Chapter Text
“I urge you to let us go”
“Us?” he asked.
“Do you take me for a fool?”
He had to say, in his time being a hero and working with villains, this guy was the most perplexing one he ever had the chance of interrogating. He was a big guy - but not as big as some of the villains he had fought, he didn’t even have a mutation quirk, he was just built like a rock, but other than that, pretty normal - except for the eye he refused to open; if they hadn’t injected him with a quirk suppressant, he would have been more worried.
He was still dressed in the outfit they found him in - minus a headband and a dark mask that was connected to his shirt that they had pulled down. It looked like a military outfit, standard issue. They didn’t have the chance to change him out. It was a security hazard, definitely, yet the most they could do was ensure that he wasn’t carrying anything on him. The things they found on him took 5 evidence boxes to hold, things from rations to medical supplies, to weapons sharper than almost all of the weapons found in japan.
His main goal was to extract information from the man. Find out who he was, where he was from, why he was here and any details about the children they could get out of his mouth.
Aizawa pushed down the urge to look away from his piercing gaze, “Who is us?”
It was a pointless question to ask. The villain knew, and he knew who the ‘us’ was. But there was no way in hell he would admit that he knew where the children were, because if the man had any connections to the outside world it may as well have been a death sentence to those kids.
The man relaxed suddenly and leaned against the back of his chair, Aizawa let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He was completely open, his hands were bound together on the table and his legs were shackled with tungsten chains.
The man tilted his head slightly to the right and kept his single eye on Aizawa’s.
His voice was barely audible, just slightly above a whisper.
“My shinobi”
Shinobi. Fucking Shinobi, if he wasn’t under direct watch by the police right now, he would have long landed a punch on this guy’s jaw. Those kids, younger than the kids he was teaching, this guy called them his ninjas. His. As if those kids belonged to him. He dug crescent-shaped dents into his palms.
They had indeed taken in ‘his shinobi’ whatever that meant. They had been found passed out on top of the man, who was also unconscious, bruised and bleeding.
They were tiny compared to him, Aizawa had been the closest hero there and the first on the scene, before even the police when they arrived. There were three of them, two boys and a girl, they looked too injured for normal kids. Their muscles were far more developed than even first-year UA students, scars littered what visible patches of skin they had. The children reeked of iron and sweat, their hair was matted for what he could only assume was weeks without showering.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, we aren't holding any ninja captive”
That was the truth, they weren't holding those children. The three of them were recovering at UA’s dorms after they had been tended to and cleaned of course.
Preferably they would’ve been kept at a normal hospital where they could get an abundance of medical procedures done without much fuss, but the circumstances prevented that from happening. You see, despite having restrained and injected the man in front of him with a variety of drugs and suppressants, they couldn’t risk having him escape and take the children away from a completely unguarded hospital.
This was mainly due to the fact that the drugs they had given the man didn’t seem to be working at all. His quirk was disabled, Aizawa’s presence here made sure of that, but the man seemed to be immune to everything else that they had given him. Such as the narcotic given to him to make sure he didn’t wake up before being secured in the interrogation room. Of course, seeing as how he was still awake and asking for his shinobi, the drug didn’t work.
The man smiled, it was warm yet he couldn’t help the shiver that ran through his spine.
His voice was but a shallow rasp against the silence of the room, “When I get to them - and trust me I will get to them”
He sat up a leaned forward, his face barely 20 centimeters away from Aizawa’s, “There better not be a single limb missing from their bodies”
He was disgusted at the implication that they would ever even think of laying a finger on children, let alone amputating their limbs. Just where and who was this guy?
Why did he even care about the kids…unless? The thought disgusted him to the core, he felt the burning desire to take a cold shower and rub his skin off any remnants of the man sitting in front of him. He didn’t care about those kids, did he? He called them his soldiers, it was only natural for him to not want his soldiers damaged. He was repulsed at the thought of those tiny kids going through the type of training it must’ve taken for them to get to such a level of physical fitness.
