*groaning* not getting off my desk for one…

Originally posted by ikechai

There are a few details he remembers particularly vividly.

Being collared, was one. Shock collars are always a useful way to control someone, and also a neat tool for dehumanisation, and so long as he kept resisting it was important to have some way of doing both. To this day, he is uncomfortable with having anything too tight around his throat.

Another is needles. It is very hard to perform surgery on someone who is awake and resisting, after all, so they knocked him out or immobilised him a lot. Sometimes they wouldn’t use enough, so he’d come around in the middle of a surgery, or they’d use a tranquilliser that would prevent him from moving but not knock him out - not out of malice, but because it was cheaper or because it was what they happened to have on-hand at any given time. The lack of malice was arguably worse than active cruelty would be, because it really did drum home that he wasn’t a person to them, who might be tortured or tormented, just experimental material, whose suffering wasn’t even the goal, and mattered less than their budget did.

Light, is another. It was never entirely dark in the labs. No natural light - he escaped through a ventilation shaft - but a lot of artificial light. This has contributed to his fondness for operating in the dark since his escape, as darkness was the nearest he could come to safety.

Perhaps the worst of the lot is remembering what it felt like to have his body reject a grafted power or body part, the absolute agony that entailed, often for days or weeks at a time, and how little help there was for it. He didn’t always know that was what was happening, depending on the Quirk being grafted, but it always ended the same way - pain and fever.

He can put together, from what he remembers, that he was probably being experimented on, simply because the goal did not seem to be torture. He wasn’t being interrogated, they didn’t seem to care if he was hurt or not, so they were trying to do something, he just isn’t sure what. Also that something about his Quirk is unnatural, because he left that lab without a full understanding of it - he didn’t expect it to be a constant passive ability, or to be able to remove Quirks permanently by making an effort. Some form of Quirk-enhancing experiment, is his first guess, or possibly just creating artificial humans for all he knows. He knows that they operated on him repeatedly, because he is covered in surgical scars, and he knows that he was often put in different environments and obliged to survive various trials. He knows that a lot of others didn’t survive it, and his cell was right at the end of the row they dragged the bodies past, to be disassembled and grafted onto other candidates.

So, he knows enough to know that someone was trying to do something, but given every single experiment on him failed, he really doesn’t know if it was based on actual scientific principles or whether it was a Mengele-style mad doctor who was trying to prove their crackpot theories and throwing an awful lot of money at something that was never going to work, who just happened to strike lucky by doing…whatever they did…to his eyes.

It’s…complicated.

Since taking in his sons, Aizawa starts consciously putting more of a gap between ‘Aizawa Shouta, martial arts instructor, bartender and single father of two’ and ‘Alley Cat, your unfriendly neighbourhood vigilante’, to the point of actually adopting a costume and mask rather than just relying on darkness and stealth to hide his face. His working relationship with Midnight falls very much into the latter category, and, as I’ve said, they’ve never directly spoken. And part of this is that she triggers his memories less - while he and Nemuri were good friends, she wasn’t part of the inseparable trio that was him, Shirakumo and Yamada, and thus didn’t cause the same level of uncomfortable flashback. 

By bringing her into the ‘Aizawa Shouta’ side of his life…that’s risky, especially after the way their working relationship ended. If she puts the two identities together, that’s going to have much more serious repercussions, and Aizawa cannot afford to burn this identity and move on - hasn’t been able to since his sons got into UA. Before that, they might’ve disappeared, but he’s not destroying their chance at their dream to save his own skin.

That said, Midnight’s reaction to getting confirmation that Aizawa is alive is going to be that she wants to see him again. She wasn’t hit quite as hard as his two best friends, sure, but his death still affected her. And then All Might puts together the Alley Cat thing and Midnight’s reaction to that is a lot stronger because she knows Alley Cat. Sort of. She knows him via brusque notes left on criminals and information dumped at her agency and also from having spent a few months trying to hunt him down because he was definitely involved with a few suspicious deaths of human traffickers and yes, they were awful people, but they have a system for a reason.

So…in some ways, this is worse, because they had an existing uneasy relationship that veered between being a working relationship and her trying to bring him to justice and now it turns out they had a previous friendship, and they have to figure out what to do about both of these relationships going forward.

Hm.

Going off what I have seen of Vigilantes (which isn’t much), most of the heroes we see don’t go after vigilantes much. Even Captain Celebrity seems less interested in arresting them for vigilantism and gaining a bit of easy prestige than in just telling them to go away. There seems to be a certain ‘well, I guess they’re not hurting things…’ attitude amongst underground heroes, and spotlight heroes are generally after flashier things.

That said, Alley Cat walks a much finer line by being technically kind of a racketeer, and also because he has killed before. He doesn’t do it often, but there’s one particular kind of criminal who can expect no mercy, and that is traffickers. With other kinds…your everyday just-trying-to-get-by thieves can expect to be stopped, but probably not especially roughly. Rapists and murderers can expect a beating and to be dropped off at the nearest police station with evidence taped to their chests. But there is just something about traffickers which Alley Cat is known to be absolutely unable to stand. It’s…hard to argue with that, honestly, and there are a few heroes that feel a bit uneasy about going after him for it, especially without much hard evidence tying him to these people turning up dead. It’s what put him on Midnight’s radar, not just that he passed evidence on a ring to her, but that these people turned up quite messily dead in ways that speak to a loss of control. She’s probably going to feel partly responsible for that, even if they were objectively awful people. Unfortunately, there’s something of a conspiracy of silence around the whole subject of Alley Cat in his own area, and at the point she starts looking, he’s still homeless and even most of the people in said area have no real idea to find him even if they have a shrewd idea of who he is. Shirakumo might make a similar attempt, although with no better results.

As for Extinguisher…he’s the Endeavour agency’s white whale. The agency has never reached the heights it did when Endeavour was its headlining hero since his forced retirement, and they have a tendency to go haring off after any report of a Quirk being removed. This is part of why his reputation got so out of control, as the Endeavour agency chased down every lead they could find for months, including O’Clock’s similar loss of power.