Chapter Text
Repairing a relationship that never really existed is not as special or interesting as popular culture describes, Hitoshi thinks. No. It’s mostly just Hitoshi staring at Ojiro all the time, blankly, wondering what to say to him.
This is his current speech: Hey, I know things were weird during our first year and I know you don’t really trust me, but I don’t have anything against you at all and I’m sorry I said shitty things about you and ruined the Sports Fest that year. Anyway, can you forgive me, because everything else is good now that I’ve transferred and I want to feel like everybody likes me, so.
Ojiro must feel his stare across the cafeteria. His head turns toward him and he raises a brow, almost in challenge. What are you gonna do, huh? he seems to say.
And Hitoshi looks away, instead of doing something more risky. Like, smiling, or being pleasant in any way. Because he’s a coward.
“Shinsou?”
“What?” He almost startles, whipping his head back to Midoriya.
“You okay? You’ve barely eaten anything.”
Shinsou clears his throat. “Yeah, fine. Just not that hungry.”
“Dude, you gotta get your macros in!” Kirishima proclaims. “But, uh, if you don’t want your pork, then—“
“Go for it.”
Kirishima dives in, snatching up the rest of his lunch in his pointed teeth. It would be funny if Hitoshi didn’t feel so nauseous.
The table continues their chattering, Midoriya occasionally prompting him for input as if he’s reassuring himself that Hitoshi hasn’t dissociated into oblivion.
It’s nice. The way they care about him… it’s nice, if not foreign, to have people his age care about him like this. And, normally, Hitoshi wouldn’t give a damn if there was a single person who didn’t like him much.
But in a class full of people who seem to care— really care—then the animosity of one person stings more acutely than he anticipated.
It proceeds that way—Shinsou in Ojiro-purgatory—for much shorter than he thought, honestly, because when are things ever gradual or subtle for him?
The building crumbled in an instant. What a shitty position for them both—it’s not like Hitoshi could have asked the building a question and got it to stop falling, and it’s not like Ojiro could have fended off a whole building with a tail, either, let’s be serious.
They shouldn’t have even been in this position. They ran into each other entirely on accident. They intersected on the sidewalk as Hitoshi was walking back home with two massive containers of cat litter; they kept walking after glancing at each other with no looking back, no polite nod, nothing.
Then there was an explosion. And here they were.
It’s dark and dusty and nasty and awful, Hitoshi realizes first. He coughs as he rubs at his eyes—ew, there’s something wet.
And with that realization comes pain. Horrible pain. He hadn’t ever felt anything like this before. He couldn’t pinpoint it, really, it was just…everywhere. Bad enough that he doesn’t remember what he was doing, who he was with.
Then he tastes a bunch of blood and dust, and he realizes that the wetness in his eyes is blood, too. That, somehow, grounds him, enough to finally see around him and hear someone’s ragged breathing.
“Who…?” He manages to ask, unsure of how loud he is when his head pounds so strongly.
“Shinsou! Shinsou, God ,” someone says from within the dark. Ojiro. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” he says. It comes out like a pant. “I, uh. What…?”
“I don’t know— don’t move,” he says when Hitoshi tries to look around. “You went down really hard. What hurts?”
“Not sure,” he replies, trying to take stock. “My head, I think? I can’t…I’m not sure, there’s blood, like, in my eyes. But I can move my hands.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay,” he hears, like Ojiro’s trying to reassure himself.
He gets it.
“What about you?”
“Me? Um,” he says as if he wasn’t expecting anyone to ask him that. “My left side is trapped. And, um, my tail. But I’m okay.”
Okay. Good. He keeps running down the list of things Aizawa told him to always check. “You breathing okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Hurts,” he says honestly. There’s rubble underneath him, maybe…on top? His toes—he can move his toes, but he doesn’t know what’s actually hurt. “‘S fine.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
“I…we were walking and then there was a collapse, but I really don’t know what else, or why. Do you?”