The man continued, “It’s been quite some time since I’ve tortured someone, but you can be confident in the fact that I will not let any impudence against my shinobi slide”
“Are you threatening me?”
The audacity this bastard had to pretend to care for those children made his blood boil.
He smiled, the scar cutting through his closed eye wrinkled, “If I was threatening you, you would know. I’m simply informing you of what is to come”
The smile on his face dropped, and his eyes exuded rancour.
Aizawa had had enough of this guy, he stood up, the metal chair dragging against the tiled floor. He left the room, the heavy door slamming behind him. He wanted to see those children, his mind was too occupied with them to bother listening to the man’s lies.
Outside, watching through a one-way mirror was detective Naomasa Tsukauchi. His brows were furrowed and his mouth was twisted into a frown. Aizawa walked to him, he needed to tell him where he was going.
Unfortunately, when he reached the window, it took a while for the words to get out of his mouth. Just a fraction of a second after he made his way in front of the window, the man was gone. Tsukauchi and he froze, he was gone.
He was gone.
Fuck .
He had been bound to the table and the floor with heavy shackles pumped full of disorientating narcotics and tied to the chair he had been sitting on. The door was triple-reinforced steel, the only way to get out was via a biometric scan and a chip embedded in one’s wrist. There were no windows to the outside, the walls were made of meter-thick concrete and the only air vents situated in the room were 4 meters above where the man had been sitting. Even then the air vents had seals over them to make sure nothing could get out. This prison was the depths of hell for criminals, and the man simply disappeared, leaving a pile of leaves where he had been.
The man had escaped Tartarus.
In a matter of two minutes and 45 seconds, the entirety of Tartarus was aware of the man who escaped hell. Prison guards were on the lookout, prisoners were on the verge of a riot and the National news was already preparing to go live.
In less than three minutes, Aizawa made his way out of the prison maze and into his car. To say he sped to UA would be an understatement, he was pushing 150km/h on a busy rainy night. The risk of him dying before even finding the man was starting to get higher with every acceleration.
He would get there.
He would make it.
________________________________________________
The wheels on his car were on the verge of melting away as he screeched onto the UA compound. The car had barely even stopped moving before he was out and running towards the dorms, where those kids were, hopefully unhurt.
The rain soaked through his clothes and dripped down his face, he was blinded by it, his skin was cold and pale. Every step he took, he could feel his heart beating faster in his head. When the doors to the dorms opened, his class was there, ready to see him in all of his glory.
They were all collected in the living room, watching the news that had aired only a few minutes ago. He ignored them, the priority was those kids.
Despite his ignoring them, his students rioted to follow him, and questions of all sorts popped up.
“Are you alright?!”
“Mr Aizawa, is it safe?”
“Where are you going?”
He ran to the top level like his life depended on it because really, the kids’ lives did depend on it. There he was met with Nemuri standing outside the door. He assumed that Hizashi was standing inside, protecting those kids. Before she could even glance at him, he pushed her to the side and burst open the door.
The man didn’t look to be in the dorms or even within the vicinity of UA but he couldn’t risk it. He had escaped Tartarus without so much as batting an eyelash. And if his memory served right, the man had promised - rather vehemently at that - that he would find his shinobi.
It took him longer than usual to realise. The room was different from this morning when he was visiting the sleeping children in the afternoon. He felt goosebumps rising against the back of his neck, something was different. There was a lack of…beeping.
It took him about a second to fully realise the missing bodies of those three children weren’t in the room. The windows were wide open and Hizashi wasn’t there. Instantly his mind raced to the possibility that the children had died, that recovery girl couldn’t heal them. And then he felt a hand on his shoulder. He bristled.
“Where are they”
He was scared of what Nemuri might say.
‘They passed’
‘Someone was sent to kill them’
“We moved them,” she said.
His mind raced through the possibilities. Then he relaxed, of course, they moved them, that was good. There was a villain after them, and certainly not a villain they could afford to underestimate. They probably moved the children to a more secure location, like the main building or training ground C.
