Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone

[strikefirster]

Who: Johnny, Daniel, Ortus, Gideon Nav's Exquisite Corpse, Paul, Kaworu, Deku, Harrow, Maybe more?
What: Kidnapping, Forced Adoption, Getting these kids away from the Emperor
When: Shortly after boatgate
Where: The Bone House and Cobra Kai

Content Warnings: Probably references to Murder, Manipulation, Johnny Lawrence.

Prompts and Mingle will be in the comments.

Comments

[terriblepurpose]

The force of Midoriya's grip and tug throw Paul off balance, pitching on his knees to shore up against Midoriya's side. He doesn't notice the sting of claws under the crackle of lambent energy sheathed Midoriya and the unexpected crash of their bodies. He doesn't follow Midoriya's gaze up, too preoccupied by the explosive, bloody claim that he makes.

It doesn't come as a surprise. Not a real one, when Paul remembers everything that's led to this moment, the things Midoriya has said and done since the ship sank. But it feels like a revelation, some veil twitched back from his own clouded vision.

He's dragged himself this far mechanically, one foot after another, always thinking to the next thing, and the next, and the next, so that the feelings dogging his footsteps could not catch up to him. Now, at the worst time, they do. He kneels, half-fallen, in the shadow of the Reckoning, and all he wants to do is curl himself under Midoriya's arm and close his eyes under the aegis of his protection.

"Hear him, Reckoning," Paul says, much quieter than Midoriya, finally lifting his eyes in shameless entreaty to another god of death. "Hear him and know your price will be paid for what we ask of you. We seek your judgment, laid over that house, against any in it who would harm Kaworu Nagisa, favored of your ill-done sister, her seas fresh on his lips - and I offer you this."

He raises his hand higher. Blood rushes down to his elbow, trickles along the curved muscle of his upper arm. He is shaking, with its loss or with awe, a tiny tremor that makes the droplets on his fingertips dance with reflected light.

"My contrition. My supplication." Fervency wrenches his voice. "Let me pay the debt I owe. Let it be me, and not him."

[wannasmash]

Midoriya unfastens his grip only long enough to clutch Paul (bleeding, shaking, desperately alive) to him by the waist should they need to leap away. The Reckoning jerks her head in what seems to be a scoff, but only after Paul is done speaking, so it is unclear what at. It is not enough to bring down death, or Midoriya would have sensed it coming. Probably.

The Reckoning drops to one knee with a shaking of the ground and leans down to get a closer look. She sways with more deadly grace than anything her size ought to. Her face is obscured by a veil, but she seems to take in the two ants before her with something more than eyes.

"So much for constancy," she berates in a bold, cutting voice that echoes with her size. "Contrition... What of the contrition of Kaworu Nagisa?" With her free hand, she unfurls two skeletal fingers battlesign-quick. She lowers one, but the other remains upright and expectant. Midoriya's heart despairs, and his vision fills briefly with red before it drips down his cheeks.

"I'm watching Kaworu too." I'm watching him carefully, or I'm watching over him. Both are true. He does not mean to be vague; it's the limitation of his native language. "He's hurting. I need to get him back. Help him try to do better. He's mine too!"

Her helmet turns just slightly to wordlessly consider Midoriya, who involuntarily surges with more power than is strictly safe for him. He can feel it rattle in his joints and jostle his tensed, spring-loaded cords. It chases the fear out of him, leaving nothing but feral, clawing purpose.

She jerks her head back to Paul. "Confess your crimes," she orders sharply.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul can withstand the scrutiny of the great Pthumerian. When she strikes the earth to shaking, he remembers the old man of the desert, the angel of the beach, the conqueror wyrm of the ocean come to claim him. He is before the vast, consuming eye of the universe, and he looks back into it from the threshold of a shadowed place.

But she speaks of Kaworu's contrition, and his heart clamors. She turns her gazeless sight to Midoriya's protests, and Paul goes tensely coiled next to the turbulent storm of Midoriya's rippling power inside the encircling anchor of his arm.

(If she touches him, either of them, Paul will fall back across that threshold. He will ignite in retribution, he will make himself a scourge. Black, cold knowledge lays a stilling hand on the back of his neck.)