“Same. I have no idea. But there’s no one else here.”
“Cool,” Hitoshi says, for some reason.
What the fuck, he hears Ojiro murmur.
Since he’s on a roll, Hitoshi continues, for some reason, with, “I didn’t know you lived around here.”
“Oh, I don’t. I teach at a karate school up the block, that’s, uh, what I was coming back from.”
“Oh. I do.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, we live around the corner. Me and Aizawa-sensei.”
“Oh.” He hums, then starts again. “Wait, you live with him?”
“Yeah, he adopted me a few months ago. But I started living with him in our first year.” He licks his bloody lips. Delicious. “I dunno why I’m telling you this. I’ve never told anyone this.”
“I think you might be a little, um, delirious?” Ojiro squeaks. “But I don’t want you to fall asleep. You should keep talking. So, Sensei’s your dad?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He pictures Aizawa in his mind—his wild hair, the way his one eye crinkles when he tries to hide a smile, the way his calloused hand feels when he rests it on Hitoshi’s head. “I was a ward of the state. But when we started training together I ended up crashing at his place a lot. It made sense for him to adopt me, I guess? I dunno. I don’t really understand him.”
Ojiro takes a minute to think on that, then asks, “What is that even like ? Living with him?”
“Normal, I think. I dunno. He kinda sucks at cooking. But he’s good at, like, being a dad. Especially with Eri.”
“Oh, right, so Eri is, like, your sister?”
“Yeah.” Her smile comes to mind…the sound of her singing in the shower that fills the whole apartment…the way he calls him a butthead at least twice a week… “She’s the greatest.”
“Yeah? All my siblings are adults, um, so I don’t…”
it comes out without thinking: “So you were an accident.”
Ojiro snorts. “God, you always hit the nail on the head, don’t you?”
“I—” Hitoshi pauses. “I am an asshole, yeah.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just…” Ojiro pauses.
“Yeah.” He pauses. “You wanna know something fucked up?”
“Sure.”
“I wasn’t really allowed to talk freely growing up. Or I didn’t really want to. So I pretty much only talked if I was gonna use my Quirk, and, uh, I liked to catch people off-guard. But I think that just trained me to be a real dick.”
“You’re not a dick.”
“I’m not?”
“Well. Maybe a little. But I think you really care about people. Like, you notice things.”
“You…don’t think I hate you?”
“Um. Do you?”
“No!”
And he says it so strongly he chokes on…something. Blood, maybe. He takes a solid thirty seconds to hack it up.
“Fuck. Fuck,” Ojiro says. “Fuck, we need to be able to call someone—I can’t reach my phone, it’s in the pocket that’s crushed. Do you…?”
“No. Fell somewhere,” he croaks.
“Fuck.”
“Sensei’s not home,” Hitoshi says errantly. “Went to PT. He does that on…Thursdays.”
“Are you trying to say, like, he’s not around to find us?”
“Mhm. ‘Cross town.”
He wonders how it’s going. He fantasizes briefly about Aizawa somehow getting a bad feeling and sprinting over here, searching for Hitoshi, cradling him once he finds him and telling him how much he loves him.
But that won’t happen. That doesn’t happen to Hitoshi, no matter how much Aizawa cares about him. There are certain things he doesn’t deserve.
“It’s fine. This has to…people have to have noticed. Isn’t there a fire station around here? I feel like I’ve seen one on my way to work. It—it’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” Hitoshi pants. “Yeah.”
“Um. Okay, I need to keep you talking, right?” Ojiro starts again. “Talk to me. Tell me about…I dunno. What do you do for fun?”
Hitoshi wants to burst out laughing. A bubble of something rips through his chest, something like laughter. “I…we don’t know anything about each other, do we?”
Ojiro laughs, too, breathless. “No, I guess we don’t.”
“‘S okay. Uh, I like to…like to ride my bike. Like to go mountain biking.” He pants. “Have three…no, two cats.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Cujo ‘n Email.”
