Chapter Text
In a world of heroes, the studies into what made a hero were extensive. Psychological studies of heroism have been invested in that definition since long before the evolution of quirks, but researchers have generally concluded that acts of heroism involve a voluntary act of service for others who are in need, without any expectation of reward or gain, with recognition and acceptance of the potential risk or sacrifice made by the undertaking of heroic actions.
They are often characterised with twelve central traits, and are considered to be brave, courageous, determined, helpful, honest, inspirational, protective, self-sacrificial, selfless, and strong, and have conviction and moral integrity.
In an age of quirks, there are pretend heroes, pseudo heroes, false heroes, aspiring heroes, and anti-heroes.
And every once in a while, there are true heroes.
Heroes who are made of greatness.
“-and if you can make sure that these forms are filled, properly, and returned to me by Friday morning. If they aren’t, then Support won’t have time to update your uniforms for the Festival and I’m not asking for any favours getting them through in time,” Aizawa Shouta paused to look meaningfully at Ashido and Kaminari, who avoided making eye contact with him.
He resisted rolling his eye and looked back down at the notes he’d made for the items he needed to cover in home room for that morning. Iida and Yaoyorozu were making their way through the class, handing out equipment request forms, while the students whispered among themselves. The Sports Festival for third years was perhaps the most highly anticipated festival for the entire three years of high school, because, in addition to the regular events, they were also permitted to participate in a no-holds-barred competition where they were allowed to use their full uniform and any support equipment they regularly utilised.
The idea was that it enabled any student who had not already been scouted by an agency the opportunity to display their abilities against their fellow students, in the hope that it would help them line up graduate employment. It was only open to Hero Studies students though, and ran after all the other events had already been held, on the final day of the Festival. Typically, the students who had already performed well in the other events chose not to participate, but Shouta struggled to see a scenario where Bakugou wouldn’t participate in another event that would enable him to show that he was at the top of his cohort for a reason.
And if he was going to, then Midoriya and Todoroki would inevitably participate as well.
For whatever stupid game of one-upmanship they were all playing.
“Mr. Aizawa,” Midoriya perked up, his hand held straight in the air.
Bakugou slumped a little deeper in his chair with a quiet growl, snatching his form from Yaoyorozu as she walked past.
“Yes, Midoriya?” Shouta sighed, stacking his papers away in preparation for the bell.
“Will the stadium be reinforced for the final event?” Midoriya asked curiously, bouncing on the edge of his chair in a way that indicated that he had a long-winded explanation of why it should be that he was barely resisting launching into.
“No more than usual,” Shouta shrugged, continuing before Midoriya could reply, “so I suggest you avoid injuring any of the spectators.”
“But-” Midoriya paused and glanced at the back of Bakugou’s head, “with our equipment…”
“Believe it or not, I am, in fact, aware of all of your destructive capabilities. As a result, the field has-”
“I AM HERE!”
Shouta’s closed his mouth with a click of his jaw as the door to his classroom was slammed open and Yagi leant through the gap, a broad grin on his narrow face.
Once upon a time, his energy had been tempered by being in his diminished, less healthy form. As the years between All Might’s forced retirement had stretched, though, he had started focusing on his health, building up the strength that he had neglected in favour of spending as much time as All Might as possible, and finally learning to eat appropriately for someone who was missing ninety percent of their stomach.
None of this was necessarily a problem, but with the return of his health, had come the return of his ego.
“It’s five minutes until the bell for the change of period,” Shouta advised irritably.
Yagi laughed boisterously, striding into the classroom with his hands in the pockets of the bright yellow, pinstripe suit he had chosen for the day. It was worlds away from the uniform he had worn for decades, and the man himself was probably more than one hundred kilograms thinner, but he wore it with the same pointless confidence that he had worn the mantle of The Symbol of Peace.
“Five minutes early is better than five minutes late,” Yagi grinned, winking at Midoriya, who grinned back.
Shouta bit back the retort he wanted to make and shoved his notebook into his satchel bag instead. The students had perked up and were buzzing with energy, more enthusiastic about whatever idealistic bullshit Yagi was about to serve up to them about life as a hero than anything Shouta had ever had to impart. Even Shinsou, who was sitting at the back of the classroom next to Tokoyami, was watching Yagi with an expression of interest.
Trying to rein them in to have a two-minute discussion about the adjustments that had been made for the Sports Festival for their year would be a pointless endeavour, and would only result in giving himself a headache. He could already feel one developing, tight and sore, across his forehead, but it was possible that it had been caused by lack of sleep and aggravated by Yagi’s sunny demeanour.
At least when Hizashi disrupted his home room class with his brash and loud nature, he apologised for it later. Half of the time, Shouta wasn’t even sure that Yagi recognised that he had been disruptive.
“Fine,” Shouta rolled his eye, picking up his bag jerkily, “forms, Friday.”
He didn’t look to see if the class had taken the instructions on board. Typically, Iida and Yaoyorozu were good at keeping the class to deadlines, so he’d leave it with them.
Yagi caught his shoulder lightly as he went to storm past him though, a small frown on his face.
“Are you okay, Aizawa?”
His tone was soft, almost caring, but Shouta shrugged his hand off.
It took him a moment to remind himself that Yagi was not, in fact, the selfish, self-centred, egotistic asshole that he sometimes built up in his head. That the image of All Might that he had always sneered at was not the same as the man who he had worked alongside for three years.
Just, sometimes, Yagi made it hard to differentiate.
“Over tired,” he mumbled softly.
And it was true.
He was overtired. He had gone from classes the day before, to campus patrol with Cementoss, to city patrol, to a shower, and then back to classes. Not to mention, he had a pile of papers in his in-tray in the staff room and a practical test in the afternoon with 3-A, so his opportunities for sleep were dwindling down to a twenty-minute nap now, and a few hours after dinner before his campus patrol at three in the morning.
