Chapter Text
Shouta thinks it’s a bad idea.
He’s just stating it for the record. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter what he thinks, because it comes from a place of emotion and insecurity, and not from anything concrete. Logically, he knows this is the safest bet. It makes him feel better, and it makes Hizashi less jittery, and hopefully, it’ll help them all in the long run. Currently, though, he just feels exhausted.
He places two servings of takeout katsudon on the table, slaps an extra pair of chopsticks next to the other bowl, and slumps down on a chair. He tears at the wrapping for his own disposable ones with his teeth, too tired to even think about using anything he’d have to wash later. Even the bowls are disposable plastic, which would make Hizashi go on a rant about environmental threats, but Hizashi is currently on a stakeout across the city, and the kid won’t tell.
His head rings with exhaustion, and it’s only due to the non-existing sound of it that it takes him a couple of moments to notice the lack of movement from the other side of the table.
Shouta raises an eyebrow in Midoriya’s direction. “Eat,” he says.
Midoriya doesn’t look at him. “Not hungry,” he replies. It’s curt, but not impolite. In fact, he sounds almost apologetic, as if he’s simply justifying himself, but feels bad about it. He sounds like that quite often, honestly, and it scratches uncomfortably at something inside Shouta’s chest.
“Oh,” Shouta says. He pauses for a few seconds, considering. Then, “Yeah, I still don’t care. Eat, kid. You need it.”
The kid winces, but picks up his chopsticks. Shouta eats another mouthful, chewing mechanically, more for something to do than for any actual hunger. He hasn’t felt hungry in a while. His appetite has wavered and waned throughout the years, to the point that Hizashi has stopped lecturing him about going through the day with a jelly pouch and a protein bar; he knows Shouta forgets, because he doesn’t feel the need to eat. So, Hizashi makes up for it by trying to rope them into having dinner together every day, or, if either of them has patrol, to leave food prepared in the fridge.
But, as aforementioned, Hizashi isn’t here tonight, and he hadn’t remembered to leave behind any of the “boyfriend bentos” he’s so proud of. Shouta doesn’t blame him. Everyone is stretched too thin, trying to make up for the lack of something they can scarcely conceptualize, some fundamental crack in the system that eventually wore itself to the bone. Every day, instead of teaching a class, Shouta wakes up, and goes patrolling. Sometimes he heads to Naomasa’s district, if he’s needed for an interrogation — although more often than not, he just ends up getting roped into organizing intake forms for new arrests, into making sense of the sheer amount of newcomers that the prisons in Musutafu are receiving every day.
(“Anyone called for a national security emergency alert yet?” Shouta asked once, somewhere near three in the morning, after Naomasa dropped another pile of intake forms onto the makeshift office he’d organized inside Naomasa’s own room.
Naomasa, thirty-three years old going on eighty, with the way this whole situation was aging him, had laughed hard enough for Shouta to wonder if he’d lost his mind. “And what the hell’s that gonna do?” Naomasa had asked back, helplessly. “It’d be just as useful as putting out an arrest warrant for All For One. As mailing the guy a court summons so he can be tried for violent abolition of the social order. The institutions don’t work. ”
Shouta had blinked, slowly, in that way Hizashi says makes him look like a cat. “What,” he’d deadpanned. “Are you saying the Musutafu Police is functionally useless? Who would've thought.”
Naomasa had pressed his official stamp onto the document in front of him with a bit more force than necessary, staining his fingers with blue ink. “You think I became a cop for the glory of it? If I wanted to make a difference, I would’ve become a hero. I had a sick mother and needed a stable job to put food on the table. Now I don’t even have any of those things, because this job’s a fucking mess.”
And to think Shouta had coined the guy as a preppy, wide-eyed optimist when they first met. War truly makes and unmakes man.
“I object to you saying that being a hero is the way to make a difference,” he had said, after a few minutes of feverish scribbling on Naomasa’s part. “I think heroes changed the world. I also think they might also end it, at this point.”
Naomasa ceased his scribbling, sunken eyes staring deep into Shouta’s eyes. “You once said that a hero is anyone that saves a life.” He scratched his nose, already distracted by the report again, despite the intensity with which he’d looked into Shouta’s fucking soul. “At least that’s a lot more good than I’ve managed to do.”
Shouta hadn’t replied. He also hadn’t managed to get anything else done, that night.)
