The wind that whipped across the rooftops of
Musutafu was biting, carrying the sharp, metallic tang of impending rain and
the greasy exhaust of a million idling cars. To most, it was just the smell of
the city. To the creature crouched upon the rusted lip of a commercial
air-conditioning unit, it was a tapestry of information.
He was small. Too small, perhaps, for a life
spent entirely on the unforgiving asphalt of the urban jungle. His fur was
short, dense, and a wildly unnatural shade of forest green, tipped with a
darker, almost black undercoat that helped him blend into the shadows. He had a
kink at the end of his long tail—a souvenir from a close encounter with a
speeding delivery bike three winters ago—and a notch missing from his left ear.
He was a cat. His body told him this every
waking second. It told him through the agonizing, hollow ache in his belly that
demanded protein. It told him through the twitch of his whiskers that measured
the distance between the fire escape and the adjacent brick wall. It told him
through the sheer, paralyzing terror that gripped him whenever a stray dog
barked too loudly in the alleyways below.
But there was a ghost in his head.
He didn’t know what to call the ghost. He
didn’t have the vocabulary for it. Words were strange, slippery things. He
understood the sharp ‘Hey!’ of a shopkeeper with a broom, the sweet ‘Here
kitty’ of a child with a piece of fish, and the terrifying ‘Scram!’ of an angry
drunk. But the ghost in his mind spoke in complex strings of thoughts that his
feline brain could hardly process.
The ghost made him look at the giant, glowing
billboards in the city square—the ones showing brightly colored humans smiling
and doing impossible things—and feel a profound, crushing sense of longing. The
ghost gave him fragmented dreams of a soft voice, smelling of jasmine and warm
rice, saying something that felt like Izuku. It gave him nightmares of a loud,
explosive sound, the smell of burning caramel, and a searing pain that
swallowed the world.
He shook his head, his green, tufted ears
flicking rapidly as if to dislodge the thoughts. He couldn't afford to think
about the ghost right now. The ghost couldn't catch mice, and the ghost
couldn't scavenge from the dumpsters behind the fish market.
He stood up, his spine arching into a deep
stretch, his claws extending and catching on the rusted metal of the AC unit.
He let out a silent yawn, exposing rows of needle-sharp teeth, before settling
back on his haunches. His eyes, large and an impossibly bright, luminous
emerald green, scanned the streets below.
Most cats hunted for food. He hunted for food,
too, but he also hunted for... something else. The ghost in his head demanded
it. When he saw the brightly colored humans—the ones the ghost called
Heroes—stop the bad humans in the streets, a warmth spread through his chest
that had nothing to do with a full stomach. He loved watching them. He loved
analyzing them.
He remembered watching a man made of wood
swing through the streets a week ago. The green cat had followed him for three
miles across the rooftops, observing how the wood-man used his branches to
distribute his weight, how he prioritized civilian pathways, how he corralled
the fleeing thief into a dead-end alley. The cat hadn't eaten that entire day,
entirely captivated by the strategy.
Analyze. Predict. Protect.
The concepts were vague, instinctual urges
that warred with his animal need to Hide. Survive. Eat.
Tonight, the streets were relatively quiet.
The neon signs flickered, casting long, warped reflections in the puddles left
by an earlier drizzle. He leapt from the AC unit, landing silently on the
concrete roof. He moved with a fluid, liquid grace, his low center of gravity
making him entirely noiseless. He bounded over a low parapet, dropping down
onto a metal fire escape. Clang-clink-clang. He winced at the slight noise his
claws made against the grating, instantly freezing.
He waited for ten heartbeats. His ears
swiveled like radar dishes. No shouts. No dogs. Just the distant wail of a
siren and the low hum of the city.
Safe.
He continued his descent, hopping from the
fire escape to the top of a dumpster situated in a narrow, dimly lit alleyway.
The smell hit him instantly—rotten cabbage, stale beer, and the faint,
tantalizing scent of discarded fried chicken. His stomach gave a vicious, loud
rumble.
He began to paw at a torn plastic bag, his
nose twitching as he honed in on the source of the grease. Just as his teeth
gripped a mostly-eaten chicken wing, his ears caught a sound that made the fur
on his spine stand straight up.
Footsteps. Two sets. Fast, desperate, and
erratic.
He dropped the chicken wing, melting into the
shadows cast by the dumpster’s lid. His emerald eyes dilated, becoming massive
black pools rimmed with green, drinking in the scarce light of the alley.
A woman backed into the alleyway. She was
breathing heavily, clutching a faux-leather purse to her chest like a shield.
She smelled of fear—a sharp, acidic scent that made the cat’s nose wrinkle.
Following her was a man. He was tall, wearing
a dark hoodie, and his boots scraped harshly against the pavement. He smelled
of cheap, pungent alcohol, old sweat, and violence. The man had one hand
raised, and from his fingertips, small, sparking arcs of electricity danced. A
Quirk.
"Just drop the bag, lady," the man
growled, his voice low and menacing. "I don't wanna fry you, but I will.
Just drop it and walk away."
The woman pressed her back against the damp
brick wall, her eyes wide with terror. "P-Please, my bus pass is in there,
and my keys—"
"I don't care!" the man snapped,
taking a sudden step forward, the sparks on his fingers intensifying,
illuminating the alley in erratic flashes of blue light. "Drop it!"
From atop the dumpster, the green cat watched.
His feline instincts screamed at him in
absolute terms: DANGER. LOUD NOISES. BRIGHT LIGHTS. FLEE. SURVIVE. Every fiber
of his muscular little body was primed to launch backward, to scramble up the
fire escape, to hide under the safety of an air vent until the terrifying
humans went away.
But the ghost in his head—the stubborn,
impossibly loud ghost—screamed something entirely different.
She needs help. He is going to hurt her. You
have to do something.
He was a cat. He weighed barely ten pounds.
His claws were sharp, but against a human with lightning at their fingertips,
he was nothing more than a nuisance. He could die. He knew he could die. He had
seen cats killed by less.
The man lunged forward, grabbing the strap of
the woman's purse. The woman shrieked, refusing to let go. The man raised his
glowing hand, aiming it directly at her arm.
The ghost won.
Before his brain could even process the
command to move, the green cat was already in the air.
He didn't just jump blindly. The ghost in his
head calculated the trajectory with terrifying precision. If he bit the arm,
the electricity would travel through him. If he scratched the hand, he might
get shocked. The target had to be vulnerable, unprotected, and highly
sensitive.
The cat flew through the damp air, a silent,
green missile.
He landed squarely on the man's face.
With a vicious, guttural yowl that sounded
entirely demonic coming from such a small creature, the cat sank his front
claws into the fleshy part of the man's cheeks, right below his eyes. At the
same time, his powerful hind legs kicked out in a rapid, devastating flurry
against the man's chin and throat, while his teeth clamped down hard on the rim
of the man's nose.
The man screamed—a high, panicked sound of
pure shock and pain. The sudden, blinding assault caused his concentration to
break instantly. The electricity crackling around his fingers sputtered and
died as he let go of the purse, his hands flying up to his face to rip the
furry demon away.
Mission accomplished. Retreat.
The cat didn't wait to be grabbed. The moment
he felt the man's hands brush his fur, he unlatched his claws and pushed off
violently from the man's face, using the human's nose as a springboard. He
landed lightly on the wet pavement, immediately darting to the side to avoid a
blind, furious stomp from the heavy boots.
"Run!" the cat tried to yell at the
woman. But his throat wasn't built for human words. What came out was a harsh,
urgent, "Yroowl!"
The woman didn't need to understand feline.
The moment the man had let go, she had spun on her heels, bolting out of the
alleyway and toward the brightly lit main street, screaming for the police.
The man wiped his face, his hand coming away
smeared with blood from three deep scratches across his cheek. He looked down,
his eyes locking onto the small, scruffy green cat standing a few feet away.
"You little rat," the man hissed,
rage contorting his features. His fingers began to spark again. "I'll skin
you!"
The cat arched his back, his fur puffing up to
make him look twice his size, and let out a vicious hiss. Distraction
successful. Target is safe. Time to go.
He turned and bolted deeper into the alley,
weaving behind a stack of wooden pallets just as a bolt of blue electricity
scorched the concrete where he had been standing a millisecond prior. The smell
of ozone filled the air, making the cat sneeze, but he didn't slow down. He
scrambled up a stack of discarded milk crates, his claws finding purchase on
the brick wall as he prepared to leap back onto the fire escape.
Suddenly, a shadow fell over the alley.
It wasn't a shadow cast by the neon lights. It
was a physical mass, dropping from the rooftops with the silence of an owl.
