Chapter Text
Not much changes when you adopt a child.
That is to say, not much changes when you adopt a child post-apocalypse, and their entire intent in life is to impact you as little as possible.
Shinsou is… well he’s different. Aizawa has gotten used to substituting that word in place of any sort of elaborate description. Something exhaustingly long and wordy and definitely scholarly and Homeresque, that would be the best way to encapsulate just how peculiar the young boy is.
For starters, if Aizawa weren’t so concerned about Lurkers, he would definitely attach a bell to the child for monitoring. It seems he’d spent up all his loudness in his frantic escape from Aizawa all those months ago, or had developed some sort of sixth sense in the ability to hush since being in Aizawa’s care—
Presence. His presence.
There has been an astounding number of times where Aizawa’s suddenly lost track of the boy while scavenging and had to spin in all directions, gaze even beseeching God in last resort, only to find him tucked close to his hip, about to tug on his pant to alert him to some canned food or bottled substance or recessed hole to make camp. And on the subject of beseeching God, God forbid he sends Shinsou off somewhere to check a closet or gather supplies, lest he turn around and be greeted to Shinsou’s silent, sad apparition the next instant, task completed.
Aizawa would love to take accountability for such discipline, but really, he hasn’t made efforts to teach Shinsou anything so useful. In fact, it’s starting to feel like an insult, with how thoroughly Shinsou clams up the minute Aizawa’s eyes land on him.
Which is stupid. He should be grateful, to have acquired such a quiet mouse.
But instead he keeps asking the kid all these lousy questions.
Like he’s trying to correct the obmutescence.
“What’s your favourite colour?”
“Do you like any sports?”
“Did you have a favourite show?”
“How about superhero?”
“Would this shirt make me look fat?”
That last one he asks in the now. In a boutique with tags too plentiful in pre-decimal digits. It has Shinsou turning and whipping out the most confused possible distortion of his little face. Like he’s sucked on a lemon, which would be bad enough, but then he’s found out the lemon has been dug from a site of truly nauseating trash, which sets his lip to curl.
“That’s gotta be a solid yes,” Aizawa says, re-racking the pink-camo jumper—three sizes too small—from its place against his chest. Shinsou continues to stare, though the sour-citrus expression seeps away, leaving only bewilderment at having been asked at all. He looks small, huddled in Aizawa’s red plaid jacket. ‘Red’ being a bit generous, with the worn hems and elbows and lack of NANOX reinforcing the dye. They’re shopping for a coat more sized to a child. Winter has started to encroach, and summer is fleeing quickly. The leaves are already brittle and shattered against the sidewalks, the sweep of metal fingers no longer keeping them sequestered in landfills or rotting composts.
The store has that feel of being thrice ransacked. Tipped over fixtures; dismembered mannequins; scattered garments, some ripped; glass from the front door and the display window. Products of unkind entrances and exits, likely fueled by haste. Or less optimistically, indulgent vandalism.
Funny how wandering into a child reminded Aizawa there were others traipsing the planet, still rich in myelinated matter.
And not so rich, he thinks, watching Shinsou plot his way through hills of snow pants like an adventurer through trap panels, in humanity.
(Such thoughts ended as strange premonitions to what followed that evening.)
Aizawa chases after Shinsou’s path. Faster, with longer legs and a bit of strange urgency that he rules as being finished messing around. He’s starting to get cold, after all. So he needs his jacket back sooner rather than later.
Shinsou unearths another one of his little quirks for him once he’s aware of being followed, riveting to the spot like being suddenly drenched in cement. He waits, looking at the man, until they’re almost an arm apart, before continuing deeper inside. Aizawa winces.
That one, actually, might have a bit to do with him. How he’d scolded the boy before for moving too quickly.
“It’s the end of the world, where the fuuu-rick are you rushing to?” He’d huffed, clambering up a ladder furiously after him. Realizing the terrace they’d found could have been occupied. Aizawa had even waved away the tiny apology, like that had been a bother too.
He’d been bad at delivering bad grades too, come to think of it. Didn’t really know how to pitch softly.
Hadn’t really cared to.