It’s been a few weeks since then. The school year at U.A. has been officially terminated a quarter into the semester, and most of his students are patrolling every day as if they were fully licensed heroes. Gone are the days where an underage hero student out in the field without supervision was a punishable offense for their superiors, gone are proper hour banks and reasonable rest time between shifts. A couple days ago, in one of his now rarer visits to Heights Alliance, he watched Kirishima come back to patrol covered in soot and tipping to the side with exhaustion, only to rush out with his gear back on and hair still damp from the shower, about two hours later.
Shouta feels so helpless. It’s all he’s never wanted, seeing kids sprint head on into danger without proper training, without proper field experience. And he knows, God he knows, that even children with that training and experience might not be safe at all, not even a little bit, but at least then he could pretend. At least then he could, selfishly, feel a little bit better about himself, about his job as a teacher. After all, the reason why he chose this was so he could make sure that those years at U.A. would be as complete and as plentiful as possible, that they would really, truly help shape those chubby-cheeked kids into young heroes. So that the past wouldn’t repeat itself.
He glances at the flowers on the windowsill. They’re small, bluish little things, drooping at the stem as they always do after the sun sets. They were someone else’s favorite flowers, a lifetime and a childhood ago, and Shouta has brought their seeds with him to every apartment he and Hizashi have moved to.
He shoves another mouthful of rice into his mouth, for want of something to do.
Across the table, Midoriya is doing a stellar job of pretending to eat by moving the food around in his plate, occasionally nibbling on a piece of katsudon. From time to time, he’ll give a long blink and then startle, as if he’s falling asleep sitting up. After the fourth time it happens, he sighs and rests a cheek on his hand, the sleeves of his borrowed gray hoodie bunched up into sweater paws.
The kid looks absolutely exhausted. Shouta’s heart would hurt a little more, if it didn’t feel like he was looking at his own reflection. The only reason why his own eyes aren’t stinging and dry is because he’s been drenching them in eye drops ever since he got home from the hospital — Hizashi had really driven the point home about how Shouta should take this seriously, breaking down in their bed as Shouta struggled to open his left eye so Hizashi could pour some drops in.
Shou, what are we going to do? His blonde hair had been tied up in what was maybe once a bun, now too messy to be recognizable. Shouta’s eyesight had still been too blurry for him to properly parse out the expression on his husband’s face, but the devastation in his voice was clear as day. What are we going to do?
“Kid,” Shouta calls. He struggles to breathe through the splinters in his chest at the way Midoriya jumps in place, eyes dazed with tiredness but now suddenly wild and alert. He knows very, very little about Midoriya’s stunt as a legally-sanctioned vigilante, but it doesn’t take a genius to read in between the lines. Trauma is a tunnel. The only way out is through, and yet everything echoes and echoes forever. “Do you want to take a nap?” Shouta continues, trying to mold his voice into something softer. “I can heat up the leftovers for you later. As amusing as it is to watch you almost faceplant into the plate and then not.”
Midoriya huffs something that could be considered laughter. “I don’t need a nap, ‘m not five, ” he argues. As if to contradict himself, he immediately yawns hard enough to almost tip to the side, and then rubs his eyes with his fist. He half-glares at Shouta when he notices him staring. “I’m just tired.”
“Aren’t we all,” Shouta says, setting down his chopsticks. He takes a swig of his cup, tipping it back. It’s just iced tea, but he wishes it were something stronger. “But really, kid, it’s no issue. I would like to get some food in you, but resting is also one of the priorities written in all caps in that to-do list Recovery Girl gave you. I’m taking what I can get.”
Shouta does, in fact, have the very physical itemized self-care list that Recovery Girl shoved into Midoriya’s hands the second he was well enough to wheel himself on his own wheelchair. The doctors had all been half-nervous, half-fascinated while watching the nerves in Midoriya’s arms regrow themselves, but Recovery Girl was barely phased. She remakes tissue and reattaches bone fragments for a living, and she’s been watching all the ways in which Midoriya slowly destroyed his limbs in the past year. She knew, more than anyone — and she had shared those thoughts with Shouta, tight-lipped in front of a sleeping Midoriya’s hospital bed — that One for All facilitating the healing of the kid’s more-than-destroyed arms was no miracle, but an excuse for Midoriya to do even more damage to himself.
All heroes, Shouta supposes, have some sense of self-sacrifice in them to begin with. That’s what separates someone who would run into traffic for the chance of saving someone from being run over, and someone who would stand on the sidewalk and call an ambulance. The person who would stand on the sidewalk is probably the smartest one, if Shouta is being honest. Heroes don’t have a shred of common sense within them. And yet, he became one anyway.