And that was assuming that Eri wasn’t still suffering from recurrent nightmares, as she was prone to during the nights when Nemuri looked after her when Shouta had back-to-back patrols. It wasn’t anything against Nemuri, but she was a little sensitive about new places, even if she was used to Nemuri and she was still sleeping in her own bedroom in Shouta’s two-bedroom apartment in the teacher’s dorms.
They were seeing a child psychologist, but if they didn’t start making progress, they might have to look into seeing a psychiatrist instead, and Shouta was reluctant to start forcing her to take medication for her PTSD diagnosis.
So, yes, he was overtired and Yagi’s blinding energy and his optimism was doing precisely nothing for his mood, even if his aggression wasn’t, strictly speaking, justified.
He knew that the students liked the persona, and that Yagi on his own or with his colleagues was much quieter, more amenable to guidance and feedback, helpful and thoughtful. At the same time, he couldn’t deal with either loud, egoistical All Might, or helpful, considerate Yagi at the moment.
He needed a quiet corner and his sleeping bag and not to be disturbed for half an hour.
Yagi nodded with a soft smile, stepping aside to let Shouta leave the classroom.
The corridor, at least, was quiet, as Shouta closed the door to the 3-A classroom with a snick, blocking out the noise from Yagi’s boisterous greeting. The staff room, unfortunately, was not.
Hizashi and Nemuri both didn’t have first period classes, and Hizashi was engaged in a loud discussion with Hound Dog about a baseball game that either had occurred over the weekend or was going to occur over the weekend. It sounded like they had vehemently different ideas about who would win. Frankly, Shouta cared about as much for baseball as he did about American football.
This is to say, not at all.
Nemuri was sitting at her desk when he walked in, frowning at her computer screen with a pair of cat-eyed glasses that she would refuse to admit that she wore perched on the end of her nose. She tapped angrily at her keyboard, her nails clacking on the keys, as Shouta slunk over to his desk beside her and stared at his in-tray with a sour expression. He wondered if it was worth just marking the papers with the students’ average marks, rather than reading them and giving an actual grade.
Nemuri looked up with a huff before he could contemplate throwing all the papers in the bin and claiming that he lost them.
“You’ve had to do this review of your hero license, right?” She asked with a sigh as Shouta was half-way through pulling his sleeping bag out from under his desk.
He paused, glancing at her screen. She seemed like she was halfway through the truly horrendously long document that was designed to make sure that all registered heroes still met the same rigorous guidelines that had started being introduced for hero studies students two years ago after the emergence of the League of Villains.
Of course, the League was no longer a significant threat, All for One had died of health complications in Tartarus and the other members of the League had been arrested over a year ago. Because of difficulties establishing mental culpability, several members of the League weren’t tried. Probably the most controversial of these was Dabi, who had been revealed to be Todoroki Touya, but given how much he appeared to loathe Endeavor, the house arrest and mandatory counselling he had been given seemed like a fitting punishment to Shouta.
Todoroki seemed happy enough to have him at home, at least.
The villain known as Mister Compress had escaped Tartarus, after being declared one of only two full members of the League fit to stand trial, and Spinner had been broken out of custody when he was being transported from Tartarus to Tokyo for his trial. Otherwise, Toga and Twice had been placed in psychiatric institutions, and Kurogiri…
The legal system had a difficult time working out what to do with Kurogiri, because his sentience was on a completely different level to the other nomus that were decommissioned with the fall of the League. Shouta didn’t even know what the correct thing to had been, because he was equally uncomfortable with the idea of killing Oboro again, or letting something that was categorically not Oboro continue to utilise his body.
In the end, the decision had been taken out of their hands.
Shigaraki, who was now to be referred to by his birth name – Shimura, had proven virtually unable to be rehabilitated without Kurogiri. The co-dependency he showed was extremely unhealthy, but it was decided that Shimura was far too dangerous to not be fully rehabilitated. Yagi had been a strong advocate that Shimura deserved a second chance at life, despite very nearly causing the fall of Japanese society as they knew it.
So, Kurogiri was part of Shimura’s rehabilitation, but he was also the subject of extended attempts at rehabilitation himself.
Basically, the doctors wanted to try and undo what had been done to Oboro’s body that had made him Kurogiri, since they suspected that there was at least some of Oboro’s consciousness left. There had been an extended lecture about humanity that Shouta hadn’t listened to.
As far as he was concerned, he had mourned Oboro, for almost fifteen years. For doctors to continue to experiment on his corpse now was just continuing to desecrate it. Whatever echoes of Oboro’s consciousness that were left in Kurogiri were just that, echoes.
Hizashi wasn’t very happy with him. Part of Kurogiri’s rehabilitation was continued, consistent and prolonged exposure to the connections in his life that had made him Oboro. Hizashi went every week to the hospital in Tokyo were Kurogiri and Shimura’s rehabilitation was being held, while Oboro’s parents visited once a month. Shouta hadn’t gone once in the almost two years that Kurogiri had been incarcerated.
Not since the first time that they had discovered that Kurogiri was a nomu that had been constructed from the corpse of one of his best friends.
Maybe he was getting old.
Maybe he was just sick of losing people. Or almost losing people.
Nemuri had spent almost six months in a coma after the fight that had brought down the League, and more of his students had been seriously injured than he even wanted to experience again. Going through the process of trying to get Oboro back, only to realise that it was a lost cause and lose him again, would be more pain than it was worth.
It didn’t make Hizashi any happier with him about it.