The mugger looked up just in time to see a
flurry of what looked like dirty white bandages descending upon him. Before the
man could even raise his sparking hands, the bandages wrapped securely around
his wrists, his torso, and his legs, binding him tightly.
A figure landed softly on the concrete. He was
a tall, slouching man dressed entirely in black, with a ratty grey scarf—the
source of the bandages—looped around his neck. His black hair was wild and
unkempt, defying gravity as it floated slightly above his head. His eyes were
glowing a menacing, brilliant red behind a pair of yellow, slatted goggles.
"Attacking civilians and frying local
wildlife," the man in black drawled, his voice deep, gravelly, and
saturated with an exhaustion so profound it seemed to seep into the very air.
"You're a real piece of work, aren't you?"
The mugger struggled against the bindings, but
the more he pulled, the tighter they became. "Let me go! That freakish cat
started it!"
The man in black—Eraserhead, though the cat
didn't know his name—pulled sharply on the capture weapon, yanking the mugger
off his feet and leaving him dangling upside down from a streetlamp bracket.
The red glow faded from the hero's eyes, and his hair dropped to rest against
his shoulders.
"The police are on their way,"
Eraserhead said, pulling out a flip phone and dialing a quick number.
"Hang tight."
Up on the milk crates, the green cat had
frozen entirely.
His heart was hammering against his ribs like
a trapped bird. The ghost in his mind was screaming, but not in fear. A Hero. A
real Hero. He moves so fast. His weapon is an extension of his body. He
neutralized a ranged Quirk user in under two seconds through the element of
surprise and specialized equipment.
The cat was staring so intently, his emerald
eyes wide, that he entirely forgot to hide.
Down below, Eraserhead finished his call and
turned his head. His dark, tired eyes scanned the alleyway, cutting through the
shadows until they locked directly onto the green cat perched on the crates.
For a long moment, man and cat simply stared
at each other.
Aizawa Shota was not a man easily surprised.
In his years as an Underground Hero, he had seen quirks that defied logic,
villains that defied morality, and situations that defied description. But as
he looked at the small, scruffy green cat, he felt a distinct spark of intrigue
cut through his chronic fatigue.
Aizawa liked cats. That was a poorly kept
secret among the U.A. faculty. He fed the strays behind his apartment building,
and he respected their independent, no-nonsense nature. But this cat was different.
He had watched the entire altercation from the
fire escape above. He had been preparing to drop down and apprehend the mugger
when the cat had intervened.
Cats were easily startled creatures. A feral
street cat facing a human, especially one generating bright lights and loud,
crackling noises, would inevitably flee. It was basic biology. But this cat
hadn't fled. It had analyzed the situation. Aizawa had seen the way the
creature had waited, shifting its weight, calculating the exact moment the mugger’s
focus was entirely on the purse.
The attack hadn't been a wild frenzy. It was a
tactical strike. The eyes to blind, the nose to cause maximum pain and
distraction, the immediate disengage to avoid being grabbed. And then, the
ultimate oddity: the cat had placed itself between the fleeing woman and the
villain, drawing the aggressor's attention to ensure the victim's escape.
Hero Syndrome, Aizawa thought dryly. In a
street cat. That's a new one.
"Hey," Aizawa grunted, taking a
slow, non-threatening step toward the crates.
The cat flinched, snapping out of its trance.
It took a step back, its ears flattening against its head.
"Relax," Aizawa said, his tone
softening just a fraction, the way he spoke to the jumpy first-years at U.A.
when they had panic attacks. "I'm not going to hurt you. You did good work
down here. Reckless, illogical, and stupid. But good."
The cat tilted its head. It seemed to
understand the cadence of his voice, if not the words. It looked at the
dangling villain, then back at Aizawa, its green eyes painfully expressive. It
looked... proud? But also deeply exhausted.
Aizawa took another step, slowly reaching into
one of the many utility pouches on his belt. He didn't just carry caltrops and
eye drops; he was a man who patrolled the back alleys of the city every night.
He always had a little something on hand.
He pulled out a small, foil packet of premium
wet cat food—tuna and salmon pate. He popped the seal, and the rich, fishy
scent immediately flooded the damp air of the alleyway.
On the crates, the green cat let out a
pathetic, involuntary squeak. His stomach gave a rumble so loud Aizawa could
hear it from five feet away. The cat stepped forward, his nose twitching
frantically, his eyes locked onto the foil pouch.
"Yeah, that's what I thought,"
Aizawa murmured, crouching down so he was less imposing. He held the pouch out.
"Come here. You earned it."
The internal war raged within the cat.
Feline instinct: Stranger. Bigger predator.
Trap. Danger. Run away.
The Ghost: Hero. Safe. Good person. Tuna.
Tuna. Oh god, tuna.
The hunger, combined with the ghost's
insistence that this man was a Hero, tipped the scales. The cat crept forward,
belly low to the crates. He hopped down to a lower pallet, then down to the
concrete, his eyes darting between Aizawa's face and the pouch.
He approached agonizingly slowly. He could
smell the man now. Under the sweat and the city grime, the man smelled like
strong black coffee, old paper, and a soothing, dry warmth. He didn't smell
like fear or anger. He smelled safe.
The cat reached the pouch. He didn't look up,
burying his face into the foil and eating with a frantic, starving desperation,
his rough tongue making wet, clicking sounds against the plastic.
Aizawa watched the creature eat. Now that it
was close, he could see how remarkably rough it looked. The green fur was
matted with dirt and grease, his ribs were visible beneath his coat, and he had
a constellation of old, small scars across his muzzle. But the fur color itself
was fascinating. It didn't look dyed. It looked natural, right down to the
roots.
An animal with a mutation Quirk? Aizawa
wondered. Or just an anomaly? Nedzu is going to have a field day with this.
Slowly, deliberately, so the cat could see his
hand moving, Aizawa reached out. He expected the cat to hiss and bolt. Instead,
the cat merely paused its eating, side-eyed his hand, and went back to the
tuna.
Aizawa’s calloused fingers brushed against the
matted green fur behind the cat's ears. He began to scratch, finding the sweet
spot right at the base of the skull.
The cat froze. For a moment, his entire body
went rigid. He hadn't been touched gently in... well, in as long as he could
remember. The street was cruel. Touches usually came in the form of kicks,
thrown rocks, or the teeth of other animals. The sensation of warm, gentle
fingers massaging his skin sent a shockwave through his nervous system.
Before he could stop himself, a deep, rumbling
vibration began in his chest. Purrrrrrrr.
Aizawa smirked slightly, the expression barely
visible beneath his scarf. "You're a softie underneath all that tactical
bravado, aren't you?"
The cat practically melted into the hand,
leaning his head against Aizawa's palm. The ghost in his head felt a profound,
aching sense of relief. He was so tired of being alone. He was so tired of
being cold.
Aizawa let the cat finish the pouch. When it
was empty, the cat sat back, licking his chops clean, and looked up at the
hero.
"Alright," Aizawa said, standing up.
He looked at the villain, then heard the approaching wail of police sirens.
"Cops are here. Usually, I'd leave you to your territory. But you're
smart. Too smart for your own good. Someone's going to catch you and sell you,
or you're going to pick a fight with a villain who won't hesitate to fry
you."
Aizawa unspooled a section of his capture
weapon. He knelt back down, creating a sort of hammock with the fabric.
"You're coming with me," Aizawa
stated, not asking. "If you try to bite me, I'll drop you.
Understood?"
The cat looked at the makeshift hammock. It
looked warm. He looked at the fire escape, his usual cold, hard bed.
The green cat stepped forward and climbed into
the folds of the capture weapon.
Aizawa blinked. He had expected at least some
resistance. A struggle. A scratch. But the cat simply curled up into a tight,
green ball against Aizawa's chest, tucked within the warm fabric, and closed
its eyes.
"Right," Aizawa muttered, adjusting
the scarf to secure the small weight. "Sensible. I like you already."
The police arrived moments later. Aizawa gave
a brief, monotone report to Officer Sansa, a mutant-type officer with the head
of a cat. Sansa eyed the green bundle in Aizawa's scarf curiously.
"Taking on a new partner, Eraser?"
Sansa joked, twitching his whiskers.
"Just picking up trash from the
alley," Aizawa deadpanned, though his hand subconsciously rested over the
green lump to keep the wind off it. "Make sure that guy gets charged with
illegal Quirk usage and attempted robbery. I'm going home."
"Have a good night, Eraserhead!"
Aizawa took to the rooftops. He didn't swing
as violently as he normally would, utilizing his capture weapon and parkour to
take a smoother, less jarring route. Inside the scarf, the cat was jostled
slightly, but the overwhelming warmth and the steady, rhythmic thump-thump of
the hero's heartbeat lulled him into a state of semi-consciousness.