But there is a line between self-sacrifice and being reckless with your own wellbeing. After barely over a year of knowing the kid, Shouta thinks that someone, someday, failed at showing Midoriya where that line stood, and then everyone else continued to fail him, every single following day.
Midoriya makes a face. He sets down his chopsticks too, and his hands hover awkwardly on his lap, as though he can’t figure out what he should do with them.
Shouta knows the feeling.
“Don’t you have patrol in the morning?” Midoriya asks, fidgeting a little. His eyes slide over to the microwave clock behind Shouta, above the counter. Shouta glances over. 2:36, it reads. “You don’t have to stay up to make sure I eat, I… I can do it myself.” The kid bites his lip. “I’ll set an alarm? For like, an hour from now… then I’ll wake up and eat.”
It’s pitch black outside the window, a loud contrast to the warm, toasty half-lights from all the lamps he and Hizashi keep in every room, instead of a central, bright light in the ceiling. It makes everything look more mellow, softer. Smaller, but in a good way, when the whole world outside feels too big.
“You don’t have a phone,” Shouta points out. “How will you set an alarm? You’ll sleep through the night and won’t eat.” He pauses. “Well, if you sleep through the night I think I can let one missed meal slide.”
“You can’t bribe my subconscious,” Midoriya says, but he’s kind of smiling.
Shouta shrugs. “Eh, worth a try.”
They’re making conversation. It’s shallow and easy, a bit more prodding on Shouta’s side than anything else, but it’s still something. After they’d found Midoriya again, it had taken a worrying amount of time for him to speak a word to anyone who wasn’t Todoroki, Uraraka or Iida, in that order. Him clamming up like this was so uncharacteristic and unexpected that for a little while, they’d suspected that trauma might’ve made him go non-verbal — but that wasn’t the case, Hound Dog assured them. Midoriya was just ashamed.
Shouta knows a thing or two about shame. How it lives in the throat. How it coats the lungs, cloying and dense. He knows about the cycle of self-hatred that usually stems from it, the withdrawing from others. Shame, funnily enough, is a shameful emotion; it is also inherently vulnerable, which is why those who are ashamed tend to hide, curl up on themselves. It is easier to drown in your own shame than to be witnessed in your own despair.
But sometimes you need to be witnessed in your own despair, if only so you know that it isn’t imagined, that you aren’t inventing your own pain from nothing.
He watches Midoriya steadily for a few moments. Midoriya watches back, worlds away from the kid who would’ve flushed and stared down at his lap at the thought of making eye contact with him. Shouta used to think that it was because he was a hero. It took him way too long to realize that it was because he was a teacher.
He then asks, as he does most nights, “Do you want to talk about it?”
The thing is, Shouta isn’t really sure why Midoriya is here. Or rather in this apartment, with him and Hizashi. The other kids are still in the dorms at Heights Alliance, though there are rumors that they might need to be moved somewhere safer and sturdier soon enough. Midoriya, once cleared of any worries about denutrition, exhaustion and dehydration, could have very well stayed with them. Lord knows Todoroki is probably suffering from the world’s quietest case of separation anxiety.
But, Shouta had told Midoriya, when he came to help the kid pack his things, you’re a flight risk.
Midoriya’s eyes were sunken and red-rimmed. If it was from sleep or tears, Shouta didn’t know. He still doesn’t know today. Yeah, the kid had murmured. So I’ve been told.
Midoriya’s shoulders hunch up impossibly high, almost up to his ears. Every time his answer is the same, and every time Shouta still asks. “Not today,” Midoriya replies, pulling his sleeves over his hands. “If that’s alright.”
“It’s alright, kid,” Shouta murmurs. “Of course it’s alright.”
He stands, taking the leftover katsudon and placing it on the kitchen counter. He scraps everything into a tupperware and then sticks it on the fridge for later, however later that might be. He’s half-certain he won’t be sleeping tonight, for a myriad of reasons, and at the very least he can make sure Midoriya is properly fed after he gets some shut-eye.
It’s not the first time this scenario has unfolded since Midoriya came to stay with them, so Shouta is a bit startled when he turns back to clean up the rest of the table and sees Midoriya still sitting on the chair, instead of curled up with a blanket on the couch. The kid’s a quiet thing, and when it’s this late at night he moves through the apartment as silently as a ghost, padding on socked feet.
But he’s still right where Shouta left him, hugging a leg to his chest. He’s practically swimming in Shouta’s borrowed hoodie, and green curls of hair fall askew over his forehead on one side. Hizashi had managed to con him into putting little mushroom-shaped hair clips to hold back the hair on the other, which had earned them the first Izuku smile of the day.
