Chapter 1: Beginning
Chapter Text
Hanta’s quirk being mutant-type, he was born with dispenser elbows. Still, no tape came out of them until he was two and a half, and even then it was just small spurts.
But for a while around when he turned four he couldn’t make the tape stop.
It was draining, literally. Hanta had to walk around with a juice pouch or a bottle of water at all times, to avoid dehydrating. Not that he walked around much, what with tape constantly pouring out from his elbows and sticking him everywhere.
That’s why Hanta was there that day, sitting at the foot of a tree in the shade, watching sullenly as other kids ran around and played in the park while he was very much stuck to the ground by the two piles of tape on either side of him.
[Who would you like to see talking with little Sero? Take your pick!]
[All ways are nice, I promise, just different flavors of kids interacting.]
Chapter 2: Shouji
Notes:
Chapter warnings:
mentioned violence against a lizard, childhood speech impairment (articulation disorders due to unusual shape of mouth)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Looking around the playground, Hanta noticed something.
There was a cat near the fence and a kid that never said anything in class had crouched down before it.
He watched on as the kid, who had a bald pointy head, seemed to talk to the cat, and soon after the little animal was letting tiny squared hands pet its head and belly.
Cool.
“Uh, ‘lease don’t tell anyone ah’out Kouji’s quirk.”
Hanta whipped his head around to look at the kid who had kind of sneaked up on him.
He was a tallish kid for their age, but the strangest thing was that he wore a long poncho and a scarf around his mouth.
Hanta was confused. “Is his quirk talking to animals?”
The other boy didn’t answer beside a slightly worried look in his eyes.
“I won’t tell anyone!” Hanta promised quickly. “Just, why?”
The kid looked at him. Then another eye peeked from under the poncho to look at him as well, disappearing as soon as Hanta met its gaze.
Hanta just blinked and the boy finally answered.
“Last tah-in son’one knew, they told he’ to tell a lizard to stay still. They ston- stonnff-.. squished it with their shoe.”
“Eww, that’s horrible!” Hanta made a disgusted face.
The boy nodded. “Koji cried so wuch.”
Hanta studied him. “Do you talk strange because of the scarf?”
The kid took a half step away but still answered. “No. I have a strange wouth.”
Hanta shrugged. “I have strange elbows.” He shook his arms to emphasize his point and was surprised to find he wasn’t pouring out tape anymore. “Oh, it stopped.”
The boy finally sat down, his poncho bunching up real weirdly around him. “Nway’he not thinking ah’out it helfs.”
Hanta blinked, then gave him a smile. “I’m Hanta!”
“I’nw Nw–… Nnwezou,” the other kid forced out.
“Hi, Mezou-chan,” Hanta hoped he’d understood enough of the boy’s speech patterns to get the name right. He knew he did when two eyes smiled at him from over the scarf.
They sat in the tree shadow for a while, watching over Kouji from a distance, until the cat went away.
Then they stood up and left behind two piles of tape, finally going to play.
Notes:
When writing this, I imagined baby Shouji with thin/almost no lips, so as a kid I'd see him struggling with m/b/p and v/f sounds.
Chapter 3: Shinsou
Chapter Text
“Why are you here alone?” A voice asked near Hanta.
He turned to find a kid around his age with purple hair and an unhappy face.
Hanta pouted back. “Why do you think?” He shook his arms sending tape flying around him in wider arcs.
“You can’t make it stop?”
Hanta narrowed his eyes, but the question seemed genuine. “Yeah…”
When no teasing immediately followed, the other boy just looking deep in thought, he decided to ask something as well.
“Why are you here alone?”
The concentrated expression disappeared, replaced by something wary. Eventually the boy responded. “People don’t like my quirk.”
“Why?”
“I can make people do things.”
Hanta tilted his head as he tried to decipher that. “Like, make them do silly faces?”
The other kid blinked as if surprised, but then grimaced. “Yeah, but I could also, like, tell the teacher to give me extra cookies—”
“Awesome!”
“—or make other kids admit they stole them and get punished instead of me.”
“…not that awesome.”
The kid just nodded. “So you see, that’s why people don’t want me around.”
“Do you do that?”
“What?”
“Do those things, with your quirk?”
The boy scowled. “No.”
“What do you do with it?”
A pause. “I could help people. Like… I could stop the tape from your elbows.”
“You could?! Do it, do it!”
“Are… are you sure?”
“Yes, do—” Hanta felt suddenly far away from his body, looking as if through a fog and no longer in control.
“Stop letting out tape,” the boy said, and Hanta distantly felt his elbows still, before he was plunged back into sensation.
He looked at the boy in wonder. “You did it!”
