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It’s about the same time that Izuku gets his wrists bound with a zip tie that he feels his emergency phone buzz in his pocket. Thankfully, the villains are either too distracted tying up the other hostages to notice or they’re just incompetent. The burner phone that only has his father’s number programmed into it is in the pocket sewn onto the inside of Izuku’s favorite blue hoodie. It takes effort not to giggle when the text comes through and the phone dances across his ribs inside of the pocket.
His dad really has horrible timing, Izuku thought absentmindedly while he reached down to adjust the zip tie around his ankles. It was a rookie mistake to tie them with their hands in front of them but Izuku wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. He settled the now unfastened zip tie to lie across his sneakers in a convincing way and then leaned against the wall that the villains had manhandled him against to get a better sense of what was going on.
There were three villains. Two girls and one guy as far as Izuku could tell. He hadn’t been near the entrance when they came in so there was a possibility that there were more people in another part of the department store. Because of course fashion disaster, Midoriya Izuku was in a department store for the first time in his life since his father stopped dragging him along to pick out clothes on the day that a villain crew decided to ransack the place.
And ransack was definitely the correct word for what they were doing as far as Izuku was concerned. He had a suspicion that the culprits had pulled this scheme together over the weekend with no real research on how to rob a department store efficiently. It was pitiful really, all that information on how to commit crime was only a few keystrokes away and yet these people in clearly traceable custom masks were doing it all wrong.
First off they had come in wearing their masks and holding guns and brandishing their quirks. Izuku was at the very back of the store when this happened, trying to pick out an appropriate tie for both the meetings that his dad dragged him to constantly and the secret interview he had at Shiketsu next week. However, he knew it happened because they were incredibly loud about it. That meant that at least one of the employees certainly had the chance to hit the panic button and that the police were on their way and probably already had access to the security cameras. This also meant that they would see the super cool and stylish masks and contact custom mask shops in the area or look commissions online and find the robbers' identities and then it would all be over within minutes if they had a good negotiator on call.
Izuku knew, objectively, that he should be more worried about his current situation than he was. The businessman next to him that reeked of cigarette smoke was trembling in his shiny shoes and the woman with fluttering dragonfly wings and impeccable eye make up on his other side was praying fervently. Izuku was chastising himself for not just buying a new black tie for the one Shigaraki had ruined and getting out of the store. No, he had to spend a stupid amount of time looking at the ones with patterns and stripes because he knew his father would immediately either laugh or choke him for wearing one to a league meeting.
Izuku was as calm as could be. He had lived through much worse than an amateur hostage situation in a department store. He had watched his mother’s back as she abandoned him in their apartment at the age of seven. He had quickly gotten rid of any expectations that his father would love him when he showed up the next day with a grim smile and an open hand. He had trained and trained and trained and trained until he wasn’t a liability and his father couldn’t risk getting rid of him completely. He had fought his way up from a quirkless doormat for members of the league to push around until sensei got around to turning him into a nomu to his father’s irreplaceable left hand.
Left hand, not right hand, Shigaraki despite his shortcomings, was the right hand, the honest one, the trustworthy one, the face of the operation, the one who sensei wanted everyone to see. Izuku had long ago pieced together that this was because Shigaraki was related to Nana Shimura but he honestly thought that was a rather petty move on his father’s side of his and All Might’s stupid blood feud. No, Izuku was the left hand. He dealt with money and underground politics and played the part of the adorably obedient son in his little vest and his tie and his gloves that would hold a dagger to your throat if his father snapped his fingers in a certain way.
It was his life, but he was getting out of it. He had collateral and an interview and a fake quirk registered on his ID and he was going to prove both his mother and his father and Shigarakiand Kurogiri and Kacchan and Tsubasa wrong.
That, however, wasn’t the most pressing matter at the moment.
