Chapter Text
It starts with an uncomfortable feeling at the back of Hitoshi’s neck, a slight prickling that comes with the irrational feeling that he is being watched.
Aizawa sensei would call it his budding hero sense, a sixth sense for trouble that all heroes supposedly had; Hitoshi would call it a damn nuisance. He’s on a very busy train home for the weekend, it’s rush hour, and out of the sixty odd people crammed into this little overheated sardine tin on wheels there’s absolutely no chance that somebody has singled him out -
“Hey! Hey, Shinsou!”
Ah.
Hitoshi’s hand creeps to his pocket where he subtly rams the volume up on his phone, and he stares pointedly out of the window, hoping to be left alone.
“Hey - mindfuck!” The voice is suddenly a lot closer. Gah. “I know you can hear me!” Hitoshi has never been more interested in the rolling fields and the twinkling lights of the scattered farmhouses and cottages that are passing them by.
His peace is finally, irreparably and abruptly shattered by his earphone being yanked out by someone behind him, and, fighting down a grimace, he carefully twists his upper body around to look, casting an apologetic glance to the other commuters currently at risk of being skewered by his elbows.
Ahhh shit.
Why him.
Why this guy.
Why today.
Before him, cramped into the entryway of the train carriage and trying to squeeze between two disgruntled businessmen to reach him, is his accoster. He’s familiar, in a vague but gut wrenching this-guy-has-it-in-for-you kinda way, but Hitoshi can’t quite place him beyond the absolute innate feeling of needing to run the fuck away.
Pity the only options for escape here are (a) further into the crowd, or (b) out of the window. Hitoshi isn’t sure which is less appealing at this point.
“Shinsou! Hah, I knew it was you! Where the fuck have you been? Kicked out of UA yet, you little weirdo?”
Ah, how original. Hitoshi leans his neck to the side, eliciting a satisfying crack that is swallowed up in the grumble of the engine, before twisting around the rest of the way to face the newcomer.
“What do you want.” It isn’t a question. Hitoshi is careful about that, the tone and inflection just right to pass it as a statement. Not careful enough, apparently, as the new guy’s face scrunches up with disgust, and he physically recoils from Hitoshi, to the disgruntlement of the passengers behind him.
“I’m not going to brainwash you, asshole.”
“Awww Shinsou, don’t be like that! I just wanted to catch up with an old friend, that’s all.” Hitoshi feels his skin crawl at the word ‘friend’. What a joke. “Seriously though, that’s a UA uniform, have they really not got rid of you yet? That has to be a record. For you, at least. What was it, six schools in the two years I knew you?”
“Shut the hell up, dude,” Hitoshi retorts. He feels his face heating up with anger and embarrassment and shame. Normally stuff like this wouldn’t get under his skin - hell, this guy is using exactly the same tricks to get to Hitoshi as he himself would have to employ as a hero. It shouldn’t get to him. It shouldn’t.
But today was long, and he is so tired, and there are too many people in his space, people that are already pissed off from being shoved around this tiny carriage and now they know who he is and they know what he can do and they know, they know, they know -
Hitoshi pushes his shoulders back, and stands a little straighter, minutely tensing and relaxing all the muscles in his arms and legs - a little trick he’d found online to ground himself when his thoughts start running away from him. It works, but the panic is quickly replaced by the same anger that triggered it.
The bully can tell, though, if the sick grin that’s crawling across his face has anything to say about it. God, fuck this guy.
“What’s the matter, Shinsou? Did I hit a nerve? I’m just being honest with you man, I can’t believe they haven’t got rid of you yet. I saw you in the sports festival on TV. I’m surprised they didn’t expel a villain like you on the spot. Guess that school really is going to the dogs.”
A sliver of a memory creeps into the forefront of Hitoshi’s mind - one of his middle schools - he vaguely remembers this guy being there, but it’s almost like the memory shrinks back and hides when he tries to examine it more closely. Odd. After a moment Hitoshi pins it down. This bully… that was it, he was a sort of ringleader to the local band of delinquents, and he’d had it in for Hitoshi from the day they’d met.
Back then, every time he moved school, word would get around within days of what his quirk was. It didn’t matter that he tried to stick to every rule to the letter, it didn’t matter that he kept to himself and put up with the jabs and the whispers and the relentless taunting until he couldn’t anymore.
He was an easy scapegoat. Most of his classmates caught onto that fast, and were relentless in exploiting it. As a hero course hopeful, he couldn’t fight back and risk any violence on his record. And in his teachers’ eyes, his quirk had already set him on the path to villainy, so any students blaming him for their own misdemeanors were automatically more credible than him. It took all of Hitoshi’s effort to stay under the radar, from teachers and other students alike.
(Privately, he firmly believes that the only way he made it into UA at all was as some kind of charity case; whilst he knew he was a good kid, really, he couldn’t realistically hope that Nedzu et al hadn’t seen his record from his various middle schools. It wasn’t pretty.)
So when he’d been approached by the worst bully in the school, and asked by him to join his merry band of assholes, Hitoshi could do nothing but laugh in his face with a ‘hell no’. He’d paid for it for the rest of his time in that district, even when he’d changed schools; the kid knew where he lived and would wait on his route home just to chase him down.
Fucker.
