Work Text:
Kazue babysat him when he was younger and liked to twist her fingers in his hair while they sat in front of the tv. He liked to watch the news and she would watch it with him even though it made her face contort like that, the grim smile and the furrow in her brows. She made her own food and used a grocery delivery service. She often let him stay up half an hour later than his mum had allocated. She stayed up late with a mug of tea cupped in her hands watching recorded videos of her old fights. Most of all, she’d hold him while he cried after a particularly bad day and tell him over and over again that it would be okay and that she was so proud of him.
Kazue doesn’t talk about her villain days very much, there are heavy implications and sometimes she’ll slip, but most times she smiles sadly and try to change the subject. Izuku knows that it is a tender topic and he doesn’t bring it up often. Instead, he talks about how he wants to be a hero and how cool a hero fight had been and the rescues. Kazue likes these talks better, even though Izuku knows that some of her own friends had fallen under the hands of heroes.
“Don’t be a villain, Izuku, you can’t unionise.”
Izuku is fascinated with quirks. He likes to watch them and document them. Kazue buys him as many notebooks as he wants and sometimes points things out as well. She has a wind quirk where she can manipulate the air around her. Her villain team sometimes comes to visit him too. She sometimes talks about other villains, ones that aren’t flashy enough to be on tv. She tells him about the ones in jail who cry every night, she tells him about the ones that have lost little brothers and sisters, she tells him about the ones that have shaky hands and red rimmed eyes. She tells the stories of them and she smiles so sadly.
Izuku has never wanted to become a villain, he knows why Kazue had become one though. When he first asked she had brushed him off with a light-hearted remark about how being a villain had seemed cool. Izuku knows this is untrue, he knows that sometimes her hands shake and the objects in her apartment will be shredded, he knows that she doesn’t have any siblings anymore, he knows that she cries every night because the walls in this apartment complex aren’t quite paper thin but they’re very close. He knows that she has scars her arms and legs that are so long but thin and that the rash on her hand has never been healed by choice.
“Don’t be a villain, Izuku, you can’t get a date.”
Izuku gets into the Yuuei hero course and he breaks both his legs and an arm. Kazue sits in quirk suppressing hand cuffs and disappointment on her face. She berates him for hurting himself like that and then kisses him on both cheeks and then his forehead and tells him that she’s proud of him for making it. He feels extremely guilty for not telling her the whole truth, he’s fed her the same lie he’s told his mum, and knows that they’ve both eaten it up because of their trust in him. He thinks about this in the middle of the night so much, the guilt ebbs away at him and he feels his resolve deteriorate after every night.
All Might pulls him aside one day to ask about his relationship with the Breeze Dancer. Izuku just grins nervously and tells his hero that she might as well be his older sister. It makes for a very concerning parent teacher interview with two pro-heroes, one ex villain and his mum in a tense but quiet discussion about Izuku’s involvement with a bad influence. Kazue wears a muzzle and a choker that Izuku knows has other connotations.
“Don’t be a villain, Izuku, you’ll never get a stable job.”
Kazue worked casually at the convenience store, but Izuku had seen her uniform. She had a marker that identified her from the other employees, she would wear a collar around her neck that paralysed her if she were to use her quirk. She had to wait after every shift for the manager to deactivate it and take it off. She didn’t tell Izuku when her shifts were and when he did go to buy bread and he saw her, he wouldn’t unsee the resigned expression that clouded her face when the supervisor with the electric quirk shocked her after a customer had been served. It’s for safety, the manager replied when Izuku asked him, the manager had pat his head and Izuku had known that his quirk was the vibrant red bat wings and that he could only hover a few centimetres above the ground.
Kazue spent a lot of time visiting prisons, asylums, and camps, she never took Izuku with her. Izuku has visited a prison before, he has visited an asylum, and one time he snuck into a juvenile detention camp. He had been ushered out immediately, civilians aren’t permitted into them without visiting passes. Izuku doesn’t know what Kazue did at those prisons. She never mentioned them a lot, and Izuku knows that she had to be in a mood before she’d answer his questions. The Midnight Blade is held in solitary confinement, Izuku thinks about this often.
