Chapter Text
Midoriya Izuku was pretty sure that he tended to get kidnapped more than most other people, but he didn’t exactly have a good reference point for how often the average person got kidnapped. He’d read an article in his fourth year of primary that talked about the issues that Japan had with human trafficking, so he just sort of assumed that everyone else got kidnapped at least once a year, and his once-or-twice-a-month ordeals were just a little bit more than normal.
Most of the time he was kidnapped, it was by quirkless traffickers. He’d be rounded up in a room with a whole bunch of other people like him and they’d be tied up, usually not very securely. Guarded by only a few grunts who never expected their captives to fight back, escaping was fairly easy.
But other times the kidnappers seemed overly prepared, watching him like he was a nuclear weapon, not a weak quirkless boy. Sometimes these groups would take Kacchan along with him, so Izuku knew they weren’t kidnapping him for his lack of quirk. These schemes didn’t happen often, but when they did, they were much bigger issues. They’d truss the two boys up like highly volatile turkeys and shunt them into secure holding cells. Izuku had only managed to escape the first one of these with Kacchan’s help, and ever since he had brought tools with him to aid in freeing himself.
Kacchan and him had developed a strange relationship over the years. It was hard not to form a strong bond with someone he’d been kidnapped with eighteen times (twenty-three if you count the times they’d been taken by the same group but had been held and escaped separately), but Kacchan hated Izuku for being a quirkless liability. He still never purposefully left Izuku behind, though, and they’d gotten matching tracker implants together for Izuku’s twelfth birthday that could send an emergency SOS to the other’s phone if needed.
So when Izuku woke up in a hospital, two arms wrapped in casts, and knew that Kacchan had been taken, he flipped out a little.
“I need my phone right now,” he told the doctor who was explaining to him the extent of the damage on his hands. Izuku couldn’t hear him over the ringing in his ears, anyway.
“Kids these days,” the man muttered. “I’m going to cut the casts off with a small saw, first. Try not to move. You can have your phone after that.”
Izuku tapped his foot impatiently, trying not to twitch at the loud noise of the saw turning on. He watched as it cut through plaster which was then cracked off of his arm using another instrument. He still couldn’t move as the second one was also taken off. But as soon as the plaster was off of both of his arms, he was ripping off the padding underneath and lunging for where his phone sat on the side table next to a bag of clothes and some flowers.
He turned it on, and froze. “It’s August sixth.”
“Yes,” the doctor confirmed. “You slept through the fifth and most of today. Your friends are here to visit you, but I also wanted to point out that both our hospital and UA have mental health and trauma resources–”
“Don’t send my friends in. Please,” Izuku begged, “I have to go.”
“...Okay,” the doctor agreed. “I’ll just grab you your papers and then you’ll be all set.”
The man turned around to take some sheets from the printer, and by the time he looked back, Izuku was already out the window.
Izuku knew the statistics. He knew he and Kacchan were exceptions to the rule, that kidnappers wanted to keep them alive yet beaten down, but he couldn’t stop thinking about three percent. Three percent of kidnapped kids don’t make it home, dead or alive.
Kacchan wouldn’t be one of them.
He pulled up the tracking app in a secure browser, already heading down the street towards the nearest train station. Luckily, someone had packed a sweatshirt in the bag that he had grabbed from the side table, so he pulled the hood low over his face. It was better to be seen as a delinquent than to be caught.
The tracker said Kacchan was in Kamino ward. Izuku had only been to Kamino a few times before, once on a trip and maybe another two or so times when he had been kidnapped before.
The clock is ticking, he thought. It’s been almost two days already.
The longest that Izuku had ever gone missing was six days. For Kacchan, it was three. But it usually took them less than a day to escape, sometimes only a few minutes and other times a couple hours. Having Kacchan for this long meant something was wrong. He paid the train fee and hopped onto a late night train heading for Kamino right as it entered the station. It was nearly silent in the car aside from the rumble of the train on the tracks, and the obnoxious squeak of his thick-soled red sneakers as he bounced his leg up and down drew nasty glares from other commuters.
