Chapter Text
The country of Japan is in a rather bad state nowadays. It isn’t quite a full-blown failed state, but it is getting dangerously close.
That isn’t a recent development.
Japan didn’t fare too well in the era of chaos immediately following the Dawn of Quirks, in big part thanks to a certain demon lord whose obsession for LARPing made everything objectively worse. Although his heroic brother and his followers - willingly or not - contributed.
One side crosses another line. The other is forced to go even further to stop themselves from losing. The other side responds with the same thing. And so it continues.
Most countries out there have managed to recover from their own experiences of the Dawn of Quirks era. Japan, however? The societal issues caused by the arrival of quirks were never truly dealt with, the wounds mostly patched but with a part of them continuing to fester.
All for One, still hiding in the shadows and plotting the downfall of society, has contributed to that fact greatly.
All Might’s Era of Peace was a brief moment of light shining through. Brief in comparison - it was more than two decades, although this was still only a tenth of the time that has passed since the Dawn of Quirks. It certainly didn’t feel brief for those who lived through it, who experienced twenty years of something resembling peace.
Of course, it was peaceful in comparison to times before it. It was far from being peaceful in comparison to times before quirks.
And then, All for One died. And, to the surprise of most people that knew him, that was the start of things going from bad to worse.
***
To Aizawa Shouta, however, the state of the country really didn’t matter. At least at this moment. Because Eraserhead has a personal tragedy to deal with. And while he genuinely thought that what happened to Oboro taught him something about how to deal with grief, it… isn’t the sort of grief that he expected.
An underground hero raid against an organized crime warehouse. This has happened before many, many times. So how did things manage to go so wrong?
He lost two things that evening. The first one was one half of the little finger on his left hand, which he admittedly could live without. It was just one finger, after all. Ectoplasm retired from active service and focused on teaching after losing both legs; compared to that, Aizawa’s loss was meaningless.
The other loss was Erasure. His quirk.
The quirk-suppressing bullets have been circulating on the streets for a while now. Always in small numbers, but with depressing regularity. Heroes had been doing their best to locate the source for at least a year now, with little success. The raid was a part of those attempts.
It wasn’t the first time that Aizawa was shot with a syringe bullet. But it was the first time that his quirk had not come back for several days.
What he was shot with wasn’t a quirk-suppressing bullet.
He discovered that during a medical check-up with Recovery Girl. The old nurse was straight-up horrified when she realized that Erasure was gone . Eraserhead (just Aizawa Shouta now, probably) was… apathetic to the discovery.
He just emotionally shut down. Worse than after Oboro. Much, much worse.
The panic caused by the concept of permanent quirk-erasing bullets in hero circles was nothing short of inspirational, obviously.
The concept was too terrifying for anyone to comprehend at first, really. Nedzu of all people was horrified (probably imagining what would happen to him if he got shot, his quirk actually made him sentient). Eraserhead didn’t even know that the principal could be intimidated by something.
Eraserhead took a week off from school to figure out what to do with his life. The fact that Emi decided to not try to cheer him up with her jokes (typically assisted by her quirk) and instead gave him some breathing space was a telling thing. Especially as she also limited her patrols to be there if he needed it.
Part of him wondered if she was worried that he would do something permanent. To lack your quirk, it was…
He just lost a part of himself. And, to be honest, he had no idea how to even begin to describe it to someone who didn’t go through the same thing. He would rather lose an entire limb to this.
It was tolerable when you knew it was temporary. Knowing that it was permanent was…
He was watching the TV (more like staring in space absentmindedly in front of it, to be honest), sitting on his couch, a cat sleeping soundly on his lap, when someone rang the bell of his apartment. And that, alone, was strike one.
The whole apartment block is secretly owned and inhabited by a handful of veteran underground heroes. They were all grumpy, street-savvy and paranoid asses. You were happy when you were working for so long in this line of work and wasn’t an emotionally crippled, PTSD-ridden wreck. Such people making a lot of strange and paranoid rules to keep their one holdout of safety safe was… entirely in character.
One of them is to knock, not ring on the apartment door. So that whenever someone did ring the bell, it was going to be a large red flashing warning sign.
