Chapter Text
Aizawa Shouta has been in the hero business too long not to believe in luck. His own bad luck, if nothing else.
As a result, dying in a building collapse comes as no shock.
The narrow odds of mirroring Oboro’s fate aren’t lost on him – certainly not given the wide array of unrelated deaths he narrowly avoided during the war – but with the semi-recent miracle of his class making it to graduation despite all of the everything that stood in their way, he figures he was probably due some bad luck to even the scales.
Death has always been a possibility in the field, he and Hizashi have known that since most kids were still trying to settle on a permanent hero name. And, really, as deaths go he could do worse. It’s dark, but Shouta’s always rather liked the dark, and at least it’s not cold. He should probably be in pain, but he’s past that point now. Now it’s all just soft and gentle and distant.
Hizashi’s screaming somewhere deeper in the rubble, loud enough to pierce the haze that’s settled over his thoughts, and as the darkness gets heavier and heavier at the edges of his vision, Shouta’s just glad neither of them will have to find the other in the aftermath this time.
He’s sorry to Tensei, to Emi. He’s sorry to Nezu. He’s sorry to the kids. He’s so sorry to die on them now that things are finally supposed to be safe.
He’s sorry to die, but he’s not surprised.
What surprises him is waking up.
The first thing he notices when he opens his eyes is precisely that – eyes, plural. Great. The second thing he notices is legs, plural. Even better. Whatever end-of-life delusion is going on, it’s nice of his mind to afford him the ability to both see and walk.
Sensory inputs come faster from there. His head is pounding. The sun is evil and bright and barely even up. He’s lying on the floor next to the ugly, squeaky, red leather couch Nemuri found secondhand three weeks after she graduated UA and somehow convinced Tensei to drag up five flights of stairs.
Across the room, lying passed out under the coffee table, is none other than a young Kan Sekijiro.
If nothing else, that explains the headache. Shouta only remembers a single instance where he would have been around Kan rather than Vlad King for any length of time, and really remembers is a stretch. He remembers being almost-physically dragged into this party by Hizashi and Nemuri – arguments of ‘come on, Shou, it’s a big milestone’ and ‘it’s at my place, you can’t even pretend you’re not willing to stay over’ ring prominently in his mind – and he remembers the hangover. It isn’t their actual graduation party (he’d managed to weasel his way out of that over a year before this), but rather a celebration of everyone making it through their first year as heroes and finally earning unconditional licenses.
They’re their own, fully independent heroes.
Shouta’s been an independent hero for more than fifteen years. He was scraping Hitoshi off of Jiro’s floor after one of these parties not three weeks ago. But he still remembers this feeling, remembers the irrepressible surge excitement even he’d felt in the face of the accomplishment. It’s probably how they convinced him to come to this party, they certainly never managed it again.
He turns to face the couch in an attempt to block out the growing sunlight, only to find its occupant staring at him.
“If you speak above a whisper I will kill you,” he hisses, very stubbornly not thinking about interacting with a version of Hizashi so young he barely knows him.
The blonde squints at him. “You’re only using one eye,” he murmurs.
Shouta winces, opening his right eye. He wants to think it’s a natural reaction to the headache, but the truth is relying on both eyes is probably going to take some getting used to. “I–”
“You have two eyes,” Hizashi whispers tentatively, his gaze intense.Shouta firmly reminds himself that this is definitely certainly his mind’s last-ditch stress response and not the result of some sort of time-travel quirk or anything, regardless of how incredibly, tangibly real this moment feels. Regardless of how unlikely it seems that this precise moment would be the one that would come to mind in his final moment. Regardless of anyone’s close relationship with a little girl who can rewind things.
If it’s all in his head then there’s really no reason to be particularly subtle. And if it’s not…well if it’s not then Hizashi just said something that shouldn’t make any sense.
“I do.” Shouta nods very slowly. “And two legs, too.”
Hizashi’s in pretty rough shape. He’s clearly just as anti-sun as Shouta at the moment, and even with his hearing aids nowhere to be seen – and shit, this is pre-hearing aids entirely, isn’t it? – he grimaces at the volume of his own whisper. His hair has mostly come free of its loose bun and is sticking out every-which direction, his glasses are lens-down on top of Kan’s coffee table, and his t-shirt bears a bright pink stain that suggests whatever he was drinking, it was sugary enough to make the hangover worse.
He smiles and for a second all of that disappears.
The smile fades almost immediately as his husband – Future husband? Former husband? Definitely not the latter, not even in his own head – takes on a contemplative air, but it’s enough to know that whatever’s happening, it’s happening to them both. “You think it was Eri?”
“I haven’t ruled out you being a hallucination.” He has, actually, at least as much as he’s ever going to. If only because it makes more sense to assume it’s real and has real consequences than the alternative. But it’s something to say to avoid the question.
“Shou.”
Shouta caves. “I hope it wasn’t. I hope she had nothing to do with it and she was nowhere near and the whole timeline reset before she ever found out.”
“But it’s not impossible.”
“No, it’s not impossible.” He sits up gingerly, leaning back against stiff red leather. From his slightly higher vantage, he can see Tensei draped awkwardly over an armchair and the hand of someone who seems to be sprawled out on the hall floor. Not Nemuri, but she’s around here somewhere. There were at least thirty people here at one point, and without going room to room he has no way of knowing how many stayed over.
Everyone’s sound to the world for the moment, but they don’t give out hero licenses to just anybody. This is not the place to be having a conversation they want to keep private.
“We need to move,” he decides, glancing meaningfully around the room.
Hizashi’s shifting almost before he says it. “Agreed.” He moves to stand, slowed down in his endeavour not to raise a din of leather and groaning springs. The man’s walking almost experimentally, tapping his ear when Shouta raises an inquiring eyebrow.
“Balance is a bit messed up.” he whispers as he cleans his retrieved glasses on an un-stained corner of his shirt.
Shouta gets to his feet with significantly fewer cracks and aches than he’s come to expect from sleeping on the floor. It’s nice but it’s…unsettling. Heroes have to be entirely aware of every little detail of their body’s limits just to have any hope of survival, especially ones without the sorts of physical quirks that raise those limits. To have the baseline improve all of a sudden is to be out of sync with his body in a way they’re trained to dread. They’ll need to up their training regimens for a while before attempting any major work. It’s dangerous to operate like this.
Still, it’s not so limiting as to keep them from silently navigating a loft full of sleeping party-goers. They’re halfway out the door before anyone seems to notice them, but clearly they’re not the only ones trying to keep quiet while everyone sleeps, because as the door opens, Nemuri’s head pokes out of the kitchen. She doesn’t look surprised to see them sneaking out without saying goodbye, or even surprised that they’re both heading out before the sun’s fully up.
Shouta forgets, with Hizashi being the platonic ideal of an extrovert in his head, but he wasn’t the only one with a tendency to shut people out after Oboro died. It’s been barely three years, now, and while Hizashi would never go so far as to avoid the friends they already have like Shouta tended to in the aftermath, he also wasn’t throwing himself into social settings in these years. Maybe by twenty-five, but not at nineteen.
Nemuri just gets a gentle look on her face that nobody would expect from the newly-established R-Rated Hero and says: “coffee before you go?” She holds up the steaming pot like a peace offering. It might work, if not for the fact that mentally they’re three years out from a different friend’s death. Oboro is an old, scarred wound, soothed slightly by Kurogiri’s actions at the end of the war. Nemuri, though? Nemuri’s death still knocks the wind out of him, from time to time.
Shouta sees that soft, kind look and does what he’s always done out of costume when faced with overwhelming emotions, he flees.