He faced Nemuri, but before he could ask where they were she told him of everything that had occurred whilst he was needed at Tartarus.
“They were hostile, Nezu asked you to go suppress their quirks and calm them down when you got back, they’re underground in the main building”
Well, that was unexpected.
But there was something else, the kids were moved underground, that's where their safe house was. It was likely the second safest place in Japan, the first being Tartarus. The very nature of it being a secure safe house, also meant that it was one of the worst places one could keep panicked children; there were no windows, the walls were scarcely decorated and the entire place smelled stale. Of course, it wasn’t decorated like a prison or anything, but it wasn’t much better was all he was saying.
And for Nezu to want him to suppress their quirks, they must’ve had a reason. Had anyone else told him that they were keeping likely traumatised children in a facility underground with no connection to the outside world and asked him to not only talk to them but suppress their quirks, he would have gone red and beat them to a pulp. But this was Nezu, and he trusted the principal enough to know that he had a reason to do everything.
Nemuri had said they were hostile, but how bad could it have been for them to move the kids underground? He wondered why she didn’t just use her quirk or why they didn’t restrain them.
“WHAT!?”
A voice from behind him chimed.
It was Kaminari.
“Nemuri, did you tell my students?”
She avoided his gaze, “I forgot….hahaha”
He turned to face his students, he could look over all their heads, they were so … small compared to him - at least most of them were. Those children, they were bloody when he first laid eyes on them, they were so much smaller than the group standing right in front of him right now. He couldn’t bear to think about what horrors they might have gone through and how stressed they must be right now.
Every second he was here was a second they were alone.
He pushed past his students.
“Nemuri, explain and brief them”
He didn’t look back.
“Mr Aizawa! Let us follow you”
He didn’t have time for this, this matter was not for his students to worry about.
“Nemuri”
He smelled the familiar sweetness in the air right as he exited the dorms, the loud ruckus slowed to nothing. Before he made it ten steps from the doors, the dorms were engulfed in complete silence.
______________________________________
Cementos was there. As he walked down the stairs, he realised that the entire structure of the underground was different. It looked more ‘friendly’ he supposed that was the least they could have done for those kids. They had changed the layout to something like an observatory. The stairs that led down were connected to a short hallway. Through that hall was a glass door and through that door was where the kids were.
The room was huge, it was a circular room, with a dome-shaped top. Cementos, Nezu and he were separated from the kids by a single glass pane running straight down the middle of the rotunda - laminated one-way glass he assumed. As he entered the room even he had to admit he was slightly jealous. The room was nicer than any of the dorms in UA, the entire place was painted a deep dark blue and the curved ceiling was dotted with thousands of small lights, making it resemble the night sky.
It was calming, for kids it would be even more so he guessed. After all, what kid wasn’t infatuated with the idea of space and becoming an astronaut?
He was glad that they had at least put some effort into trying to calm those kids down. On the other side of the glass, the room was decorated with plenty of celestial-like embellishments. There were three beds placed of equal length apart from each other.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough. His heart ached at the sight in front of him. The three kids were standing stiff as a board against the wall directly opposite them. The two boys looked to be protecting the girl. It hurt him to think of what they were trying to protect her from.
They looked terrified.
He looked to Nezu, “Let me in”
“Change before you go in”, Nezu pointed to a pile of dry clothes and towels at the side.
The principal paused, “There’s something about them, Aizawa, we’ll come in if there’s any trouble”
He changed quickly in the corner of the room, drying off with the towel along the way, and left the wet clothes on the floor. When he was done Nezu only gestured to a door on the right. Before he went in, he warned him.
“Don’t take your eyes off them, make sure you have your quirk on at all times, and Aizawa, be careful”
Aizawa trusted Nezu more than he trusted anyone else to give him orders, before he even went through the door, his eyes bled red and his hair floated up. The moment he entered, the children moved with incredible speed from the middle of the room to the side furthest from him, their backs still against the wall.