But she pivots back to Paul, and the future clarifies. He called her. He knew what she might ask, what she almost surely would ask, the sacrifice not complete until she does. He swallows a citric acid scald in the back of his throat, something hot and vital loose in the dark hollow of his skull. Blood trickles from his nose, unfelt, as his palm still pulses in rhythm.

"I confess," he says, tongue heavy, "I confess to sacrilege against my Patron, Mariana, and her domain. To abuse of my power, to domination of others' will, to theft of their freedom. I confess to profaning of the blood," and he hitches in Midoriya's hold with a stuttering inhale. It is slippery as cool grey stone from a faraway sea, a hundred times as heavy.

"I confess to murder, twice over." He won't look away from her, however hard her regard falls across him, as long as it stays with him. "I confess to being a traitor to my House, an oathbreaker. Faithless."

They may as well be two kinds of killing. Jamis, the pirate. The heart of House Atreides. His heart. They jumble together in his thoughts, a roil of guilt and shame and intangible, impossible loss.

His father would have wept to see what Paul did.

"I am at your mercy," Paul says, in a stranger's soft, accepting voice, "I ask for The Reckoning."

cw: gore description

[wannasmash]

"You confessors always make your crimes sound so pretty, your disregard for others and their lives..."

Midoriya bares his fangs. He wanted to look at Paul at murder, twice over, but he will not take his eyes off the Reckoning. Every person closest to Midoriya has told him not to risk himself, knowing that he does. If the Reckoning lays a finger on Paul or Kaworu, Midoriya would do it again, no matter what happens to him. It would be a quick, ignominious end. There is nothing romantic about being dashed to the ground in pieces of red flesh, white bone, and green fabric.

Midoriya and his Patron are fundamentally opposed. Midoriya has not concerned himself with seeking justice or revenge. He is someone who saves others or shows them the right path. He is the hand that reaches out or the one that protects, not the one that punishes. And yet, his intent to save resonates with her own.

"Protector, hear me and obey. You will be an instrument of my justice, thus: Witness Kaworu Nagisa's contrition before the next moon. Humble him with the toil of atonement."

"I will," Midoriya growls, his hackles not entirely lowered, but recognizing a shared goal. The Reckoning curls her raised finger down.

"See it done, or I will. The curse as described will last until the next moon. Place your blood here."

Her fingers loom over them as she offers the pad of her thumb. When they have done so--Midoriya swiping the tar-smell of his blood tears onto it, Paul bleeding enough to eclipse that--she straightens and brings her sword in. Its movement cuts the air like a windmill, and the two boys look about as useless as a knight trying to fight one. She runs her stained thumb along its edge, drawing out a thin streak of her blood. She flips her grip to aim her swordpoint downward, perilously close to the young humans.

Midoriya tightens his hold, but Danger Sense is quiet. He breathes to Paul, "It's all right--"

She drives a third of the thick blade into the ground at her side. The soil near the edge of what John calls his property trembles and drinks the invisible curse like wine spilled on cloth.

cw: gore description, psychological horror

[terriblepurpose]

When Paul smears his blood over the god's thumb a curtain of lightning falls across his vision, the world eclipsed in brilliance as he drops his shaking, bleeding arm to his chest and curls his hand into a fist. Vessels narrow, blood clots, but there is only so much compensation that even his physiology can make for what now slicks arm and thumb and hallowed blade.

Like a crysknife, he thinks, before she flips the sword and Izuku whispers into his ear. The universe hangs suspended between the two, divine retribution and mortal solace.

The blade strikes home, and so does the thunder.

Paul takes a shattered breath like the blow split his chest and not the starveling earth, curving around his leaping heart as silver pours from his stunned open eyes. The curse shivers ephemeral at the edge of his sight, ripples outward and onward into a future bisected. The moisture of his eyes, of his lips, weeps with the faint sting of acid, a brackish tide drawn forth by the gravitic tug of the Pthumerian's will.

"It is done," her voice says with his throat, and then he slumps against Midoriya's side bonelessly, teeth gritted against a strangled whimper as a cascade of sparks tumble agonizingly down every tender nerve in his mouth. It feels like catching a star on his tongue and swallowing, white hot annihiliation boiling in the stains of his guilt, pain welling up from soul more than body.