For the first time in his life, the cat didn't
feel the need to keep one eye open.
The journey took twenty minutes. Aizawa lived
in a sparse, functional apartment complex near U.A. High School. It wasn't
luxurious, but it was secure.
He keyed open the door, stepping into the dark
entryway. He kicked off his boots, flicked on the hallway light, and unwrapped
his scarf.
"Alright, out," Aizawa said,
lowering the fabric to the floor.
The green cat uncurled, stretching his front
legs out long and yawning. He stepped onto the polished hardwood floor, his
claws clicking softly. Immediately, his senses went into overdrive.
He mapped the territory. It was warm. The air
was dry. It smelled deeply of Aizawa—coffee, ozone, and clean laundry—but there
were other, older smells. Traces of other cats, though none fresh enough to
suggest a current rival. Faint traces of a loud, blonde man who smelled like
hairspray and vocal lozenges.
The cat began his patrol. He rubbed his cheek
against the leg of a small shoe rack, marking it with his scent. Mine. He
walked down the short hallway into the main living space. It was minimalist. A
low table, a worn-in couch that looked like it had survived a war, a small
television, and a kitchenette. No plants. No fragile knick-knacks on low
shelves. It was, inadvertently, a very cat-proofed apartment.
Aizawa watched him explore, tossing his
goggles onto the table and running a hand through his hair. He walked into the
kitchen and opened a cabinet.
The sound of a pop-top can opening made the
cat freeze in the living room.
Squelch. The sound of wet food hitting a
ceramic bowl.
The green cat didn't run; he trotted. He
skidded around the corner into the kitchen, his tail held high with the kink at
the tip twitching in anticipation.
Aizawa set a small blue bowl on the floor.
"It's chicken and liver. Better than the street garbage."
The cat sniffed it once, deemed it the most
incredible thing he had ever encountered, and began to eat. He ate quickly, but
less frantically than in the alley. The safety of the walls around him allowed
him to actually taste the food.
Aizawa leaned against the counter, crossing
his arms, observing his new roommate. The creature was small, terribly skinny,
and filthy. Tomorrow, there would be a bath, which Aizawa was already dreading.
But for tonight, the cat needed rest.
"You're a weird one," Aizawa
murmured, grabbing a glass of water for himself. "Jumping a villain to
save a civilian. Most Heroes don't even have that kind of instinct without
hesitation."
The cat paused his eating, looking up at
Aizawa with those huge, eerily intelligent emerald eyes. He let out a soft,
questioning, "Mew?"
"Don't give me that," Aizawa sighed,
rubbing his eyes. "I know you understand more than you let on. I don't
know if you've got an intelligence Quirk or what. But if you're staying here,
you need a name."
The ghost in the cat's head whispered, Izuku.
My name is Izuku.
But the cat couldn't say it. He could only
stare.
Aizawa looked at the matted, forest-green fur.
He wasn't a creative man. He named things as he saw them.
"Green," Aizawa said softly.
"Midori. That'll do."
The cat—Midori—tilted his head. The name
didn't match the ghost's whisper, but it felt... acceptable. It was a word that
belonged to him now. Spoken by the Hero. He gave a sharp, affirmative nod of
his head, went back to his bowl, and polished it off.
After eating, Midori began the meticulous
process of grooming himself. He sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, lifting
a hind leg and dragging his rough tongue over his fur, trying to rid himself of
the alley grime.
Aizawa sighed, walking past him into the
living room. He didn't bother changing out of his hero costume, merely shedding
the heavy utility belt. He collapsed onto the worn couch, pulling a throw
blanket over his legs. He was scheduled to teach 1-A in four hours. Sleep was a
necessity.
Within minutes, Aizawa's breathing evened out,
slipping into the light sleep of a man used to being woken up at a moment's
notice.
In the kitchen, Midori finished cleaning his
paws. The apartment was quiet. The hum of the refrigerator was a steady,
comforting sound. He walked into the living room, sitting on the rug and
looking up at the sleeping Hero.
The ghost in his mind was unusually quiet. The
frantic urge to run, to hide, to hunt, was silenced by a heavy blanket of
fatigue and a full stomach. Midori jumped silently onto the opposite end of the
couch. He didn't want to crowd the man—he didn't know the boundaries of this
new territory yet.
He curled up near Aizawa's feet, right at the
edge of the throw blanket. The fabric was soft. The room was warm. No rain. No
dogs. No villains.
As Midori closed his eyes, his green ears
twitching once before settling, he let out a long, shuddering sigh. He didn't
know what tomorrow would bring. He didn't know why his mind felt so impossibly
large for his small skull. But as he rested his chin on his paws and let sleep
overtake him, he knew one thing for certain.
He wasn't going back to the streets.
This was home.
The indignity of the bath was a trauma Midori
would not soon forget.
It had happened on his third day in the
apartment. Aizawa had approached him with a grim, determined look in his dark
eyes, wearing thick, rubber dishwashing gloves that went up to his elbows.
Midori, whose feline instincts were finely tuned to recognize the universal
sign of You Are About To Be Handled Against Your Will, had immediately bolted
under the couch.
It took ten minutes, a broom handle, and a
freshly opened tin of sardines to coax him out. The moment his teeth had sunk
into the fish, Aizawa had scooped him up with surprising gentleness and carried
him into the bathroom.
The sound of running water was terrifying. On
the streets, water meant freezing rain, deep puddles that chilled you to the
bone, and the overwhelming scent of wet garbage. When Aizawa lowered him into
the shallow basin of warm water in the sink, Midori’s initial reaction was
panic. His claws unsheathed, his legs scrambled for purchase on the slippery
porcelain, and a pathetic, high-pitched yowl tore from his throat.
"Easy. Easy, Midori," Aizawa had
grunted, keeping a firm but careful grip on the scruff of the cat's neck,
effectively paralyzing his escape reflex. "You smell like a dumpster fire,
and if you're sleeping on my couch, you're getting washed."
Midori had frozen, his large green eyes
staring up at the Underground Hero. The ghost in his head—the human
consciousness trapped behind layers of feline instinct—recognized the logic. He
is trying to help. We are dirty. We must be clean.
With a monumental effort of will that went
entirely against millions of years of feline evolution, Midori had forced his
muscles to un-tense. He let his paws slide down the porcelain. He allowed
Aizawa to massage a dollop of unscented, hypoallergenic pet shampoo into his
matted fur.
The water in the basin had turned a horrifying
shade of brown, then grey, before finally running clear. When Aizawa lifted him
out and wrapped him in a fluffy, oversized towel, Midori looked less like a cat
and more like a drowned, miserable green rat.
"There," Aizawa had sighed,
aggressively but gently rubbing the towel over Midori’s head. "Now you
actually look like a living creature."
Once he was dry, the transformation was
startling. Free from the layers of grease and urban grime, Midori’s fur was
impossibly soft, thick, and a vibrant, striking shade of emerald green. The
darker undercoat gave him a slightly mottled, woodland appearance. His white
paws, previously stained grey, were now pristine.
Since that day, a quiet, domestic rhythm had
settled over the apartment.
Aizawa Shota was a creature of habit, and
Midori adapted to those habits with frightening speed. Midori learned that 6:00
AM meant the alarm clock would buzz, and Aizawa would groan. It meant Midori
could jump onto the bed, walk up the man's chest, and gently pat his cheek with
a sheathed paw until the Hero arose to dispense breakfast.
He learned that the hours between 8:00 AM and
4:00 PM were spent alone, while Aizawa went to a place called U.A. High School.
He learned that evenings were for grading papers, and nights were for patrol.
It was during the quiet, lonely daytime hours
that the ghost in Midori's head grew the loudest.
With a full stomach and a safe, warm
environment, the survival instincts that had dominated Midori's mind for ten
years began to recede, leaving a vacuum. And into that vacuum poured a
desperate, insatiable curiosity.
It started with the television.
It was day twelve of living with Aizawa.
Midori was perched on the back of the couch, his tail flicking rhythmically as
he stared at the black rectangle on the wall. He had seen Aizawa make the
rectangle light up by pointing a small black stick at it.
Midori hopped down onto the coffee table. He
sniffed the remote control. It smelled like plastic and Aizawa's fingers. He
pressed his nose against it. Nothing happened.
The ghost in his mind nudged him. Paws. Push.
Midori raised a white-furred paw and carefully
placed it on the red button at the top of the remote. He applied pressure.
With a soft click, the television flared to
life.