There were three villains, possibly a fourth or fifth that Izuku hadn’t seen yet. They were amateurs with powerful quirks that were most likely doing this for quick money and an adrenaline rush. They had custom masks and had entered loudly so it was possible that the police would get here and talk them down before anything bad happened. They had brought enough zip ties to corral an amusement park worth of hostages if they wanted too and were surprised about the small number of people in the department store so they hadn’t mapped out the place beforehand and weren’t very bright if they thought that people still went to department stores when online shopping existed.
Izuku put his priorities in order. First, he needed to find a way to respond to his father’s text or else risk getting grounded for not responding and miss his interview. He had contingency plans if he did but he would really rather get into the school with the best security in Japan second only to U.A. (he wasn’t going to U.A. ever, even if all his contingencies failed and he had to try and kill his father instead of wiggle his way out of his grasp).
There wasn’t really anything to do until he had accomplished the first task so he refocused his gaze on the criminals and strained his hearing to pick up what they were discussing. Hopefully, they would move on from watching the hostages squirm soon and try to get one of the employees to take them to the safe or head to the other end of the store where the jewelry cabinet was. But until then, the more information he had the better.
The three were gathered in a loose semi-circle a few meters away from the hostages. One of the women and the man were leaning against each other, so they were probably involved in some way. The fact that their masks each had a half of a heart on the side that matched up when they bowed their heads together to listen to the other woman, further supported this theory.
The masks were really works of art and a mockery at the same time. They were tricked out Kitsune masks. In place of the regular sloping red lines decorating the fox face, the love birds had half a heart on the left and right ear respectively with hundreds of small hearts creating a pointillism picture of a fox’s fur.
The other woman was less cutesy, she was the shortest of the group but her demeanor designated her as the leader. She moved her hands a lot as she spoke, despite the fact that she had a handgun dangling from one of them, and she demanded the attention of the love birds. Her mask was classic, elegant even until you got to the bottom half of it. The maw of the fox was painted open with sharp teeth crowding it and foamy bloody spit dripping from the open jaw.
“Tomio,” was the first word he heard bloody maw say and his immediate first thought was: ‘holy shit are they calling each other by their real names?’, “you stay here and guard the hostages while Rika and I sack the jewelry case.”
The male lovebird, apparently named Tomio, protested this. “What the hell!” he shouted, “No way am I getting stuck with the boring gig while you and Rika go off and have fun,” his arm tightened around his girlfriend’s shoulder as he spoke, “We tied up the hostages for a reason, didn’t we? I want in on the fun part.”
Bloody maw waved her handgun around again. “Sure we did but we don’t know if any of them have quirks that would let them get out!” Or if any of them have spent their entire life from the age of seven putting up with being bound in much more difficult to escape ways, also allowing them to get out.
Rika lets out a shrill giggle. “As if!” She says, “If any of them had a quirk that would let them stand up to us I would have told you silly!”
So Rika had a quirk that let her know about people’s quirks just by looking at them, or maybe touching them? She had been the one to put on everyone's hands in zip ties.
Bloody maw sighed and shook her head at her accomplices fondly. “Fine, whatever, I'm sure that Zekuu is waiting for us already.”
As the group walked off he heard Tomio make a joke. “I’m sure he’s vibrating out of his skin with the amount of trigger he shot up with before we came here.”
Izuku marveled at how quickly he would be able to accomplish his goal. He also mentally tallied another player on the enemy's side, then pinched himself for falling into Shigaraki’s stupid video game slang. He was just a tiny bit concerned about the man hopped up on trigger, and the fact that he still had no idea what bloody maw or Tomino's quirks were. He pushed that to the side.
When he pushed himself up from the ground the businessman stopped trembling out of pure shock and the dragonfly winged woman looked up at him with a hopeful expression on her face. Izuku gave her his best, ‘I’m totally not a dangerous criminal’ smile. It was, admittedly, a pretty good smile because he wanted so desperately for that to be true. A few other people in the line of hostages relaxed at the sight of a young boy looking so hopeful.
