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Aizawa doesn’t fully process the hand pressed between his shoulder blades until he can’t do anything to stop it.
He and Midoriya are weaving through a thick crowd, attempting to get back behind the walls of UA before Aizawa has to leave for his second round of patrols. It was a mistake to think that Aizawa could get any patrolling done in a timely fashion with Midoriya constantly asking questions about it, but such is life. This week and last week, Aizawa was bullied by Nedzu into allowing a few of his students to shadow underground hero patrols with him, so he has a right to complain to himself in his head, a little bit. Part of this bullying had been to get Aizawa’s students more experience, but Aizawa suspects that part of the bullying had been to help Aizawa track down the head of the underground fighting ring that has been abducting people for weeks, and then leaving them stranded out in industrial, less-populated parts of the city, beat all to hell.
Midoriya, still asking questions as Aizawa feels someone else touch his back, notices immediately when Aizawa’s gait stops dead. Midoriya stops too, eliciting several grumbles from people who have to weave around them, and asks, “Sensei?”
Aizawa’s feet start to move again. This time, it isn’t because Aizawa is telling them to. With alarm, Aizawa begins to notice the sticky, uncoordinated feeling of someone else controlling his movements, and he clunkily begins to shuffle forwards, veering towards a less-populated side street.
“Sensei, where are we going? UA is the other way.” Midoriya jogs to keep up, half a step behind Aizawa as he continues to move forward against his will.
Aizawa’s jaw feels as if it has been wired shut, and he finds himself unable to turn his head to address Midoriya. He just keeps moving, and Midoriya follows him with a dumb amount of trust.
Whoever had touched Aizawa before must have activated a puppeteering quirk. They’re powerful.
When Shinsou uses his quirk on Aizawa, it’s a warm sort of darkness. It tells its target to relax, and pushes the mind to a state of rest that tells it to just do what Shinsou intends them to do.
This quirk is not like that. This quirk seeps over every inch of Aizawa’s skin, starting at the point where the man had touched between his shoulder blades, and then hardens into a shell over the top of Aizawa’s skin, leaving his brain completely aware of what’s going on. Instead of any kind of reassuring blankness, an overwhelming surge of claustrophobia overtakes his brain.
His next few steps take him around the corner, ducking behind a small bakery, where he encounters four people standing ready for him. To his right, he hears Midoriya balk, footsteps stuttering, but then Midoriya is dragged past him by two more men, hands clamped around Midoriya’s upper arms.
Aizawa, powerless, is halted. He stands and stares forward at the people gathered in front of him.
A voice sounds from right next to Aizawa’s ear, close enough for Aizawa to feel it. Unable to cringe away, Aizawa can only listen as the person says, smug, “Looks like we found you first, Eraserhead.”
“What did you do?” he hears Midoriya demand. It’s taking three different people to restrain him, even though he hasn’t activated his quirk yet. He drives his elbow into the stomach of one of his captors, and prepares to dispatch another one.
Then the man behind Aizawa’s shoulder says, “Stop.”
Midoriya obviously doesn’t listen to him, and continues to struggle free. He sends the first of his captors to the ground, unconscious, and starts on the second.
The man lowers his voice, and says, “Stop him.”
The invisible shell around Aizawa starts to move, dragging him forwards. At first, his movements are jerky and unnatural, and Midoriya hesitates when he sees the strange motion out of the corner of his eye. Aizawa does everything he can think of to resist, mentally digging in his heels and trying to stop himself from reaching out towards Midoriya. But as the length of time under the influence of this quirk extends, the shell begins to sink into his skin, taking more and more direct control of Aizawa’s body.
“Sensei?” Midoriya asks, shying away, even as Aizawa’s hand clamps around his wrist. He must know that something’s wrong—he has to be able to tell.
Even if he doesn’t know right away, Midoriya figures it out when Aizawa takes hold of one of Midoriya’s fingers and bends it back until it breaks with a crunch . While Midoriya reels from the shock and begins to backpedal, pulling himself away from Aizawa to prevent further injury, Aizawa’s hand reaches out and swings into the side of Midoriya’s head, clocking him so hard that the kid stumbles.