“Don’t be a villain, Izuku, it’s not a fulfilling career path.”
Kazue wrote books. Kazue wrote books under a pen name. They were books on mental illness. Izuku has a signed copy of all of them on his book shelf. Izuku often references the coping methods in the anxiety book. Kazue had bought him a hero colouring book out of the blue one day. An author’s discount, she told him, it was made by one of her friends. Izuku is half way through it, the colouring helps his trembles and to put his mind on something while the world spins too fast.
Kazue used to turn her phone off and disappear for a little while. To destress, but Izuku thinks that it’s the mandatory counselling sessions put in place for villains who are on parole. There were days where she would come home with dried tears and a stuffy nose and Izuku would hug her with his small arms and they would sit on her couch and watch shitty romcoms. They make milkshakes and microwavable hash browns and drown in every blanket they can find in both apartments.
“Villains are so uncool, Izuku, don’t even think about it.”
Izuku’s last year of middle school had been Kazue’s first collapse. No hospital would take her in, and she’d been taken away in the back of the Crimson Fist’s car. Izuku had stayed up all night colouring a complicated picture of Endeavour. Kazue returned three days later with so many bandages and a box of sleeping pills. She’d laughed him off and hugged him tightly. He watched as the Crimson Fist had stayed the week to watch over her. He listened to the watery phone calls to the other members of her team and the sobbing reassurances. He doesn’t sleep very well for the entire year. She collapses four more times.
Kazue’s old villain team consists of elementals. He knows them very well. Two of them are in prison and he visits them with Kazue when he starts high school, when he’s not on bed rest. Azure Fang is the only active villain. Azure Fang manipulates water like it’s nothing, she washes the dishes exceptionally fast. Midoriya Inko has only had a few reservations about Kazue being a neighbour. She had still worried over her son when he started to spend time next door. Inko often debates stopping the contact between the two, but she has seen Kazue take a hit for her son and she knows that Kazue is not bad for her son. Only her son, Inko doesn't trust Kazue with anyone else.
“Izuku! Did you see the newest video of All Might! I saw Hiroko, don’t learn anything from her though.”
Kazue takes the Midoriya family out for dinner sometimes, she has to wear the parole badge. The accessory is blindingly obvious, and attracts the wrong sorts of attention. Kazue endures it with gritted teeth and darting glances towards exits. Inko always makes sure that the tables they book are close to the door, that Kazue has the seat closest to it. Kazue always watches for villain attacks. Having been at the top before, she’s still strong, she slams herself into the man that stands up and waves a gun at the dinner guests. The man laments how badly his life sucks and how the world should change. Kazue brings him down with just her hands and talks him through it until he’s crying with his cheek pressed into the purple carpet.
Kazue wants to fix the prison system. She tells Izuku this over peas and pasta. She tells him that Takashi had been beaten bloody and how close to death he really was. Izuku listens quietly, and agrees quietly. Takashi, another one of her team, made of fire and burning defeat. Takashi who lost his whole family. Takashi who can’t escape his own hands. Izuku visits him in the prison hospital, and he wishes that he had a healing quirk.
“Izuku, did you know villains don’t have healthcare? It sucks a little bit, having to pay so much for an ambulance.”
Izuku looks into Kazue’s sentence once, the word burns into the back of his eyes. Murder. He finds the news clippings and articles all about the Breeze Dancer. Notorious. Kazue is caught by the police, no one knows how. The rest of the team had disappeared. Izuku wonders why she would let herself be caught. He knows why, he won’t ever say though. Kazue has given up plenty of times in her life, Izuku will not remind her. He knows that she has done more than kill, he has seen the way she scrubs at her hands.