He hadn’t bothered with holding his wrists the correct way when Rika tied him up so Izuku brought the zip tie to his mouth and tightened it with his teeth until the hard plastic cut into his skin. Then, he raised his hands above his head and brought them down quickly into his stomach. His elbows flared out as he rolled his shoulders back with the motion. With that, the ties broke at their weakest point, the locking mechanism, and the plastic hit the tile floor with a light tink.
The people who were looking at him doubled. He ignored them, mostly, he still tried to keep the polite expression on his face because he felt bad for dragonfly woman. He had half been paying attention to her prayers and apparently she was missing her daughter's ballet recital after promising to go for months.
He got out his phone and checked the text that his father had sent him.
All For Fuck All : You need to be home sooner than expected to help Shigaraki pick out some new recruits. Kurogiri informed me of your current predicament but I’m sure that you can get out of something so trivial on your own. Be back to the bar by 4:30 or you're grounded. :)
Izuku bit back a groan and checked the time at the top of the phone. 3:27. Fuck! God fucking- there was no way the police would be able to get him out of here in less than four hours at best. This sucked, why did stuff like this always happen to Izuku? Why did god hate him? He snapped his stupid burner flip phone closed and held the cool plastic to his forehead to calm down.
Then he snapped it back open and he called 911 and told the operator exactly what was going on and all the information that he knew because it didn’t hurt to make sure that the police were at least outside with first aid just in case. And also because if he didn’t do that the other hostages would probably go a little crazy. It was already a miracle that none of them had tried to talk to him so far.
Obviously as soon as he thought that businessman decided that it was time to be proactive in the most annoying way possible.
“Hey kid,” he whispered but not really whispered because he was actually talking pretty loudly and his voice just rasped a lot, “untie me and we can get everybody out of here.”
Izuku shook his head and put on his best ‘I’m just a smart teenager who wants everyone to be okay’ voice. It was an easy voice to fake because, again, it wasn’t really fake. “No, it’ll be best if we all stay tied up for now so that they think they’re still in control. If we try to get out of here on our own they might hurt someone.”
While he talked Izuku shuffled back into line with the rest of the hostages and arranged the pieces of his zip ties over his limbs to make it look like he was still tied up.
An old woman a few people down was nodding. “The young man is right,” she said, “it’s best if we all just stay calm and wait it out, it doesn't seem like they want to kill us so we’re just leverage right now. If we do anything rash they’ll have an excuse to show the police a dead body and that always makes things worse.”
The businessman sighed and Izuku’s nose wrinkled automatically at the smell of smoke that accompanied his breath. Dragonfly woman patted Izuku’s leg with her bound hands to get his attention and gave him a shaky smile.
Izuku settled in with a mental clock ticking down inside his head. He had half an hour to get out of here, the bar wasn’t that far so he could probably make it there in give or take 10 minutes if he sprinted at full speed and took all the shortcuts. That gave him 40 minutes with two or three minutes of wiggle room to get himself out of here without drawing unnecessary attention and putting anyone else in danger.
He couldn’t just go after them because despite his training and his fake quirk registration he was still quirkless. He couldn’t go up against a group of four people with moderately powerful quirks with nothing but his favorite throwing knife strapped to his ankle. He needed to take one of them out, maybe get info on the other three from that person and then work out a plan of attack.
He wants to scream just a little bit because he also still needs to obtain a new tie before he can show up at the bar or else his father will grin at him and say something horrendously snarky about dress code while he straightens Izuku’s shirt collar and Iuzku will get grounded.
He also wants to cry a little bit but Iuzku hasn’t cried since the day his mother looked him in the eyes and told him that she couldn’t stand him anymore and he had sobbed in the entryway for hours before crawling into his bed. It was actually one of the reasons he hadn't gotten killed immediately when his father brought him to the league.
Shigaraki had smiled his horrible smile, skin cracking and flaking off with each pull on his lips, and disintegrated the only toy that Izuku had brought with him. When Iuzku didn’t react beyond dropping the dust that had collected in his palm onto the ground the teenager had scratched at his neck and asked ‘sensei’ if he could keep Izuku-kun around for a little while.