If Aizawa had any control over his own muscles, he would be retching on the floor. The sight of Midoriya, scared of him and disoriented from the strike, is too much for Aizawa to process today.
“Excellent,” says the man. He’s staying behind Aizawa so that Aizawa’s gaze can’t fall on him--he’d known Aizawa’s hero name, so it makes sense that he would know Aizawa’s quirk. “Kid, if you want your sensei to live, you’re gonna have to stay quiet for me, okay?” A hand touches the back of Aizawa’s neck, sending horrible shivers down his spine. “Now, Eraserhead--do me a favor and knock yourself out.”
And Aizawa’s feet abruptly shuffle towards the wall, and Aizawa’s head rears back in preparation to brain itself on the bricks.
“Wait!” Midoriya exclaims. His request remains unheeded.
I’m going to be late to patrol, is the helpful thought from Aizawa’s brain. And then his forehead pitches forward at full speed and makes contact with the solid wall.
Aizawa wakes up to the worst headache of his life.
The floor under his head isn’t exactly soft, but it has a small amount of give. Gym mat, is the thought that springs to Aizawa’s head, because apparently one of his main skills is identifying whatever weird surface he’s woken up on.
Slowly, his ears adjust to let in the sound of a roaring crowd. It isn’t that big. It isn’t Sports Festival big, at least. It might be gymnasium big, judging by the sound alone. When Aizawa’s eyes finally crack open, he finds that he lies on his side, his cheek pressed to a gym mat, in the corner of what looks like a raised platform with stretchy ropes lining the edges.
The overhead lights are too bright for Aizawa to see anything beyond the four sets of ropes. His vision blurs and begins to hurt from the strain of the lights, and it takes several seconds for him to adjust enough to see the beginnings of the crowd.
More importantly, he makes out the figure in the opposite corner of the ring.
Midoriya crouches in the opposite corner of the platform they’re on, still in his school uniform. He mumbles to himself incessantly, making nervous motions with his hands as he talks to himself. He’s likely strategizing his way through the situation, but all Aizawa can pick up from here is the deep bruise blossoming on Midoriya’s temple.
The corresponding ache of Aizawa’s knuckles is all Aizawa needs to remember where the bruise came from. His nausea from earlier makes a repeat appearance, but Aizawa’s body remains prone at the corner of the ring, unresponsive to his wishes to move.
He hears the crowd of people shouting, talking, cheering.
Somewhere, high above him, a bell rings.
Aizawa’s hands, without warning, begin to move. He starts the robotic process of pushing himself up to his feet, the movements unhindered by his hazy, swimming sense of balance. He must’ve hit his head. That’s not why his movements don’t feel like his own, but it’s not exactly helping him gather his thoughts.
His shambling steps take him closer to Midoriya. Midoriya, at the ring of the bell, has startled up into a wavering cower in the corner of the--
It’s a boxing ring.
Aizawa tries to dig in his heels, to no avail. His feet carry him closer and closer to Midoriya, until he can eventually hear Midoriya’s frantic mumbling.
“--There aren’t too many people and not all of them are trained so if I go quickly enough past the edge of the stage I should be able to reach--”
As he crosses the ring, Aizawa’s movements become more precise. What started as a staggering, zombie-like gait becomes fluid movements. The closer he gets to Midoriya, the louder the cheers become.
“Can you hear me?” Midoriya asks Aizawa. He presses himself back into the corner, as far from Aizawa as possible, like a cornered stray cat, and looks even less secure when Aizawa can’t respond. “I’m not going to leave you like this, because he said--he said if I don’t fight you he’ll.” Midoriya chokes on his words. His foot lifts, blindly searching for a hold on the bottom rope like he’s going to try to climb up the side of the ring.
Aizawa is almost within arm’s reach.
