Heroes, Vigilantes, and Villains

Chapter twenty-four

Izuku POV

Leaving a note on the fridge, I ran to the hospital, moving as fast as my legs could carry me there, but slowed down once the building actually came into view.

Growing up quirkless I have never liked hospitals in the least. They were the place where I learned that I wasn't something that could fit in with society, that I was wrong. In the years just after my fourth birthday all I would get was pitying stares from the nurses and other hospital staff that knew about my case from past visits. But as I grew up, those stares turned hostile as everyone's did. When the bullies turned violent I never even considered coming to hospital or even the school nurse, figuring that it would be better to just patch my wounds up at home. If you don't give someone the power to hurt you then you'll never have to feel the pain of when they do.

A nurse pointed me to Hito's room after I lied and told her that I was his cousin when she said that only family was allowed to visit, an action that my mother would find deplorable but I think the Shinsous would find entertaining. They weren't exactly the most conventional bunch, but that's part of what made me like the lot as much as I did.

Knocking on the door loudly to announce my presence, I pushed it open enough to see a shock of purple hair that told me that I was in the right room before slipping in.

My eyes instantly fell on the small sleeping form in the hospital bed. Hito's hair didn't have its normal product in it so it obeyed the laws of gravity for the first time since I've met him, spraying across the pillow as he slept. He looked as pale as he normally tended to, with the eyebags as prominent as ever, but there was a haunted look to him that never seemed to leave even as he slept and it only seems to have gotten worse.

"There's my other corpse," a voice said from the side of the room.

I turned towards the sound of the voice and found a familiar figure sitting in the hospital chair with a kind smile on her lips.

"Hey Mrs. Shinso," I greeted, walking over to the woman and sitting down in the chair next to her. "How is he?"

She shrugged lightly. "He passed out while still at USJ so they gave him a sedative to let him sleep through the worst of the healing process and so Recovery Girl can actually help him," she explained.

"Of course he would have to sleep to be healed," I said, finding a slight amusement in the idea. "Only Hito would have this kind of luck."

His mom laughed quietly at that.

An hour passed with Mrs. Shinso switched between sadly watching and nervous movements around the room as I read through my second year text book on coding that I had downloaded onto my phone at the start of the term a few days ago before switching to chemistry. Towards the end of the hour she convinced me to explain to her the concept that I was currently reading about, so I started breaking down the chapter that I was on.

"Izuku if I have to hear another word about Pi and Sigma bonds, I will buy that book myself and throw it at your head," another voice threatened.

Mrs. Shinso and I jumped to our feet, each of us taking one side of the bed and looking down at the owner of the new voice.

"You'd have to get out of here first, you little asshole," I joked, something that earned me a dirty look from the taller boy.

When I looked up at Mrs. Shinso, she had a bright smile on her face that I had never seen a parent look at their child with before even though deep down I knew it was a normal gaze. My mother and I have always tiptoed around one another, dancing away from anything close to a real conversation. She's always looked at me like I was glass about to break. She would have been terrified right now, not smiling at her son and his friend's jokes.

The three of us spoke for a few minutes before she excused herself to go down to the cafeteria and grab something for the three of us. When I was sure that she was a good ways away, I looked at the other boy and found him already gazing at me.

"Hito, if you ever need to talk..." I started, letting my voice trail off, purposefully leaving the statement open ended.

I didn't tell him that I would understand, he wouldn't have believed me if I had. But the thing was, out of everyone, other than his own classmates and his teachers, I would have understood the best. I could understand in a way that he didn't know that I could.

The other teen nodded, wincing slightly at the action. We were content to sit quietly for a while, taking in a silence that we hardly ever had before.

"It was just supposed to be a rescue training exercise," the other teen said quietly after a little while. "But the villains showed up out of nowhere. There were tens of them. They came through this purple warpegate and there was this monster with them that didn't even look human."

I felt my breathing hitch quietly at the scene that he described. At the scene that haunted my dreams everytime that I closed my eyes. The warpgate was Kurogiri, the monster a nomu, and-

"There was this man child there that barely seemed like an adult," Hito continued, "he seemed to be orchestrating it all."

The other teen explained almost being drowned by one of the villains. He told me how he got out of the shipwreck and hid in the woods with a girl from his class because he couldn't walk and make it to the others.

I got up when he was done and went to the other side of the bed, pulling back the sheet at his ankle and looking at the long gash there. It was covered up by gauze, but I knew that even with Recovery Girl and her healing when she finally comes, that there will be a nasty scar.

"You know if you wanted to be twins we could have just gotten a friendship bracelet or something, you didn't have to do something so permanent," I told him, my tone normal, but he knew me well enough to know that it was a joke.

"Where's the fun in that?" Hito jested, but I could tell that he was growing tired.

I stayed and we talked for a little while longer after his mom got back and we ate through the cafeteria dinners and the food that the nurses brought by, trading jellos with one another like they were some kind of currency. I left once visiting hours started to come to a close and promised to come by the next day after lessons if he was still in the hospital.

The guilt gnawed at my gut as I walked home, the knowledge that I could have done something to help the students if I had been there. I have fought more villains than any of the students there, I'm even the only one to have fought a nomu before they brought it out for All Might to destroy. It was my father ordering the attack and my... and Tomura leading it. I could have helped but instead I was doing normal school work at the time.

It didn't help either that I found myself worried about the blue haired villain. Hito had said that he had been shot by one of the heroes when they came to save the students. I know that it's wrong and that I shouldn't worry about the man, but a part of me couldn't help it. It was the same part of me that wondered how my father even got his hands on the man in the first place and why he felt he needed him in the first place.

Whatever relationship that the pair have, it didn't sit right with me, not from an abandoned child perspective, but from someone that has seen too many things in past year to think that my father has anything close to pure intentions with the man he calls my brother, especially with the actions that they have been taking lately.

I couldn't help but wonder what the bigger plan was.