To be fully honest, this happened many times already, and it never meant an actual attack or a villain infiltration. 9/10 it was one of the neighbors who forgot about the rules due to being drunk, or something like that. Not exactly a reason for alert.
No one should be visiting him right now, though. Zashi and Nem were teaching at UA right now. The only other person to show up in his room was Emi, and it couldn’t be her. Because he saw her head poking through the kitchen’s door (she did her best to fix Eraserhead’s ‘horrible excuse of a diet’ after they got married, with some successes), with a questioning expression on her face.
“It’s probably Zashi and Nem.” Eraserhead then said. If Nedzu or Recovery Girl let it slip what happened to him, his two dumbass friends probably rushed here on the spot. “I’ll open the door.”
Present Mic and Midnight still didn’t know that Eraserhead - their best friend - was a married man. It wasn’t THAT long (less than a year, really) and, besides, Emi considered this to be a form of a practical joke played at their expense.
They also have a ‘how long it will take him and Nemuri to figure us out’ bet going so Aizawa let it slide. It was payback for those two pulling him into all those horrible social situations all the time.
The situation on this field was clearly going to change, because Eraserhead has no idea how to explain Emi Fukukado being in his house, with a terrifyingly colorful cooking apron on top of her clothes.
Or… it wasn’t going to change.
He was still an underground hero, even if effectively retired now that his quirk was gone. Paranoia is his way of life. He grabbed the capture scarf (always near the door, except when they go to sleep, because then it was right next to their bed) and approached the entrance door.
It is pretty hard to break through. And has a very good lock. Three, in fact. He also looked through a peephole before opening it.
It isn’t Hizashi. Not Nemuri, either. No one he knew, in fact.
Instead he saw a small figure wearing a plain brown hoodie and old-looking black sweatpants. And a black face mask with a white number one written on it, which certainly looked like a support item.
Eraserhead didn’t recognize the guest. He didn’t look like a hero, so it was either a vigilante… or a villain.
A single gesture and Emi was there, standing two meters behind him. As combat ready as she could be wearing her standard homely dress and a cooking apron. So, knowing her, quite so. Her punches and holds were brutal, and she was lightning-fast.
Eraserhead is, as already established, paranoid. He had a few more cameras placed through the building, and a monitor for them that just happened to be right next to his entrance door. He looked at it now, and there was no one else but their mysterious visitor in the area.
Paranoia was all there, but cowardice wasn’t. Whoever the guest was, he knows where Eraserhead lives. He managed to get all the way here, despite looking suspicious as hell and the building being a hotspot for underground heroes.
Confrontation had to happen. But he could minimize the risks.
“Who are you?” Eraserhead asked loudly. Loudly enough for it to be clearly audible on the other side of the door. For obvious reasons, he isn’t standing right in front of them, but to the side, with eyes still on the camera feed.
“My name’s Vox.” The answer came back a few seconds later. The voice sounded like a teenager. Male. Not particularly threatening, though considering the circumstances... “I’ve come here to give you your quirk back, Eraserhead.”
Full stop. Nobody save for Nedzu, Sir Nighteye, Emi and Recovery Girl knew about him losing his quirk.
Sir Nighteye was the head of the investigation into whoever is producing the quirk-suppressing bullets, so he had to be made aware of the new development. Nedzu knows because, well, he is Nedzu. Not telling Emi would be illogical to the extreme, and Recovery Girl was the one that diagnosed his quirk as gone for good.
They are all good at keeping secrets. Yet Vox clearly knows about what happened. That leaves only one option.
“I’m not working with the people who did that to you.” Vox came to the same conclusion as Eraserhead, but spoke about it first. Aizawa froze for a second. The voice he heard now was completely different from the one he heard first. This time it was the voice of an elderly man. “I can see the silence where your quirk was from here. You might have heard about me being called the Quirk Healer.”
Once again Eraserhead’s mind ordered a full stop.
He'd heard of the urban legend. His job made him spend half of his life on the streets, and he met many villains.
Some of them easily counted into the most superstitious people out there. It was a form of a subculture, in a way.
The Quirk Thief, for example, was a common urban legend for decades - a man (or woman) capable of stealing quirks to make themselves stronger and all that. Bullshit, but an intellectually entertaining one. The sort of curious story to talk about to kill time before the heist.