Either way, one of the results of the actions of League was that registered heroes were now required to undergo retraining and retesting every three years, as well as extended ongoing training designed to reinforce the ideals of heroics. Shouta had renewed his license almost six months earlier when he’d had to apply to be Eri’s full time foster parent, rather than her emergency foster parent. He wasn’t quite sure why it made him a better foster parent to have a renewed license, but it seemed like a stupid thing to argue over when he had no intention of putting Eri back into the system.
He was fairly certain that if he had even tried, he would have had three teenage boys trying to adopt her instead. Well. Mirio was twenty in July, but that wasn’t the point.
“Yeah,” Shouta replied with a yawn as he rolled out his sleeping bag.
“What did you write in this section where we have to review the incident that we most regretted, and what we would have done differently? This sounds like a stupid job application, not a hero license renewal application,” Nemuri sighed.
Shouta unzipped his boots and toed them off, ignoring Nemuri’s derisive expression as he pulled the sleeping bag on.
“It’s not a complicated question, you just need to demonstrate your ability to reflect on your behaviours and suggest ways that you would have improved, given another chance,” he shrugged, pulling the hood of the sleeping bag over his head.
Nemuri kicked his desk chair into the nice, dark den that was the underside of his desk that he was about to crawl into, blocking the entrance.
“Help me with this, nap later,” she instructed with a drawn huff.
“I haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, just treat it like a bloody job application if it makes it easier. It’s just stuffing anyway, they’re not going to deny you your license if they’re not happy with your explanation of why you want to be a hero and whether your original motivation has changed,” Shouta growled quietly, pushing his desk chair to the far side of his desk so he could fit underneath it.
“They denied the renewal of two teachers at Shiketsu, the school is having to consider whether they can be reassigned to non-hero teaching roles, which would step away from the mould that UA set when Nezu introduced having a full set of staff who were heroes, or whether anyone who fails renewal is dismissed,” Hizashi interrupted, leaning over the top of the divider between the desks with his glasses perched on the very end of his nose.
“So?” Shouta shrugged, folding his legs under him to sit cross-legged in his sleeping bag, just out from under his desk, “Shiketsu isn’t UA, and none of their teachers were actively involved in the war against the Paranormal Liberation Front. I’m not surprised that some of their teachers failed renewal, but what is the HSPC going to say? Thank you for your service but fuck your values?”
Nemuri frowned.
“Well, frankly? Yes. This is serious, I don’t know how to answer this stuff. I’ve had years as a pro, and most of my cases were completely mundane. That’s life as a hero. Not every day is a flashy fight, or an action you regret. Most of the day-to-day is just keeping criminals off the streets and doing our best to protect civilians. But I don’t know what I regret the most, and I don’t know why I became a hero, and I don’t know if it’s changed,” she threw her hands in the air in frustration.
“This is ridiculous, I’m going to sleep,” Shouta rolled his eye.
“Aizawa Shouta!” Nemuri snapped, catching the back of his sleeping bag as he went to crawl under his desk, “I really need your help…”
Shouta stared at the promising darkness of the underside of his desk, and then up at Nemuri, who looked genuinely upset and worried, and then at Hizashi, who was watching him with more faith than he had ever earnt.
He glanced back at his den.
His twenty-minute nap drained away before his eyes and he sighed.
“Fine. Your biggest regret and what you would have done differently?” He asked, pulling himself to his feet and into his desk chair.
“Yes,” Nemuri confirmed, pushing her screen around so Shouta could see the page displaying the document she was filling in.
“You’ve been a hero for fourteen odd years, right?” Shouta asked and Nemuri nodded, “what moment stands out the most for you in all that time? If I ask you to think of one fight, which one do you think of?”
Nemuri frowned, but there was a flicker in her sky-blue eyes that confirmed that she immediately thought of one.
“Did you win or lose?” Shouta asked.
“I won,” Nemuri replied hesitantly.
“So what made it stand out?” He prompted.
“It was a teenager, and it was his third strike for a minor offence. He received a mandatory prison sentence of seven years… he still hasn’t been released,” Nemuri replied quietly.
“What would you have done differently?” Shouta questioned, pulling the first report off the top of his in-tray.
Iida.
So, if he didn’t already want to sleep, he would after he read Iida’s undoubtedly perfectly researched, perfectly presented but passionless argument.
“I think I would have liked to take more time with it and evaluate if there was another action than I could have taken, I was focused on the arrest but I don’t think anyone had ever bothered talking to him about what he had been doing…” Nemuri frowned, “I just wanted the collar and I cost someone their twenties.”
“There you go, a regret and something you’d do differently,” Shouta shrugged as he started reading Iida’s paper on the ethics of quirk registration.
“What if that isn’t enough? Or what if it isn’t what they want?” Nemuri replied, her hands hovering over her keyboard.
“Is it true?” Shouta replied, as kindly as he could when his patience was quickly wearing out.
“Yes, but what did you say?” Nemuri sighed as Hizashi shifted to walk around their desks to look over her shoulder.
“I talked about my fight at the USJ,” he shrugged, scrawling a seventeen out of twenty on the corner of Iida’s paper and some recommended extra readings.
“See, that’s a poignant moment in history that most of us have regrets about, and who wouldn’t regret not being strong enough to look after a room full of kids when faced with villains like that?” Hizashi complained, “but we can’t all say that.”
“I said I regretted not making a more strategic decision in light of the knowledge that All Might had used up his allotted time in his quirk-form for the day. Instead, I assumed that I was good enough to look after the students and proceeded with a class knowing that I did not have the correct number of hero supervisors for the activities planned. My regret was that I didn’t ask Nezu for a replacement staff member before we left for the USJ. Whether I was strong enough or not is irrelevant, and not worth harbouring regrets over.