“...Those are their names?”
“Yeah.” He sucks in a breath. It’s getting hard to do that. “Sushi died. Couple weeks ago.”
“Oh, um, I’m sorry.”
“Was Midnight-sensei’s cat.”
“...Oh.”
“‘S okay.” He murmurs. “Sensei was…but he’s fine. Wanted me to get cat litter today.”
“Yeah? That was what you were doing?”
“Yeah. Said it counted as weight training. Walked twenty blocks w’em.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. I need it, though, you don’t.”
“What?”
“‘Cos you’re, like, strong.”
There’s a beat of silence. Hitoshi rubs his fingers together, feeling the dust and blood mix into a paste over his skin.
“Do you really—I mean, I kindof thought…”
“That I hate you?” He coughs. “Just said I didn’t.”
“Right, yeah, but—”
“You’re the only person in the class that…doesn’t like me,” he manages to say. “‘Least I think so. ‘M sorry.”
“Wha—what makes you think that?”
“Fucked up the first-year Sports Fest for you.”
“That was my choice. You were just using your Quirk—”
“Called you a monkey.”
“Well, you were trying to get a rise out of Midoriya. I get it.”
“So, you—”
“Shinsou, I do not care anymore,” Ojiro says calmly. “You were making your mark to get out of Gen Ed. You didn’t break any rules. I probably would have done the same.”
“Huh,” Hitoshi pants quietly. “Mkay.”
“So you thought I didn’t like you? And that’s why you avoid me at all costs?”
“Mhm,” he murmurs, not caring about his ego anymore, because, “‘M cold.”
“You’re cold?”
“Mm.”
“I hope that’s not because you’re in shock,” he says quietly, then continues, “God, of course you are, a building fell on us. Jesus.”
His thoughts drift back to Aizawa and Eri again. Mostly Aizawa. He remembers a story from Aizawa’s work-study. Someone who had a building fall on them. It was sad. He couldn’t remember why. Something…
“Sensei doesn’t fuck with building collapses,” he murmurs.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Freaks ‘im out. Can’t remember the story, though.” Hitoshi coughs again—wet and angry, making his chest buck against the rubble. “He’s gonna kill me.”
Ojiro laughs. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever heard.
“What…d’you like to do?”
“Me?”
“No. The angel talking to me in the…the bright light.”
“Shinsou…” Ojiro warns.
“Yes, you.”
“Uh, well, I teach at the dojo.”
That’s the only thing he says.
“That’s it?”
“I mean, I work out.”
“‘S not a hobby. Not for us.”
“That’s fair,” he murmurs. “Well, I mean, that’s that. I never really did anything else as a kid, my mom thought I was a judo prodigy so I kinda only did that.”
“Forced to?”
“I mean, maybe, but it’s why I’m gonna be a hero. Things work out.”
“When we get outta here,” Hitoshi states, “we’re gonna…find a hobby for you. Pottery ‘r some shit. Cello. Swimming. I dunno.”
He laughs quietly. The atmosphere stills.
“I can’t swim,” Ojiro blurts after a few seconds. “At least, not for long. My tail gets in the way, it’s too big. We had a race before you transferred to 1-A and I made a fool of myself.”
If this were any other circumstance, Hitoshi would laugh at how insecure Ojiro seems about something so trivial. “‘S okay. Sensei can’t really swim.”
“Wait, seriously?”
“Yeah. Scared of water.”
“No way.”
“Yup.”
A memory—Eri seeing a pool on TV, determined to go to one in real life. Aizawa declining too sharply to be normal. Hitoshi prying. Aizawa caving under the condition that Hitoshi teach her. Aizawa letting them swim at the UA pool on the weekends, glaring at them with so much concern that it was almost cute. Hitoshi dragging Eri around in the water, having her try floating on her back and putting her face under. Trying to convince Aizawa to join them. Claiming he can’t because of his leg, which Eri debunks. Him sticking his good foot—nasty old man foot—in the water. Scowling. Letting his kids laugh at him.