“I don’t know how to break his quirk for sure,” Midoriya says to Aizawa, still talking in an undertone that’s hard to discern above the noise of people shouting, “but I have a few guesses. It was...it was touch activated, right?” He swallows hard, likely against a churning stomach, judging by the pallor of his skin. “He either has a time limit, or he has a release word he needs to use before his stamina runs out, or--”
Aizawa’s body lunges. Midoriya, expression unreadable, doesn’t move out of the way--he just ducks under Aizawa’s arms and whips Aizawa’s torso to the side, taking advantage of Aizawa’s poor balance and effectively slamming him into the floor of the ring.
While Aizawa reels from the impact, his body has already rolled to a recovery and tackled Midoriya around the waist, bringing both of them to the ground. Before Midoriya can catch his breath back from where it’s been knocked out of him, Aizawa has punched his jaw hard enough to give the kid whiplash.
There has to be a way to find the reins over his own body again. There have been quirks like this used on him before, and he could always find a lever or an imaginary rope to tug on. Aizawa tries to retreat into his own mind, but the impact of his fists on Midoriya’s face drag him out of concentration twice more.
He’s causing real damage, and Midoriya’s refusing to use his quirk to throw Aizawa off. He should be fighting back. He should be doing anything, but instead, his nose is bleeding and one of his eyebrows is split and Midoriya’s eyes have become wild and unfocused.
Please fight back, Aizawa screams, and wrenches his mind back hard enough that his next punch falters, skews to the side and hits the floor of the ring with force that elicits a horrific crack from one of his knuckles.
(It’s better than hearing any of the bones in Midoriya’s face break.)
When the expected blow doesn’t come, Midoriya’s eyes finally focus in on Aizawa’s again, uncertain, surprised.
Hit me, Aizawa pleads. Your quirk is recognizable, but you can deal with that when you get out of here.
Woozily, Midoriya’s eyes slide shut, then open again. This split-second drags on for what feels like a full minute, and only passes when Aizawa registers something like comprehension in Midoriya’s face. With a darting glance to where Aizawa’s fist has punched the floor, Midoriya comes back to life.
As the tiny frame of leeway shrinks, Midoriya recovers just enough to buck Aizawa off, then plants a strong foot in the center of Aizawa’s chest and uses just enough of his quirk to send Aizawa careening across the ring until his back slams into ropes and bounces off into a useless pile on the ground.
Like a limp marionette, he is dragged up to his feet. The momentary lapse of the quirk has disappeared without a trace. Aizawa can’t find any sort of vulnerability, or loophole, and he can’t remember what he’d done in his panic before. Midoriya’s not going to kill him, even if Aizawa can’t hold back.
“It’s okay, sensei.” Slick blood coats Midoriya’s smile until his teeth no longer shine white. The blood dribbles over his lip and down his chin and falls unheeded onto the front of Midoriya’s ruined uniform. His feet remain sturdy in their fighting stance, as if he isn’t hurt at all, but his eyes are unfocused and one of them struggles to stay open while blood from his eyebrow weeps into it. “It’s not your fault.”
(He was going to be such a great hero, crosses Aizawa’s mind, already speaking in past tense.)
Aizawa, unlike other pro heroes he’s met, has never had the luxury of being able to retreat into the back of his mind. Yamada has quietly told him about being under torture and closing himself in a small room in the base of his skull until the pain went away. Kayama has spoken of watching herself from a high spot in the ceiling, fleeing her skull and finding safe haven in the rafters to watch what happened to her body.
Aizawa’s body is not his own, but he isn’t allowed to leave when it charges at Midoriya. His hands are not his own, but they still swing into Midoriya’s skull-- Midoriya can’t even block, he’s too unsteady-- and Aizawa still feels his knuckles make sharp, unforgiving contact.
His lips don’t move when he tells them to. Instead of finding safety inside the enclosure of his skull, he finds himself trapped, unable to be heard when he begins to scream, stop. Stop. I’m going to kill him!
After the next unblocked strike, Midoriya’s steadfast stance wobbles, his head snaps to the side with Aizawa’s punch. His loss of balance seems--wrong, somehow. Something is different.