Midori jumped back, his ears flattening, a low
hiss escaping his lips. But the rectangle didn't attack. It just showed moving
pictures and projected voices. Slowly, his curiosity overriding his caution,
Midori crept back to the edge of the table, sat back on his haunches, and
watched.
It was a news broadcast. The screen showed a
massive villain—a man with the head of a shark and rippling, heavily tattooed
muscles—tearing up a city street in a neighboring prefecture.
Suddenly, a blur of red, white, and blue
smashed into the frame. The camera shook, and when the dust cleared, a giant of
a man stood over the unconscious villain. He had impossibly large muscles,
blonde hair that stuck up in two distinct tufts, and a smile so bright it
seemed to illuminate the room.
"Have no fear!" the man on the
screen boomed, his voice vibrating through the television speakers. "For I
am here!"
In the living room, Midori stopped breathing.
A physical shockwave tore through his tiny
body. The ghost in his head didn't just whisper; it screamed. It flooded his
feline brain with a chaotic, blinding rush of images.
A bedroom plastered in posters of that exact
face.
A red, white, and blue action figure clutched
in small, chubby human hands.
A computer screen replaying a video of a
disaster, over and over.
A voice, his own voice, much higher, asking a
woman with green hair, "Can I be a hero too?"
Midori let out a strangled, breathless chirp.
He stood up on his hind legs, balancing precariously on the coffee table,
leaning toward the screen. His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped
hummingbird. He reached a paw out, batting at the glass of the television,
trying to touch the smiling man.
All Might.
The name surfaced from the depths of his
fractured memory, bright and burning. All Might. Number One. The Symbol of
Peace.
For the next four hours, Midori did not move.
He lay on the coffee table, his chin resting on his paws, his emerald eyes
glued to the screen. He absorbed the news, the analysis of Quirks, the casualty
reports. He was a sponge, soaking up a world he felt he belonged to, yet was
physically barred from.
When Aizawa unlocked the front door at 4:30
PM, he stopped dead in his tracks.
The television was blaring a daytime talk show
interviewing the Hero Mt. Lady. On the coffee table, Midori sat like a sphinx,
watching with intense, unblinking focus.
Aizawa looked at the TV, then at the remote
control sitting neatly on the table next to the cat, and then at the cat
itself. Midori slowly turned his head to look at Aizawa, offering a soft,
completely innocent "Meow?"
"Don't give me that," Aizawa sighed,
slipping off his shoes. "I know I turned that off before I left."
Aizawa walked over, picked up the remote, and
turned the television off. Midori let out a sharp, disappointed squawk, pawing
at Aizawa's hand.
"Screen time rots your brain,"
Aizawa muttered, heading for the kitchen to open a can of food. "Though I
suppose I shouldn't be surprised. You figured out how to open the hall closet
yesterday. Nedzu is going to want to run tests on you, Midori. You're too smart
for a standard feline."
Midori trotted after him, weaving between the
man's legs. I am not a standard feline, he wanted to say. I remember things. I
remember All Might. I remember... something else. Explosions. The smell of
burnt sugar. A boy with red eyes.
But all that came out of his mouth was a
series of demanding, high-pitched chitters for his dinner. The frustration was
a physical weight in his chest. He was trapped. He had the thoughts of a human,
but the hardware of a beast.
Two weeks later, the weather turned violently
foul.
It was a Tuesday night. A massive low-pressure
system had settled over Musutafu, dumping sheets of freezing, torrential rain
upon the city. The wind howled against the windows of Aizawa's apartment,
rattling the panes.
Aizawa stood by the door, clad in his black
tactical suit, his grey capture weapon looped tightly around his neck. He was
pulling on a pair of waterproof combat boots, his brow furrowed in a deep,
tired scowl.
Midori sat on the shoe rack, his tail wrapped
neatly around his paws, watching the man intently.
"Don't wait up," Aizawa said, his
voice gravelly. "The scum of the earth love the rain. Masks their scent
and their noise. I likely won't be back until dawn."
He reached out, his calloused fingers
scratching Midori behind his left ear—the one with the missing notch. Midori
leaned into the touch, purring softly.
"Stay out of the cupboards," Aizawa
ordered, though there was a hint of affection in his tone. He opened the door,
a gust of cold, wet wind sweeping into the hallway, and stepped out into the
night. The door clicked shut, the deadbolt engaging with a heavy thunk.
Midori sat in the entryway for a long time.
Usually, when Aizawa went on patrol, Midori
would sleep. He would curl up on Aizawa’s discarded sweaters and wait. But tonight,
the air felt wrong.
It wasn't just the change in barometric
pressure, though his feline senses absolutely hated the heavy, charged air of
the storm. It was the ghost. The human intuition inside him was whispering a
warning, scratching at the back of his skull. Danger. Bad night. He shouldn't
be alone.
Midori paced the hallway, his claws clicking
rhythmically. He let out a low, distressed yowl. He walked to the window in the
living room and peered out. The city was a blur of neon lights smeared by the
heavy rain.
He needs backup.
The thought was absurd. Midori was a ten-pound
cat. Aizawa was a pro hero. But the anxiety was gnawing a hole in his stomach.
He couldn't just sit here.
Midori trotted into the bathroom. Above the
bathtub was a small, horizontal window meant for ventilation. Aizawa kept it
cracked open just a fraction to let the steam out.
Midori leaped lightly onto the edge of the
bathtub, balancing on the thin rim. He stood up on his hind legs, placing his
front paws against the glass of the window. He pushed. It budged, but only a
millimeter. The latch was stiff.
He dropped back down to all fours, thinking.
He looked at the shampoo bottles. He looked at his own paws.
Jumping back up, Midori didn't use his paw
pads. Instead, he extended a single claw from his right paw, slipping the
razor-sharp point into the tiny gap between the latch and the frame. With a
sharp, sudden jerk of his head and shoulder, he pulled.
Click. The latch gave way.
Midori pushed the window open with his head.
The freezing rain immediately pelted his face, making him wince and flatten his
ears. The wind whipped his whiskers violently.
This is a terrible idea, his feline instincts
screamed. Warmth is here. Food is here. Outside is death.
He is out there, the ghost replied.
Midori squeezed his small body through the
narrow gap. He dropped down onto the slippery metal of the exterior fire
escape, shaking himself vigorously as the rain immediately soaked through his
outer coat.
He paused, opening his mouth slightly. Cats
have an organ on the roof of their mouth that allows them to "taste"
the air, analyzing scents with incredible precision. He filtered through the
overwhelming smell of ozone, wet concrete, and exhaust fumes.
There. Faint, but distinct. The sharp scent of
black coffee, old paper, and the distinct, fibrous smell of Aizawa's capture
weapon.
Midori lowered his head, his body pressing
close to the cold metal grating, and began to run.
He was a green phantom in the night. He leaped
from fire escape to window ledge, from rooftop to billboard framing. The rain
made the surfaces treacherous, but his balance was flawless. He didn't just
run; he analyzed the urban terrain, taking the most direct routes, avoiding the
streetlights, moving exactly how he had seen Eraserhead move.
He tracked the scent for three miles, moving
toward the industrial warehouse district near the docks. The buildings here
were older, the alleys darker, and the shadows deeper.
As he bounded across the corrugated metal roof
of an abandoned fish-packing plant, the scent grew drastically stronger. But it
was no longer just coffee and fabric.
It was mixed with the sharp, coppery tang of
fresh blood.
Panic spiked in Midori's chest. He
accelerated, scrambling to the edge of the roof and peering down into the
alleyway below.
The scene was bathed in the harsh, flickering
yellow light of a broken sodium streetlamp.
Aizawa was backed against a brick wall. He was
breathing heavily, his yellow goggles pushed up on his forehead. One of his
arms hung uselessly at his side, a deep, jagged laceration tearing through the
sleeve of his tactical suit, dripping dark blood onto the wet pavement.
Standing ten feet away from the hero was the
villain.
He was entirely wrapped in something that
looked like liquid shadow, making him nearly invisible in the dark alley. The
only solid parts of him were his arms, which didn't end in hands, but in
massive, scythe-like blades of jagged, hardened bone.
A mutant-emitter hybrid Quirk, Midori’s mind
supplied, the ghost analyzing the threat. Camouflage combined with
close-quarters natural weaponry. A terrible matchup for Eraserhead.
"Can't erase what you can't see, can you,
hero?" the villain mocked, his voice echoing wetly in the alley. He took a
step, melting seamlessly into a patch of darkness, disappearing from sight.
Aizawa didn't speak. He gripped his capture
weapon with his one good hand, his eyes darting frantically, trying to catch a
glimpse of the villain's solid form to activate his Quirk. But the rain was
obscuring sound, and the shadows were too deep.