“If I had died there, then I would have been devastated to not save my students, but I would have known that I had done everything in my power. The truth is that I didn’t, I knowingly took them into danger with fewer than the required number of hero supervisors, and I almost got an entire class of hero studies students killed because I was arrogant,” Shouta replied sharply as he pulled out Uraraka’s essay, “your personal regret doesn’t need to have made national news, but as long as you are genuine about your response then that’s all they can ask.”
“What about why did you become a hero, and has your motivation changed?” Hizashi asked, leaning over his laptop with his own renewal assessment open.
“I don’t know, why did you become a hero?” Shouta rolled his eye.
“Because All Might made it seem like a pretty bang-up career,” Snipe shrugged, sitting down on Shouta’s other side with his laptop, “kinda grand that we beat him into teaching, hey?”
“And how many people do you think are going to write All Might is cool on their renewals?” Shouta groaned.
“Well, All Might is cool,” Nemuri smirked, ducking under the ball of paper Shouta tossed at her head.
“Okay, fine, All Might is cool is fine to write as why you started, but just follow with something more substantial,” he shook his head.
“I don’t know, Yagi is still pretty awesome,” Hizashi smirked.
Shouta shot Hizashi a flat look as he marked Uraraka’s essay fifteen out of twenty and slammed it down in his out-tray.
“Wow, he pissed you off early,” Nemuri giggled, “what did he do?”
“I just don’t have the energy for his false positivity this morning, I’m exhausted and now I’m helping three of my colleagues with their homework,” he replied, his tone only slightly harsh.
“You know, you could stand to be nicer to Yagi, he really admires you,” Thirteen pointed out calmly as she walked past, carrying a stack of medical papers that she was probably carrying to Recovery Girl’s office.
“I’m nice to him,” Shouta argued, “he’s just too much sometimes.”
Nemuri hummed disbelievingly as Hizashi and Snipe carefully looked down at their computers, typing a few sentences into their renewal applications.
“He’s been through a lot though, he needs a few good friends,” Thirteen shrugged before she slipped through the door out of the staff room.
Shouta touched his fingertips to the metal join just below his knee, where the prosthetic leg clamped onto what was left of his calf. The electrodes designed to read the movements of his muscles and tendons, to move the prosthetic, were a little more noticeable than normal, and the stocking designed to prevent chaffing was too tight.
But, honestly, most of the time his colleagues forgot that he had lost more than his eye coming out of the war. That he, too, had almost lost his quirk. Hizashi and Nemuri didn’t, which was why they winced at Thirteen’s comment, but otherwise – sometimes he was too good at getting on with his job, and everyone forgot that there had been a time not so long ago that he didn’t need to wear an eyepatch.
Thirteen paused in the doorway, and looked back at him with wide eyes.
“I didn’t- I didn’t mean that you haven’t been through a lot too, just… oh bugger. I’m sorry Aizawa,” she added quickly.
He shrugged.
“We’ve all been through a lot, don’t worry about it,” he replied calmly, “except Present Mic, he’s still as pretty as ever.”
Hizashi laughed, slapping him between the shoulder blades good-naturedly.
“Aww Sho’, I didn’t know you cared,” he lowered his glasses to wink, running a hand over his stupidly over-gelled hair.
“Go back to writing your application, I don’t want to pick up your classes if you don’t get readmitted,” Shouta rolled his eye.
Thirteen offered Shouta a shift of her shoulders that he interpreted as an acceptance of his acceptance of her apology, and let the staff room door close behind her.
“Okay, but in all seriousness, what did you write for why you wanted to be a hero originally?” Nemuri sighed, scribbling a note on the pad of paper next to her laptop.
“I’m not telling you that,” Shouta frowned, “it’s private.”
“So it was because of All Might, then?” Snipe cocked his hip, his thumbs tucked into the pockets of his jeans.
Shouta couldn’t see his face, but he would have paid good money that he was smirking.
“It was not because of All Might,” Shouta rolled his eye, “not-“
“I bet I could guess what you wrote,” Hizashi perked up with a grin, his eyes glittering with mischief.
“Do it and I tell the whole staff room why you did,” Shouta replied coolly.
Hizashi narrowed his eyes at him from behind bright yellow sunglasses and hummed, then opened his mouth, apparently having decided that Shouta was bluffing.
“Don’t,” Shouta warned, “I still know where she lives, and if she thought you were a weirdo in middle school, I can make it so much worse.”
Hizashi’s jaw clicked closed and he glowered down at him.
“Spoilsport,” he huffed quietly, looking back down at his computer, “I’m going to have to think of something better than that.”
“It does not matter what your original motivation was. If they take away licenses from every hero who says they were inspired by All Might, or because someone told them they had a good quirk for heroics, or because they wanted to impress someone, there would be none left. The second half of all these sentences is the key point they need answered,” Shouta rolled his eye, picking up the stack of papers that was Midoriya’s essay and wondering if he could reasonably foist it onto All Might.
Probably not.
All Might had two full years’ experience as a teacher now, he didn’t need to help grade Shouta’s papers so he could get a hang of it anymore. It was sort of a shame, because Shouta was pretty certain that he liked Yagi best when they were alternating who brought back hot coffee/tea from the staffroom and drowned in marking together. Outside those strange midnight hours, everything seemed harder.
Yagi couldn’t drink, so most of the staff evenings were wasted on him and he had never come anyway. Everyone had eventually stopped inviting him. He went on campus patrols, but his schedule rarely matched up with Shouta’s. It wasn’t as though Shouta was being purposefully difficult, they just… didn’t see eye-to-eye on most things, and now that Yagi didn’t need his experience teaching anymore, they were colleagues, and cordial, but not friends.
It wasn’t a big deal.
“I can’t believe that you’re all qualified teachers and you are having this much difficulty with it, we do this to the students all the time,” Shouta grumbled, flicking through the pages of Midoriya’s essay.