The kid tensed, taking a step back. “Sorry, I—”
Hanta kept talking. “You made it stop! Finally! Look!” He tore the tape from his elbows and nothing poured out again. “It worked! Ah, you’re my hero!”
It was the boy’s turn to stare amazed.
“I’m Hanta!”
“…Hitoshi.”
Hanta grinned wide, then rose to his feet and took the other’s hand. “Come play with me, ‘Toshi-chan!”
They enjoyed the playground to their hearts’ content that afternoon, and even when Hitoshi went to a new foster home the next week, he kept cherishing the memory of their time together.
And if through the years remembering the name and the face of the boy with tape elbows became increasingly difficult, Hitoshi kept his words in his heart, because even if the world told him he’d surely be a villain, he knew he was already someone’s hero.
Chapter 4: Shigaraki
Chapter Text
“Are you here alone because of your quirk?” A voice croaked from Hanta’s side.
He looked up to find an older boy, who had to be in elementary school despite looking thin and a bit frail.
“Uhm yeah,” Hanta replied, a bit wary, but guessing there was no point in denying what was evident. “Uhm, what about you?”
The boy studied him with red eyes under a curtain of light blue hair. “I can’t play with others either, because of my quirk. But I wanted to come to the park, so I sneaked out anyway.”
Hanta’s mouth parted in an ‘oh’ shape. “You sneaked out?” Older kids were so cool! And Hanta wished he could be sneaky too, like a ninja maybe! But he trailed tape everywhere making stealth impossible.
The boy grinned, and it stretched dry lips horribly. “Yeah,” he said, and huddled down.
He was a bit close, but there was still the pile of tape between him and Hanta. The boy was looking at it, while Hanta’s elbows whirred softly and continuously, never stopping their sluggish emission.
“Do you have feeling in your tape?” The older kid asked out of the blue.
“Uhm, no, why?”
“It bothers you, right? I could… make it disappear. This here,” he poked with a single finger at the pile between them.
Hanta blinked, wanting to be rid of the tape around him, but “Only the part that is out would disappear, right? I, I can’t control it now, but my tape will be useful someday!”
The boy gave a sad smile. “I wish I could do that with my quirk too. I won’t touch you, just the tape.”
Hanta thought about it, but couldn’t find anything to protest to that. “Okay.”
The boy gave a strange grin and touched all of his fingers to the tape. It started dissolving.
Hanta gaped as the pile that was beside him quickly turned to dust, the hand that was doing it keeping a safe distance from his elbow.
He looked at the boy. “So cool,” he whispered, and seeing the previous grin turn more pleased he added, louder. “Do the other!”
At one point they had to laugh as Hanta’s tape got spitted from his elbow on top of the boy’s hand, tangling him and leaving his thin skin sticky even after he’d brought in his other hand to free himself.
“Hey, but do your hands always do that?” Hanta asked, genuinely curious.
The boy closed off anyway. “…Yeah.”
“Oh. That is troublesome. Do you have to wear gloves?”
“If all of my fingers touch the glove, it decays, there’s no point.”
Hanta felt bad, the boy had helped him and he couldn’t do the same for him. Unless…
“Wait!” Hanta dug through his pockets, happy to find his gloves still there even if it hadn’t been that cold in a month. He looked at his own big hands and the boy’s slender ones, nodding.
“Maybe they’re small on you, but do you want to try making, like, two fingers disappear? Then you could wear them!”
Red eyes blinked at him wide and surprised. Slowly, five fingers closed around two pointy cloth endings.
When they were done, the boy had two ugly and misshapen gloves with missing fingers, but he could wear them, and placing his whole hand on the tree trunk did nothing.
“Thank you,” he said in a small voice.
Hanta grinned. “You're welcome, but really they were a thank you for…” he gasped as he noticed that during their excited moment of crafting his tape had stopped pouring out. “My tape! It stopped.” Hanta was so happy.
The boy smiled back at him, before freeing a hand from its glove to dissolve the last of the tape dangling from those quirked elbows. “Now you can go play.”
“What about you?”
The boy shrugged, but it was a dejected movement. “It’s better if I don’t. I should head back anyway.” He stood. “Thanks for the gloves, …”
Oh, they hadn’t exchanged names. “Hanta!”
A small smile. “Thank you, Hanta,” and the boy left.
Hanta realized only a while later that he’d never received a name back.
~ ~
Years down the line, Shigaraki Tomura scratched at his neck as the tv showed the U.A. stadium getting covered in half a glacier.
Something tickled in the back of his mind, but he couldn’t place it, dismissing it as disgust for the society that considered that a great spectacle and all that.
It would be months later that he would remember being nine and smiling for the first time in years.
Digging through a dust-covered box of old video games, he recovered a lonely small glove with missing fingers. A name stared back at him half faded from the label on the inside.
Sero Hanta.