Midoriya, Izuku. Shouta’s been wavering on the names. He’s been wavering on a lot of things, like professional distance, like what’s appropriate for him to say or think as someone who isn’t related to the kid. Emergency custody isn’t the same as being someone’s guardian, and being someone’s guardian doesn’t grant him immediate emotional closeness to them. It’s one of the many reasons why Shouta had argued, while arrangements were being made to make sure Midoriya didn’t run out on his own, that the first obvious choice for temporary guardianship should have been Yagi.
Personally, Shouta doesn’t have many good things to say about All Might. But Yagi Toshinori isn’t All Might, and if he once was, the only resemblance he now bears to the hero that became the face of all international propaganda for Japan are the wispy strands of blond hair that frame his gaunt face. Even before he knew about One for All — which, to be clear, Shouta had a lot to say about to Yagi’s face — he could tell that there was some sort of special connection between the guy and Midoriya. He’d kept an eye on it because it was his duty as a teacher, just to be sure that there wasn’t anything odd about it, and came up empty. Yagi clearly cared for Midoriya like a son; Midoriya clearly looked at Yagi like he’d arranged the stars in the sky.
So, when Nedzu handed the papers for temporary guardianship for Shouta to sign, Shouta had been uncharacteristically at a loss for words, for once. The only one who hadn’t seemed surprised was Yagi himself.
“I cannot protect him,” was all he had said. “Not in the ways that matter. I barely eat. The medications I take for sleep are too strong — I would not wake if he needed me. He cannot need me in that way.”
“You’d burn the world to the ground in order to keep the kid safe,” Shouta had replied. The ink was still drying on the paper, his signature glistening.
Yagi had chuckled a little. “He doesn’t need someone who could burn down the world. He needs someone to sit by him as he sleeps. He needs someone who feeds him. He needs someone who can hold him while he cries and has something to say other than I’m sorry. ”
“Mm,” Shouta hummed. “You haven’t failed him, though. You can’t truly believe that. The kid loves you.”
“You don’t have to believe in something,” Yagi said, “in order for it to startle you awake.”
And so Shouta’s name was signed onto the document that named him Midoriya’s temporary guardians. There was little fight on Midoriya Inko’s side, and Shouta could see how much it tore at her, but — bottom line was, she couldn’t protect Izuku. She was a civilian, and a clear target for All For One, who could very well decide to take her as bait or kill her to break Izuku’s resolve. Naomasa scarcely had to persuade her into going into protective custody. But Izuku was still sixteen, and though legally allowed to be emancipated, leaving the kid to his own devices after his stint as a vigilante was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
“What’s up, kid?” Shouta asks, softly, as if speaking to a cornered animal. He sits back down slowly, feeling like he’s treading unfamiliar water.
Midoriya looks up at him with wide eyes. He’s biting his already chapped lips, a nervous tick he didn’t use to have when he first arrived at U.A. Curled around his leg on the chair, he looks half the size he normally is, which isn’t very much to begin with. Shouta remembers the startled realization of those many civilians, once Midoriya had made it back to U.A. grounds: the hero Deku is just a child. He could be someone’s son. He could be someone’s little brother.
With a startle, Shouta realizes there are tears sprouting in the corners of Izuku’s eyes. It’s so different from the kid’s usual loud, blubbery sobbing that it takes him a few seconds to react. Then he’s standing up as calmly as he can and putting an arm around the kid’s shoulders, ushering him to the couch with mostly nonsensical whispers of reassurance.
He throws a fluffy purple blanket over the kid’s lap before sitting down himself, pulling half of it over his own legs so they’re sharing. The couch is cozy and well-worn, a gift from Hizashi’s moms from when they moved in. It sits next to the balcony window, separated by only a small cabinet covered with small bonsais Shouta likes to keep. The curtains on the window flutter and flicker with the wind from outside, a low murmuring.
Shouta turns to Midoriya, making sure to keep his own expression as open and relaxed as he can. Izuku looks a mix of terrified, anxious and hopeful — it’s an emotional landmine if Shouta’s ever seen one, and the tears keep silently springing up his eyes and down his cheeks. Shouta’s chest feels as heavy as lead.
“You said you didn’t feel like talking,” Shouta says, quietly, even as Midoriya startles. “I respect that. I will always respect your privacy, unless I think you’ll do something to hurt yourself or someone else. We’ve talked about this.” At Midoriya’s nod, Shouta continues, “But it seems you do want to talk, kid. Am I right to assume that?”