And wahoo here he was now, living his charmed life.
Izuku only had to waste a few minutes of his precious time before the female lovebird pranced back. She had on some expensive looking rings and necklaces and there was a silver bracelet dangling off of the ear of her mask that didn’t have half a heart on it. She clapped her hands once excitedly before threading her new ring clad fingers together.
“Okay, so which one of you employees wants to be the one to come with me and unlock the safety deposit!” She sounded very clearly like she was grinning. The small group of department store employees looked at each other nervously. Izuku figured now was the best chance he was going to get, especially considering that Rika didn’t have a physical quirk.
When none of the employees offered themselves up Rika approached them, slowly. Maybe to intimidate them, maybe because she was going to choose based on their quirk, either way, her pace gave Izuku the perfect opening.
When she was maybe three feet away from the group of employees clustered against the wall, five away from Iuzku, he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. She had just reached out a hand to touch the cheek of a crying makeup counter employee, mascara painting streaks down the woman’s face, when he pounced. Literally.
He cleared the distance between them easily, his feet rocketed him from his position against the wall toward Rika in an elegant arc. She never saw him coming. He was able to maneuver their fall so that he had both of Rika’s wrists in his hands, her mask clanged off the tile as they hit the ground. Rika let out a gasp of air and then inhaled deeply, she was going to scream.
Izuku, lightning-fast, dug her gun out of the waistband of her jeans with one hand and pressed it to the back of her skull. The air she had gathered into her lungs hiccuped as she second-guessed her instinct. The air rushed out of her again as she tried to process what was going on.
“Don’t scream,” Izuku told her, just to make sure they were on the same page.
Rika’s hands pulled against his grip on her wrists, her fingertips made contact with his forearm. “You’re quirkless?” She wheezed out, incredulously.
“And you have a gun to your head,” Iuzku replied. “You have two options right now. You tell me what your friend’s quirks are and then you let me tie you up or, I pull the trigger.”
Rika was shaking now. All of her bravado and bubbly energy left her the first time her breath was forced by her lungs. Now she knew how businessman and dragonfly lady felt. Now she was the hostage. Izuku’s hand tightened on her wrists.
“You wouldn’t,” Rika hissed, “they’ll hear the gunshot and come running you twerp.”
Izuku resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He cleared his throat and then said, in a perfect imitation of Rika “Don’t worry about that guys! One of the hostages was just trying to pull some funny business!” He finished the statement off with a giggle, an exact copy of the one that he had heard when he first tuned into their conversation.
“What the fu-” Rika started to say, all the anger that had previously colored her tone was gone, her fingertips brushed his skin again with a certain flavor of desperation. Izuku cut her off by pushing the barrel of the gun against her skin harder.
“I’m only going to repeat myself once,” he said, back to his own voice, “You tell me about your partner’s quirks and let me tie you up or I pull the trigger,” to further demonstrate his seriousness he pushed even harder against her skull with the gun.
“Okay!” she said, “Okay, okay, okay. Tomio can manipulate the level of carbon dioxide within a bubble that he creates. Sakura is, she’s brutal, her quirk is called feral and up- for a period of time after she activates it she just becomes like a wild animal with like rabies or something, and Zekuu has a viper mutation, anything a viper can do he can do.” Rika was breathing hard after her explanation, having spit it all out without stopping to take a breath.
“And?” Izuku prompted, mentally noting that Sakura must be bloody maw.
“A- and Zekuu shot up with a whole lot of trigger before we got here so he’s even stronger than usual.” Rika spat out desperately.
“And?” Izuku prompted again, his eyes raised from the back of Rika’s head to the pile of extra zip ties that the gang had left next to a display a few yards away.
“A- and nothing I don't know what else you want me to say I-” Rika’s voice grew steadily in volume in her panic.