“Sensei, it’s not your fault,” Midoriya says, his words marred by gurgling blood. And at the exact right time, he turns his hand over, clamps it onto Aizawa’s wrist, and uses his quirk to dart behind Aizawa, pinning the arm behind his back and then jumping up to throw an arm around Aizawa’s neck.
Good kid.
Aizawa feels his body jerk, writhe, attempt to break free. In his struggle, amplified by someone who doesn’t care about his limits, his bad elbow bends just-wrong and he can’t even let out a noise of pain. His vision spins into red agony and he hears something snap and he can’t even blink the sensation away.
“I’m sorry,” Midoriya gasps, still maintaining his unyielding pin of Aizawa’s broken arm to the middle of his back. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry,” he continues to say. Aizawa feels his thumb press against something smooth— it’s the home button of Aizawa’s phone. Midoriya, even half-conscious, has figured out how to get Aizawa’s phone unlocked.
Aizawa bucks, but the person controlling him doesn’t know how to extricate themselves from this, so Aizawa’s balance tips too-far and Midoriya manages to slam him down to the ground, crunching Aizawa’s face into the floor of the ring.
Something in his face crinkles, breaks. Aizawa’s nose bends the wrong way, and it begins to bleed. It smells like the concrete floor of the USJ.
This time, instead of jumping immediately to trying to throw Midoriya off, Aizawa’s body goes slack for a moment. Perhaps the man is gathering his thoughts, preparing a strategy, but Aizawa can’t even begin to strategize with the feeling of hairline fractures arcing through the front of his face.
“—I can’t talk long. Are you a pro? You were just at the top of Eraserhead’s call history.” Midoriya must be speaking to someone on Aizawa’s phone. Midoriya’s voice swims in and out, periodically dropping behind the pulse thumping through Aizawa’s skull. “ Mic-sensei—! I-- sent my location , I sent it, please come as quickly as you can.”
Without a second of warning, Aizawa’s torso twists sharply with the intent of throwing a startled Midoriya off of him. The motion only gives him a small amount of slack, but it’s enough for Aizawa to scrabble free, planting a hand in Midoriya’s face and shoving with all of his strength.
Midoriya drops the phone. Aizawa spins on the floor of the ring, shoving out a foot and kicking the phone far away until it comes to a halt at the other corner where it’s out of Midoriya’s reach.
Warm blood drips down his chin, splashing onto the mat as he is pulled back up to his feet.
I let you down, Aizawa wants to yell. I was responsible to get you home safely. Save yourself and get out of here.
“Sensei,” Midoriya assures him, garbled by his bloody nose, “it’s gonna be over soon. I dunno if you can hear me, but--”
Aizawa reaches forward in a lunge for Midoriya’s throat, and Midoriya dodges and drives the sharp edge of his shoulder into Aizawa’s stomach.
Aizawa sees the lights, and the faraway ceiling, and then a confusing blast of colors and sounds as his back hits the ground. The crowd roars, deafening, but the sound trickles into Aizawa’s ears slowly and unevenly.
Gradually, he begins to hear Midoriya talking, pleading. “—I don’t, I mean—it’s. This is going to hurt, I’m sorry, I’m sorry--” and then Midoriya takes hold of Aizawa’s broken arm and uses it to flip Aizawa over onto his stomach, where he can put a knee in the center of Aizawa’s back and pin him like a butterfly on a corkboard.
“He’s sitting past the lights to the left,” Midoriya says, in an undertone, and wrenches Aizawa’s upper torso to the side, turning Aizawa’s neck by force and angling his uncooperative head upwards. Finally, Aizawa lays sight on the man with the puppeteering quirk, and Aizawa understands what Midoriya’s plan is.
As the initial burst of pain subsides into a tooth-grinding ache, Aizawa flips the switch on his quirk.
The mind-control, previously a thick syrupy weight over Aizawa’s bones, drains away until Aizawa feels his fingers again. He stops struggling against Midoriya’s chokehold, and Midoriya releases him immediately, leaving Aizawa to flop back down onto the mat, smashing his cheek into thick plastic.