Aizawa had smiled, then. He’d been doing a lot of smiling after the war—more than before, anyway. It happened to coincide with the time he adopted Hitoshi. Hitoshi liked to think that was more than a coincidence, even if it really wasn’t.
“You…should tell Sensei, I—“
“No. No, no, shut up, I’m not telling him anything,” Ojiro says with a surprising amount of conviction. “You’re gonna live. We’re making it out of here. Keep talking to me.”
“Wha’ you wanna know?”
“Your favorite color.”
“Purple. You?”
“I guess that makes sense.” Ojiro’s voice is overlaid with panic. “Mine’s blue.”
“…Your costume?”
“Yeah, exactly.” Ojiro huffs. “It’s funny, I never thought you, like, paid attention to me. Most people don’t.”
“‘Course. You’re…” He wants to say more, but he knows the next word out of his mouth will start with M and rhyme with funky. “Self-esteem issues.”
Ojiro burst out laughing again. He has a nice laugh, actually. It peals brightly, like it could light up the dark pocket of rubble they’re lucky enough to be in.
“Favorite food, go.”
“Plum…onigiri.”
Aizawa hates his habit of just eating four of those as dinner.
“Cool. I like karaage.”
Aizawa makes horrible homemade karaage. Too greasy, not crunchy enough, but Eri loves it, so he makes it all the time. Hitoshi will happily eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if it means he can get out of here.
“You ask me one now. Stay awake.”
Hitoshi just said he doesn’t hate Ojiro, but he’s getting there after all these questions. He’s just too tired to keep this up. “Your parents…divorced?”
“Yeah. I, uh, live with my mom, my dad’s in Sendai. Wait, how’d you know that?”
“Self-esteem.”
“What, are your parents divorced too?”
“Nah.” Hitoshi wiggles his hands so he knows they still exist. It sends a rush of pain to his ribcage. “Not sure who my real dad is, n’ my mom’s locked up. Had me in prison.”
Aizawa didn’t care when Hitoshi finally told him about her. Said it had no effect on him wanting to be a hero—that Hitoshi could do anything if he wanted it badly enough, and that he’d stand beside him and defend him.
“Shit.”
“Yeah. No one…” Hitoshi is starting to recognize this behavior as truly delirious now. “…knows that. ‘Cept me and Sensei. Congrats.”
Ojiro laughs a little more. “You’re funny compared to the last time we talked, like, two years ago.”
“Thanks,” he grunts. “Went to therapy.”
His laugh grows louder. It makes Hitoshi crack a grin, too.
“Wanna know what—“ He breaks off into a wet cough. “—wha’ she was in for?”
Ojiro’s voice is softer this time. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me.”
“Bet you’re curious,” Hitoshi teases.
“Well, I—“
“Grand larceny.” He’s got her rap sheet memorized. “Three counts…fraud. Five counts reckless endangerment secondary to…to Quirk misuse. ‘N four counts second-degree murder.”
The silence is dead, then. It always is—even Aizawa was a little stumped on what to say when that detail finally came up. This is why Hitoshi should never talk about this. What has he done?
Everything seems to hurt a lot more, all of a sudden. Everything’s sharper.
So when Ojiro’s fingertip touches Hitoshi’s palm, a tremor runs through him. A facsimile of hand-holding.
“I’m sorry,” Ojiro says quietly.
“‘S okay.”
“No,” Ojiro whispers. “It’s not. And I’m sorry.”
And Hitoshi thinks he might be right.
Aizawa has to be in a nightmare. There was no alternative. It couldn’t be real.
He’d left PT as soon as he got the page. He might be semi-retired, but that didn’t stop him from still using a police scanner for his neighborhood. And he didn’t want to—he didn’t want to go to the scene of a collapsed building, especially because he can’t do anything at a scene like this, his quirk isn’t suited for it. And especially when witnesses said two teenagers rushed inside, scrambling to get people out. He didn’t want to go.
