Chapter Text
Hitoshi passed Midoriya off to Todoroki with a solemn nod, which was returned after Todoroki gave the green-haired boy a scrutinising once-over. Thankfully, Midoriya remained unaware of the fact that this was, in fact, glorified bodyguard duty rather than a simple coincidence that Todoroki had been lurking on the couch in the common room rather than in his room the way they all knew he preferred.
Then, he steeled himself and marched up the stairs to Aizawa-sensei's room, knocking firmly on the door.
Sensei pulled it open with a sleepy scowl, blinking for a moment as he took Hitoshi in before waving him inside.
“So?” He asked, shuffling past Hitoshi to drop onto the couch, waving for Hitoshi to have a seat anywhere.
“Midoriya and I need to book a training session in a strength-quirk gym on Thursday. You need to be there too. We’re going to be testing some things with my quirk.”
Sensei nodded, pulling out his phone and making a note before giving Hitoshi an expectant look. “What else?”
Hitoshi swallowed, locking his fingers together and pulling just on the side of painful.
“Do you ever read our files?”
Aizawa-sensei quirked a brow at him, leaning deeper into the couch. “Are you worried I’ll see your old teacher’s comments and it’ll colour my opinion of you?”
The man seemed genuinely concerned at the idea that Hitoshi had been letting this eat at him for however long.
“No,” Aizawa-sensei said when Hitoshi didn’t respond, pulling his dark hair back into a low ponytail. “I get accommodations and medical issues submitted to me through the school, so there’s no need for me to ever open them.”
Hitoshi clenched his jaw.
“It wouldn’t matter if Sensei looked at our charts,” Midoriya had said one day after training. "Our old teachers bent over backwards to make sure Kacchan ever had so much as a negative comment on his report card, let alone his official record.”
But that was the point. If Aizawa-sensei looked at their records after forming his own opinion of them, he could see the disparities between what the world said about them and what their behaviour did. He would have been able to see Midoriya’s quirk being registered within weeks of the entrance exam and put him in quirk counselling, or pair him up with the support course to find a quirk aid that helped not him mutilate himself while he figured things out. It was…arrogant. Arrogant just like he had been, thinking he could know what the hero students’ lives had had been like because they didn’t have the extra layer of discrimination that came from a ‘bad’ quirk — though even that wasn’t quite true, since Midoriya had told him about a few students who had no doubt faced the same sort of attitudes that he had.
Hitoshi wondered how much he could say, how much he could push, before he said too much.
“I’m not worried about me,” was all he said in the end.
Sensei’s gaze snapped over to Hitoshi.
“You’re worried about Midoriya.”
It wasn’t a question, so he didn’t answer.
“Why?” Aizawa-sensei asked after a moment, this time more quietly, like he knew that this was important, and if he handled it wrong, that would be it.
Hitoshi thought of breaking bones with a smile and med kits tucked beneath books. He thought of quiet admissions of spider lilies and rooftops. But he didn’t say any of that. Couldn’t.
“He didn’t know he purred when he was happy until he was in the hospital,” he said instead.
Aizawl grimaced. “He lives with his mother who, based on all of my interactions with her, seems one bad day away from a nervous breakdown. I’ve already started monitoring that, so you don’t need to worry.”
Hitoshi closed his eyes, letting out a long breath.
The man was looking, but in all the wrong places. Mrs. Midoriya probably was one bad day away from a nervous breakdown, of course, but that wasn’t why Midoriya didn’t know he could purr.
But Hitoshi had never been good at crafting his anger into something pretty, like determination or drive, so when he opened his mouth, he had found words to move the man, but they weren’t the ones he wanted.
“You’re not as good of a teacher as you think you are,” he said softly, disappointed rage spilling out from the cracks in his chest as he pushed to his feet, words like broken glass cutting his tongue as they spilled out — untrue, but an image shattered to make sharp edges. “If you think the reason he didn't know he could purr is because of his mother.”
His eyes stung as he went to storm out, only to be snagged around the wrist with the man’s capture scarf. Hitoshi tugged futilely, glowering at the floor.
“Sit,” the man ordered, sounding far too soft given Hitoshi’s disrespect.
Reluctantly, Hitoshi dropped back into the plush chair across from the man.
“Want to tell me what that was about?”
It…wasn’t a question. Not really.
“I shouldn’t have to,” he mumbled anyway, a last-ditch effort to vent his frustration and push the man just far enough to kick him out without explaining.
“I shouldn’t,” Aizawa-sensei agreed. Of course he wouldn’t take the bait. “But I am anyway.”
Hitoshi gnawed on the inside of his cheek, rolling the sharp edges of words he could say across the back of his tongue, wondering what notes he should hit to make what he really wanted to say resonate with Eraserhead. In the end though, his voice came out small and tired and so very helpless, frustrated tears pressing at the backs of his eyes and balling in his throat.
“Why do you let people hurt Midoriya?”
Aizawa-sensei’s brows shot up. “I wasn’t aware that I did.”
Hitoshi glared at him from betneath his lashes, an idol smudged into black hair and clothes and a slash of grey capture weapon and sun-deprived skin as he finally succeeding in tugging his arm free from the capture weapon.
“That makes it worse, honestly,” he grumbled, eyes finally dry enough to look up. “Did you know that he likes quirk analysis?”
Aizawa-sensei shook his head.
“Don’t you think it’s weird that someone who analysed the whole class’ quirks doesn’t know how to handle his own?”
Hitoshi was desperate. Desperate to know why his sensei who cared enough to train Hitoshi himself to prepare for joining the hero course come second semester was also so willing to blind himself to the world. To his students.
“Introspection is difficult,” Aizawa-sensei huffed, leaning back. Introspection is difficult, Hitoshi’s mind snarled cruelly. So is doing more than the bare minimum for your students, apparently. “But no quirk counsellor would have signed off on his sessions if they hadn’t gotten him to a point of understanding his backlash to work through on his own, or with another counsellor later on.”
Hitoshi gripped his knees, nails biting through his pants.
“He never saw a quirk counsellor, Sensei!” He snapped. “And you would have known that if you’d ever bothered to check, or even asked him! And I can’t-” he broke off, glaring at the door he should’ve stormed out of before spilling Midoriya’s secrets, but if the boy wasn’t going to do it himself…well, what kind of hero would Hitoshi be if he let Midoriya destroy himself rather than talk to Aizawa-sensei? “He deserves better than that. From you. From the school.”
Recovery Girl refused to heal him, he doesn’t say. He’s been here for months and you keep pairing him up with someone he looks up to, sure, but who hurts him every time, and then you blame him for not figuring out how to make it work.
“You’re hurting him,” Hitoshi settled on finally, when the words he wanted to say just about burned a hole in his throat for all that he swallowed them back. “Read his file.”
He stood, and this time, Aizawa-sensei didn’t stop him.
It was easy to shoot Todoroki a text, to tell him to bring Izuku to his room and that Hitoshi would bring snacks up. It was an All Might documentary night. Midoriya knew them by heart, and could rattle off facts about filming or additional context, and Todoroki loved them because he’d never seen them before — barring the ones Midoriya had already shown him — so it was good all around. Hitoshi may not be overly fond of the man, but you didn’t grow up in Japan with heroic aspirations and not hold some nostalgic fondness for over thirty years of amazing feats.
Well, that, and making snacks would buy him enough time to press down the simmering rage still curdling in his chest. Midoriya still didn’t take well to anger, even if he’d outgrown his defenselessness.
Everyone hurt Midoriya. Hitoshi and Todoroki wanted to be better.