Schwing!
The villain materialized directly to Aizawa's
left, swinging a bone-blade in a lethal, horizontal arc aimed at the hero's
ribs.
Aizawa threw himself backward, parrying
desperately with his capture weapon, but he was too slow. The blade sliced
through the fabric and bit into his side. Aizawa let out a harsh grunt of pain,
his knees buckling as he hit the wet concrete.
"You're slow," the villain sneered,
raising both blades above his head for a final, executing strike. "Night-night,
Eraser."
Up on the roof, Midori's mind shattered.
The human ghost and the feral cat merged into
a single, terrifying entity driven by absolute, unconditional panic.
NO!
Midori didn't jump. He threw himself off the
three-story roof.
He didn't aim for the ground. He spread his
legs, maximizing his air resistance to control his fall, and aimed directly for
the villain's shoulders.
The villain never saw him coming.
Midori landed with the force of a ten-pound
bowling ball covered in razors. His hind claws dug violently into the meat of
the villain's shoulders, while his front claws lashed out in a blinding fury,
tearing across the villain's neck and jawline.
The villain let out a shriek of agony, the
stealth camouflage instantly dissolving as his concentration broke. He
staggered backward, dropping his arms, thrashing wildly to dislodge the fury of
green fur attached to his head.
"What the—AGH! Get it off! GET IT
OFF!"
Aizawa, clutching his bleeding side, blinked
rapidly through the rain. His red, exhausted eyes widened in pure disbelief.
"Midori?!" Aizawa choked out.
Hide! Retreat! You are small! You will die!
Midori’s feline instincts screamed as the villain's bone-blade arms flailed
dangerously close.
But Midori didn't let go. He sank his teeth
into the shell of the villain's ear, tasting bitter blood, determined to hold
the monster's attention.
"R-RAAGH!" The villain roared.
Instead of using his blades, which were too awkward to reach his own neck, he
threw himself backward, slamming his back—and Midori—against the hard brick
wall of the alley.
The impact was devastating.
The breath was forcefully expelled from
Midori’s lungs in a pained squeak. The force rattled his small skeleton,
stunning him. His jaws locked, his claws slipped, and he tumbled down the
villain's back, hitting the wet concrete with a sickening splash.
Midori tried to stand, but his back left leg
wouldn't bear weight. He collapsed, his vision swimming, gasping for air that
wouldn't come.
The villain spun around, panting heavily,
blood streaming from his face and neck. He looked down at the small, broken
green cat twitching on the pavement.
"A cat?" the villain hissed, his
eyes wide with manic rage. "A freakish green cat? I'll skewer you!"
The villain raised his right bone-blade,
pointing the jagged tip directly at Midori’s spine. He brought it down.
"NO!" Aizawa roared.
The hero lunged, throwing his body over the
cat. The bone-blade plunged into Aizawa’s left shoulder blade, pinning him to
the ground just inches above Midori’s trembling body.
Aizawa coughed, a splatter of blood hitting
the wet concrete near Midori’s nose. The hero's body was a heavy, warm shield
over the cat, but he was trembling violently. His Quirk flared, his hair
rising, his red eyes locking onto the villain to erase the camouflage, but he
was pinned. He couldn't fight back.
"How touching," the villain sneered,
twisting the blade deeper into Aizawa’s shoulder. The hero let out a suffocated
groan, his eyes sliding shut as shock began to set in. "Dying for a stray
animal."
Beneath the hero, Midori lay paralyzed.
He could smell Aizawa’s blood. It was
everywhere. It was soaking into his own green fur. He could feel the hero's
heartbeat fluttering, slowing down.
He is dying. He is dying because of me. He is
dying to protect me.
A primal, human agony ripped through Midori’s
consciousness. It was a grief so profound, a desperation so deep, that a tiny
cat's brain could not contain it.
Do something, the ghost wept. Help him! Call
for help! Do something!
The villain raised his other blade, preparing
to sever Aizawa’s neck.
Midori needed to scream. He needed to make a
noise so loud it would wake the entire city. He needed to draw the villain's
attention. He needed to yell words, human words, to demand the villain to halt.
He opened his small, feline jaw, pushing all
the air from his lungs through his vocal cords.
But feline vocal cords are delicate things.
They are thin, parallel folds of mucous membrane designed for purring, hissing,
and high-pitched meowing. They were not built to handle the sheer volume or the
complex articulation of human speech.
But the sheer force of Midori’s will—the
undeniable, explosive desire to protect—collided with the latent, unstable
Quirk DNA still dormant in his bloodstream.
The friction was catastrophic.
Inside Midori’s throat, something tore.
It was an agony unlike anything he had ever
experienced. It felt as though he had swallowed a mouthful of lit matches and
broken glass.
Deep within his neck, the hyoid bone—normally
a small, shield-like structure in cats—shattered and began to rapidly
reconstruct itself. The cartilage thickened violently. The larynx, positioned
high up in a cat's throat to allow them to breathe and swallow simultaneously,
was forcefully dragged downward, reshaping into a human-like vocal tract.
The muscles of his tongue seized, stretching
and widening. His jaw cracked, dislocating and sliding slightly forward to
accommodate the new space needed for articulation.
Midori squeezed his eyes shut, his entire
small body convulsing under the hero's bleeding torso. Blood, hot and metallic,
bubbled up in his own throat from the anatomical violence occurring within.
Say it, the ghost commanded, fighting through
the blinding pain. SAY IT!
The villain brought his blade down toward
Aizawa’s neck.
Midori forced his newly reconstructed,
bleeding vocal cords to vibrate. He forced his tongue to press against the roof
of his mouth. He shaped his lips, forcing air through the agony.
The sound that erupted from the cat was not a
meow. It was not a yowl.
It was deafening. It was jarring. It was a
sound that tore through the rain and the wind, echoing off the brick walls with
an unnatural, impossible acoustic resonance. It was raspy, broken, and dripping
with blood, but it was undeniably, terrifyingly human.
"S-STTT-OPP!"
The sheer volume and the impossibility of the
sound caused a shockwave in the alley.
The villain froze. The blade stopped mere
millimeters from Aizawa's neck. The villain stared down at the bleeding,
unconscious hero, and then peered under his arm to see the small green cat
staring back at him with furious, glowing emerald eyes.
"What..." the villain whispered, his
jaw going slack in absolute horror. "Did that... did that thing just
talk?"
For exactly two seconds, the villain was
entirely, mentally paralyzed by the impossibility of what he had just heard.
Aizawa Shota, an Underground Hero who had
survived for years on capitalizing on his opponent's mistakes, did not need
more than two seconds.
Despite the blade in his shoulder, despite the
blood loss, Aizawa’s eyes snapped open, glowing a brilliant, furious red. The
villain's Quirk was instantly erased. The heavy bone-blades vanished, turning
back into normal, fleshy human arms.
Before the villain could comprehend that his
weapons were gone, Aizawa surged upward with a vicious roar. He ignored the
tearing of his own flesh. With his one good arm, he lashed out with his capture
weapon, wrapping it securely around the villain's throat.
Using the villain's own panicked backward
momentum, Aizawa twisted his hips, executing a flawless, brutal judo throw.
The villain was slammed head-first into the
brick wall. The sickening crack of his skull meeting masonry echoed in the
alley, and the man crumpled to the wet ground, unconscious.
Silence fell over the alley, broken only by
the steady, relentless patter of the rain.
Aizawa collapsed onto his knees. He was
bleeding profusely from his side and his shoulder. He coughed, spitting a wad
of blood onto the concrete. He reached up with trembling fingers to pull his
goggles down, breaking his Quirk's activation.
He took a ragged breath, leaning against the
wall so he wouldn't fall over completely.
Then, he slowly turned his head.
Midori was lying on his side on the wet
ground. The cat was a miserable sight. His green fur was matted with Aizawa’s
blood and the dirty rain. He was trembling violently, entirely soaked.
But it was what the cat was doing that made
Aizawa's blood run cold.
Midori was pawing frantically at his own
throat. He was hacking, coughing up small spatters of blood. He opened his
mouth, trying to meow, trying to let out a distressed squeak, but nothing came
out. The vocal cords, having been violently mutated and instantly shredded by
the force of the scream, could no longer produce feline sounds.
Midori looked up at Aizawa. The emerald eyes
were wide, filled with tears of pain and absolute terror.
Aizawa stared at him. The hero’s mind was
racing, trying to process the auditory hallucination he must have experienced.
But he knew, deep in his gut, that he hadn't imagined it. The sound had come
from the cat. A perfectly enunciated, human word.
Stop.
"Midori," Aizawa whispered, his
voice cracking.