Twelve.
He had asked for one-thousand-five-hundred words. He was trying to not overload them with work so early in the term, but he supposed Midoriya still got a little… enthusiastic about research.
“You do this to the students? Most of my exams are multiple choice questions,” Nemuri sounded scandalised.
Hizashi looked a little pale as well, and Snipe was watching him with an expression of concern behind his glasses.
“Yes,” Shouta replied with a confused roll of his shoulders, “it engages critical thinking because you need to assess what the marker is looking for in the answer, and requires you to be concise, which helps you argue better. They need to be able to express themselves articulately, otherwise their mission reports will read like gibberish.”
Hizashi made a pained whine and went back to typing, while Nemuri shook her head. Snipe sighed deeply and looked back down at his laptop as well.
“It’s hardly any wonder that your kids are terrified of you, I remember the essays we had to do in literature class for Mr. Hiyori, I hated that man so much. Who the fuck cares if the curtains were blue? Sometimes curtains are just blue, it doesn’t mean the character is depressed!” Nemuri huffed, tossing her hair over her shoulder.
Shouta rolled his eye, dropping Midoriya’s novel on top of the pile in his out-tray, with notes for extended readings and a mark of eighteen out of twenty. The bell for the change of period had rung twenty minutes earlier, so some of the staff were starting to filter in and out of the staffroom, but it wasn’t until Hound Dog came back into the staffroom, carrying a psychology textbook and a cup of coffee from the café closest to the school, that Shouta paid it any mind.
His tan-gold ears were pricked out of his mane of hair, and his muzzle was raised, mouth half open as he scented the air.
“Inui?” Snipe asked curiously as Ectoplasm slipped into the staffroom around Hound Dog, grumbling about the first years and their lack of understanding about basic algebra.
“Nezu say anything about visitors on the grounds?” Hound Dog asked, growling over the words.
Several sets of eyes swivelled to look at Shouta, who personally felt that was unjustified. Nezu didn’t tell him everything. In fact, Nezu took pleasure in occasionally keeping things from him to see how long it would take him to find out. His personal best was two hours after Nezu had made the decision, Nezu’s was five months – which Shouta argued was cheating because school hadn’t even been in session for three of the five months Nezu counted, and Shouta had been hospitalised for three weeks during the remaining two.
Regardless, Nezu’s record was five months before Shouta caught wind of him plotting something and accurately guessed what it had been.
If it had also been related to Yagi’s joining their teaching staff, and the reason why, it was not a contributing factor to why it took Shouta so long.
“It’s a Tuesday and the sun is out, yes – it’s possible that Nezu is planning something. It’s also possible that we’ve just started a school year and parents are doing the campus tour with their second-year middle school brats,” Shouta shrugged, picking up Bakugou’s essay with a smirk.
He was always sort of interested to see how passionate Bakugou could get in an essay without actually swearing. Thus far, despite his language in class, he had never actually cursed in an essay.
Hound Dog grumble-growled a response that Shouta missed but that made Snipe look up sharply.
“What?” He asked, closing the lid of his laptop sharply.
“Said, there’s no new kids on campus,” Hound Dog repeated, more clearly.
Shouta frowned, unzipping his sleeping bag before pulling his boots back on.
“I don’t have a class until after lunch, I’ll do a sweep of the building if you and Snipe take the perimeter?” He suggested with a weary yawn.
Even with the fall of the League of Villains, there were too many idiots who wanted to prove themselves the next villain to be feared. What the fascination with attacking a school was, Shouta would never understand. Surely, attacking Endeavor Agency, home of the new Number 1 was more impressive than stalking the ex-Symbol of Peace through the corridors of an educational facility?
Except, evidently, it wasn’t.
Hound Dog nodded as Hizashi stood as well, adjusting the oversized speaker he wore around his neck.
“I’ll check the inside with you, we can cover more ground if we both head out,” he grinned, “where was the scent coming from?”
Hound Dog huffed at the air again, his lips curled into a grimace over his sharp canines.
“The western corridors…” he growled.
Shouta frowned.
There were a lot of rooms along the western corridors, including Nezu’s office and some of the support workshops, but Yagi’s office was also on that side of the main building and it wouldn’t be the first time someone had tried to break in.
There had been a weird moment in time during Yagi’s second year teaching when there had been a trend on social media of people trying to get selfies of themselves sitting at All Might’s massive UA staff desk. Most of the images had been photoshopped, and the ones that weren’t were of the students who had asked, but it had meant an increase in people trying to get onto the school campus when they shouldn’t have been. They weren’t successful, because Nezu’s security system was horrifyingly efficient, but it hadn’t helped Shouta feel more relaxed or well-rested about his job.
“I’ll check on Yagi,” Shouta sighed as he clasped his goggles around his neck.
Hizashi laughed and trotted after him as he slouched out of the staffroom, his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket.
“You sure I shouldn’t check on Yagi? Are you going to grouch at him?” Hizashi needled.
“I’m not going to grouch at him for existing, I’m going to flay whoever snuck onto the campus to steal his favourite mug again,” Shouta replied, his tone a little sharp, “just check the support rooms, it would be our bad luck that we assumed someone was after All Might but were actually in here stealing hero support gear.”
“It might just be someone visiting Nezu from the HSPC, Hound Dog always gets a bit antsy whenever those lot are on campus,” Hizashi shrugged, fiddling with the wireless headsets they used while on campus patrol.
“Hopefully, let me know if you see anything odd,” Shouta yawned, knocking his elbow against the elevator button as Hizashi continued along the second-floor corridor towards the support workshops.
