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His wings, large and leathery, sound against the night sky in a steady heartbeat rhythm. Flap. Flap. Flap.
Grandpa will sometimes call him Birdie, when he's been especially well behaved, and let him rest his head against his lap as he reads an old old book about something a little like him; a creature sewed together with broken and borrowed pieces.
He loves that book, the way Grandpa’s voice reverberates around the cavernous laboratory and lulls him to sleep, even if he can’t quite comprehend it.
Tonight, he's been lent out to the twitchy, equally half formed Successor. Shigaraki Tomura is nearly always shadowed by Kurogiri, who is tall and well made, a veritable masterpiece according to Grandpa, and always looks at him with an unreadable expression that feels... almost sad.
Tonight, he soars over Hosu.
His objective is simple; Wreak havoc.
He no longer cares for things as simple or as mundane as overturning cars, maiming heroes with his long and sharp talons, or dropping said heroes from high, high, above the earth and watching them land in splattered heaps as gravity takes what it's owed.
The Successor has told him to do so, and even if he thought to question those orders (and he doesn’t), if he does a good enough job tonight, when he returns home to the lab, Grandpa might let him rest his head against his lap in the dim purple lighting of the lab. Grandpa might read to him, holding the weathered paperback in one hand and idly running a hand over his head oh so carefully with the other.
Grandpa has favorites in the Lab and he's acutely aware that he's one of them. It doesn't scare him as much as it does some of the others who still have the wherewithal to feel fear. Grandpa knows what he's doing. The Master knows what he's doing. One day, even the Successor will know what he's doing.
He gets higher, the hero clutched in his claws hanging limp and bloody. Once he's high enough, he's going to let go. He's going to watch him fall down, down, down.
Or at least he would had Endeavor not sprinted up the side of a building toward him. His feet leave molten grooves in the metal siding of the structure and when he leaps forward and toward him, moving like a seasoned hunter, it’s with a flaming lance in one of his hands.
He distantly recalls a memory that feels as though it doesn't belong to him, a memory of watching this same man on a TV on someone's floor. A boy with red eyes and a sharp smile.
The memories surface every now and again, bobbing to the surface like something dead and rotten. He does not like those memories or the way they leave his head feeling as though it’s going to split right down the middle. The memories make no sense. He doesn't understand where they come from and what they mean. He sees people he almost recognizes, faces that should be familiar but are simply not. He remembers sensations like someone trimming his hair, a woman's voice singing to him, children's voices laughing.
Sometimes, he will try to ask Grandpa despite the way his voice just doesn't seem to work as it should, the sound always comes out as a chitter or a garble or a growl, and Grandpa just clucks his tongue and says something about "Almost perfect."
Grandpa has been trying to help him talk since the beginning. He works at it tirelessly, tinkering with his ill-fitting body the way an artist would sculpt their clay. Grandpa insists he's close. So Close. He has no reason to doubt Grandpa.
He knows, at least abstractly, that Grandpa built him from the ground up. Turned what would have been spare and wasted parts into something strong and powerful and nearly perfect.
Endeavor’s flaming lance hits him hard enough that it shoots clean through his head. The pain stuns him enough that he releases a piercing animal shriek, letting go of the hero in his talons long enough for Endeavor to grab them before gravity can. He flies into the night, higher and higher, only narrowly dodging a fireball, willing his regeneration to work faster, ease the pain.
The fire is lighting the billowing smoke as it drifts into the night, painting it in shades of red and gold as he circles.
The smoke reminds him of something. A name that sits just on the tip of his tongue. He can nearly smell the scent of a fresh explosion, but not the ones the Others have set off. The explosions he's thinking of are harmless little pops being held in small hands, a collection of sparks.
He circles in a holding pattern, listening to the steady flapping of his wings as he goes. The sound is comforting; nearly comforting enough to distract him from the pain of a healing burn. He will swoop again when he’s more together, more oriented. The Successor will be mad when he watches the footage later, but he only circles until the bleeding has stopped.
He sees the green boy from a distance, ant small and one of many on the ground. He doesn't know why he chooses to swoop, why he targets him specifically. He just knows that he must.
His long and vicious talons grasp the boy firmly around the middle, digging into the soft flesh of his abdomen as he takes to the sky.
“MIDORIYA-!” someone cries with animal desperation in their voice, and something about that name is hauntingly, achingly familiar. Familiar enough that it makes his head ache again in a way that has little to do with the blow Endeavor inflicted.
In a flash of motion, one of the figures, the one in a long trailing red mask, streaks up at him from the ground, swinging with another blade and missing his right wing by mere inches. He barely pays the man any mind as soon as he returns to the ground.