He didn't care about his bleeding shoulder. He
didn't care about the unconscious villain. Aizawa crawled across the wet
pavement, ignoring the agony in his own body, until he reached the small green
cat.
He carefully gathered Midori into his
uninjured arm, cradling the freezing, trembling animal against his chest.
Midori buried his face into the fabric of Aizawa's suit, letting out a silent,
breathless sob that wracked his tiny body.
"You crazy, stupid creature," Aizawa
breathed, resting his chin gently on the top of Midori’s wet head. "How
did you find me? What are you?"
Midori couldn't answer. The pain in his throat
was blinding, and the adrenaline was rapidly fading, leaving only exhaustion
and the deep, throbbing ache of his bruised ribs. But he felt the steady, reassuring
thump-thump of Aizawa's heart.
He had done it. He had protected his Hero.
Aizawa fumbled for his radio with one hand,
pressing the emergency broadcast button.
"Eraserhead to dispatch," he
coughed, his voice tight with pain. "Code Red. Villain apprehended at the
dock warehouses, sector four. Need an ambulance and a containment unit."
"Copy that, Eraserhead. ETA is four
minutes. Are you severely injured?"
Aizawa looked down at the blood soaking his
suit, and then at the small green cat, who had passed out in his arms, his
mouth slightly open, revealing a jaw structure that looked subtly, unnervingly
different than it had that morning.
"I'll live," Aizawa grunted into the
radio. "But divert my transport. I don't need a civilian hospital."
"Eraserhead, protocol dictates—"
"I said divert it," Aizawa snapped,
his eyes darkening with a fierce, protective intensity. "Take me to U.A.
High School. I need Recovery Girl. Now."
"...Copy, Eraserhead. Rerouting."
Aizawa let the radio drop. He pulled the dry
side of his capture weapon over Midori, shielding him from the freezing rain.
He didn't know what this cat was. He didn't
know if it was a mutant, a science experiment, or something else entirely. But
he knew one thing: this creature had just ripped its own vocal cords apart to
save his life.
"Hang in there, kid," Aizawa
whispered, the word slipping out instinctively. "I've got you."
The wail of sirens began to bleed into the
sound of the rain, but Midori didn't hear them. He was lost in the dark, the
ghost in his mind finally silent, resting in the absolute certainty that they
were safe.
The sterile, blinding white of the U.A. infirmary
was a harsh contrast to the dark, rain-slicked alleyways of Musutafu.
The air smelled violently of rubbing alcohol,
bleached cotton, and the faint, sweet scent of Recovery Girl’s stamina-inducing
gummies. The only sounds in the room were the rhythmic hum of a heart monitor,
the muffled drum of the storm against the reinforced glass windows, and the
rapid, furious tapping of a keyboard.
Aizawa Shota sat on the edge of an examination
bed, stripped to the waist. His left shoulder and side were heavily bandaged,
pristine white gauze stark against his pale skin and the dark, blooming bruises
that painted his ribs. Recovery Girl had already used her Quirk on him, sealing
the worst of the lacerations, but the exhaustion that followed her healing left
him feeling as though his bones were made of lead.
Yet, he refused to sleep. His bloodshot eyes
were fixed unblinkingly on the small, glass-walled isolation pod in the center
of the room.
Inside the pod, resting on a heated pad and
hooked up to pediatric IV lines, was Midori.
The green cat looked impossibly small. The
blood and grime had been carefully washed from his fur by medical droids,
leaving him looking soft but dangerously fragile. A thick, specialized brace
was wrapped around his neck to stabilize his ruined throat. He was heavily
sedated, his small chest rising and falling in shallow, erratic breaths.
"Stop glaring at the glass, Shota, you’ll
crack it," Recovery Girl scolded softly. The diminutive elderly heroine
was seated at a massive computer terminal, her magnified visor pulled down over
her eyes as she scrutinized a series of complex medical scans.
"Is he going to live, Chiyo?"
Aizawa’s voice was a rough rasp, devoid of its usual deadpan cadence.
"Physically? Yes," she replied, her
tone unusually grave. "The structural damage to the throat was
catastrophic, but I’ve managed to accelerate the cellular regeneration. He
won't be in danger of suffocating. But Shota... we need to talk about what
exactly is sitting in my isolation pod."
Aizawa flinched slightly. "I told you.
The cat tried to scream. It tried to vocalize human speech, and it tore its
vocal cords."
Recovery Girl spun her chair around to face
him. Her expression was not one of a veterinarian treating a brave pet. It was
the deeply troubled look of a seasoned medical professional staring at an
impossibility.
"Shota. Look at these scans."
She pressed a button, and the wall monitor
flickered to life, displaying a skeletal rendering of Midori’s head and neck.
"When you brought him in, I assumed we were
dealing with a mutant-type animal. An intelligence Quirk, perhaps, similar to
Principal Nedzu. But Nedzu’s biology is stable. This creature’s biology is...
it's a warzone."
Aizawa frowned, leaning forward despite the
protest of his ribs. "What do you mean?"
"I mean the hyoid bone didn't just break
from force. It rearranged itself," Recovery Girl pointed a small cane at
the screen, highlighting a cluster of bones in the throat. "Look at the
density. Look at the cartilage rings. This isn't the anatomy of a feline
attempting to mimic a human sound. This is human anatomy aggressively
overwriting feline biology."
Aizawa stared at the screen, a cold dread
pooling in his stomach. "Overwrite?"
"I ran a deep-tissue DNA sequence while
he was in surgery," she continued, her voice softening, heavy with a
terrible sorrow. "It was masked at first. Buried beneath layers of feline
genetic code. But in the areas where the tissue was actively repairing
itself—the throat, the jawline—the base pairs are shifting. Shota... Midori
isn't a cat with an intelligence Quirk."
The infirmary went dead silent, save for the
beep of the heart monitor.
"He's a human," Recovery Girl said
quietly. "Given the bone density and organ scaling prior to the mutation,
I'd estimate he's a young boy. Somewhere around fourteen years old."
Aizawa stopped breathing.
His eyes slowly drifted from the skeletal
scans to the small, green-furred creature sleeping in the pod. A cat. A stray
cat that had been eating out of dumpsters, sleeping on fire escapes, fighting
off street dogs for scraps of rotting meat.
He's a child.
The memory of the alleyway hit Aizawa like a physical
blow. The way the cat had looked at the television. The tactical genius during
the villain fight. The way it had curled into his chest, seeking warmth. The
desperate, blood-choked scream. STOP.
"A transmutation Quirk," Aizawa
whispered, his voice trembling with a rare, naked horror. "Someone turned
a child into a beast."
"And left him that way," Recovery
Girl nodded grimly. "Transmutation Quirks of this magnitude are incredibly
rare, and usually temporary. The fact that his body has sustained this form
means he was either hit by a permanent trigger, or a time-locked Quirk that
hasn't expired. But the lock is breaking."
"Why now?" Aizawa demanded, standing
up, ignoring the flare of pain in his shoulder. "If he's been like this...
god, Chiyo, he could have been on the streets for years. Why is his body
changing back now?"
"Stress. Emotion. Willpower," she
hypothesized, adjusting her visor. "Quirks are tied directly to the
neurological state of the user, and by extension, the target. In that alley, watching
you die... the boy's psychological desire to save you, to call out for help,
eclipsed the Quirk's hold on his biology. His mind demanded human speech, and
his body violently attempted to comply."
Aizawa walked over to the glass pod, placing
his good hand flat against the warm glass. Midori—the boy—shifted slightly in
his sleep, a soft, broken wheeze escaping the neck brace.
"If the lock is breaking," Aizawa
said softly, "will he turn back?"
"I don't know," Recovery Girl
admitted. "His cellular structure is highly unstable. If he forces another
change too quickly, the physical trauma could kill him. The shift from feline
to human involves massive restructuring of the skeleton, organs, and nervous
system. Doing it all at once would be fatal. If he is going to revert, it has
to happen slowly. One piece at a time."
Aizawa closed his eyes. The weight of the
situation was crushing. If word got out that a child had been trapped in an
animal's body for years, the media would swarm. The Hero Public Safety
Commission would step in. They would lock him in a laboratory, probe him, study
him, treat him as a living anomaly rather than a traumatized victim.
"I'm filing the paperwork tomorrow,"
Aizawa stated, his red eyes snapping open, blazing with an absolute, unyielding
resolve.
"Paperwork?"
"Fostering. Ward of the state. Whatever
loophole Nedzu has to exploit to make it legally binding," Aizawa growled,
never taking his eyes off the green cat. "Until he can speak for himself,
until he remembers who he is, he stays with me. The HPSC gets nothing."