Whether he wanted to or not, he heard a lot of such urban legends.
The Quirk Healer is a relatively new one. Someone out there, capable of ‘fixing’ quirks. Changing the way they expressed themselves and a lot of other things. But he (or she) only popped up when someone had a seriously debilitating or dangerous quirk. Showed up from nowhere, ‘repaired’ the quirk in question and then vanished into thin air. Typically after a brief exchange of words (and an agreement on a price) on some online forum after one confessed to having problems with their quirk.
This never happened to a hero. Or a policeman, as far as Eraserhead was aware. He also didn’t hear of any confirmed case of a villain confessing to have met or seen the Quirk Healer. They were supposed cases among civilians, but those were generally shrugged off as minor quirk reawakenings.
And now, the supposed urban legend showed up in front of Eraserhead’s apartment. Wearing a hoodie and speaking in several voices. Or, at least, a teenager claiming to be an urban legend did so.
Emi stays silent. To not betray her presence, she was waiting for him to make a decision. She wanted to avoid scaring the chance away.
Aizawa looked back at her and nodded. She nodded back.
They were a pair of pro-heroes. Against them was a teenager, most likely. If that was an assassination attempt, they were going to deal with it. But if Vox was telling the truth…
Eraserhead felt deeply wrong without his quirk, as if a part of him was missing deep inside him. Confirming the existence of the Quirk Healer would also be an important bonus. As would be learning how he found Eraserhead’s little fortress.
“Alright.” Eraserhead said after turning towards the door again. “I’m going to open the door. Make no sudden movements.”
He unlocked the door and opened them up. Vox stood there calmly. Not saying a word and not moving up at all. The only movement Eraserhead could see was his chest moving a bit as he breathed.
Not a lot more to add about his looks, despite getting to see him up-close. The disguise, especially the mask, was solid.
Vox could see Emi now, but he made no reaction. If he could see quirks through a wall as he claimed, he probably saw her before entering.
“Come in.” Aizawa said while he took a step back. “Slowly.” Vox obeyed. Aizawa pointed his finger to the point in the middle of their living room, as the self-professed Quirk Healer moved there obediently.
Emi was busy observing the guest attentively. With a smile on her face (she always had it), but he knew that she could easily break a man’s jaw in three seconds without breaking her smile for a millisecond.
The atmosphere was tense, that’s what everyone in the room could feel rather clearly. Except for Eraserhead’s cat, because Yoshi took that very moment to appear out of nowhere and rub herself on Vox’s leg.
Yoshi had no sense of the atmosphere. But Eraserhead trusted her opinion on people. He would have made his cat into his sidekick if it was possible, because Yoshi was just so good at judging people.
She has only ever hissed on a single person, and he just happened to be a villain mole among the underground heroes. Eraserhead actually suspected a quirk, because her track record was just too good.
“So, how does your quirk work, exactly?” Eraserhead decided to interrupt the silence finally, but not before he gestured at Yoshi to shoo off. The cat (somehow) obeyed the instruction. Vox decided to not comment on it, but Aizawa could see Emi’s tip of the mouth trembled, just slightly.
“I can alter the quirks of the people I touch.” Vox replied. “I’m not going to elaborate on what exactly I can do, but restoring your quirk should be possible. I’ll need no less than thirty seconds of uninterrupted physical contact and you’ll lose consciousness for the duration of the process.”
Dangerous. There were many nasty touch-based quirks out there. In a way, quirks were mostly balanced - stuff like insta-killing, healing or a more thorough mind control tended to require physical contact. Prolonged one meant that the quirk was even stronger than average, at least typically.
Just being able to kill people by looking at them would be way too powerful.
“Why did you decide to show up?” Eraserhead continued the interrogation, secretly wishing for Naomasa to just pop out from nowhere in order to confirm Vox’s answers. “You know that if you use your quirk on me, I’ll have to arrest you for illegal quirk usage.”
For some reason Aizawa was certain that Vox didn’t have a license. Neither as a professional doctor nor as a recovery hero. And ever since the insurrections two years ago, the issue of quirk usage was… treated very seriously.