He refreshed his browser over and over, watching his mark on the GPS draw closer and closer to the point that Kacchan’s tracker was pinging. He couldn't help but remember the train on the way to Hosu, the same nervous energy building in his gut.
The station he got off at was only two blocks away from Kacchan, and he pulled his hood even lower, slumping his shoulders and hopefully blending in with the delinquents and ne’er-do-wells that haunted the well lit spaces underneath the tracks. He set out to find him.
He kept an eye out for people who looked just slightly out of place, ones that walked with a certain spring in their step that Izuku had come to recognize symbolized a villain, someone who believed that they were a more important piece of the world than the other people on the street.
There were none.
Now, this wasn’t particularly strange. Oftentimes groups would forgo an active patrol around their perimeter if they had eyes on the streets and back alleys from the buildings. Izuku remembered one specific kidnapping where he had been grazed by a bullet from a sniper perched on top of the roof of the building he was running from.
There was nobody watching from the buildings.
Occasionally–but rarely–the only guard was standing in front of the building, like a bouncer. It was almost always a bad move by the villains, because they never seemed to expect someone to be breaking out from the inside, but less experienced groups were prone to doing it.
But as Izuku drew even closer to Kacchan’s location on his GPS, there were no figures guarding any doors.
Izuku was brought back to his days of being kidnapped by quirkless traffickers. Sometimes, when the groups had obviously just started out, they would underestimate the people they were capturing. But many quirkless people had faced being kidnapped before, and they had learned from those experiences. If they could get out once, they could get out again.
These groups would leave their quirkless captives in rooms without guards, usually unrestrained. Few–if any–of the exits would be blocked by anything substantial. Izuku had even been in a situation once where the kidnappers forgot to lock the door.
So maybe, just maybe, the League of Villains fit into that same brand of stupid.
The building that Izuku had reached was nondescript from the outside, with a single door being the only entrance on the first floor. There were windows higher up, though, probably on the second floor, so Izuku began climbing.
He gripped at the grooves of the mortared brick wall and slowly pulled himself up. His worries abated that the League was a competent group, because he was climbing up the outside of their building and they seemed to be none the wiser, but his discomfort still grew. There had to be something.
His fingertips ached as he let go of one hand to grab a knife from his bag, jamming it into the thin space between the two sides of the window and popping the latch open. The right panel of the window swung outwards without him touching it and Izuku gripped the knife tighter, ready to fight, before he realized that it was just an old, crappy hinge. He climbed through.
He scanned the room. There was a single solid door, no windows aside from the one he had just entered through. The vents were too small to climb through. The walls had once been white, but they had become a sickly yellow from smoke stains, and the only furniture was an overturned table. Izuku walked around the table hesitantly, waiting to be ambushed, until he saw–
“Kacchan?”
There was a lump on the floor, beaten and bloody but still recognizable by his blond hair. His hands were tied behind his back, palms pressed together. It was the usual way that kidnappers tied him, so that he’d have to blow a hand off first if he wanted to use his quirk to escape. He was breathing, if a little shallow, and his left eye was dark blue and puffed up to the size of a golf ball.
Izuku slapped him across the face.
“Mmrgh– Fuck you,” Kacchan said, and bloody spit came flying at Izuku’s face. He dodged it.
“Kacchan. Wake up,” Izuku whispered.
“Oi, ‘s that you, nerd?”
“Yeah. We have to get out of here. I don’t like what’s going on.”
“Me neither, dumbass.”
“No, not like that,” Izuku explained while sawing away at the ropes binding Kacchan’s hands. “They’re either really shitty kidnappers or they’re playing the long con. Either way, we need to get out.”
Kacchan sighed, massaging his newly-freed wrists. “Managed to piss off the emo asshole so he threw me in here, but I must’ve passed out before I could do shit. As far as the villains? I think they’re just fuckin’ amateurs. They’re dumb and reactionary and they all have daddy issues.”
“Let’s just get out while we can,” Izuku murmured, still on edge.