But then Hitoshi’s phone was going straight to voicemail. And he knew .
He hasn’t spoken a single word since he got here, he thinks. He’s floating far away—he has to jolt himself back to Earth every once in a while because he knows Hitoshi needs him to be present once they pull him out.
If.
Aizawa is a pragmatic man. He knows that this is how people die—rarely, he supposes, because building collapses don’t necessarily happen much—and that there’s a good chance Hitoshi is lying dead in there, crumpled in the concrete with a broken neck. And the other kid, too, whomever it might be. Dead. That’s it.
He needs to be ready for that reality. Maybe he’s already accepted it. Maybe he’s known that having a stubborn teenage hero for a son meant Hitoshi would go six feet under before Aizawa.
As he watches the firefighters sort through rubble, as he uselessly tries to help the cops on the scene, as he searches the concrete for a shock of purple, it sinks in. And he floats farther away from it.
Hitoshi stopped talking a while ago. It got too hard—he isn’t sure why, but every breath he takes is like knives all over. The slab on top of him (underneath him? To the side of him?) seems to be crushing him. Maybe there’s no slab. Maybe he’s just plain dying.
So Ojiro talks to him. Endlessly.
“...and people ask me all the time if my tail is fur or hair, and to be honest it’s kindof both? Like, it gets greasy when I sweat, same as my hair, but it’s fluffier, I guess? I wash it same as my hair. One time, Mina put some kind of cream on it, and it got curly, which was fun. But weird.”
Hitoshi grunts in affirmation, just to let him know he’s still there.
“I, um. I can’t feel my tail. I didn’t really want to talk about that before, I guess.”
Hitoshi’s breath hitches.
“I don’t know that it’s my back that’s broken, ‘cos I can move my other leg. But my tail, it’s, ah…it’s definitely crushed.”
The silence is thick as molasses.
“If I don’t have the one thing I—How am I supposed to be…”
He recognizes, dimly, that Ojiro is crying, and that’s why he didn’t finish the sentence.
Hitoshi can’t take a deep breath—he tries, but he ends up spitting blood. It’s enough airflow, though, to speak again.
“You’ll—“ he gasps, “—be okay.”
Ojiro sobs. It’s broken and awful and something you just cannot describe.
“I’ll—I’ll be—“ He gasps again, mouth wide open like a frog. He must look dumb as fuck. “—here. For you. Be fine.”
It’s not the most eloquent or creative thing he’s ever said. But, honestly, he probably couldn’t have come up with anything better even if his lungs were working. It must be okay, though, because Ojiro’s finger, still extended and resting in Hitoshi’s palm, reaches just that bit further. Three fingers curl around Hitoshi’s wrist.
Then something crumbles. The concrete groans and shifts, the sound of a waking beast soon to finish the job.
Ojiro’s breath catches. “Shit.”
They sit in silence. Hitoshi, still very dimly aware of everything around him given he cannot breathe and has never felt colder or more scared, is able to recognize that he’s trembling. They both are.
Then light breaks through as concrete shifts. If Hitoshi could scream, he would—it burns over his shock-dilated eyes.
The next shift is louder.
“Agh, oh, God…! ” Ojiro screams. There’s a wet crunch of what is undeniably Ojiro’s bones that Hitoshi will never forget if he makes it out of here.
“Wait, wait, stop! Is someone there!?”
Hitoshi blinks. There’s no way.
“ Sensei!? ”
“Ojiro!? Talk to me, what’s going on?”
Oh. It’s him. How? He must be too far gone at this point. He can barely see anyway, his eyes keep closing without meaning to.
Ojiro’s sobbing now. “Sensei, we—it fell and—“
“I know, I know, who’s ‘we?’ Who’s with you?”
“Dad,” he croaks with everything left in him. “Please.”
“ Hitoshi! ”
“Oh, God…”
“Shinsou, don’t you dare! Wake back up!”