“Should probably get something you can grow into,” Aizawa rationalizes, as they stop before some merchandise, less tossed than others and certainly smaller. The coats hang like fruit on barren trees, black, silver and orange puffers in random discordance on the hooks. One’s got a hood so fluffy it’s practically a mane, and little tan pom-poms on either side.
Like ears.
Teddy ears.
Aizawa reaches for it, for some reason. His arm moves and grabs and pulls it from the high rung, probably because out of all of them, it looks the most like it will fit.
Wow. The long rope tassels even have ends of thick tan tufts.
“This one blends well,” Aizawa says, and Shinsou seems to squint. Aizawa clarifies, “It’s black.”
“…so’s that one,” Shinsou points. Aizawa’s eyes don’t follow the gesture.
“This one looks larger. And thicker. Plus I think it’s more expensive, which usually means it’s better quality.”
Shinsou looks like he could argue. Which would be a first since Aizawa had to wrangle him into staying by his side. He looks between the jacket, and Aizawa, and the one on the wall, and then down to some middle-distance as though he has been confronted with some entirely complex puzzle. Which is really just saying ‘no.’
Unfortunately, as Aizawa has always been blunt about bad news, it has also made him particularly indisposed to requests, especially nonverbal, for mercy.
He goes in for the kill. “Here, try it on quickly. I’m dying of the cold here.”
The mere thought of inconveniencing Aizawa immediately spurs Shinsou to action. Although he does indulge a second to look up at the man imploringly, both in apology and distress about not knowing how to protest.
It maybe makes Aizawa feel a little guilty. But then the coat’s on, and it’s a bit big but not dwarfing, though the hood basically swallows all that purple hair and those pale cheeks. And the ears really resemble a bear, and he thinks there’s a tail on the back they didn’t notice before.
“I think this is a girl’s jacket,” Shinsou tries, voice muffled, and Aizawa pulls back the hood with a tch!
“Gender is a social construct,” He overturns, “And winter doesn’t care who the jacket was made for.” With hair even more fluffed from the static of the hood, Shinsou’s revealed face almost seems disgruntled. Almost, because he seems to be trying to squash it in respect for Aizawa. The man takes it as a white flag, remorseless. “Yeah, this looks perfect. You want gloves?”
Minutes later, their costless shopping spree is wrapped up. Aizawa ends up carrying both the spoils and the boy when they’re about halfway to their domicile. Even after being plied with food the kid’s still light, and tucks into his side easily, dozing. He’s wearing most of the goods (sans the cutesy cowl, tucked into their rucksack). New hiking boots and a grey half-zip, near identical to Aizawa’s own fleece number.
There just hadn’t been a lot of colour variety that blended well with urban sprawl.
They’d had to make do with matching.
Lurkers have retained most of the negative qualities of humanity post-nuclear makeover. They’re loud, and ugly, reek a little of chemical doused BO, and seem very much entitled to taking up as much space as possible wherever they go. They congregate in weird gormless moaning groups, like sluggish parodies of racewalking homemakers from reality television shows. Or a group of exhausted businessmen all on their way to the same hated job.
While sometimes there are exceptions, such as when sliding the door of a closet open to have one pop out like the world’s worst game of jack-in-the-box—
—or, potentially, on unexplored landings where they would tower over anyone under four feet tall—
—while sometimes there are exceptions, for the most part Lurkers can be avoided by remaining as inconspicuous as possible. They’ve got about as good eyesight as a cataracted crone, so even if it is unnerving to sometimes turn onto a long stretch of street and see them making their slow hustle forward at the other end, avoidance is easy.
Aizawa does not so much tiptoe as quietly scuttle into a dart of alley that strokes between two small complexes, where a ladder connects to a terrace with telephone cables disrupting its sky ceiling, and a rather superfluously large window.
Which also rather conveniently serves as their front door.
On the matter of listing conveniences, it is of note that, conveniently, Lurkers are notoriously horrible climbers.
Shinsou shifts and stirs when Aizawa bumps him higher over a hip, but seems to forgive himself for making Aizawa carry him now vertically as well. His eyelids flutter and upon connecting with Aizawa’s profile grow heavy again. He curls tightly into the man’s neck, hair ends tickling.