Aizawa’s broken arm smacks down to the floor, uncooperative as well. Now that there’s nothing keeping him moving, he can’t even breathe past the pain lancing through his entire body. All he can do is stare straight ahead, out at the gathering of spectators that’s scattering at the sight of Midoriya, vindictive, vaulting over the ropes and rocketing towards their captor at the top of the stairs with green electricity charging every step he takes.
Aizawa should be able to stand up. This isn’t the worst pain he’s been in.
But instead, as Midoriya punches their captor so hard that several of the man’s teeth fly out, Aizawa only watches with unheroic satisfaction until cold, woozy unconsciousness overpowers his weak field of vision.
Aizawa’s return to consciousness is unpleasant.
First, he is overwhelmed by the feeling that he’s being smothered. Lifting the arm that feels easiest to lift up to his face, he discovers that the suffocating feeling is from layers of bandages covering his face. His nose must have been broken. His nose looked pretty fucked up before this, and he’s morbidly curious as to how much worse it can get before it just falls off his face.
Around his other arm, he feels the stiff restraint of a cast. From feeling alone, Aizawa thinks that that’s the only cast he has, but the rest of his torso aches like an elephant sits on his chest. Even if his ribs aren’t broken, he’s going to be having chest pain for weeks. He’s too old to wake up like this anymore.
After he’s gathered as much information as he could without sight, he forces his eyes open, blinking against searing white lights and confirming his suspicions that he’s landed in a hospital. He lies on a cot in the center of a ward, with light green curtains drawn all around him to separate him from other patients.
Beyond the curtains surrounding him, he hears nurses and other patients and visitors bustling around in a confusing jumble, so he’s not completely alone. From where he reclines, he can see neither clock nor window to check what time of day it is, but judging by the activity in the ward, it’s during visiting hours, at least. That means Aizawa at least stayed in the hospital overnight, and it leaves an unpleasant taste in Aizawa’s mouth that nobody is here to visit him.
It seems that he’s gotten a little dependent on Hizashi being there when he wakes up in the hospital. But...it is during the school day, and he decides that he’s glad Hizashi isn’t overreacting or panicking about the situation. As much as Aizawa wants to see him, it’s strangely reassuring that his injuries hadn’t necessitated an anxiety attack on behalf of his husband.
Even though...there must be a reason why Aizawa remembers Hizashi as being part of the incident Aizawa had responded to. Now that he’s thinking about it, pieces begin to fall into place. Hizashi was the person who Midoriya called to respond to...the underground fighting ring, which Aizawa colossally fucked up in trying to investigate.
Aizawa attacked Midoriya in front of a crowd of people.
Aizawa’s mind can’t even begin to process the sheer amount of horror that overcomes it. He feels lightheaded, distant, and lost throughout the time that a nurse comes and checks over him. She lists injuries, and tells him what someone had healed for him, but Aizawa just stares through her with vacant terror, wondering where Midoriya is and wondering how long he has before Midoriya’s lawyer mother comes and pile-drives him into prison. Midoriya hadn’t broken any limbs, right? Midoriya hadn’t permanently injured himself while dealing with the repercussions of Aizawa’s mistakes...right?
After the nurse leaves, allegedly to find a visitor for Aizawa, Aizawa finally gathers himself and re-centers himself in rationality. He hadn’t voluntarily attacked Midoriya, and Midoriya had been whole enough to go attack the ringleader without hesitation.
Midoriya had smiled through blood spilling out of his mouth and had apologized to Aizawa while subduing him in the most gentle way possible. He’s a good kid. He’s a good kid who Aizawa had punched half to death last night.
The nurse returns with the visitor she promised, interrupting Aizawa’s thoughts. Aizawa hadn’t been paying close enough attention to really understand what she’d said before she left, but he isn’t surprised that the person she returns with is Tsukauchi. Considering everything that had happened, a debrief is in order.
“Thank you,” Tsukauchi tells the nurse, who then slips through the curtain to go tend to someone else. Tsukauchi takes a seat next to Aizawa’s bed, after setting his coat down on the back of the chair. “Hello, Eraserhead.”