Dad?
“Wake up!”
Ojiro’s fingers smack against his palm a few times.
I’m here.
“Hitoshi!”
There are some more noises.
“No! No, get Shinsou out first, I’m fine! I’m fine!”
Please, Dad, come find me.
The light changes some.
I’m so scared.
He smells blood and dust and gasoline and sweat and vomit.
Please don’t leave me behind.
“I’m here, I’m here, kid, I’m not—Hitoshi, please—“
Everything hurts, a lot , but maybe not as bad as before. He’s warmer. Something…He’s not on concrete anymore. He’s warm.
“You’re okay. You’re okay. You’re okay,” someone is repeating over and over, like a prayer. “You’re okay, I’m here. Dad’s here. You’re okay.”
Okay.
Aizawa could not breathe.
He’s been in many situations where he couldn’t breathe over his career. Being strangled in a back alley by his own capture weapon. Fighting against a poison gas Quirk and asphyxiating. Having a pneumothorax after being pushed off a roof. Aspirating his own blood during the USJ.
And he’d been anxious, too, plenty of times. Felt short of breath, had his fingers tingle and his vision fade. But he’s never been unable to breathe.
Ojiro was bad enough. When they lifted the concrete up, his entire left side lay crushed, mottled purples and reds all over. He was crying uncontrollably from pain—Aizawa had never seen that stoic kid cry—and yet, he was insisting on being left alone until whoever was with him could be pulled out, like it was nothing.
And Aizawa pleaded to any god that it wasn’t Hitoshi with him, even though he heard Ojiro say it. It just couldn’t be true, he didn’t want it to be true, even though it was illogical and he knew, he knew from the beginning.
But when he saw his son—his beautiful son—struggling to take in air under rubble crushing his chest, Aizawa stopped breathing. Even with a puddle of blood bubbling in his mouth, blocking his airway, Hitoshi was whispering incoherently. But Aizawa was silent. Is silent.
Then the glaze over Hitoshi’s eyes fades for a moment—just a moment—as the medics finagle a backboard underneath him. Ojiro is still crying, and Aizawa will go to him in a moment, but right now, Hitoshi is looking at him.
Dad , his lips whisper.
And Aizawa behaves entirely illogically and swoops in, carefully, carefully embracing him and praying he has no spinal injuries that he can aggravate. Hitoshi’s head lolls into Aizawa’s shoulder and his breath hitches as a dusty, blood-covered hand grips at his sleeve.
And Aizawa finally breathes, just so he can speak and comfort him.
He struggles to find the right words. You’re okay, I’m here , is all he can come up with. He’s not—he’s not , but he’s not dead, and he will be okay, and even if he’s saying it just to get Hitoshi to stop looking so wild and confused, he needs to believe it.
He eventually lets go, because they decide that his son’s condition is too acute for Aizawa to be in the ambulance with him. He gets it. He switches back into the attitude of a teacher, then, as he goes to Ojiro’s side and murmurs encouragement while the kid tries to hold it together. He was stable enough for Aizawa to be in his ambulance, which was good. Manageable. More manageable than staring at Hitoshi’s barely-conscious, confused face.
More manageable than playing a father. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Most parents feel more like a parent when something awful happens to their child. What is wrong with him that he even considers distancing himself from this situation?
He knows his ignorant therapist would say it’s because he’s got preexisting trauma about it, sure, but it’s not logical . He is a father above anything else—he agreed to that, bound in writing, and that is a fact— so why? Why can’t he control himself?
He leaves his body once Ojiro finally loses consciousness in the ambulance, cried out and descending into shock. He’s not inside his mind as he blankly navigates the trauma ER, both of the kids ( children , just children) off for emergency surgery. He’s far, far away as he calls Yamada, getting someone to watch Eri as much as he wants her with him right now. She can’t see him like this, so far away and gone from his body. Not this bad.
Because he’s not sure if he’s going to find his way back anytime soon.