#bnha civilians
MLA May AUs (Parts 11+12/31)
5/11: warm smiles do not make you welcome here
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5/12: a small pack of thieves that distort the world
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Content Note: Gwen has Opinions on the Chapter 307 civilians; news at 11.
warm smiles do not make you welcome here
When the dust settled and the smoke cleared, the muscle villain was long gone, hauled away by the interloper in green that defeated him. Shame. Killing him would have set a good example—if they could have. Seeing the scale of the destruction, Gen wasn’t sure his little group here would have been up to the task. They’d been lucky as it was to avoid that initial sweep, and the word from on-high was clear: there’s work for the heteromorphs to do, but anyone who can, batten down, stay put, and don’t let yourself get evacuated to some shelter that will try to shut you back up in the box.
There’s an advantage right now in civil disobedience, had been the order, garbled over an uncertain phone connection. Heroes don’t have the resources to devote to cracking down on it, and the longer we can prove it’s viable, the harder it gets to root out. Stay the course, Pilgrim.
It’d been nice to hear his codename again. Gen and his squad had been avoiding them as a measure for blending in—the group had picked up some stragglers in the city, people who’d left shelters or ignored evacuation orders but then been driven to look for safety in numbers. Promising recruits, but uninducted so far, and he didn’t want to scare anyone off.
So, immediate crisis averted, the squad turned their attention to the aftermath and brought the hero kid in on a makeshift stretcher. His girlfriend tailed them close behind, anxious eyes widening a bit with every wheezing, pained breath coming out of his chest—definitely some broken ribs there, but nothing sounded wet enough to be in his lungs, so at least there was that.
“You got some people to contact?” Gen asked the girl, wrapping one steadying hand around her elbow. She wheeled up to look at him in a jolt of panic and he waved his hands, placating. “Calm down, miss; that was my bad phrasing. I didn’t mean his next-of-kin! I meant your—supervisor, or however you kids are doing it right now. Have you got someone on the way we need to be on the look-out for? My people here’re pretty keyed up.”
She unwound by increments as he talked, terror fading into a nervy wariness. At the end, her chin tipped up, and she nodded, sucking in a quick breath before answering in quick, professional tones.
“I have two classmates on the way. Mr. Smith is bald, light teal blue skin and a heavy jaw, wearing a heavy black jacket and a gold chain. Boomerang Man has wavy black hair down to just past his shoulders; wears all black with a red scarf and brown fingerless gloves.” Her tone slowed as she calmed down. “Our supervisor is Pro Hero Miss Joke—she has light green hair, and wears an orange bandana and striped green and orange shorts. I’m—not sure who she’ll be bringing for back-up. Sorry.”
Gen shook his head. “That’s plenty enough, miss.” He looked around until he spotted his second. “Relay that, huh? And have ‘em get started on the clean-up. See if anything useful got shook loose, and pile the rest up for blockade.”
When the man nodded and hustled off, Gen turned his attention back to the girl. “Right. So.” He rubbed his neck. Stay the course, but don’t give the truth away. Never thought I’d be negotiating the future with teenagers, though. “Your boy there’ll be okay. Maybe tell him later to tone it down with the big glossy hero act. But in the meantime, why don’t you and me sit down and talk about what we’re gonna do when your people get here.”
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a small pack of thieves that distort the world
Content Note: This fill about the relationship between two infamous families is set in two different periods. If you want canon-current characters, check the second half; the first half features Harima Oji as well as my take on a character suggested by the canon but never shown: Destro’s lover and the mother of his child. I call her Fathom; her quirk, Antennae.
Her meta-ability tells her someone’s there before anything else does. Movement on the next roof, a man’s shape displacing the air, loose clothes, the tang of metal and—wax paint?
Fathom continues to stare out over the city, gathering tension into her core, shifting her weight to the fronts of her feet—reading to move without yet moving. The man doesn’t feellike a hero, and he definitely isn’t acting like one.
He moves, a light jump through the air, and lands in a crouch on the edge of her own roof, still absolutely soundless. She turns to face him, deliberate, and as soon as she lays eyes on him, she knows who he is.
“Good evening, Miss Fathom.” Harima Oji, loved by the people on the street and ferociously loathed by the Hero Commission, straightens up into a poised stance on the railing. With an unmatched fluidity, he raises one hand to his face, finger pressing to his jaw as he tips his head to one side. The bells on his bracers shift and tilt, making not the faintest of chimes, only a muffled rolling noise from the pellets of metal inside them. “I wonder if I might have a word with the lady of the late Destro?”
