Licensed Villains

Escape

Izuku wakes to guards jostling him to his feet. After a few days in the commission's hold, he's less shocked by the action and more confused. Odd how that happens.

He stumbles to his feet, wobbling on still half asleep legs. The guard at his side supports him by his elbow long enough that he finds his barrings and then he's being tugged away from his barred home. His sleep muddled brain half registers Charlie being dragged beside him. He hopes Damaso isn't going to interrogate them again. If she's going to pound answers from his head, she should do it when he's not running on what few hours of sleep he got.

That night had been rough, to be it simply. He's discovered that sleeping in a cell is much harder when there are people shuffling past it everything ten minutes. With his brain in hyper-aware mode, he struggled to doze off as footsteps repeatedly echoed in his ears. Charlie, judging by the bags under his eyes, faced a similar trouble.

The guards guided them to a small room in the north-most side of the building. The room is set up completely different from any other place he's seen in the building so far. The walls aren't a sleek grey but rather a black shade that seems to blend with the shadows from the white overhead lights. Tables are scattered across the floor, set up almost randomly. Atop the tables are dozens of supplies similar to those he'd find in his middle school science labs, with papers scattered alongside them.

Everywhere in the commission had been neat and tidy, but this room held a certain chaos to it that made Izuku's stomach turn. What unnerved him most was the ten foot tall glass cylinders lining the walls. He peered at them, struggling to make out their contents in the dark of the room. He thinks for a moment that he sees something move in one of them. Blaming his sleep brain, he looks back to the rooms center.

Damaso stands there, her hands clasped in front of her. Her paper white clothes practically glow in the rest of the rooms black. The sight of her pulls bile into his throat and brings his teeth to grind against each other.

"Morning, boys," she greets, honey dripping from her words.

So it's morning, Izuku notes. It was oddly comforting have some sense of the time. He missed clocks.

"Are those. . .?" Charlie responds. Izuku glances at him only to find his friend's eyes trained on the glass cylinders, his face looking paler than usual - or maybe that was just the rooms off putting light.

"Experiments," Damaso replies, sounding too pleased for the situation.

Charlie's face adopted a more horrified look and Izuku frowned. Clearly he was missing something. It was strange to not be the one in the know for once. He didn't like the way it heightened his senses and brought the hairs on the back of his neck to stand. Nor did he appreciate how his heart skipped a beat before plummeting into his stomach.

"Speaking of," Damaso said, "I was struck with an idea yesterday after our conversation."

The room smells stale, like someone had gone overboard cleaning it. Izuku's nose twitches every time he breaths, especially now as his breaths turn sharper. He can't help it when his body decides to display the ounce of fear he feels when Damaso speaks.

He hardly catches what she says with his ears ringing at such close proximity. They breath the same stale air and that fact alone makes it seem a lot less clean and more poisoned. He wonders what she'll do to Charlie and him this time - what she's done to Ayumu to make her disappear for the past night.

What are you thinking, Revite, she'd asked him last time they saw her. Now the answer would be: What are you planning?

Maybe the uncertainty in how she'd respond is what terrifies him most.