Izuku cut her off. “That’s all, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t hiding anything else.”
He got off from on top of her, but kept the handgun pointed at her while he backed toward the zip ties. Rika lifted her head slowly, only to be met with Iuzku’s dull expression staring at her from down the barrel of her own gun. She stayed shock still. Izuku grabbed two zip ties without looking away and then a woman’s scarf off of the display mannequins.
Now that he had a wider view of the situation he could see the other hostages mixed looks of awe and horror. Dragonfly lady seemed to be in the first category, Izuku’s lip twitched into a half-smile at that. He also caught a glimpse of a security camera and congratulated himself for not changing out of his work disguise after lunch. He still had the brown contacts in and his hair was dyed black with a powder he usually didn’t bother with but luckily had this morning. That, alongside the witness’ knowing that he was quirkless would probably be enough for the police to not tag his true identity. After all, Midoriya Izuku had an analysis quirk and green hair and eyes, the kid in a blue hoodie holding a gun to a criminal’s head was a mystery.
Rika was tied up (with her hands behind her back) and gagged within minutes. Izuku dug his phone out of his hoodie again to check the time. 3:42. He needed to hurry this along. It would probably be wise to just leave then. Give himself time to change clothes when he gets to the bar and fall back into the correct role. But if he left and one of the other villains found Rika tied up they might do something rash and that wasn’t something Izuku wanted on his conscience.
He shot one last look at the group of scared civilians before he took off in a light jog toward the front left half of the store where the customer service counter resides, and behind that break rooms and offices and a vault. While he ran he checked the magazine of the gun, unsurprised to find it more than half empty because of their theatrics when they first entered the store. That only gave him six shots.
When he reached the customer service center he moved into a crouch under the counter and listened. He could hear the three remaining villains talking inside of one of the rooms. He did some mental math in his head. No doubt, Tomio had to be taken out first.
He had the only long-distance quirk and the closest connection to Rika. Seeing Izuku instead of his girlfriend would no doubt set him off. The next biggest threat was Zekuu, he was unstable and venomous and Izuku did not want to deal with extracting venom from a human being to make an antivenom that might not even be ready before Izuku died. Sakura was also a big worry, but she would be more level headed than the other two so she might not jump immediately into using her quirk.
Izuku nodded to himself and rolled up his pant leg to give easier access to his knife. Then he took a deep breath and silently made his way to the room that they were gathered in. If he could just get off a few shots before any of them were aware that something had gone awry then he would have the upper hand.
His back slid along the wall as he edged toward the open door that led to the manager’s office, probably. Either way, they were all gathered there. Izuku allowed himself one breath, one second to reassure himself that these were criminals and he would be facing things a lot worse than guilt if he wasn’t on time.
Then, he smoothly maneuvered himself into the open doorway with his gun drawn and fired five of the six shots that he had. Two for Tomio for each of his legs, two for Zekuu, already in a charge with wild eyes behind his neon green patterned mask, and one for Sakura’s shin before she bowled into him and smashed them both into the wall.
During the crash, her mask had been knocked off. What was underneath was a much more gruesome yet matching picture. Sakura’s eyes were blown wide, her pupil taking up the entirety of her eye and her mouth was already foaming like a rabid dog’s would. In the seconds it took for Izuku to process this, she already had her teeth, unnaturally sharp but probably not venomous, buried in his arm.
She shook it in her grip like how a dog shakes a chew toy, digging her teeth further into the meat of his bicep and tearing through the muscle there. It would probably be too much pain for most people to handle. Izuku was not most people. His gun had been knocked away in the fight so he reached down with the arm not locked in Sakura’s grip and grabbed at his knife. He stabbed her in the stomach.
The effect was much more dramatic than Izuku expected. Her pupils shrunk back down to their normal size and her teeth pulled back out of his arm without her moving her head, like needles retracting. She slumped against the ground and fumbled for the wound. Izuku kept his hand on the handle as he lowered her to the ground.