He put his hands up as a peaceful gesture, he needed to approach them without scaring them off. He got about halfway there before the blonde boy spoke.
“Don’t come any closer! I’m warning you!”
It wasn’t the first time he had seen the boy, but now he could observe him more closely. His blonde hair was more of a bright yellow than blonde and his eyes were a clear blue. Having both was quite uncommon in Japan, even after the first quirks manifested. He was probably foreign. If Aizawa had to guess, he likely had a mutation-based quirk as well, there were three whisker-like marks on his cheeks.
He stayed where he was, to move closer and break the boundaries set by the boy was probably the worst thing he could do for building trust between them right now.
He tried to make his figure smaller, “I just want to know your names, I’m not going to hurt you”
The black-haired boy whispered to the other two and he saw their eyes go wide before they nodded, and returned to ‘normal’. That made him up his guard. What were they whispering about? There were only two possibilities, they were discussing how to escape or they were discussing him. To be analysed right in front of your face was generally not something he was comfortable with.
The boy stepped in front of the other two, “Which village are you from?”
Village? That was an interesting choice of words. Coming from a village was getting rarer and rarer every year, what with everyone starting to move to the big cities and overseas.
He hesitated in answering, “Tokyo…what about you?”
The boy moved back to his friends, keeping his eyes on him before whispering to them again and stopping soon after. The girl now looked to be doing most of the conversation, she stood by his left while the blonde stood to his right, listening to what the girl had to say. He didn’t like this. Those kids had enough sense to mask their lips while they spoke, not that he could read lips much better than at a basic level. The girl tilted her head so that her hair fell over her face while she spoke, the other two just listened intently.
“Do you take us for fools?” The girl broke the silence.
His heartbeat quickened, that was almost exactly the same words that the man had said. What did they mean? He was from Tokyo. Were they asking the exact village his family was from? He didn’t know which village he was from, he was born and raised in the heart of Tokyo.
All of a sudden the blonde rushed forward in front of his friend and started yelling. “HEY OLD MAN, YOU BETTER LET US GO, OR I’LL BEAT YOU UP, DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHO I AM?”
Did he agitate him somehow? Aizawa kept silent, he didn’t want to anger the boy anymore than he already was. He let him continue. The boy ran up to him, closer than he thought the blonde would be comfortable with. Aizawa looked down at him and could only think about how young he was and how easily influenced he must’ve been.
“I'M UZUMAKI NA-”
Aizawa’s eyes betrayed his shock. He had gotten a name faster than usual, and he didn’t even have to do anything. Unfortunately, the boy’s friend, the girl, ran up, pulled him back and shut him up before he could say his full name, but the important thing was that they got his family name. He glanced at the reflective glass wall discreetly. Hopefully, Nezu would be able to find the boy’s family soon.
Before his gaze moved back to them, goosebumps rose along the back of his neck.
He dropped to the floor on his knees out of instinct, and a flurry of butterflies rose in his stomach up to his throat. Above him, he saw a blinding light race past the exact position his head had been in. The sound was deafening, it sounded like a thousand chirping birds all at once, multiplied by a hundred. His ears rang and his vision was starting to cut in and out.
Shit.
The first thought he had was that the man had found them, he found them and he was about to deliver on his promise. Aizawa’s back gave out and he laid there, prostrated on the ground, it was comparable to getting hit with a flashbang right in front of your face. It hurt like a bitch. The hairs on his arms raised and his ears rang.
Shit.
He was going to die, he needed to get up. But he wasn’t a mutant, nor did he have a quirk to negate the effects of a flashbang-like quirk, it would take him a while to reorient himself. And even he knew, despite being blinded and deaf, that if the man was here that there wouldn’t be any time for him to get up. If he didn’t stand now, he would never stand again.
Before he mustered the strength to stand, he felt small arms under his arms, he was dragged along the floor away from the door and away from where he was almost killed. Were those kids helping him? Unfortunately, of course, that wasn’t the case, shortly before he regained his vision and a bit of his hearing, he felt cold steel against his neck.