The fifth-floor corridor along the western side of the UA main building was quiet, almost deserted. Class 3-A would have literature with Cementoss, and Yagi didn’t have any classes until after lunch when he had a combined class with 3-A, 3-B, Kan and himself over the last two periods before final bell. He had a desk in the staffroom that he utilised occasionally but when he wasn’t feeling as well, he liked to relax by himself for an hour or so before he came down to the chaotic mess that was the staffroom at UA.
Shouta didn’t blame him. If he had a private office to retire to, he probably wouldn’t come out.
Which, retrospectively, might be why Nezu had never offered him one.
That, and he wasn’t the Symbol of Peace.
Favouritism.
Honestly, he should complain to Nezu. Was it so much to ask for to have a couch at his napping disposal whenever he wanted one? Whenever he tried to use one of the ones in the staffroom, someone (usually Nemuri) sat on his ankles.
Yagi’s door was closed, which wasn’t unusual, but not locked, also not unusual.
Shouta knocked politely, staring down the corridor as he waited for a response. There wasn’t anything that seemed out of place, but there was an oddly sweet scent on the air. The hydrangea bushes that grew around the building wouldn’t be blossoming for another month or so, and the smell wasn’t quite floral. It was sweet like toffee apples but not as pleasant, possibly something from support downstairs that had come through the building on the breeze.
After a few minutes of silence, Shouta knocked again, a little louder.
“Yagi, it’s Aizawa, do you have a minute?” He called through the wooden door.
Another minute of no response, and Shouta pushed the door open. It was a little stuck, and he had to press his shoulder against the wood to get it to open.
Inside Yagi’s office, the sweet smell hung like a heavy cloud, though it wasn’t visible, and Shouta felt immediately lightheaded. He pulled his scarf over his nose to try to filter the smell, his eye watering as he stumbled to the window. Yagi was slouched, unconscious over his desk, but the room, at first glance, appeared otherwise empty.
The window was latched and locked, and for the life of him, Shouta couldn’t get the complicated latching mechanism to unhook.
“Mic,” Shouta called through the comms.
There was creeping darkness at the edges of his vision, and the smell of burnt sugar was getting stronger.
The earpiece he was wearing crackled distantly, but he couldn’t quite understand what was being said, or even if it was Hizashi that responded.
“Need assistance. Yagi’s office. Bring gas…masks,” Shouta added.
He could break the window. Nezu would dock his pay check for the repairs, but-
A hand fell over his wrist as he went to punch out the windowpane, and a tingle from someone’s quirk shot up his arm.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, broken glass can cause such nasty injuries. They can be so tricky to heal.”
Shouta spun, his vision swirling for a moment as the vertigo struck him and he stumbled to lean against the window.
The man who had spoken was dressed in a long black cape with a cowl that came low over his face, his voice was smooth, silken, woven with a thousand promises. His hands were the only part of his body visible in the black cloak, pale with neatly manicured nails. His movements as he stepped away from Shouta were elegant, so gracefully that he seemed more like he was floating than walking.
There was a burning sensation at Shouta’s wrist, like the skin was pulled too tight over the joint, and his vision was slowly blackening. His capture weapon was not designed to filter the sedative in the air, but it seemed to be slowing its effect a little.
Not enough though.
Yagi wasn’t moving behind his desk, his mop of golden blond hair strewn across the wood and his hands lax on the tabletop, by a pile of papers that he seemed to have been in the middle of grading. Shouta couldn’t rely on him for any assistance. He might not have been as strong as he once was, but he was fast.
Whoever had come into his office had evidently anticipated that.
They were fast as well, moving before Shouta could straighten. Shouta’s hands were curled loosely in his capture weapon and it swirled as the man attacked, wielding a short knife that flashed from the insides of his cloak. His capture weapon wrapped around the man’s wrist and the hilt of the dagger as it slashed towards Shouta’s face, but he wasn’t able to keep his balance.
His head smashed against the pane of the window. His brain rattled and another wave of vertigo had him fighting the urge to throw up, but he wasn’t able to move before the man’s hand came up again, this time his hand closed over the top of his goggles, blocking his vision and digging into the sides of his face.
“I was really hoping to avoid any of you, but I didn’t expect you to be the first to respond. You have rather the reputation, and your quirk is formidable. Even if it’s only half as strong as it used to be,” the man goaded, using the grip that Shouta’s capture weapon had on his wrist to keep his hands tied.
Shouta tossed his head angrily, ignoring the weariness that pricked behind his eye and the nausea. There was a sharp pain in his thigh, shooting down his leg, to the cut off joint and through his toes. A phantom pain, but an ache that had him stumbling on the prosthesis. There were other sensations, a stabbing pain on his shoulder, an ache over his ribs, a slashing pain across his face.
Then his elbow was on fire and he actually screamed.
It was falling apart again, skin and muscle and tendon and bone disintegrating, without it ever being touched, and Shouta was fairly certain that that was worse.
He struggled against the grip that the other man had over his face, surging forward to sink his teeth into the man’s shoulder.
It was not pretty but it worked.
The man yelled in pain and stepped away, yanking Shouta’s earpiece away as he did so. The small communication device shattered against the floor as Shouta stumbled forward, his heavy boots crushing it.
Whatever the villains quirk was, it was touch activated.
The pain faded slightly when he stepped away, but the tiredness and the blackness at the edges of Shouta’s vision did not. He tripped as he tried to pull his capture weapon up to attack, unable to steady himself on his prosthetic leg, the vacuum seal designed to keep it secure loose somehow.
“Wha’ do you…” Shouta slurred, dodging away from the villain’s next knife attack.
He used his other hand, and didn’t show any particular weakness with either strike, but Shouta could barely concentrate.
There was a click somewhere above the office, in the ventilation shaft, that seemed to echo in the room, and Shouta noticed for the first time that under the heavy cowl, the villain was wearing a gas mask that completely covered his face. Whatever sedative was in the air was not his quirk then, and his quirk did something else, something painful.