“Or is it maybe the opposite? They’re keeping you around to make the hero kids look good?”
“Dude, just shut up. I transferred to the hero course, like, a month ago. Back the hell off.” Hitoshi glances up at the screen above them, pixelated station names flickering along next to a flashing digital clock. Fuck, he’s still minimum twenty minutes out. Although… if he gets off at the next stop, in three minutes, maybe he could wait for the next train -
“You’re joking, right?” Oh. This time it’s Hitoshi who’s hit a nerve, apparently. All traces of amusement disappear from the guy’s face, his lips curling into a snarl. “So UA really has gone to the dogs. Who the hell did you brainwash to get the transfer? That’s probably a crime, right?”
“I worked hard, I got transferred.”
“Yeah, I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Cool, I don’t care.” Hitoshi replies bluntly. The train starts losing speed, slowly pulling up to a platform, with the unfortunate side effect of the whole cramped crowd tilting in unison, pitching Hitoshi towards his bully. He grabs a railing, trying to stop himself from making contact, but he’s too little too late, suddenly finding himself much closer to the bully than he’s comfortable with.
“Maybe you should care.” The guy says quietly, right into his ear. Hitoshi looks down to see a very pointy knife hovering level with his navel. Ah shit. A heavy stone drops into his stomach, his mouth drying instantly as a cold zap of electric fear shuttles down his spine.
Hitoshi glances nervously at the passengers around them; luckily, for them at least, nobody seems to have noticed what’s going on. The knife is held low, close to his stomach, and in the tightly pressed crowd he doubts anyone can see below chest height.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” The guy whispers into his ear, words dripping with malice. “You’re going to get off this train, and so am I. And then we can have a nice little talk about respect. Any funny business, I shank you, and report you for brainwashing me into it. You know how it works, freak.”
A painful feeling settles in his chest, and for a moment, Hitoshi feels like he’s back in middle school again, on the hook for yet another crime he didn’t commit. Yes, he does know how it works. He knows way too well.
God, why. He just wants to go home. Why.
...Actually…
“Why are you doing this?” Hitoshi mutters, reaching out desperately with his quirk. I just need a response. I just need a response...
All he gets in return is a single raised eyebrow, and Hitoshi feels his last shreds of hope crumble away at about the same time as a sharp point pushes against his skin - barely enough to even cut his shirt, but the threat is clear enough. A tremor starts to rattle through his bones as he tries to stay calm, remember his training.
The train finally jerks to a stop, a tinny speaker in the corner of the carriage announcing the station. With a pneumatic hiss, the doors rattle open, and Hitoshi reluctantly allows himself to be swept along by the crowd onto the platform, hyper aware of every movement around him, and the ever present point of pressure that is the knife against his stomach, even as he is pushed slightly further away from the villain.
With a stab of panic Hitoshi remembers something important, a memory that’s been dancing just out of reach throughout this whole encounter: the one thing that made his assailant so scary back then, when they were in middle school. His quirk. Hitoshi is pretty sure this guy has the ability to telekinetically move and maneuver metal objects around, as long as he’s touched them once.
Back then it had been pocketfuls of drawing pins, needles, anything small and metal and sharp that would follow Hitoshi home, floating through the air and glinting with reflected moonlight like his own personal lethal blizzard as he ran and ran to get out of range. Those attacks hadn’t lasted long - he’d moved to another home after a few months, and the guy had never found him - but it had been incredibly traumatic, and Hitoshi had very effectively squashed the memory of it into a dark corner of his mind until now.
Welp, guess that’s a nice new topic for the nightmares to pick up on.
The guy loops an arm around his shoulders, stepping off the train alongside him, and the crowd is still thick enough that the poised, floating knife remains hidden to any bystanders. He steers Hitoshi to the right, out of the stream of commuters and towards a quiet exit near the end of the platform, so that almost instantly his back is turned away from the crowd, and away from the guard on the platform. Shit.
“Why are you shaking, Shinsou? Not scared, are you?” The villain’s grin is mocking, and it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Real heroes wouldn’t feel fear, now would they?”
Whatever witty retorts Hitoshi would normally come up with are lost in the miasma of fear that clouds his mind. Damn, he is literally in training for situations like this! What the fuck kind of hero will he be, if he’s this scared of a petty delinquent-turned-villain?
And what would Aizawa-sensei think? He isn’t even - he isn’t even fighting back, just mechanically putting one foot in front of the other, walking wherever this damn villain directs him to, as if under his own brainwashed spell. Think, Hitoshi! There has to be a way out of this…
They make it to the end of the platform, stepping through a gate and onto a narrow backstreet outside. The main entrance to the station is just barely in sight, a glittering glass metropolis at the other end of the street, full of light and noise and people who can help him, but right now it seems impossibly far away, the street stretching endlessly between him and his goal.
He briefly considers making a break for it, but he remembers all too well what happens when you run from this quirk, and the phantom feeling of a hundred needles chasing him down and piercing his skin at speed is probably going to pale in comparison to how that knife will feel when it catches up to him.
The villain steers him around another corner, into an alleyway between two dilapidated office blocks, and Hitoshi finally loses sight of the station, and it’s just him and this bully, alone, in the dark, with a knife between them.
Hitoshi is well acquainted with loneliness, but right now, he has never felt more alone in his life.