He heard the voice beside his ear before realising Nezu and Cementoss rushed into the room.
“Let us go, or he dies”
It was the girl. Her feathery voice now bled resentment and animosity. He tried to move, years of training couldn’t go to waste now when he was being held by a bunch of kids. He tried to move, yet he couldn’t. He was tied up. Every movement he made, the razor-thin string dug deeper into him, threatening to break his skin through the fabric.
His hands were tied behind his back and his legs were wrapped together, if he wasn’t on the verge of death he’d be blushing from the embarrassment of getting taken down by a bunch of kids.
His hearing and eyesight were pretty much completely back by now. He surveyed the room, the black-haired boy was standing to the right closest to the door while the blonde and the girl looked to be behind and beside him respectively.
“Alright, just put the…kunai down”
Kunai? Aizawa spared a glance at the sharp object pressing dangerously close to his skin, it was a kunai. The words of that man came back to him, ‘my shinobi’ , he said. Was this the work of a villain? Was there some greater evil lurking in the shadows?
Thus, in spite of the kunai held to his neck, he couldn’t help but feel compassion and sorrow for these children. How young must they have been to have such proficiency in fighting? Were they scouted like Hawks was? What was their life like before they were taken? Were their families still looking for them? Most of all, he felt a deep burning hatred towards the villains who took away their childhood to make them soldiers for whatever twisted cause they had.
They were so young, to have their entire lives taken just like that was an evil reserved for only the worse in society.
The girl spoke from behind him, “We’ll let him go when we’re outside”
They moved along the wall, bringing him along with them, Nezu and Cementoss moved as well, constantly keeping themselves opposite them. They moved until the two of them were reunited with the black-haired kid by the door. He marveled at the strength of the girl, she struggled with his weight for sure, but most of his own students couldn’t imagine even being able to move him from his spot.
Aizawa was fully recovered by now.
The trio were a couple of meters from the door before he initiated his escape.
He hesitated in escaping mainly because he didn’t want to hurt the girl, but he couldn’t let them leave the room and besides, the girl would be fine.
A small dagger constantly kept at his side in a small hidden pocket would finally be used. In his many years of hero work, he had never once used it, mostly because he was skilled enough to not get captured. Luckily, this also meant that the knife was still razor sharp and would hopefully easily slice through the string. While the girl dragged him along, he managed to get that dagger in his hands and slice through the strings enough that he would be mobile but not enough to alert his abductors.
Only a few steps from the door was when he stood and flipped her over his shoulder. Unlike how it ended most of the time, however, she didn’t go down as quickly as normal. Instead, rather than falling on her back as most people would, she simply flipped to standing again. She did look disorientated though so at the very least his flipping didn’t go all to waste.
“SAKURA!”
The black-haired boy pulled the blonde back by his jacket while the blonde pulled ‘Sakura’ back by her shirt as well.
“Naruto, Sakura, get behind me!”
The two of them scattered behind the boy. Which was usually not a good sign for anyone in front of the person who everyone got behind. Aizawa rushed to the other side where the principal and Cementoss were.
The boy made signs with his hands, they were so fast that he couldn’t make out what they were.
He held his hands, clasped together in a sign, below his mouth.
Time seemed to stop as the boy’s chest expanded almost unnaturally, his internal instincts were going wild, asking him to run to the door. But he knew better, whatever it was the boy was planning to do, he wouldn’t be able to make it out before he had done it.
“KATON!”
Cementoss placed his hands on the ground.
“GOUKAKYUU NO JUTSU!”
He caught a glimpse of a blazing inferno right as a concrete wall came up completely blocking whatever quirk the boy had.
The heat only came a few seconds after the wall was brought up. It cascaded over them like hot lava, he feared that the wall wouldn’t hold, or that even if it did, they would be baked alive, trapped in a large concrete oven. By the time it was over, they were drenched in sweat.