Izuku led their way out of the window and down the wall. When Kacchan’s grip gave out halfway down, he caught his arm so he didn’t crash to the ground.
“Didn’t need your help. Could've gotten out of this whole place by myself,” Kacchan told him.
“Okay,” Izuku agreed, like he was talking to a twelve year old who thought they knew everything.
Kacchan grumbled, but didn't respond.
They walked several blocks in silence, trying to move away from the building and the train station–it's where the villains would look for them first in any normal escape attempt. The air around them was still, anticipating something—but it was going to be something bigger than the two of them, so Izuku’s fear rested over him like a thin blanket rather than a smothering weight.
Kacchan began to stumble not too long after, though he would never admit it, so Izuku moved them into an alleyway off of the bigger street.
“The heroes are on your case already, so we should call Aizawa-sensei to update him.”
Kacchan collapsed to the ground and rested his back against the rough brick side of a building. Izuku carefully ignored how weak and beat up he looked. They never really talked about any of their kidnappings after the fact, but Izuku knew it was nice to be in the company of someone who understood.
Izuku pulled out his phone and called Aizawa, his second number on speed dial after his mother. It rang three times, and then the man picked up with a click.
“Problem Child. Please tell me you’re not on the brink of death after jumping out of a hospital window and running away during an ongoing investigation.”
Izuku chuckled nervously. “I’m okay. But I went and got Kacchan and he needs some medical attention. Nothing urgent, but they did rough him up.”
Izuku dodged a half-hearted kick from Kacchan as Aizawa’s incredulous voice came tinny from the speaker. “You… 'got Bakugou?' Like, you found him?”
“Yeah. The League’s kidnapping scheme was really unprofessional. They even left him alone with no guards or alarms.”
The line crackled with static silence before Aizawa spoke again. “Where are you?”
“In Kamino ward, a few blocks east of the League’s base. I can send you my GPS.”
“Do that. And don’t leave.” The tone of his teacher’s voice left no room for argument.
“Yes, Sensei.”
Aizawa hung up.
“Well. That was weirder than usual,” Izuku commented.
Izuku had never used a shock blanket before, but he had to admit he liked it. It crinkled as he sat in the back of the van that had been driven over from UA. A few of his friends sat in the back with him. Apparently they had very nearly snuck out to go find Kacchan, before Izuku had left and they’d put their ward of the hospital on a soft lockdown. Oops.
Kacchan was sitting a few rows up, passed out against the window after a kiss from Recovery Girl. Izuku found himself checking on the other boy through the crack between the benches and the side of the van every few minutes. His nerves were always a little bit frayed after kidnappings.
“So… How did you know where Bakugou was?” Asked Uraraka, after a short bout of silence.
“Oh! I have a tracker for him on my phone. He has one for me, too, we got them together for when this type of thing happens.”
“Don’t you mean ‘for if this type of thing happens’?” Asked Kirishima with an awkward grin.
“No?” Questioned Izuku. “Definitely ‘when’. It’s been a little better since we got into UA, but there’s always going to be kidnappers out there, right?”
He laughed. Nobody else did.
“Deku, have you been kidnapped before?” Asked Uraraka, slowly.
“I mean, yeah, hasn’t everyone? Japan has a massive human trafficking problem.”
“When I was very young, a group attempted to ransom me because of my family, but I’ve never truly been kidnapped. Has anyone else?” Asked Yaoyorozu,
The van was silent.
“Bro, how many times have you been kidnapped that you needed to get a tracker?”
“I, ah, lost track at about a hundred,” Izuku whispered weakly.
“What,” came a hiss from the passenger’s seat of the van where Aizawa sat.
At that moment, the van came to a stop in the UA parking lot, on the opposite side of where hundreds of reporters were clamoring for comments.
“Aha, it looks like it’s time to go!” Warbled Izuku, and he tugged open the door to the van with enough force that it bounced back, before running for the main building. His shock blanket trailed behind him like a silver cape.
“We will be discussing this!”