Heroes, Vigilantes, and Villains

Chapter twenty-eight

Izuku POV

When I woke up I was in a room that I didn't recognize, chemical smells overwhelming my senses as I tried to look around. I was in a bed, the sheets a stark white that almost perfectly matched the shade of the walls around me. I was laying on my back, a pillow warmed from the amount of time that I've spent here beneath my head, but when I tried to sit up I didn't make it very far.

The cool bite of metal on my skin was something far too familiar for me to not know it by touch alone, but the hopeful part of my mind wanted to see it to know that it was real. It's the same part of my mind that I have always hated more than anything else in this world other than myself. Lifting my head up, I will myself to look down at my sides and sure enough there's silver wrapped tightly around each of them, the other half of the cuffs securely locked to each side of the bed in an unforgiving embrace.

And suddenly the room is as dark as the night sky, the only light there is in the room slipping in from under the crack of the door. And I was back in the days when time meant nothing to me because I had no clue of its true passage, only guesses that I would never know if they were right or not. The cries of monsters that should have never known life echo in my ears as my body remembers the aches of a few fights too many.

And I'm struggling and struggling because the wails are drawing closer, the cage walls rattling louder than I'd heard them before, engraving themselves so deep into my mind that I would have to die to forget them. I know that I can't go back there, that I'll die if I do. I know it in the primal way that animals know who is a predator and who is the prey. Because even if I survive the seemingly endless number of beasts, there is a monster lurking behind them, clinging to life as if immortal.

There's a pain in my wrist, in them both, but I ignore it in the way that a child ignores every problem that comes their way in hopes of it going away. And there's someone calling my name, a familiar voice that I know as well as my own, but their voice is so far away, and everything else is just so loud, that it falls into the background.

But then there's something on my shoulder, something with a grip of its own, that jars me out of my trance. The touch, no matter how friendly it may seem, is an unwelcome one given by someone that I still can't see, the room still being dark though a part of me knows that in reality it is not. My hands are still bound, the metal restraining me, confining me to the bed, sinking further and further into my skin, but pain is a dear friend that I have held longer than any other. My teeth snap widely in the direction of the stranger in the room, making me no better than a rabid animal backed into a corner.

"-zuku! Come on, Izu. Snap out of it!" The voice pleads once more. They sound louder this time, closer than ever before. There's an emotion there that doesn't fit the owner, a desperation that they shouldn't hold, but I still can't remember who they are, anything but the dark room.

But even as I think that the darkness begins to fade.

Hito.

The world comes back slowly, the noise that only I could hear being slowly replaced by the sounds of ragged breaths that took me some time to realize that they were mine. My throat burned as my body slumped against the bed once more, all of the fight leaving it at once as it tired quickly. There was a wet feeling at my wrists, but I didn't need to look down to see the blood stained sheets there.

I didn't need to see the metal still laying there as if it had any right to do so.

"Hito," my voice came out much more gruffer than I had intended it to, much softer as well, but the purple haired boy heard it still.

"Hey, you bastard."

—-

Hitoshi POV

I wanted to still be angry with the other boy, he'd lied to me for months, ever since we met, but couldn't be. Not after seeing what I just had. Not after watching the pure terror rip across the smaller teen's face. It was the most emotion that I had ever seen the other boy possess. It was more than I had even thought him capable of doing so. And the first time that I saw him express such emotion, it had been something beyond simple fear.