The wall collapsed, and they saw the molten red rock that had become of the outer layer of it. Most importantly, however, was that the kids were currently running out of the room and up the staircase. He could just barely hear their footsteps, which was insane if he truly thought about it.
Aizawa ran out of the room chasing them down, despite the sound of their footsteps gradually disappearing they were still well within his view. He only caught up to them when they reached the ‘outside’.
His scarf reached out, they were in an open field, his worst territory. It reached out and it caught the blonde’s ankle. It dragged him down to the floor.
He pulled out another Kunai from god knows where and attempted to cut off his tether, luckily for Aizawa, he couldn’t do it. It didn’t take long for his team to realize their missing person, they turned around with a vigor he could only hope to instill in Bakugo. They faced off there.
The two were staring at him, while the blonde was still on the ground, attempting to wrestle out of the bind.
“Naruto! ”The girl shouted, the black-haired boy pulled her back from running to help ‘Naruto’.
“IT"S ALRIGHT, SAKURA, I'LL GET OUT!!”
Aizawa highly doubted that. Though he was starting to get nervous with how much the blonde was wiggling about.
It was the boy this time, “Naruto!”
“I KNOW, I KNOW”
*crack*
His eyes snapped back to the boy and away from the two other kids. He heard it, he heard that oh-so-familiar sound, the sound that he had spent countless hours of his life listening to. A dislocation.
“FUCK!!!! SHIT SHIT SHIT”
Before he could grab the boy and tend to his now dislocated and bleeding ankle, the boy ran to his friends. Or more accurately, hopped on one foot while the other looked grossly mangled. Aizawa’s heart nearly burst out of his chest. What the actual hell, the boy's foot was bleeding and the dislocation looked more like a broken bone. Had the boy exerted too much pressure? It was too bloody for a dislocation.
He reached out, but the boy was moving too fast “WAIT, KID”
If he kept moving like that. The injuries to his foot would be too severe, torn tendons and dislocated ankles were a completely different matter from shattered tarsals and bones, not to mention with the pressure he was placing on them every so often when he needed to regain balance.
He ran up to the boy, he was faster, he would catch up in less than a few seconds. Aizawa’s arm reached out as far as it could, he could almost feel the rough fabric of the boy’s jacket on his fingers.
One more step.
Just a little more.
He reached.
The tips of his fingers graced the dirt and blood-stained collar of the jacket. Just a little bit more.
He leaned forward, ready to tackle the boy or at least stop him. His hands clutched his collar, scrunching up the fabric. He expected the boy to fall backwards into his arms, pulled along by his jacket, but instead, his fingers soon found themselves clutching nothing but thin air.
It was the raven-haired boy.
He was carrying the blonde on his back, he was faster than him, he couldn’t catch up. Just what quirk did this boy have? Speed and flames? Flames that rivalled the heat of Todoroki’s, and speed almost as fast as Mirko’s? No, it was impossible, the two quirks had no relation to each other whatsoever, there was something else.
A drop of rain fell below his eye.
Was this the work of all for one?
Did the boy simply have a copy quirk? Like Monoma’s?
In front of him, in less than a second, the boy had grabbed his friend and launched him on his back. What was it? Time slowed as his heartbeat quickened. Something scratched at his brain, something important.
.
.
.
His eyes.
Aizawa’s quirk had been activated ever since he entered the room, yet the boy was still able to activate his fire and speed quirk…and his eyes.
The raven-haired boy’s eyes were red. They spun, lighting up like lanterns on the dark and cloudy evening. Even now, with his back turned away from him, he could feel the power emanating from those eyes. It was the same. The same sense of unease, of turmoil….of fear. It was the same as when he was stuck in the room with that man.
The boy, there was something about him too.
He wasn’t like his friends.
Yes, that was it. He was different, he felt different. It wasn’t just his eyes, there was an energy lurking around and within him. He didn’t know what it was when he first entered the room he was held in, just chalking it up to his own jitters after confronting that beast of a villain.