Recovery Girl smiled sadly, an expression of
profound respect. "I'll have Nedzu draft the NDA for the medical files.
He's yours, Shota. Just... prepare yourself. If he has human consciousness
trapped in that brain, the frustration he must be feeling... it will be
agonizing for him."
Three days later, they returned to the
apartment.
The rain had cleared, leaving Musutafu washed
clean and shining in the pale autumn sunlight. Aizawa unlocked the door with
his right hand, his left arm secured in a black sling.
Midori walked into the apartment entirely
under his own power, though his gait was stiff and careful. The thick medical
brace had been replaced with a sleeker, padded collar that supported his
healing throat.
The moment his paws touched the hardwood
floor, the ghost in his mind surged to the forefront.
Before the villain fight, Midori had been
content to be a cat. He had allowed the feline instincts to steer, enjoying the
simple pleasures of warmth and food. But the trauma of the alleyway, the
violent shift in his anatomy, and whatever drugs Recovery Girl had given him
had irreparably cracked the seal on his human consciousness.
I am not a cat, the ghost whispered. It wasn't
a vague feeling anymore. It was a concrete, undeniable fact. I am a boy. My
name is... Izuku.
Midori—Izuku—walked into the living room and
sat down. He looked at his front paws. They were small, white, covered in soft
fur, ending in sharp, retractile claws.
He willed his paw to open like a hand.
Nothing happened. The tendons just splayed his
toes apart.
A wave of profound, suffocating despair washed
over him. He was trapped in a prison of flesh and fur. He remembered the
feeling of fingers. He remembered holding a pencil. He remembered the texture
of paper. He wanted to write. He wanted to tell Aizawa everything. He wanted to
say 'Thank you' and 'I'm sorry you got hurt because of me.'
But when he opened his mouth to try and
vocalize a sound, a sharp, stabbing pain shot through his reconstructed throat.
The most he could produce was a low, raspy click.
"Don't push it," Aizawa’s voice came
from above.
Izuku looked up. Aizawa was standing by the
couch, looking down at him with an expression entirely devoid of his usual dry
apathy. There was a deep, quiet sorrow in the hero’s eyes.
Aizawa slowly knelt down, wincing as his
injured shoulder protested. He sat on the floor, cross-legged, bringing himself
down to Izuku's eye level.
"Recovery Girl told me," Aizawa said
softly.
Izuku froze, his ears swiveling forward.
"I know you're in there," Aizawa
continued, his voice steady and grounding. "I know you're not a cat. I
know you're a kid. We don't know who did this to you, or how long you've been
this way, but we are going to fix it. Do you understand?"
Izuku’s eyes welled with tears. The sheer
relief of being seen—of not having to pretend, of being recognized as a human
being—broke something inside him. He hobbled forward, pressing his forehead
against Aizawa’s uninjured knee, letting out a series of broken, raspy purrs
that sounded like a flooded engine.
Aizawa’s large hand came down, gently stroking
the green fur along his spine. "You're safe now. No more alleys. No more
villains. Just focus on healing."
The next week was an exercise in agonizing
frustration.
Izuku’s mind was rapidly expanding, demanding
stimulation that his feline body could not accommodate. He watched Aizawa grade
papers, his green eyes tracking the red pen as it moved across the page. Izuku
knew the answers to the hero-law questions the students were failing. He knew
the Quirk theory. The knowledge was there, bubbling just beneath the surface of
his memories, but he had absolutely no way to express it.
He tried to communicate through charades. He
would bat at specific letters on Aizawa’s keyboard, but his paw pads were too
broad, mashing three keys at once.
Asdfg, the screen would read.
Izuku would let out a frustrated wheeze and
slap his own face with his tail.
Aizawa was incredibly patient. The hero was
grounded from active patrol duties due to his shoulder injury, meaning they
spent all day together. Aizawa began talking to Izuku not as a pet, but as a
roommate. He explained the news on the television, discussed Quirk mechanics,
and even vented about his louder coworkers at U.A.
"Mic wants to come over," Aizawa
grumbled one Tuesday morning, trying to open a carton of milk with one hand.
"I told him no. You're still recovering, and his voice operates at a
frequency that makes my ears bleed, let alone yours."
Izuku sat on the kitchen island—a privilege
recently granted now that Aizawa knew he wasn't tracking literal litter-box
germs everywhere. Izuku watched the hero struggle with the milk carton. Aizawa
gripped the base with his knees, trying to pry the cardboard spout open with
his good hand.
Let me help, Izuku thought desperately. He
nudged the carton with his nose.
"I've got it, kid," Aizawa sighed,
finally popping the spout open. He poured a splash into a saucer for Izuku,
then filled his own favorite, oversized ceramic mug with black coffee.
Izuku lapped at the milk, but his mind was
racing. He hated feeling useless. He hated that the man who had saved him, who
was currently suffering from a stab wound because of him, was struggling with
basic tasks while Izuku just sat there.
The desire to do something, to physically
manipulate the world around him, began to build in his chest. It felt like
static electricity, humming beneath his skin, concentrating in his front
shoulders and running down to his paws.
The incident happened on a Thursday.
Aizawa had been pushing himself too hard. He
was stubborn, refusing to take his pain medication because it made him groggy.
He was standing in the kitchen, reading a thick file on recent
Quirk-trafficking rings, balancing his favorite black coffee mug on the edge of
the counter while he turned a page with his good hand.
Izuku was sitting on the floor nearby,
grooming his tail, though his eyes were constantly darting to the hero.
Suddenly, Aizawa shifted his weight. His hip
bumped the counter.
The heavy ceramic mug, filled to the brim with
scalding hot black coffee, teetered on the edge.
Time seemed to dilate.
Aizawa’s eyes widened, and he lunged with his
injured left arm to catch it. A sharp hiss of pain escaped his teeth as the
torn muscles in his shoulder seized, stopping his arm mid-air. The mug tipped
past the point of no return, plummeting toward the hardwood floor.
Danger. Hot. Breakage. Help him.
Izuku didn't think. The human instinct
completely overrode the feline biology. A cat would have scrambled away to
avoid the splash zone.
Izuku leaped toward the falling mug.
He didn't want to bat it away. Batting it
would just shatter it against the cabinets. He needed to catch it. He needed to
grip the handle. He needed fingers.
I need hands!
The willpower, fueled by a decade of
suppressed humanity and a desperate, burning desire to aid his guardian, acted
as a localized explosive charge within his genetic code.
Mid-air, the static electricity in his
forelegs ignited into a searing, blinding agony.
It was infinitely worse than the throat. The
throat had been a localized crushing. This was an active, violent elongation of
solid bone.
Izuku let out a breathless, gurgling shriek.
Inside his front limbs, the radius and ulna
bones forcefully lengthened, the calcium cracking and rapidly re-knitting in a
fraction of a second, stretching his forelegs by several inches. The carpal
bones in his wrists snapped, rotating ninety degrees to allow for human-like
pronation and supination.
But the true horror was in the paws.
The metacarpals—the bones that made up the
long part of a cat's foot—splintered. They thickened, flattening out to form
the palm of a hand. The soft, pink toe beans stretched, the skin tearing
slightly at the webbing as the phalanges elongated violently.
His dewclaw, located higher up on the wrist,
was brutally dragged down the side of his hand. The bone thickened, forming a
secondary joint, creating a fully functional, opposable thumb. The sharp,
curved claws at the end of his toes retracted, flattening out and hardening
into thick, dark fingernails.
It happened in the span of a single heartbeat.
Izuku hit the floor. His newly formed,
elongated, fur-covered hands instinctively cupped upward.
Smack.
The heavy ceramic mug landed perfectly in the
palms of his new hands, his elongated fingers wrapping securely around the
base, the thumb locking into place to stabilize the weight. A few drops of hot
coffee splashed over the rim, dotting his green fur, but the mug did not break.
Silence slammed into the kitchen, heavy and
absolute.
Izuku remained frozen in a crouch. His hind
legs were still those of a cat, but his front limbs were planted on the floor,
holding a mug of coffee with two distinct, hand-like appendages.
The adrenaline vanished, and the pain hit.
It wasn't a sharp pain. It was a deep,
sickening, bone-deep throb that made his vision swim. He dropped the mug—it
clattered loudly against the floor, spilling the coffee in a dark pool, but it
didn't shatter—and collapsed onto his side, clutching his new hands to his
chest.
He couldn't scream. His throat was still
healing. All he could do was let out a series of broken, wet gasps, his body
curling into a tight ball of pure agony, his green fur trembling so violently
it looked vibrating.
"Izuku!"