“Hello,” Aizawa says back. He begins the skeleton-aching process of sitting up, struggling to prop himself up with his unbroken arm. Tsukauchi doesn’t reach out to help him, which Aizawa is glad for. He doesn't think he can be touched right now, especially not by a work acquaintance.
Perhaps simply to be polite, Tsukauchi asks, “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Aizawa says.
“I do always love our talks.”
“Can we get this over with?” Aizawa asks, unamused even though Tsukauchi is trying his hardest to keep the conversation light.
With a sigh, Tsukauchi drops the veneer of good humor. “Of course. We can wait for you to be healed again to do most of this,” he allows, “but I did want to keep you updated on what happened after you fell unconscious.” He sits forward in his seat, hands clasped, arms resting on his knees. “We apprehended the ringleader of the fighting ring. His quirk, as you probably guessed, was a puppeteering quirk that allows him to take one person under his direct control once a day. We managed to contain the majority of the people present in the crowd, and we have a memory quirk specialist working with them. I doubt any of them will want to publicize what they saw, lest they incriminate themselves for being present.”
While Tsukauchi talks, Aizawa relaxes bit by bit. There is still the matter of his hero reputation, forever tarnished, even to just a few people, by the sight of him trying to murder a teenager.
Speaking of that teenager, Aizawa nods and then asks, “Is Midoriya safe?”
Tsukauchi smiles, though the sight is a bit strained. “Yes, he is now.”
“What does that mean?” Aizawa’s tone sharpens.
The chief of police raises his hands, soothing, a little patronizing. “Hey. He’s fine. Present Mic said he was near inconsolable last night when he arrived, though. Mic had to pry him off of the ringleader before he killed him.”
“Shit.” Aizawa grimaces.
“His provisional license isn’t in danger, because Mic made a pretty good case for him. The kid didn’t use his quirk on the guy, so it could be explained as apprehension of a villain. Midoriya spent a couple hours under observation here after he got patched up, though.”
Of course Midoriya would be messed up after what happened. Aizawa can’t even imagine going through that. He can’t imagine the twitchy, oppressive horror of having his mentor directly attempt to murder him, especially considering Aizawa is demonstrably good at busting through barriers to get at whatever target he’s spotted.
“You’re--no, listen to me,” Tsukauchi says, and finally lays a hand on Aizawa’s bed, nearby enough that Aizawa notices, but not touching Aizawa and thus not incurring any reflexive attack from Aizawa. “They had to keep an eye on him because he was so upset that he couldn’t be with you. He just wanted to make sure you were alright, but we didn’t know if the quirk had worn off on you a hundred percent, and we didn’t know if you would try to attack him again.”
Midoriya’s...not afraid of him.
Aizawa’s going to force that kid to get some self-preservation if it kills him.
“You look confused,” Tsukauchi observes, sitting back a little bit as he watches the realization work its way through Aizawa’s brain.
Aizawa shakes his head, and then lowers his gaze to the thin hospital blanket draped over him as he tries to get his thoughts in order. “I need to talk to him.”
“Sure. I mean, I’m not the person in charge of that decision, but I can ask around for you.” When Aizawa looks over, Tsukauchi gives him a reassuring smile. “Take it easy, Eraserhead.”
“You too,” Aizawa says. He watches Tsukauchi stand up and leave, and then his mind, no longer distracted, returns to the shallow ditch of guilt and physical pain that had plagued him earlier.
Midoriya is finally allowed to visit two hours later, immediately following a snippy argument that Aizawa had with a nurse who wouldn’t let him stand up and walk around a bit, as if Aizawa was too stupid to figure out how to stretch his legs without jostling his broken arm. Aizawa had eventually prevailed, mostly because the nurse got tired of him and left, throwing his hands up and giving up on Aizawa’s obstinance. Aizawa, who had tired himself out with fighting, didn’t end up getting up at all.
When his curtain slides open again, Aizawa expects it to be the nurse, back with reinforcements and perhaps some morphine to make Aizawa less angry. Instead, Midoriya stands there, a bruise blossoming up the side of his jaw, his eyes bloodshot and puffy and his expression in general looking absolutely wrecked.
