Work Text:
Shouta Aizawa had grown up hating his quirk as a child. He was the one that no one else had wanted to play with because if he used his quirk no one would be able to use their quirks. After graduating from UA High, Aizawa had sworn he would never go back to that school. Sure he had met his best friend there, and someone that he had, unexpectedly fell for, but other than that, it was the same as elementary school. People stared, people whispered, and people called him a villain. A child who could erase quirks? There was no place for him as a professional hero. Yet he had defied them all, had become a professional hero, and met others who helped him to change his mind.
Several years after he had graduated and established himself as a professional hero that he had gotten a call from Hizashi Yamada who had been so excited over the phone Aizawa had been able to set it down on his coffee table and stand clear across his apartment while still being able to hear Hizashi as if he was standing right beside him. All he had to do was close his eyes and he could practically feel the other standing there next to him. Of course, it was understandable why Hizashi was excited, there was another teaching position open at UA High, where his boisterous best friend was currently employed as a teacher. Him? A teacher? He had never even considered himself to be the kind of person that could mold young minds.
It wasn’t until Yamada had pointed out that maybe if he had had a teacher like him, maybe he would not have felt so alone during school. Maybe he would have opened up, shown off, and not purposefully have lost the Sports Festival year after year when all he had to do was erase the quirk of all his opponents. He had not been able to take the stares, the whispers, the jokes and the comments from his classmates, even a look or two from the teachers.
Stepping up to UA after so long, after feeling like it was a place that he never really belonged, that all his memories were bad, false. It was seeing Hizashi standing there waving then running down the walk to throw his arms around him and nearly throw him off balance that got Aizawa to crack something close to a smile. Hizashi spent the entire day showing him around and introducing him to the other teachers, even before he had actually interviewed or accepted the job there. To that day, Aizawa was convinced it was how he had answered the principal, Nezu’s, question about why he wanted the job at UA that got him the position.
“I was one of the people who almost lost out on the chance to be in the hero course because my quirk is not flashy, and heard people talking every day about how someone with my quirk should not be at UA. I disagree. A quirk does not make a hero, it is the person’s strength, their heart, that makes them the hero.”
The most difficult part of his job was his belief that his words were true. It wasn’t the quirk that made a hero, it was their strength, their heart that made them the hero. Each year, the majority of his classes would be expelled, including the year that he expelled and entire class halfway through the semester. That had been the hardest to defend to the rest of the staff, and he had spent a full month arguing why he had expelled them when some of the students had some of the ‘best’ quirks around. They had not been best, they had been flashy.
Not until the year that his current class, the students of 1-A, did he truly feel like he had come home to UA. The students were among the brightest, bravest, and strongest he had known. He had the two top students from the entrance exam, one with strength, and one with heart. It was going to be a year he had known right off the bat that would be one to remember. This class was different from the rest, different than any other year he had taught.
And he had nearly died for those students, his students. They were his to protect because they were his to teach, to help them become the heroes that they all so longed to be. That was his purpose, that was why he had come back to UA in the first place. His thoughts were only reinforced during the Sports Festival, when he met Hitoshi Shinso, a student like him. His quirk was impressive and incredibly powerful, useful, but it wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t like Todoroki, Bakugo, or Midoriya.
When the Sports Festival ended, Aizawa put in the paperwork to have Hitoshi Shinso transferred to his class. He had left it on Nezu’s desk for the principal to find, consider, and approve. Nezu had to approve it, there was no denying the hero potential in Shinso. His quirk could stop villains without even having to lay a finger on them. It could save so many countless lives without placing anyone else in danger. The only addition to the paperwork that Aizawa had added, was a simple message to Nezu.
“You seem confident.” Aizawa glanced towards where Toshinori was standing by the gates to UA as Aizawa walked down the path. The other was in simple jeans and a t-shirt, his blonde hair hanging down around his face, a smile on his features. He changed out of that gold suit of him, after all, if he went out in it all of the students would know of his secret. “Good day then?”
“I put in the paperwork to have Shinso transferred to my class,” Aizawa answered. It had taken him a bit of time to change out of his hero suit, which was packed in his gym bag, and he now wore jeans, a jacket and a baseball cap. Most of his wounds had healed by that point, only his arm and one of his eyes continued to be covered as they continued to heal. He leaned over and nuzzled his cheek lightly as they began the walk home. “Nezu will transfer him.”
“And how could you possibly know that?” Toshinori asked him, the sun casting shadows over his features.
“Shinso is like me when I was at school, only I managed to get into the hero course. I won’t let someone with his potential slip through the cracks.” Aizawa paused when they got to the sidewalk. Aizawa looked towards the building, a small smile on his features. The memories, the good ones, were coming back to him. The late nights with Hizashi and Tensei studying for midterms, meeting some of the pros that he had looked up to as a kid, meeting Emi during his first internship, and of course, meeting Yagi Toshinori.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, just feels like, I’ve finally come back home.”