Midoriya’s chin wobbles. Unbidden, Shouta finds himself reaching out a hand and resting it on the kid’s hair, ruffling it a little. When it doesn’t seem like his touch is unwelcome, he trails his hand down until it’s cupping the nape of Midoriya’s neck. It’s warm and a little bit sweaty, but after seeing the kid beaten black and blue and bloody on more than one occasion, it’s comforting to feel him alive and solid in front of him.
“I don’t know what to say,” Midoriya whispers. It’s all thready, thin, like he barely had the courage to utter the words out loud. “I just…”
It seems like Midoriya was hoping his trailing off would lead Shouta to take the word back, and he deflates a little when that doesn’t happen. As if Shouta would let him take that out. He’s a teacher, for all that it’s worth; he’s supposed to let the kids arrive at their own answers, not steer them there himself.
Midoriya bites his lips some more. He tries to hug his legs again, but stops mid-motion when his knees knock against Shouta’s. In the half-light, his green eyes look black, the abyssal zone as seen from a night camera. After a lot more fidgeting, shifting, and almost half-begun sentences, it seems like the silence does him in, and Midoriya blurts out, squeezing his eyes shut, “I can’t sleep.”
Shouta blinks, tilting his head. “I’m aware.”
He glances at the microwave clock again. It’s twenty past three in the morning.
“No, I mean,” Midoriya shakes his head. “I can fall asleep at first, but — I don’t stay asleep for long, I’ve gotten used to — to not, and. I just.” He fiddles with the edge of the blanket in his lap. “I can’t go back to sleep after I wake up. I don’t… I took a nap, while Mic-sensei was still here. It was like, midnight? I think he hoped I would sleep through the night.”
“He’s always been an optimist,” Shouta says flatly, mildly pleased when Midoriya smiles.
“Yeah. Uh. But I woke up right as he was leaving, when you got here, and I tried to fall back asleep. I really did!” He turns wide eyes to Shouta, as if there was any reason to doubt him. “I even — I even counted sheep, because Todoroki-kun says it works for him, but I couldn’t. It was too…” he mumbles something that Shouta can’t quite make out.
“It was what?” Shouta prompts, softly. He squeezes the back of Midoriya’s neck, hoping to pass on some strength, even though he doesn’t really feel it.
Color crawls up Midoriya’s cheeks, until even the tips of his ears are bright pink. “Dark,” he mumbles, staring askance at the ground. “It was too dark.”
“Okay,” Shouta says. He makes sure to keep his voice completely judgment free and unimpressed, even if it wasn’t quite what he expected. “I didn’t know you were afraid of the dark. You never said.”
“I’m not afraid of it,” Midoriya says, and it’s the most forceful he’s sounded ever since stepping foot into this apartment, a week ago. He seems to startle himself, because in his next sentence, he’s already more subdued. “I’ve never — I mean, as a child, probably, yeah, but every child is afraid of the dark. I haven’t had issues with it since I was, what, seven, and I don’t — I don’t have issues with it, that’s just a manner of speaking, I mean that when I wake up and it’s too dark and — too quiet, sometimes it’s too quiet, you guys live in a very nice neighborhood, there’s barely any noises from outside or from the other floors, my apartment wasn’t like that, the dorms aren’t either. Uh, so, I mean, it’s dark and quiet. And I guess that makes me kind of uncomfortable and like I can’t calm down, my heart beats really fast and I can’t fall back asleep. So I guess that’s… the issue?”
He ends that little rant with his voice piped up high, like a question. Shouta squints his eyes at him and can kind of literally feel some of his synapses making connections about what he’d been seeing for the past week, when it came to Midoriya and the matter of rest.
(The matter of feeding himself is something else, although it seems, from what Midoriya has just said, to stem from a similar reason. I don’t sleep a lot, I’ve gotten used to not —it can directly correlate to I don’t feel that hungry, I’m not used to eating so many times a day. Once again, Shouta feels the need to throttle Naomasa and force some more information about just how exactly they’d had Midoriya living during those weeks while he was away from U.A. grounds. The guy is his friend, but he’s still a cop. Fuck cops.)
Come to think of it, Midoriya has been more prone to cat naps than to a full night’s sleep— at first, Shouta and Hizashi figured it was just exhaustion catching up to him. But now, if he looks back on it, Shouta realizes that every time he’s seen Midoriya asleep has been when there was someone else around: snoozing on the couch as Shouta and Hizashi discuss what to make for dinner in the kitchen, curled up with some blankets on the guest room while Hizashi blasts (and badly sings along to) American pop music in the shower. Shouta has walked into rooms to see Midoriya sleeping with the TV turned on in some generic action movie with a lot of car crashes and gunshots, or a random podcast in a foreign language droning on in the background.