Kazue stays over for dinner. Inko prepares the beef and vegetables. Kazue tells them that she’s become a vegetarian. Inko nods in understanding and she cooks the vegetables first. Kazue does a systematic purge of any kind of meat in her life. She gives all the beefs, chickens and porks in her fridge to Inko and smiles so brightly. Izuku hasn’t seen her look so happy in all the time that he’d known her. When asked, she confides that it never made her feel good to eat meat, that she couldn’t understand the appeal. She wrings her hands less often.
“Izuku, one time, during a hold-up we got ice cream, we even paid for it.”
Kazue is very skinny. She sometimes doesn’t wake up before midday and doesn’t eat lunch. She sometimes doesn’t leave the confines of the floral couch in front of her tv, where she stares unblinking at the screen. Izuku doesn’t know what she looks for. He sits with her on those days and he makes witty comments that make her huff a breath.
Izuku gets a lot of schoolwork help from Kazue, she’s good at English and maths and is patient with his learning style. Izuku muses that she could be a teacher and she smiles so fondly and shakes her head. When she was in high school she used to be really quiet too, she hadn’t ever tried to stand out. She tells him over his textbooks of the times when she had felt particularly rebellious, where she sat in empty classrooms and wrote on the whiteboards with her friends. Simpler times, now, she can’t go anywhere without notifying her parole officer and a pro-hero.
“Did you know, Izuku, that pro-heroes get long service leave. How cool is that!”
Yuuei treats Kazue with suspicion, she doesn’t spend a lot of time around. She hates the hand cuffs and the stares that follow her through the corridors. She still goes to all of Izuku’s important events. She still shows up when Izuku gets injured and kept inside the infirmary. Izuku tells her all of his secrets, and he knows that she’s told him everything too. Though, some of it is buried deep in irony and jokes, he picks it out and holds them close. Kazue stands while she waits for him, she never sits because she tells him that they’ll all look down on her.
Izuku knows that she’s self-aware and that she’s trying. She works as hard as she can, and she’s supportive of Izuku’s career choices. Sometimes she makes simulations of villain scenarios, even though it makes her hands shake uncontrollably. She talks to his friends. Ochako has taken a shine to her, even though there is always a level of distrust, Kazue smiles a little broader. Iida doesn’t interact with her often, ingrained into him a hatred for villains.
“Izuku! I bought a magazine and it has a picture of Eraserhead!”
Kazue disappears for three months, spirited away by the free members of her team, they go on a trip overseas. She sends him a post card. When she comes back she shows him all the pictures, of the beach and waterfalls. There is a horse, she had befriended it. Are horses allowed in the apartment complex? Izuku wonders.
Kazue goes speed dating sometimes, she always comes back alone. She often complains about being single. She doesn’t do much to change it, speed dating aside. Izuku knows that this is another thing she has given up on, and wisely, doesn’t comment. Kazue doesn’t like to date villains, she says that it’s a waste of time and just a place for grief, she looks at Izuku and he knows that she’s sending him a message. He listens. She often dreams about heroes, in a skate park where she falls and someone swoops her off her feet. She tells these heavily dramatized stories with gusto when she sits on the end of his bed and then switches off the light.
“Villains, Izuku listen to me, villains are often victims of circumstance, but they have all taken the worst path.”
Kazue’s apartment door doesn’t open. It’s locked. The smell of blood is horrific, Midoriya Inko calls the police. There are signs of a fight. There is so much blood. Tachibana Kazue lays on the kitchen counter. Her eyes are wide, her hands are cold and stiff and covered in blood. There is a crevice in her forehead, that creeps into her hair line. The tiny cuts in her arms and legs are dripping. Her lungs are punctured an autopsy reveals weeks later. Low priority as it is, villains and all that, probably a fight for dominance where the superior quirk was decided, the pathologists conclude nonchalantly.
Izuku hears of it two days after Kazue is discovered. He skips class until he’s dragged from his dorm room, with bite marks in his arms and puffy eyes. Class 3-A look after their own, they make sure that Izuku doesn’t lose himself in grief. Izuku goes home over the weekend and sits in Kazue’s wrecked apartment and wishes he had a healing quirk.
“Izuku, don’t be like me.”