The green boy bucks and struggles and screams, only managing to reward himself with deeper and deeper wounds as he takes into the night, higher and higher.
The green boy... the boy is familiar, in the same way the memories are familiar, the way the explosions are familiar, the way the red eyes and gentle hands and soft music he sees in his fragmented dreams are familiar.
The green boy has wild curls, some of which have been plastered to his pale round face with sweat and blood. He knows, somehow, that those wide round eyes of his, held open in terror and desperation, are a similar shade.
He has no idea why the green boy is in a hero uniform. It’s utterly out of place for some reason that he can’t identify. He should not be wearing a hero uniform. He doesn't have what it takes.
He knows this boy from somewhere. Maybe from the Before, the place where all the fragmented memories live but he can no longer recognize.
He drops the green boy on a rooftop in an inelegant, painful-looking heap, landing just beside him as the boy attempts to scramble away, as far as he can make it on what's clearly a hurt leg. But the nomu ensures he doesn't get very far. His talons dig deep into the flesh of the green boy’s uninjured leg, prompting an agonized scream.
In one of his misplaced memories, he's holding the very same boy, albeit much younger, and in place of his talons are fleshy hands. His wings give off a steady and familiar flap flap flap as he lifts the green boy off the ground by his wrists. He looks scared, his face tearful and eyes desperate. Even Kacchan and the others think he's taking it too far. He can tell by their widening eyes.
"Put me down!" The green boy cries in his memories, tears streaking down his round little face.
A voice that is both familiar and also hopelessly alien replies, in a child's high tone, "Sure thing, Deku!" in the seconds before he lets him go and lets Deku crash back to the playground grass. Kacchan was close enough to him that he said he could hear Deku's wrist break, but he wasn't sure if that was just to scare him into not doing that again when Deku's arm was better.
In the present, he leans forward and toward the green boy, his talons still deep inside of his leg. He gets close enough that he can see each eyelash, all of his freckles, and the sweat beading on his brow. The green boy's hair moves ever so slightly in tandem with each breath he takes.
"D-D-DDDe-ke-ku."
His voice is different now, not quite right. Whatever Grandpa had done to aid his speech had worked but not entirely. It’s a deep stone on stone rasp, deep in it's wrongness. Just like Grandpa's voice, it seems to reverberate around the otherwise empty rooftop.
The green boy’s mouth is slack with horror, but weather the horror is due to his voice or the word he speaks, he couldn’t guess.
He repeats himself.
"DDDe-eeeeee-ke-ku."
Then, the name he'd forgotten to remember tips from his lips.
"Kaaaaaa..." He's close, so close, just a little further, almost nose to nose, “Kaaaaaaa.....” Almost there. "Ch-ch-an."
The green boy- Deku, looks as though he’s been struck, rearing back as much as his wounds and the talons holding him will allow, his face pale and waxy from terror and blood loss in tandem as he sucks in a sharp breath through his teeth. Those forest eyes flick desperately from his face to his large, leathery wings, like he’s assembling a puzzle within his head.
The two of them stay like that for an Eternity. He repeats the two names, Deku looks as if he's about to be sick.
And then Deku chokes on a sob, one of his hands covering his mouth as the first of the tears begin to spill. Deku was always much too easy to rile up- it’d been one of their favorite pastimes on the schoolyard.
What leaves Deku's mouth as a terrified little whisper, so low that he might not have even caught it if not for his advanced hearing, is the name
"Tsubasa...?"
Tsubasa. Wings. It's... it feels right, like something slotting magnetically into place in his head. A missing piece he hadn’t realized was gone until it was in front of him again.
He makes a low chittering sound, something that’s almost an affirmation. Deku looks as though he’s full of pure and utter despair.
the Successor's voice comes through clear as a bell, as though it’s a thought in his own head and not a command; "Get back here."
Tsubasa considers Deku for a long moment, the blood that's started to puddle beneath him from his mangled legs, his shoulders shaking with quiet, nearly breathless sobs.
"Now." The successor's voice is sharp enough to wound, a nails on chalkboard rasp.
He could leave Deku be. Leave him alone on the roof with his injuries until the heroes inevitably arrived and swept him up and off to the nearest hospital or, more likely, until he bled out. Whichever came first.
But he doesn't want Deku to bleed out. He's been lost since he came back piece by piece under his Grandpa's steady hands, adrift in a turbulent violent sea of confusion and fear and orders with no explanation and no way to ask the millions of questions and-
And. And Deku is as close as he’s gotten to a life raft, a piece of solidity that he can cling to and use to keep his head above water.
Yes. It will be good to take Deku with him.
Tsubasa shifts his talons, wrapping them more securely around Deku’s torso just before he takes off and toward Shigaraki.