The gas that filtered into the room was thick, dark grey like a cloud of fog on an early morning in the mountains, and it was quick acting. Shouta barely had time to react to the increased sedative before his vision was blacking out again.
He felt his knees collapse to the carpet but he didn’t fall.
The villain’s hand settled around his throat, not tight enough to completely block his airway but enough that Shouta struggled to breathe. The pain returned, striking one area and then another. Different kinds of pain, some tearing, some breaking, some burning, some more painful than others. It faded when the villain stepped away, muttering something about All Might, but Shouta couldn’t focus enough to hear his response properly.
The carpet burned against his cheek, the pain tight and sore across his chest, his legs and arms, his eyes. The darkness was welcoming and terrifying.
He had been stupid, too confident, too comfortable. Nezu’s system was not perfect, and he had been an idiot to assume it was. He hadn’t expected the gas, and he hadn’t checked the room properly for intruders, but by the time he had been aware of either, he was too affected to do much about anything.
He hoped Hizashi had heard him, and was coming with backup.
He hoped that they arrived in time to help Yagi.
He would prefer not to die on the carpet in the office of the Symbol of Peace, that would be a PR nightmare for Nezu, but if he did, he hoped that Yagi didn’t die as well.
There was a fresh wave of pain through his calf, sharp as a blade, slicing through muscle and bone. Shouta might have screamed. He couldn’t tell.
The blackness was consuming and then there was nothing.
Silence.
Numbness.
Blackness.
* * *
There was a cool breeze when Shouta stirred again, and the distant scent of caramel sweets. Antiseptic and cleaning products. Stiff sheets and quiet voices.
The sick bay then.
The world filtered in slowly.
The warmth from the sun through the large glass windows was pleasant, but the light was filtered. It must have been late afternoon. There were hushed voices, perhaps from behind a curtain, but Shouta could make out Hizashi’s still too-loud tone.
At least if he was in the sickbay, he hadn’t died. So Hizashi must have been able to get to him in time, and hopefully to Yagi as well.
He still didn’t know what the villain had wanted with Yagi, but it couldn’t have been good if he needed him unconscious first. He wouldn’t have been the first villain to hope to take out All Might, as though they would be feared or infamous for killing a retired hero.
Yagi had a story he liked to tell about a shopping trip he had made a few months ago, when a villain had decided to try to get the drop on him while he was out in public, completing mundane and innocuous day-to-day activities, but had forgotten that even without the full capability of his quirk, Yagi still towered over the general population at two-point-two metres tall. The villain had gone to attack and Yagi had straightened, his instincts still sharp from decades as an active hero. The villain had taken one look at his height and bolted, only be to arrested in a shop around the corner by the security staff.
Of course, now that he was thinking of Yagi, he could hear the deep rumble of his voice in the distance, coming closer.
Shouta blinked his eyes open slowly, coming to terms with the warm, filtered afternoon light in the sick bay, and the curtains that surrounded his bed. Hizashi was seated next to him, his blond hair loose around his shoulders, as Nemuri tapped absently at her phone, a frown causing her skin to crinkle slightly between her eyebrows.
There was something… different amount both of them but Shouta couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. They both looked healthier, and the scars that Nemuri had worn as a result of the fight against Gigantomachia that stretched from her stomach, up her ribs and over her throat, seemed less noticeable than usual. It was probably the light though.
“Sho’,” Hizashi grinned, leaning over his bedside to give him a hug that was more a press of their chests because Hizashi didn’t bother squirming his arms under Shouta’s chest, “you’re awake.”
“Master of the f’ing obvious, aren’t you?” Shouta teased, “what happened? Is everyone okay?”
His voice felt husky somehow, slightly sore, like he was trying to use it at the wrong pitch. Too loud, or too low. Probably tired. He should probably ask how long he was unconscious for; his brain might have decided to take the chance to rest and kept him under for long enough that everyone had been worried. That might be why Hizashi and Nemuri were there, rather than trying to clean up after the villain.
Nemuri chuckled, squirming under one of Hizashi’s arms to hug Shouta tightly.
“Everyone is fine, Nezu is pissed but he’s just pacing his office, muttering under his breath about everything that he’d like to do to the villain who infiltrated his school,” she smiled.
Upon closer inspection, the scars had definitely faded, leaving behind creamy and unmarred skin, Nemuri’s eyes were bright and the some of the freckles on her cheeks had disappeared as well. She looked… younger. Not by much. Nothing significant. Maybe only five years, but definitely younger.
Hizashi, too, looked a little younger. His hair wasn’t as long, still long enough to cover his shoulders and come down over his arms, but not waist-length. Most of the scars he had earnt from fights over the years were covered by his uniform, but the crow’s feet he had started to develop at the corners of his eyes had faded and he seemed more energetic.
Shouta didn’t understand it, but maybe Recovery Girl had been feeling especially spirited when she had come around for everyone’s injuries.
“Did they capture him? Is All Might okay? How long was I unconscious for?” Shouta asked, struggling into an upright position against the pillows.
Hizashi quickly added a few more pillows from his to relax back against and grinned.
“You’ve been asleep for maybe four hours, the sedative wore off almost as soon as we got you out of the room but your lazy ass didn’t want to wake up,” Hizashi laughed.
Nemuri smacked his shoulder with a frown.
“Your body was dealing with the impact of the villain’s quirk, I think it’s probably better that you didn’t wake up and your brain knew that,” Nemuri shook her head, her hand resting lightly on his right knee, “the villain got away though, All Might Texas Smashed him through the windows of his office when he woke up and saw him threatening ‘Zashi with a dagger. The guy landed badly but we were… distracted and Hound Dog lost his scent at Tatooin Station.”