But nothing bleeds besides the slit wound on his palm as the shadow of the Pthumerian's sword falls across them as she pulls it free.

[wannasmash]

He's a Warmblood, this world's blood magic version of being Quirkless. He doesn't have anything to experience the effects of the curse being enacted on his behalf. He's already given away its best surge of power--or lack thereof--the inert quality that makes it ideal for treating Corruption and Beasthood.

As on the beach, someone speaks in another's voice, but it is not an Omen. It is Paul. Midoriya bends more securely over Paul, then curves them both into a bow, their hair nearly touching the grass. Those that would be superhuman are so small in front of the armored god.

"Thank you," he growls fiercely.

Then she is gone as quickly as she appeared, and air rushes to fill the void she left behind. The deep slit she left in the ground yawns balefully up at the sky. Finally, Midoriya disarms his Quirk. He sits up and supports Paul's weight against him. Amidst the uncoiling shock of relief, he attempts to grasp Paul's hand to stem the blood flow. His own face is smeared with rust.

"What happened to your voice?" he gasps. His own is thin and tremulous.

[terriblepurpose]

Paul numbly allows Midoriya to staunch the wound in a grisly echo of a handclasp, the silver draining out of his eyes like water from a cracked vessel. He swallows thickly, dreading what might slough down his throat from the wrecked throb of his mouth. He barely wants to skim his awareness over it; he cannot feel anything else so keenly.

"Punishment." No blood pours out, no greasy smoke. His voice is fractured and shivering, but it's his, and the agony is losing its keenest edge. "Part of the price."

All of him is shivering, a mimicry of shock. He shouldn't be so affected by the volume of blood lost so far, but he can already trace this deeper than the flesh. The fingertip of a god brushed under his chin, the faint candle flame of her might passed across his vision. His soul aches, jarred violently against its ephemeral moorings. He knows without knowing that he has been passed over by something far worse than this.

"It's done," he echoes, cold slicing down to his bones, exhaustion welling up in the gaps left behind. "Nothing will happen to him. She showed me." His hand spasms in Midoriya's with pain he doesn't feel. "It's time to go."

[wannasmash]

"Breathe," he reminds him, mind running its fingers past pages on signs, symptoms, and procedures. "You're safe."

A hand in his hand, and it is slick with blood. Midoriya works with his other hand to get what he needs from his belt. Gloves off, disinfectant ready, all of it passes in sharp relief. It should be a blur in light of how tiredly Midoriya slouches like a puppet with strings cut, but he will remember every bump of woven bandage under his fingers, every warm drop of paleblood daubed away. And he will not fall, supporting the shuddering one next to him with his weight. This is the one wound he can tend to out of so many wounds unseen.

He loops an arm around Paul and hauls him up, ignoring the weakness in his own legs. He guides him to sit in the back of the truck, where he pulls a blanket from the baggage and wraps it tightly around him.

He wipes Paul's face clean. (He's careful with the delicate skin under Paul's eyes.) Water is in order, and a steady arm--one that isn't his. Midoriya is too connected to everything that's shaken Paul, and his face is still streaked with his own warmblood besides. These are the thoughts that clip mechanically past each other as he resists the urge to put an arm around someone in need.

[terriblepurpose]

As Midoriya cares for his wound, Paul watches in numb quiet, as attentive to each detail as the other boy is, and he thinks: is this safety?

The question echoes in the sting of disinfectant he bears without a flinch or a sound, in the sponging away of blood, in the way he is raised up and carried and settled. He closes his eyes when Midoriya cleans them, still shivering, but the shivers have shuddered to nothing by the time he is done. Paul doesn't open his eyes to watch him depart, shuffling to the far side of the truck. Others join them, the last departures from this shadowed house, and the truck rumbles to life underneath them all.

The rattle of metal, the thump of wheels on a road not meant for them. Paul pulls the blanket closer around himself. He's still cold, under the summer sun, cold enough not to feel the pain in his palm or inside his chest.

Perhaps that is what safety is, this lifeless distance between himself and everything that he might feel. He hovers somewhere above himself, observing his own skin as a stranger, and he wonders if it hurts.

He opens his eyes and looks at nothing, and that is how he stays, for a while.