“Don’t take the knife out.” He told her urgently, he wiped off the handle with the sleeve of his hoodie before placing both of her hands over the knife. “If you keep it in you won’t bleed out and the police will take you to the hospital.”
Sakura nodded frantically, seeming to forget in the heat of the moment that he was the one who had stabbed her. As soon as she was settled on the ground, taking wheezing breaths through her pain. He picked up the gun and wiped that off with his sleeve too before setting it carefully on the ground. Luckily, most of the blood from Sakura’s bite had seeped into his hoodie.
Inside of the manager’s room, Tomio and Zekuu were out cold, probably from pain. Getting shot twice was not something that a lot of people could stay awake through. Izuku dug his phone out for the third time to check how many minutes he had left. 4:18.
He could spare a few minutes. He rooted around in the office and found a first aid kit. He really couldn’t do much but there were two tourniquets and a lot of gauze. He set up each of the passed out villains with one tourniquet as quickly as he could and then packed the wounds.
He couldn’t speak for the amount of damage that would be done to their legs but they wouldn’t bleed out and he didn’t have the time or skill to do anything more than that. It was 4:21. He could hear sirens finally pulling up to the building.
Izuku sprinted out of the store, only barely managing to grab a black tie off of the entrance display before he burst through the doors. He would have taken the back exit but this was closer and he managed to make it past the stunned police who were still sitting in their cars pretty easily. It was a close thing, a few officers managed to get off a shot but Izuku was around the corner of the next building before any of them could really process what was going on.
He climbed the fire escape for an apartment complex a few buildings down and spent the rest of his journey counting down the seconds in his head while he jumped and rolled across rooftops. He only went halfway down the fire escape next to the bar before he jumped the rest of the way to the ground.
He was forced to hurriedly pick the lock with a paperclip that he had in his back pocket because of course Shigaraki locked the door to make this even harder for Iuzku, before he was sitting at his usual seat at the bar, panting and holding a hand to the bite on his arm and trying to pretend that he was totally fine. At least the tie was safely stowed away in the same pocket as his phone.
He had the distinct impression that if he had eyebrows Kurogiri would be raising one at him. Shigaraki was laughing as hard as he ever did, which meant it was closer to snickering than anything else. The TV in the corner that his dad usually used to communicate with them had a clock on it, and in big white letters it said: 4:31:01.
Izuku slumped against the bar. Shigaraki laughed harder like this was the best thing to happen to him all week. Kurogiri went back to cleaning out a glass.
“Well, well, well,” his father’s voice came softly out of the speakers, “it seems like you missed your deadline Izuku. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ground you until Sunday. Go up to your room and change for the meeting and we’ll discuss the particulars afterward.”
And Izuku, once he was safely hidden away in the bathroom, bandaging his arm, grinned at himself in the mirror. His father was so predictable sometimes.
Izuku had marked his interview with Shiketsu on his ‘personal’ calendar as happening on Saturday. It wasn’t actually a personal calendar, it was a calendar that he pretended was personal, a small journal with important dates scrawled in code shoved underneath his mattress, but actually was a tool he used to mislead his father. He kept all the real dates in his head. His interview was on Sunday. His father was needlessly cruel and wanted to ground Izuku just long enough that missing his interview would seem like a close cut tragedy.
While he tied his new tie, the silky fabric slipping around his fingers easily, he pictured the expression on his father’s face when Izuku disappeared to live in the high-security dorms that Shiketsu made mandatory for all of their students. He thought about the distance that would be between them. He thought about the thumb drive that he had in a locker a few cities away. He thought about how everything was falling into place exactly how he wanted it to.
And he felt dread creep up from his now shaking hands through his tie until it was choking him. Something was going to go wrong.
He tightened his tie a bit more aggressively than was needed to snap himself out of the pit of despair that opened up underneath him.
He had done everything correctly, he told himself, sweeping a hand through his stained hair. it was going to work. It had to work.