugou.
Magne took him out the door and he blinked into the sepia colored light. It felt like he'd been transported sudden;y into a very old photograph, for in front of him was a man made of mist in a very old bartenders outfi, polishing a glass in amber lights. The walls were lined with carefully placed glasses of alcohol, and behind the bar was a serieas of containers and a mini fridge.
Lounging at the bar, unchained amnd seemingly unconcerned about what was going on here, was one Yusada Suzume, now draped in a loose dress, sipping on a multicolored cock tail. Sitting next to her was a young man with dusty hair in a black gakuran uniform,
Hitoshi blinked several times.
Just how much did the poison gas do?
When she caught sight of him, her jaw dropped.
"Hitoshi? What are you doing here?"
"Being held captive," he said slowly. "...What are you doing here?"
"The same thing," she hopped off the counter and her boots clicked against the hardwood floor. Her scrunchy was still on one wrist, and her hair was messily braided back. She looked less like a captive and more like a victim of a game of dress up.
Hitoshi could feel his head starting to hurt again, but he didn't fight her when she took his hands and started inspecting him. She eyed the cut on his arm, and frowned at Magne. Her thumb brushed over the raw skin on his wrist where the ropes had once bound him in place.
"What did you guys do to him?"
The big woman looked offended.
"We didn't do anything to him! I went down to get him and he;d broke a bottle and tried to stab me with it. Ended up cutting himself instead, and the ropes he was in."
"You still tied him up," Suzume argued. She took Hitoshi by the elbow and guided him to the bar, where she flagged down the bar tender and ordered another of whatever she'd been drinking.
"Since when do you drink?" he had to ask her.
"Hmm? Oh, I don't. It's an Abstenence on the Beach. A mocktail. It's literally just fruit juice."
The young man she'd been sitting next to squawked at her.
"It's what?!"
Suzume shot him a dour look.
"Did you really think I was getting drunk in the middle of villain central? I'm not an idiot."
"I don't know, maybe you were coping with the stress!"
"I'm not stressed, and alcohol is a shitty way of coping with the stress. I'm not interested in being an alcoholic thank you."
"Drinking to calm down doesn't make you an alcoholic."
"No, but it's a pretty good sign of one. Needed a drink to steady your nerves is making yourself reliant on it and-"
"What is happening here."
The young man glared at Hitoshi. "You're not allowed to ask questions."
"He can ask whatever questions he wants. If you get caught answering them that's your own fault," Suzume cut in, narrowing her dark eyes at the man.
Hitoshi gave up, and sat at the bar to accept the mix of fruit juice that the smokey bartender handed to him. Magne sat a few stools away, and accepted a glass of wine from the man. Hitoshi was sure he'd been told his name at some point. Kuriri? Kurosuke? He didn't know.
He did know that the fruit cocktail was good.
It felt good on his dry throat and chased out the awful taste in his mouth. He still would have killed a man for some mouthwash, but that was neither here nor there. This would do for now.
Suzume squabbled with the young man, who she called Mustard.
What the hell kind of name was Mustard?
A villain name, obviously, but did she know him?
How long had they been here?
Finally, the young man got up and scowled at her.
"Whatever," he said, "i'm getting the boss, and you two can deal with him."
"Good, I love dealing with him" Suzume snarked.
Hitoshi took a breath as the cook juice started to well and truly clear his head. It made him feel more like a person, and eased the throbbing in his temples. He was dehydrated. How long had he been out? He tried to stay hydrated at camp but…
They weren't at camp, and they hadn't been for a while if his cottony mouth and raw wrists were anything to go by.
Hitoshi looked at the smaller girl. The ease she'd exhibited before he'd stepped into the room was gone; her shoulders were tighter, her eyes were dark and alert, and her mouth was thinner.
"Suzume," he said slowly. "What is going on here? What's been happening?"
She looked at him. Then back at her glass.
"Well…"