“I came prepared.” Vox replied. “I avoid heroes and villains as a rule. However, someone I greatly respect used to know you in the past. He told me that you are a good person. Someone to trust. Someone to break my rules for, if needed. So I did so.”
“Someone that used to know me?” Eraserhead asked, trying not to display on his face how dumbfounded he was with the answer. He had no idea who that person could be. He knew a lot of people (well, most of them were behind bars due to being villains or were his former students). “Who exactly?”
“That’s not important anymore.” Vox replied immediately. “He is dead either way. I’ve decided to help you in his memory. I’m not even going to charge you for the treatment. So, are we doing this or not? I don’t have the whole day.” Which was probably something like ‘I can’t be sure that you didn’t push a panic button and hero reinforcements aren’t on their way’ but in simpler words.
Eraserhead weighed the danger against that slight flame of rekindled hope deep inside him. He could see that Emi was firmly on the ‘hell no don’t be stupid’ side, and he couldn’t blame her. But she wasn’t the one who spent the last several days feeling as if a crucial part of their body was missing.
Despite thinking that it was a horrible idea, she was letting him make the decision.
Frankly, Eraserhead barely noticed his finger being missing. The other thing that he lost burned too much. He couldn’t even describe the feeling properly to convey what a torture it was. And despite the few days to recuperate, it stayed the same. He wasn’t getting used to it.
He would risk a lot to get it back.
“Fine. I’ll lay down on the couch.” Emi stared at him with visible worry and horror. But, once again, she said nothing.
Twenty seconds later Eraserhead tasted colors.
***
Eraserhead opened his eyes, fighting back the feeling resembling the morning grogginess of a mind, but significantly more pervasive. He could see Vox sitting on a chair next to the couch, and Emi right behind him (probably ready to chokehold him if he did something suspicious).
“It’s done.” Vox stated. “Your quirk is back.”
Eraserhead could feel it.
The burning, the itching, the scratching, the un-feeling (feeling of emptiness?) that kept pestering him for days was gone. Gone.
He activated his quirk and he could feel it as he used to. Emi gasped in shock (so the external signs of his quirk being activated were probably there as well), while Eraserhead wonders internally how on Earth did feeling his eyes itch make him feel so endlessly happy.
He absolutely hated it just a few days ago.
“So…” Vox interrupted his thoughts a moment later. “... what happens to me now?”
He felt… calm about it? It didn’t feel like a resigned calmness, however. More like a confident one. It might have been the voice alteration at play, however. For now, the situation was still rather tense.
“That’s one hell of a question, kid.” Aizawa replied. Because, kill him, but he had no idea how to proceed with this situation.
No police or hero guideline that the Eraserhead knew about covered the scenario of having a cryptid in your living room. Sure, the cryptid in question appeared to also be a teenager, but…
“Legally speaking…” Emi then said, the woman stood behind Vox, probably ready to try to grab him if needed. “... we’re obligated to learn and confirm your identity, before contacting your parents and…”
So, she decided to be the bad cop on this, presenting the option that the kid was going to be against obviously, just for Aizawa to offer some more palatable alternative. Eraserhead wasn’t used to being a good cop, but…he could do that if needed.
The idea was sound. It just had one major issue - it didn’t work.
“They are dead.” Vox interjected. Well, things were going just splendid, it seems.
“Your caretakers, then.” Emi replied after exchanging worried looks with her husband over Vox’s head.
“That would be me.” Vox replied. “I’m my own caretaker. What now?”
He was either lying or testing them somehow, or… he might have as well been an adult, independent earlier than most of them. The situation was still complicated. Very, very complicated.
Hiding a quirk of this magnitude wasn’t easy. Unless you were really smart about it and managed to predict dangers far ahead, the reaction of your child developing a really powerful quirk was to announce it to the world on facebook.
And that was really hard to backtrack out of. Basically impossible to do without any evidence left behind.
But there were no names attached to the Quick Healer urban legend. No ‘guy X announced that their child awoke a similar quirk before doing their best to call it off’ story. So, this option was out of the picture.
The alternatives to that were people that were smart enough to realize that this was a dangerous quirk, and managed to successfully fake the Quirk Registry entry. The people doing that were almost uniformly villains.