Last night had been rather alarming. They don’t do shifts, because as horrible a teacher and person Aizawa had been in the Before, even in the After, trading off on ‘z’s’ with a literal child is of poor taste. They’d both been sleeping, in their odd Big-Dipper-Little-Dipper huddle, when the night split open with shrieking.
Aizawa’s body had been awake before his brain, and he’d already been sitting when his eyes opened and latched onto the glass behind him. Shinsou had tucked into his side already like a pale, sad small shadow, and they had both stared and waited. Trying to comprehend.
Unsure, uncomfortable understanding had come soon enough in raucous laughter and the spit of rapid gunfire, and howling both human and engine-revving mechanical. The night had been black as always. But the quiet was devoured in the smash of glass and the hoot of debauchery. Men’s voices, loud and incensed with a high kind of hilarity at the shattered world around them.
Slick wet groans and gurgles had trembled up the walls following the rend of sound. Loud and of plenty.
Shinsou had flinched and pressed in and then back again suddenly into himself. As though burned from a stove. Aizawa had been too tense to notice it immediately. Connect the dots, that he had been the element. He’d turned from the night, where he couldn’t see anything really, to look over his shoulder, where he could make out something just barely.
The moonlight forming a thin rivered silhouette over Shinsou’s cheek where it faced down and away. Hiding. Denying, maybe, that he had ever reached for Aizawa at all.
Aizawa had stared. Licked his lips when he found them too dry for words. Hell sounding like drowning men down below them, while Shinsou had finally tucked his arms under his shoulders as though cold and alone.
Like there wasn’t anybody beside him.
“I’ll stay awake,” Aizawa had said eventually. Feeling as though his heart had climbed into his ears at the noise, descended, and then rapidly run back up as if it had forgotten something. Feeling itchy and hot, where hands had pressed against him.
Shinsou had peered at him, but his body stayed wrapped around itself.
“I’ll stay awake,” Aizawa had repeated, and gestured dismissively, “So go back to sleep.”
Shinsou had nodded, and laid back down. But Aizawa could tell by his breathing he hadn’t listened.
Ergo, sleep struck today. Aizawa fumbles a bit for the latch, with the bag and the child, before finally tossing the sack inside with a sliding fwump! and carefully balancing on each leg as he steps through, trying not to disturb the kid any further.
There must be some kind of logic that makes sense, buried in his rusty old synapses, like forgotten, rusty old treasure, to make sense of why he can carry Shinsou now, but he couldn’t reach for him back then.
He lays him on the mattress clumsily. He’d never learnt how to properly detach the barbs of child fingers during the whole ‘putting to bed’ thing. It had never been covered in teaching school, for sure. He basically ends up collapsing in a slumped prayer position and then standing and reassembling himself with a huff. Shinsou cat-curls, and breathes sleep.
Padding over the loft to peer at the space below, Aizawa rakes over every detail. The inoffensive birch floors. Plain as white bread walls. Neat, boring furniture, spiced up with a bit of dried blood like the cake of black mud, and arranged in a nice barricade against the door.
Exactly how they’d left it, Aizawa, thinks, as he slides down the rungs and checks through the small kitchen, wet room, vanity, and three closets before determining that sentiment completely correct.
The loft, where they sleep, had clearly been used for a studio before they cleared it, though likely in a cleaner state than when they had found it. Canvasses smashed and brushes snapped and ink rippling in black currents that they’d laid over with the mattress from downstairs. They’d gathered all the pieces up in the laundry baskets. Packed away snapshots of delirium, in two short hours.
A talented artist, too. Shinsou had laid his thumb over one of the calendulas, as though the paint would feel like a petal. Softly stroking, before burying it under a coiled book when he’d heard Aizawa moving with a pile behind him.
Tension unwinds from Aizawa’s back, but still coils in his neck as he climbs again and slumps into a seat on the floor. He rubs the knot as he stares at Shinsou, still bundled in his coat. Unsure, exactly, what manner of thought is currently creeping through his mind, and why the knot has to be the form of reminder to think them.
He’d much rather a piece of string.
Or even to understand what exactly he is supposed to be thinking, so he can go ahead and get them thought already.
It is while his mind is trying to run the string through ‘Shinsou’ and ‘child’ and ‘what’s wrong, Shota, what are you trying to understand’, that Aizawa suddenly looks up and sees the girl.