“Distracted by what?” Shouta frowned, staring down at the end of the bed.
He was fairly certain that he could make out the shape of his calf and foot below Nemuri’s hand, but wasn’t possible. He remembered carving a knife through his leg, severing everything below the knee.
“Aizawa!”
Yagi’s voice had the same booming, enthusiastic tone that he put on for the students and Shouta winced, but looked up as the curtain to his bed was carefully pulled back.
The man who stepped through was not Yagi, though he was wearing the same suit he had last seen Yagi in. The blazer had been discarded, but the white button-up and the yellow pinstriped trousers were the same.
The way they fit was not.
Where the suit had fit Yagi, sitting in neatly tailored straight lines over his too-thin arms and legs, it now curved over bulging thigh muscles and stretched over broad shoulders. The buttons of the shirt strained against impressive pectorals, barely relaxing at the narrow taper of the man’s waist.
Shouta swallowed thickly.
His heart was rabbiting in his chest and he could feel his face heating a little.
It should have been illegal for someone to look like that, let alone in a suit of Yagi’s, and he knew that it was improper to have spent as long as he had staring at the strain of the man’s shirt over his chest. Surely the material only had so much resilience. The buttons were probably holding on by threads. If he just waited maybe-
Hizashi smacked his thigh, breaking his train of thought, and Shouta looked over at him with wide-eyes. There was obviously something wrong with him, he had never been distracted by a pretty form. Hizashi was smirking though, a broad smirk that made him look almost as sadistic as Nemuri.
“-irl assured me that you would be fine, that it was just a natural part of your body working through the trauma of the quirk, but regrowing an eye and a leg must have been incredibly taxing for your body and I have to apologise for my oversight. If I had been more vigilant than you wouldn’t have been put-”
The man who was dressed in Yagi’s suit was still talking, his words perfectly enunciated but quick. Not quite as quick as Midoriya’s mumble but there was something of the same quality to his rambling.
Shouta looked over at him, carefully focusing on his face instead of… anything else.
He had the same corn-field golden hair as Yagi, and it was messy as well, his bangs kinked around his face and it was shorter in the back, flying away in a myriad of directions. His eyes were perfectly blue, darker than Nemuri’s but blue like the sky on a clear, cloudless, summer day. They were sharp and intelligent, wise in a way that wasn’t reflected in his face, and entirely bottomless. They were Yagi’s eyes, younger and without the damage done to his sclera through the plethora of surgeries that had turned them black, but Yagi’s eyes.
Kind and caring.
Emotion-filled.
Inquisitive and curious.
And amused as Shouta blinked slowly, admiring long golden lashes that flickered over those eyes when Yagi blinked.
It took a moment for Shouta’s brain to catch up to Yagi’s ramblings, after it had stalled for a moment on the knowledge that Yagi was Yagi but somehow… three decades younger? He wasn’t sure he had ever seen All Might look so young, the closest would have been the scant videos and pictures of him during his American debut, but even then… he still looked younger even than that.
He touched his fingertips to the skin under his lost eye, feeling smooth, unscarred skin under his eye and the soft curve of his eyeball in his socket.
He closed his good eye.
He could still see Yagi’s bemused expression and Nemuri and Hizashi’s grin.
His toes wiggled under the blankets.
Both sets.
And then he shot out of the sick bay bed to trip to the nearest mirror, because it couldn’t be real. Limbs didn’t just regrow. Eyes didn’t just come back. They were prices he had paid for the safety of his students and the safety of society. There was no do over.
Recovery Girl kept a full-length mirror in the wardrobe she stored spare clothes and uniforms in, for days when she was thrown up on by a high schooler with a tummy bug, and it rattled against the door when Shouta threw it open. His stride was off, his balance a little uncertain without the extra weight of his prosthetic leg, but the aches that had settled in with years of heroics had faded.
He was still dressed in his uniform, without his boots, but he had two feet at the ends of his trousers, one socked and the other bare. Two black eyes stared back at him in the mirror.
But he wished he could be more excited about it.
Where his uniform had been perfectly fitted, not too tight, but not so loose as to make it difficult to manoeuvre in, it now swum on him. The sleeves came over his hands and the legs were so long that only his toes really peeked out from under the material. The waist hung low and gaped at his hips.
He was shorter as well, by perhaps as much as ten or twenty centimetres.
His face was rounder than he had last seen it, the angle of his jaw lost to teenage softness. His hair was short, scraggly around his ears and jaw rather than his shoulders, and he had a hole in the lobe of each of his ears that he had let heal over years ago.
Decades ago.
He hadn’t been this short since he had been seventeen, in the final year of high school.
He hadn’t looked like this since he had been seventeen.
Before he had graduated.
Before he had been given his hero license.
Before anything.
Hizashi, Nemuri and Yagi poked curious heads around into Recovery Girl’s office as Shouta stumbled away from the mirror, his heel catching on one of the wheels of Recovery Girl’s stool. He didn’t have the coordination to catch himself, though he would like to blame the sudden change to his height and the addition of a leg for that, and he careened into the floor.
“I’m- I- It’s-” He stammered over several sentences at once, shaking a hand at the mirror.
Nemuri started to giggle and Hizashi chuckled, while Yagi just tossed his head back and laughed. A deep, chesty laugh that had something light fluttering through Shouta’s traitorous chest.
He didn’t know why Yagi looked like he was seventeen, and he didn’t know why he looked like he was seventeen, but he did now that whoever the villain was who had put them in this mess was going to regret the day they were born when Shouta got his hands on them. Being laughed at because he had tripped over was just as mortifying at thirty-three as it had been at seventeen, but at seventeen he hadn’t out-grown the urge to blush every time he was flustered or embarrassed.
And someone was going to die for that.