“Oh,” Shouta says. Something in his chest unfurls, kind of soft, kind of sad. “You just can’t fall asleep alone, can you?”
Midoriya’s eyes widen again, and he tenses. But he nods, nodsnodsnods like a bobblehead, face growing increasingly redder, tears glistening in his eyes against the lamp lights.
Shouta looks up at the ceiling. He doesn’t cry — he rarely ever cries, because his tear ducts are practically ash, especially after their last clash against Shigaraki, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like it. In a way, it’s almost painful, how his face contracts, his eyes burn. A big part of the reason why crying feels cathartic is because, through tears, your body ends up expelling some of the hormones that are making you feel so sad. Shouta doesn’t have that reprieve, and it all just burns.
How did it get like this? It’s something he wonders often. Stalking out on top of a building right before sunrise, laying in bed next to Hizashi in the few opportunities he gets to, hearing any of his students’ voices coming through his earpiece during rescue missions. The oldest person in his class is Bakugou, who turned sixteen before the school year began, who’s nearly seventeen now. Fucking Bakugou and the chip on his shoulder, who channels every strong emotion into anger because he’s never learned how to do anything else. Bakugou, who’d been the first to catch Izuku in his arms when the kid finally collapsed, red-rimmed eyes following them to Recovery Girl’s room, arms crossed protectively over his chest as if to keep himself from reaching out.
Shouta looks at Bakugou and only sees a child who’s trying really hard to pretend he knows what he’s doing. He looks at Todoroki and sees a child who’s, at times, a ticking time bomb. He looks at Izuku and sees a child who is terrified, who’d been dragged through the most physically and emotionally traumatizing experience of his life. And then, instead of getting the chance to heal and process it somewhere he felt safe, he’d been forced to (and it doesn’t matter if Midoriya says it was his choice, because feeling like you have no other choice is coercion) give up everything he knew and become what other adults needed him to be: a perfect little hero from the second he opened his eyes to when he managed to close them, virtually homeless and jumping from safehouse to safehouse, entirely cut off from all his family and friends.
What does that even do to a person’s head? Shouta can barely comprehend it. And he can’t even call anything post-traumatic stress when the trauma is still ongoing, when in a few weeks’ time Izuku will have to face the person who nearly killed him again.
Shouta unclenches his hand. He turns it so that his palm is facing up, and places it on his knee, trying to catch Izuku’s eye.
Just take it, kid, Shouta thinks, despairing a bit. Please.
But Izuku won’t meet his gaze, too busy trying to crack his own knuckles into oblivion, his fingers tinged white with the force of it. So, in lieu of a hand reaching back, Shouta just reaches forward and untangles Izuku’s from each other, squeezing once.
“I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep,” Shouta says. Izuku snaps up to look at him, a protest already halfway to his lips, but Shouta shakes his head, keeps his tone calm and certain. “And I’ll still be here when you wake up. If I am not here, Hizashi will be here. I promise you, Izuku. I won’t leave you alone in the dark.”
“It’s silly,” Izuku says, sounding a bit weepy. He rubs a fist against both of his eyes, roughly. “So many things happened, but it’s — this is what gets me.”
“Grief is weird,” Shouta tells him, slouching back down against the couch. His neck feels stiff with tension. “It won’t always manifest in the ways you expect it to.”
Izuku tilts his head. “I’m not grieving, though. There isn’t really a reason for me to…” He bites his lip. “My mom is still alive. Todoroki, Kacchan, my classmates. And you too, sensei. I wouldn’t call whatever this is grief.”
Shouta glances at the forget-me-nots in his windowsill again. Thinks about a parking lot bursting through the cracks with cyclamens, thinks about late nights walking home from swimming pools, seventeen and still learning how to bear the weight of being a person without his knees shaking. Thinks of bright blue hair, almost shining in the gloom of those overnight conversations, dizzy with stolen soju. Shirakumo is thirteen years gone, and still it is impossible to imagine him gone, his laugh lost to some silence he can’t breach, somewhere he can’t follow. And yet.
(Nemuri’s impish grin still follows him throughout his day, beaming from her contact picture on his phone. It’s difficult to walk through the halls of U.A. without her teasingly calling out his name, throwing her arm across his shoulders. How bright her eyes would go when either he or Hizashi slipped and called her senpai, even though she’d long told them they didn’t have to anymore.
Grief needs oxygen. From time to time, something comes to remind him, like those forget-me-nots, or that street he can’t go by anymore. Then the grief catches fire, and it swallows everything, everything.)