That’s because there were government agencies that provided fake entries and general protection for people who had valuable quirks. That’s what law-abiding folks did when they awoke a quirk that was this powerful.
A good example of that was Momo Yaoyorozu, the class president of the class that Eraserhead was made a homeroom teacher of. With an ability to create any matter at will, she was worth her weight in diamonds. Sure, she might have wealthy families and good security, but no one was ready to take the risk.
As a result, the official quirk registry for Japan stated her quirk to be Creation… but it also stated that she could only create a very narrow amount of things due to limits on mass and materials involved.
Basically speaking, that her matryoshkas were all she could make. To learn the truth one had to penetrate the secured network and that was about as easy to get in as the one that contained the identities of people in witness protection programmes.
Especially in the current political climate, not showing your skills in public during the school festival when your quirk was as valuable as Creation, was also perfectly understandable. In short - if you didn’t want to get into heroics, you could live your whole life while keeping your quirk secret. Easily.
But if Vox’s quirk really could alter quirks, then hiding from the government too was a logical action. Eraserhead would do that as well. But if Vox was hiding such a quirk from everyone… why would he be using it, just enough for the urban legend to be born?
Things were fishy. Using the quirk to any degree threatened him with villains noticing his existence. And yet, he was doing it.
Normally, he was supposed to be paid. He claimed to lack any caretakers. This sounded as if he was a runaway, living on the street and earning money with their quirk (technically, a small-time villainy).
Such a quirk on the street? It was a material for a disaster. Of biblical proportions, most likely.
“I’m genuinely grateful to you for helping me.” Aizawa replied eventually, Vox watching him without a word. “But I can’t ignore a child that might as well be living on the streets. I’m going to have to ask you to come with us willingly for a proper identity check. I guarantee you that if you’re one the run from your legal caretakers, we’re ready to invoke the Hero Custody Child Protection Act and ensure that …”
HCCPA was a controversial act, but it technically allowed an active hero (which meant being a member of a respected social group, with a solid part of training similar to police officers in matters such as the law) to seize temporary custody of a child when there was a very serious risk of them being abused or endangered in their family.
Basically speaking, on the spot. Of course, there were some serious legal limitations, such as the whole deal only lasting for up to six months, which was enough time for a court case to be pushed through.
In most cases, from Aizawa’s experience, it was performed with teenagers (especially with mutant quirks, ‘villainous’ quirks, weak quirks, or no quirks at all), nowadays at least that ran away from homes and, when a hero ran into them, had stories to tell. The sort of stories that made the hero go ‘hold up’ and decide to investigate things first.
Technically, for as long as HCCPA was involved, the hero wasn’t legally obligated to inform the parents that their child was found.
That was a big thing to offer. Aizawa wouldn’t even consider it (he didn’t consider himself to be an overly parental type, and social services existed for a reason), if not for the risks that his quirk posed.
But Vox clearly wanted to have none of it.
“Touching, but I’m going to have to refuse.” Vox cutted in before Aizawa could finish. “I’ll be going, then.”
Aizawa opened his mouth to reply that it’s not exactly his decision to make, but that’s when two grenades bounced off the floor right next to Vox.
Eraserhead and Ms. Joke actually froze for a second because they were professionals. That came completely out of nowhere to them. Vox wasn’t searched (they didn’t want to spook him before the treatment was over and expected to have all the time for it afterwards), but they saw no space in his clothes for goddamn grenades.
They were used to knives and guns.
Vox took advantage of that and leapt over the nearest couch, Ms. Joke dived behind him as Eraserhead’s capture scarf wrapped around the grenades and threw them in the opposite direction of the room.
Or tried to, as that’s when the grenades exploded. Vox must have pulled the pin on them a second or two before throwing them. One of them was a smoke one, the other a flashbang. Eraserhead was temporarily blinded and deafened, Ms. Joke partially so.
She was faster than him. She would have to consider retirement if it wasn’t the truth. But the kid was closer to the balcony window (clearly his target), then gained a slight more advantage with the grenade trick. And the balcony window was open.
He had enough time to jump over the rails (Ms. Joke practically screamed at that, it was a fifth floor, he could die!) before she could grab him.
She immediately looked down, only to see… nothing. Vox was gone. Just vanished mid-air. What the hell?!