He hadn’t felt it again until the boy grabbed Naruto. Until he came so close to Aizawa that the feeling of fear was absolute. The boy had looked at him as he took his friend away. His hair and quirk were still activated, yet the boy looked him straight in the eyes, with those spinning red lanterns. What he saw in those milliseconds of eye contact froze him to the core.
Pure malice and hatred.
It wasn’t the anger of a child when their friend got hurt or when they lost a game. No, it was something worse than that. Not even the villains he had beaten to a pulp had that kind of hatred within them. They were angry, yes but not angry at him, at Aizawa Shota, they were angry at the world.
This boy, the only one of the three whose name has yet to be uttered, was filled with evil.
Those eyes were too cold, too cold for a child. The only person who he had ever seen with such eyes was the Hero-killer Stain, and yet, the boy’s was different. It wasn’t concentrated on the people and heroes of the world. That resentment was entirely aimed at him with full force, him and only him. Not him as a hero or as a teacher but as a person.
His legs stopped moving and his knees locked. He was frozen to the spot.
When the boy reached the girl, the three of them spared a look back at him. Those red eyes drew him back in. Eyes of the devil. He didn’t believe in God or Satan but in those eyes, there was nothing else that could describe them.
He found it hard to find much compassion left in him for the children.
He felt a wind rush past him, then the ground started to wobble underneath him.
Reinforcements, he suspected.
The kids won’t step foot outside of UA. It was impossible, at least it was for them. There were still several kilometres left for them to run if they wanted to even have a chance of escaping the school grounds. For children that size and age, impossible, especially since the Raven-haired boy was carrying a weight equivalent to his own, who also happened to be squeezing the life out of his arm in what could only be pain.
Despite all their skills and prowess. All their quirks and mysteries, they were still children. They were children, and children could not hope to out-think or outrun adults, especially heroes with decades in the field. He wondered what would happen to them after they were sedated again.
As he gazed upon them, concrete blocks rising to hold their feet in place, as much as he would hope that those emotions of kindness and pity would disappear from his mind after seeing the black-haired boy’s hatred, he couldn’t help the pang of sadness and guilt that overcame him when he looked at them once again.
They were ‘just’ children. They wouldn’t even be out of middle school yet if they had had a normal childhood. Those three were taken from likely the only adult they knew, no matter how disgusting his acts against them were, and placed in an unknown location. HELL the blonde had even seriously injured himself just to get away from him. They were scared. And could he really blame them?
The black-haired boy was just protecting his friends.
Even for himself, he was angry, he was so angry that he couldn’t help it when he discovered what had happened to Shirakumo. But he was an adult when he found out, at the very least, he knew how to handle grief. The boy saw his friends terrified and hurt at ‘their’ hands, of course, he was angry.
The look of panic and fear in their eyes as they tried to escape from the concrete that slowly rose up their bodies, binding even Naruto on the boy’s back almost made him look away. It was cruel.
The rain got heavier now. He didn’t mind it obstructing his vision.
The sweet scent of flowers and lavender wafted past his face and formed into a small pink cloud around the three children.
They waited for five minutes. Five minutes before midnight pulled the air away and Cementoss’ concrete receded into the muddy ground. The three of them were out cold, so naturally, their bodies dropped to the ground.
Aizawa was there before a single one of them could fall onto the mud. He held the three of them in his arms, their skin was cold and clammy from the rain.
“Nemuri!”
He locked eyes with her, “Coming!”
She walked slowly toward him, the danger was over, “Help me carry the bo- Naruto to Recovery girl, careful, his foot is completely shattered”
“Why did you shatter his foot Aizawa? That seems cruel, even for you”
His brows furrowed at the accusation, why would she even think he would do something like that…to villains yes but not to children. He supposed it made sense, no child had the tolerance or even strength to break their own body, even to escape.
“I di-”
His body froze, and a violent fear took over his mind.
“ Shattered? ”