Aizawa didn't call him Midori. The hero
dropped to his knees directly into the puddle of hot coffee, ignoring the heat
seeping through his sweatpants.
"Hey, hey, look at me," Aizawa’s
voice was frantic, a stark contrast to his usual calm demeanor. He reached out,
his large hands hovering over the boy-cat, afraid to touch him and cause more
pain.
Izuku uncurled slightly, extending his arms
toward the hero, seeking comfort.
Aizawa gently cradled Izuku’s new hands.
They were bizarre. They were undeniably hands,
possessing a palm, four long, spindly fingers, and an opposable thumb. But they
were still covered entirely in thick green fur, and the paw pads were still
present, though stretched and flattened across the palm and fingertips to
provide grip. They looked like the hands of a lemur, or a small, furry primate,
but the underlying bone structure was perfectly human.
Aizawa stared at them, his breath hitching. He
looked at the unbroken mug on the floor, and then down at the tears streaming
from Izuku’s emerald eyes.
"You caught it," Aizawa breathed,
his voice thick with a mixture of awe and absolute heartbreak. "You broke
your own bones just to save a damn coffee mug."
Izuku gave a weak, raspy chitter, leaning his
head against Aizawa's wrist. I wanted to help.
Aizawa carefully scooped Izuku into his arms,
avoiding his injured shoulder, and carried him to the living room couch. He
laid him down gently on the throw blanket.
"Stay here. Don't move," Aizawa
ordered gently. He rushed to the kitchen, grabbing a bag of frozen peas from
the freezer and wrapping it in a dish towel. He hurried back, placing the
makeshift ice pack over Izuku’s throbbing, newly formed hands.
The cold provided immediate, blissful relief.
Izuku let out a long, shuddering sigh, his eyes drooping shut as the deep ache
began to numb.
Aizawa sat on the edge of the coffee table,
leaning over the couch. He ran his right hand through his messy black hair, his
red eyes locked on the strange, furry hands resting under the ice pack.
"Recovery Girl was right," Aizawa
murmured to himself, though the apartment was so quiet Izuku heard every word.
"Willpower. You only change when you absolutely have to. When the human
instinct overrides the physical limitation."
Aizawa looked at Izuku's face. The feline
features were the same, but the expression was entirely human—exhausted,
pained, but relieved.
"You're a reckless idiot," Aizawa
said softly, his thumb gently stroking the green fur on Izuku’s shoulder.
"But you're brave. Braver than most Pro Heroes I know."
Izuku purred, the sound broken but genuine. He
flexed his new fingers beneath the ice pack. It felt strange. The joints were
stiff, and the muscles were foreign, but the connection between his brain and
his digits was finally there. He wasn't just a spectator anymore. He could
interact with the world.
The next four days were dedicated to physical
therapy.
Izuku’s hands healed with the same
frightening, Quirk-induced speed that his throat had. The bone pain faded to a
dull ache, replaced by a profound, maddening clumsiness.
Having hands did not immediately equate to
knowing how to use them. His brain had a vague memory of fine motor skills, but
the current hardware—the elongated, fur-covered fingers with flattened paw
pads—required major recalibration.
He spent the first two days just trying to
figure out how to walk.
With his front limbs extended by several
inches and ending in flat palms rather than tightly clustered toes, his center
of gravity was entirely ruined. When he tried to walk on all fours, his front
end was hiked up awkwardly, making him look like a hyena. If he tried to walk
on his knuckles, it hurt. If he tried to walk flat-palmed, his wrists ached.
He eventually settled on a strange, hobbling
gait, using his new hands more like crutches to support his front weight while
his powerful feline hind legs did the pushing.
Aizawa watched all of this with the analytical
eye of a teacher. He didn't mock Izuku, nor did he coddle him. He simply
observed, taking mental notes on the boy's adaptability.
On the fifth day after the transformation,
Aizawa left the apartment for an hour, returning with a large plastic shopping
bag.
Izuku was sitting on the living room rug,
practicing opening and closing his fist. He looked up as Aizawa dropped the bag
onto the coffee table.
"If you're going to have hands, you need
to learn how to use them," Aizawa stated, pulling items out of the bag.
"And since your vocal cords are still repairing themselves, learning to
write is our fastest path to communication."
Izuku hobbled over to the table, pulling
himself up onto his hind legs and leaning his elbows on the glass surface to
see what the hero had brought.
It wasn't a notebook and pen.
It was a set of brightly colored, oversized
wooden toddler blocks. Next to it was a wooden box with different shaped holes
cut into the top—a square, a circle, a star, a triangle—and corresponding
plastic blocks. A shape-sorter.
Izuku stared at the toys. Then he slowly
turned his head to look at Aizawa, his green ears flattening in utter, deadpan
indignation.
I am a teenager, his eyes screamed. I am not a
baby.
Aizawa smirked, catching the glare perfectly.
"Don't look at me like that, problem child. Fine motor skills require
baseline foundation. Your muscles don't know how to grip, pinch, or release
smoothly. You try to hold a pen right now, you'll snap it in half or drop it.
Start with the blocks."
Izuku let out a harsh, clicking huff. He
glared at the red wooden square.
Fine. He would show the hero. He would stack
these blocks in ten seconds flat and demand a pen.
Izuku reached out with his right hand. He
aimed for the red square. His brain sent the signal: Grasp.
His hand clamped down completely, missing the
block entirely and slapping the table hard. He winced, drawing his hand back.
"Depth perception and hand-eye
coordination are off," Aizawa narrated, taking a sip of his coffee.
"Your eyes are still set for a feline strike distance, but your limbs are
longer now. Adjust."
Izuku gritted his teeth—a strange expression
on a feline face. He reached out again, slower this time. His furry green
fingers bumped the edge of the block. He tried to pinch it between his thumb
and index finger.
The thumb was the hardest part. It felt
completely alien, moving in an axis that shouldn't exist. He squeezed, but he
didn't apply enough pressure, and the slick wooden block slipped out of his
grasp, clattering onto the table.
Frustration boiled in his chest. He was smart.
He knew Quirk theory. He had saved a Pro Hero. Why couldn't he pick up a stupid
wooden square?!
He let out a low, distressed whine, pulling
his hands to his chest.
"Breathe," Aizawa commanded softly,
stepping closer. "Don't let the frustration win. It's just muscle memory.
You have to build it from scratch. Try again."
Izuku took a deep breath, his chest expanding.
He focused entirely on his right hand. He reached out, sliding his fingers down
the sides of the block. He engaged the thumb, pressing it flat against the
wood, counter-balancing the pressure of his fingers.
He lifted.
The block rose from the table. It trembled
violently in his unsteady grip, his furry knuckles turning white with exertion,
but he held it.
Izuku stared at the suspended red square. A
profound, overwhelming wave of joy washed over him. It was a tiny thing,
utterly insignificant to the rest of the world, but to him, it was a monumental
victory. He was holding an object. He was interacting with his environment as a
human.
Slowly, carefully, he moved his arm over to
the shape-sorter box. He hovered the square over the square hole. He released
the pressure on his thumb.
The block dropped. Clack. It fell perfectly
into the box.
Izuku let out a loud, raspy chirp of triumph,
looking up at Aizawa with glowing eyes.
Aizawa smiled. It wasn't his usual terrifying
grin, nor his tired smirk. It was a genuine, soft smile that reached his dark
eyes.
"Good job, kid," Aizawa praised
softly.
Izuku felt a warmth bloom in his chest that
had nothing to do with the apartment's heating. He looked at his green, furry
hand. He looked at the hero's larger, scarred hand resting on the edge of the
table.
Slowly, tentatively, Izuku reached out.
He didn't grab the next block. He reached for
Aizawa.
His long, green fingers wrapped carefully
around Aizawa's index finger. The grip was weak, trembling slightly with the
effort, but it was undeniable. The soft, stretched paw pads pressed against the
calloused human skin.
It was a handshake. A physical connection
between two beings.
Aizawa didn't pull away. He gently curled his
other fingers around Izuku’s small, furry hand, offering a steadying, grounding
warmth.
"We'll get there, Izuku," Aizawa
promised, using the boy's true name—the name Recovery Girl had hypothesized
based on missing persons reports they were quietly running against the DNA
profile, a name Izuku had reacted to with violent, joyful tears just days
prior. "One piece at a time. We'll get you back."
Izuku squeezed the finger slightly, a silent,
absolute vow.
I will get back. I will be a hero.
The road ahead was terrifying. His body was a
patchwork of beast and boy, and the pain of the transformations was a looming
shadow. But as he sat there, his strange, furry hand holding tightly to his
guardian, Izuku knew he wasn't alone in the dark anymore.
He was reaching out, and someone had finally
caught him.