“You’re still alive too,” Shouta comments, going for nonchalant. He feels the way Izuku freezes next to him. “But you’re not the same as you used to be, and things were taken from you that you won’t get back. It’s okay to mourn for that. In fact, I’d say it’s one of the only possible logical reactions.”
“I’m okay, sensei,” Izuku says, his voice so soft it’s barely there at all. “I don’t have time to not be.”
“I will give you time,” Shouta says fiercely, heart catching in his throat. He turns to Izuku, with his tired eyes and messy hair, and pulls up the blanket they’re sharing so that it’s tight around Izuku’s shoulders, bunched up underneath his chin. “I can’t undo what has been done to you. I don’t have as much control as I would like over the things that are going to happen. But I will give you as much time to not be okay as I am able to, Izuku, because I am not burying anyone else. You hear me ? I am not burying anyone else if I have any say in it.”
Izuku’s eyes overflow with tears, once again. Only this time it’s not a quiet, sniffling thing, but heavy sobs bursting from his chest like he can’t help it, making his shoulders shake. He tips forward until his head is resting on Shouta’s sternum, as if he doesn’t have the strength to hold himself up anymore.
“Shh,” Shouta murmurs, trying to get his arms around lapful of crying teenager, which is perhaps one of the heaviest things he’s ever had to carry. And he doesn’t feel all that strong himself, but this is a weight he bears gladly. He tucks Izuku against his chest and hides him from the world.
The kid falls asleep like that, sobs dissipating into sleepy murmurs, swollen eyes slipping shut. Shouta has half a mind to get a wet cloth to at least wipe the tears away from his face, but he doesn’t think he’s gonna be able to move anytime soon.
Instead, he shifts Izuku until the kid’s head is resting on his lap, blanket tightly wrapped around him. Shouta rests a hand on Izuku’s back, and with his free one, picks up the remote and turns on a random nature documentary on the TV. He makes sure to keep the volume a little above mute.
Hizashi finds them like that, sometime in the early hours of the morning. Shouta’s head lolling on the back of the couch, legs askew. Izuku clutching at the front of his t-shirt like his life depends on it, fast asleep.
It’s one of the better nights they’ve had, all things considered.
“Are you going to the dorms again today?”
Shouta hums around his cup of coffee, brain still too sleep-addled to muster up any complete sentences. Across the table from him, Hizashi echoes a hum in response as he stirs sugar into his tea, decidedly more chipper than Shouta has ever managed to be, even when it isn’t the ass crack of morning.
Only Hizashi could sound that cheery when the bags underneath his eyes look as dark and painful as bruises, bandaged scratch marks on his neck still weeping a little blood. But Hizashi’s always been the stronger out of the two of them.
“Vlad says you’re trying to make him look bad,” Hizashi comments with a lopsided grin. His glasses are slipping down his nose, and his eyes crinkle into a soft smile when Shouta reaches out to fix it. “He’s only managed to visit his class a handful of times since this all began, and you’re there practically every single day. And people have the nerve to tell me that Aizawa Shouta doesn’t grow attached to his students.” He says that last part with mock offense, a hand over his heart.
It would be easier if he didn’t, Shouta thinks. If he treated it all just like a job. But then, if he did, it wouldn’t be him.
“I’m not trying to do anything,” he mumbles, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. It’s bright and cloudy outside, so the sky looks nearly white, as if it’s vanished. “Just making sure they haven’t set fire to Heights Alliance yet. That’d be a hassle.”
“And the likelihood of it happening has never been low enough for us to be comfortable,” Hizashi finishes the thought. “I know. Still, it’s cute. Didn’t you accidentally get roped into helping Bakugou make curry that one time?”
“I’m honestly not entirely sure if that happened or if it was just a visual hallucination.”
It makes Hizashi laugh, albeit quietly so as to not wake up Izuku, who’s still sleeping on the couch. The light coming in through the blinds doesn’t seem to bother him, curled up on his side with his hands tucked underneath his chin. Shouta watches his chest rise and fall deeply, steadily.
Hizashi follows Shouta’s gaze and his eyes go a little liquid, fond. “The kid’s all tuckered out, isn’t he?” He murmurs. “It’s been so difficult for him. I’m glad to see him rest.”
Shouta hums, drumming his fingers on the porcelain of his mug. “We should buy a nightlight for him,” he says, off-handedly. “And maybe have a sleepover.”