Fathom twitches, an angry shiver that bobs her antennae before she locks it down and levels a glare at him. “What does the Peerless Thief want with me?” The image flashes through her mind, her son asleep three floors below, and twists her stomach with a preemptive rage. If that’swhy he’s here, looking for some sort of souvenir from the fallen Liberation Army, or something to buy off the price on his own head, then—
“To confirm a theory,” Harima responds, the wind ruffling his white sleeves and wild hair. “You don’t believe Destro committed suicide in prison.” When she takes a step towards him, he rolls his hand away from his face, palm opening downward in a dismissive flick. Still the sound of the bells remains dampened, unringing. “Of course you don’t. No one with any sense believes Destro killed himself in federal custody.”
“What about it?” she grits. Her pulse thrums in her veins, a scent of red she can taste in the air. “Do you have some proof you came to dangle?”
“Proof would do us no good at this juncture. If our fledgling Hero Commission is willing to commit murder behind closed doors, there’s no point in trying to fight them using the structures the law provides.”
“The people should still know. And there is no ‘us’ with someone who won’t talk straight with me.”
He shrugs, answering, “I won’t argue the power of a good narrative, but unfortunately, I don’t have any such proof.” His red face paint accentuates the line of his lips as they part around a grin that shows teeth, the corners of his mouth pulling wide as the long slash of a knife. “I come rather as one hare to another, trying to stay ahead of the hounds.”
Fathom narrows her eyes, antennae bobbing as she sifts through his demeanor for clues. He doesn’t smell of fear, but rather tingles with an edge of thrill. Of course, her organization has a reputation of its own he surely knows. “Are you afraid they’re about to catch up to you, then?”
“Not yet,” he says, and adds with a laugh, “Not soon. Perhaps someday. But I intend to make sure my cause is in good hands by then. As, I think, is your intent as well.” He gestures to the roof floor under their feet.
“…An alliance, then,” she realizes, and he nods, lowering himself back into a steadier crouch. The warmth of fondnesssuffuses the air around him, a familiar nostalgic sweetness soft on the back of her tongue. At first it sits incongruously with the sharpness in his eyes, but after a moment, the two reconcile, and she has his measure: a cause, and people to pass it forward to. That, she understands with a painful intimacy that he’d surely taste on her just the same, were their meta-abilities reversed.
“As canny as the rumors say,” he acknowledges.
“What sort of terms are you looking for?” she presses. “Your cause and ours aren’t the same.”
“They are not, but either’s loss would be our common enemy’s gain. To spite that common enemy, I propose we that we should share information. As well as talents, perhaps, when our goals do align.”
“…What did you have in mind?”
— – —
“Atsuhiro. It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?” The voice on the other end of the line sounds bemused—and, when Re-Destro speaks again, faintly disapproving. “I understand you’ve been quite busy.”
“We’re only just getting started, Rikiya.” Sako twirls a pair of marbles in his free hand, navigating towards the back of the safehouse. It’s one his family hasn’t used in some time, in a neighborhood they pulled out of after his great-uncle got too annoying for a local corrupt officer with yakuza ties to ignore. Sako’s found two squatters thus far, which means this isn’t a suitable place to stay in long-term unless he wants to do something particularly wicked with the marbles, and murdering random homeless men is not a precedent he wants to set for himself when the world brims with so many other, more deserving targets. “On which note, my boss is looking to make some new contacts. And as it happens, I know a man who knows—well, quite a lot of men.”
“I see.” Someone less sheltered might take offense at the phrasing, but Re-Destro, who Sako never met as a young man without at least three pairs of adult eyes in the room—doesn’t seem to notice. “And what is he looking to do with those new contacts?”
“His initial goal was to take down All Might. Quite impressive work, don’t you think?”
“Hardlyhiswork,” Re-Destro hedges. “I didn’t see him do anything of note in the Kamino footage compared to”—there’s the barest fraction of hesitation before the sentence resumes smoothly—“All For One.”
“But his request,” Sako insists. He has no idea what balance of that is true and what isn’t, but this is a business negotiation, not a tell-all interview. “And who else would be audacious enough to even think of it?”
“He had quite a few audacious ideas,” Re-Destro says, and his tone tells Sako what’s coming clearly enough that his eyes are already mid-roll before the words start. “Attacking and kidnapping school children. Not exactly a hit with the public opinion.”