Aizawa halts, halfway to a snarky greeting. Midoriya halts too, crooked fingers clutching the curtain where he’d slid them aside.
“Why aren’t you in class?” Aizawa finally asks.
“I’ve been here all day,” Midoriya stutters out. He unfreezes, moving forward and letting the curtain fall shut behind him, and slowly makes his way to the chair next to Aizawa’s cot. “I had to...I just. I wasn’t allowed to come see you until twelve hours had passed after you got hit with the quirk.”
Aizawa nods, accepting the answer. Midoriya nods too, awkwardly echoing him, and winces when the movement jostles what must have been a recently-healed broken jaw.
Seeing Midoriya’s expression of pain, Aizawa sits forward. Perhaps he goes too fast, because first, nausea swirls up through his stomach and sends him leaning forward over his knees, breathing carefully. And second, at the sight of Aizawa’s movement, Midoriya flinches away from him, hitting the backrest of his chair with an audible thud.
Hot, unmitigated shame hits Aizawa like a brick wall to the forehead. He feels his face twist with it, and he raises a hand to cover his eyes before he does something stupid like cry about this. Aizawa is the adult here, and Midoriya’s trust in him has been rightfully broken. The last thing anyone needs is Aizawa breaking down into dry sobs, his ruined tear ducts unable to produce even a few drops.
“Midoriya,” Aizawa says, his voice feeling gravelly and scraping, “allow me to apologize.”
Midoriya, after a tense second of silence, asks in a surprisingly steady voice, “For what? I know you wouldn’t hurt me if you hadn’t been forced to.” He laughs, self-deprecating. “I shouldn’t have let us get kidnapped, I just got taken off-guard because I didn’t know he’d used his quirk on you, and--”
“It’s not your fault,” Aizawa snaps, and lowers his hand from his eyes to face Midoriya once more. Again, he must move too sharply, because Midoriya blinks too hard and his hand twitches up into half of a gesture to block his face from attack. The sight sends another stab of pain through Aizawa’s chest, unrelated to the bruises that cover his torso already.
After a long, horrible moment, Midoriya relaxes again. He twists his hands together, and then halts them, and then begins to pick at his already-ruined cuticles, fidgeting with as much tension as he used to have back in his first term at UA.
Aizawa waits him out, gaze drifting back up to the ceiling so that he’s not just staring his student down.
“Sensei,” Midoriya eventually says, hesitant, “please don’t blame yourself.”
“I--” Aizawa starts, but Midoriya looks up at him with resolve that he rarely has when speaking to authority figures.
“I need to say this.”
Aizawa shuts his mouth.
Slowly, Midoriya starts again. “Don’t blame yourself for this...or for, uh, for how I’m reacting to you right now. I just need a little while for my brain to remember that you aren’t...going to hurt me. I already--I mean, well. I already trust you. But I just need a few days to, um--just remember that. Does that make sense?”
With I already trust you, Aizawa’s eyes have begun to burn. It’s the feeling of the tears that would be falling if his eyes worked that way. It took him two years to get Midoriya not to cower or run the other way in the face of an angry Aizawa, and all he wants to ensure is that he hasn’t ruined that forever.
“Take the time you need,” Aizawa says, his voice embarrassingly heavy with emotion.
A long sigh of relief leaves Midoriya. His shoulders slump, as if he had been convinced that Aizawa would be mad at him for saying that, for some strange reason that Aizawa can’t even imagine.
With Midoriya’s exhale, the atmosphere around them lightens, and the tension between them evaporates. Things aren’t the same. They can’t be, now that Aizawa knows how much force it takes to break one of Midoriya’s fingers, or how it feels to punch Midoriya in the face with enough force to break his jaw. But at least Aizawa knows that his mistake hasn’t ruined anything permanently, this time.
“Um...Aizawa-sensei,” Midoriya asks, voice lilting up high in concern, “are you crying?”
“No,” Aizawa snaps, before he can rein in his tone, but this time, Midoriya doesn’t twitch away from him.