It says a lot about Hizashi, how he understands it immediately. He takes a long drink of his tea and then sets it down, running a hand up and down his face and perching his glasses atop his head. “I’m gonna die of a broken heart before anything else can manage to kill me, Shou,” he says, voice rough. “How can we fight a war when our frontline is made up of children?”
“There’ll be nothing about how young they all were in the history books,” Shouta says. He sets his empty mug down with a dull thunk. “It’ll be a story with no children in it.”
Hizashi stands up, wiping his hands down on his sweatpants. He picks up his own mug and Shouta’s and takes it to the kitchen sink, throwing a purple drying rag over his shoulder. It’s a long minute of water running and the sound of scrubbing before Hizashi says, without looking back at Shouta, “There are times where I can’t find it in myself to blame the villains. Razing everything to the ground and building something new over its ashes sounds like the only possible solution, sometimes.”
“Careful,” Shouta says lightly. “They’ll accuse you of being a defector.”
Hizashi actually laughs out loud. “They wish. Would’ve probably felt better about themselves, having an adult to blame. Is Aoyama even sixteen yet?”
“For a couple months now,” Shouta replies. His voice sounds hollow to his own ears. “He looks younger than he is.”
“I’m sure that makes it better, somehow.”
(Aoyama sitting in a jail cell. Aoyama and the bulletproof glass and the Quirk-nullifying cuffs and the sunken eyes. Aoyama and his sixteen-and-three-months of age. Shouta sitting on the other side of the glass, wondering why the fuck the teenager is in chains right in front of him, instead of his parents, who coerced him into this. Instead of whoever made the kid feel so utterly worthless as someone without a Quirk that he threw away his freedom to have one.
But everyone else is absent from the trial. There’s just Aoyama sitting in a jail cell, with parents who couldn’t be traced. There’s just Shouta and his guilt, with eyes he can’t meet even when he looks in the mirror.)
On the table, his phone buzzes with a text message. Shouta glances at it and feels his eyebrows rise in surprise as he reads Bakugou’s contact name — all the kids have his phone number for safety reasons, but Bakugou is one of the few students who’s never contacted him, even for something small. It makes trepidation rise up in his chest, but when he opens the chat, he sees that the message has been deleted before he could read it.
“What is it?” Hizashi asks, when he notices Shouta’s frown. He’s drying the dishes now, probably to waste the excess energy from the overnight patrolling.
“Bakugou sent me a message and then deleted it,” Shouta explains, pocketing his phone and standing up. “Odd. But I’m going there soon and I’ll see what it was about.”
“Could be nothing,” Hizashi points out. “Everything’s going haywire with the war, even texting apps. I’ve heard someone mention these sort of ghost messages — it seems like someone messaged you, but it was just a glitch in the code, and they didn’t actually say anything.”
“Ghost messages,” Shouta repeats. “Makes it sound like the phone’s haunted.”
“Maybe it is!” Hizashi says. “And if I had to bet on any student who would haunt you from beyond the grave, it would probably be Bakugou. He’s too stubborn to go quietly into that goodnight.”
“The kid’s not dying before me, so unless ghosts can haunt ghosts, I see nothing to worry about,” Shouta deadpans. He sees the wheels churning on Hizashi’s head, and he decides to leave his husband with the question of whether ghosts can haunt other ghosts.
He leaves the apartment with some protein bars and a jelly pouch on his functional belt, capture scarf wrapped loosely around his neck. The city is eerily quiet; he knows a lot of people have packed their bags and gone to the countryside, somewhere away from where the heavy fighting is taking place. He walks to U.A., rooftop to rooftop, and goes by entire streets without seeing anyone, even though it’s late enough to be morning rush hour on a regular day. But days haven’t been regular in a long time.
The sky is bright and white. It makes melancholy wrap its hands around his heart, the world moving as though in molasses. He feels tired in a way he can’t name, sad in ways he cannot explain. Since he was young, he’s learned how to sleep with his sadness the way one eventually grows used to a wound being picked. But he’s not used to feeling like he’s bleeding everywhere, and scrambling not to stain anyone else with red, to keep his hands clean enough to comfort his kids, to reach for his husband.
Shouta doesn’t know about the future of this war. How long it’ll go on for, how many they will lose, in how many horrible ways. He wonders if it will end, or if the bloodshed will seep into the next generation, plant its bloody seeds of revenge.
Heroes, villains. He’s been growing tired of the terms. He simply wishes to protect what is his, and to not be hurt anymore. Language often means too much.
He thinks about a bad ending. He thinks about a good one. He doesn’t know if he believes in either.
But you don’t have to believe in something in order for it to startle you awake.