“The public opinion has been written in stone for over a century.” Sako shoulders open the bedroom door and slips inside, picking his way around discarded beer bottles and other such refuse. At least it should only be for a night or two, he tells himself, and does not sigh into an open phone line. “In my view, it’s overdue for being broken and recast.”
“You know I don’t disagree. But I thought your family mostly preferred whistle-blowing and investigative work these days. Throwing your lot in with self-declared villains is—not a place I would have expected one of the Peerless Thief’s line to come to.”
“My dear Rikiya, don’t trifle with me about lineage,” Sako responds sharply, the state of his surroundings forgotten. “Your ancestor and mine are both the stuff of fusty history lessons that bore children, when they’re talked about at all. The here and now is Shigaraki and the League of Villains. In fact, one of my associates has already met with another interested party. I’m extending you and yours the invite out of deference to our families’ alliance, but I don’t justify my decisions to about my family reputation to you.”
There’s a long pause, and Re-Destro’s voice when it returns contains that particular note of tight control that Sako has long suspected means the Liberation Army’s leader is very, very annoyed indeed. Well, the feeling is mutual. “Nor would I wish you to, Sako.” Another pause, shorter this time, then the man resumes speaking in his more typical cadence. “I’ll have someone sent. Not under the Army’s auspices yet, but to get an inside eye on things. All I’d ask of you is to treat him as if you know him of old, and keep quiet about his allegiances for the time being. Would that be acceptable?”
“I don’t vouch for people I don’t know, but we can arrange a date beforehand,” Sako allows. “If he meets my standards, I’ll see about getting him past Shigaraki’s.”
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Notes for the 307 Civilians:
I place an almost certainly outsized importance on these characters as indicative of, if not the MLA’s ideal world, then at least something that looks closer to those ideals: a community of people using their quirks freely, capable of coming to each other’s defense and willing to do so in emergencies, rather than relying on heroes to turn up and save them.
I always thought a good compromise with them would be not forcing them to come back to a shelter, but rather getting them some support and letting them serve as something of an advance camp for heroes doing patrols or other civilians coming through, whether in search of a shelter or returning to their homes.
I also thought a good plot with them would be letting them help with Muscular, and then having to stop them from turning right around and murdering Muscular, because that’s the downside of vigilante justice.
Ialsoalso thought that the MLA should have had little pockets of activity all over the place that Hawks would never find out about because there just isn’t time to follow every single thread to every possible end during the investigation period he had available.
Thence, the fill kind of hits on all three points: that Gen and company are very capable of bargaining and coming to mutually beneficial arrangements, but they’re also capable of being extremely ruthless, and either way, they’re going to be a vector for the continued spread of MLA ideology, because you can’t snuff out a movement 115,000 strong in an afternoon.
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Notes for the Harima+Yotsubashi Alliance:
I wrote about Fathom here, back during MLA Week two years ago. I try to approach the information she gets from the antenna as being somewhat synesthetic in nature: aside from her keen sense of air movement, she also gets smells and tastes from them that don’t quite match up with the regular versions of those senses. They sometimes tip her off to emotional cues not through psychic means, but rather by associating the body language of those tells with specific synesthetic feedback.
Harima, meanwhile, is–and I think this is intentional on Horikoshi’s part, though I’m not 100% clear on it–taking some cues from famous historical thief Ishikawa Goemon, and particularly the kabuki theater version of that personage. The bells are a show-off–he can wear bells and still be a successful thief!–and the make-up is a kabuki thing.
Specifically, Harima’s facial pattern most closely resembles mukimiguma, a type of makeup design “used for roles that are full of youthful sensuality and have a strong sense of justice,” per a website I dug up on the matter.
A fuller version of this fic would probably have two more all-OC sections dealing with things the families do to aid each other over the course of their generations-long alliance, but that was getting a bit sprawling for a simple daily prompt fill.
Sako Atsuhiro and the rest of his family would occupy a somewhat unique place in Rikiya’s life, as allies who know the truth about his dual identity but who are not obligated to be especially deferent about it. That can be stressful, as when Compress gets snippy about their families’ relevance in the modern day, but it probably was pretty nice for the prized heir of Destro to have other family heirs around to periodically talk to that weren’t beneath him in the ever-burdensome chains of command. (Albeit not as nice as they could have been if Rikiya’s visits with them were less supervised.)
The Sako family mostly thinks the Yotsubashi family should try to stop dying before they crack 50; it can’t possibly be good for their long-term planning to keep losing leaders at such young ages.
