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It was far from the first time that they’d found Aizawa-sensei fast asleep before class, but it was the first time he’d slept through the bell.
And now, five minutes after the bell, he was still sleeping.
It took Izuku only a few moments to wander onto the forums he used to frequent for underground heroes. Eraserhead was one of the most talked about on the forums, given that he was one of the most interesting underground heroes and, as of lately, one of the most prolific. That was how he found out that Aizawa had been the main hero in a takedown of a crime ring, a takedown that had lasted hours, until just two hours before school had started. He was being praised for it all over the forums, and it wasn’t hard to figure out from there that Aizawa hadn’t gotten any sleep the previous night.
To make matters worse, they’d had a recent written exam and the class had started pestering Aizawa for their grades almost immediately after. While Aizawa was outwardly stoic and strict, Izuku had seen him hard at work grading in the dorms after school yesterday, as if he was trying hard to get the students back their grades. Which… probably meant that Aizawa-sensei hadn’t been able to sleep during the afternoon, either.
It made sense that Aizawa had slept through the bell, but… it was a little hard to ignore how much he looked like an actual cat right now, rather than a hybrid. He was curled up under his desk, not even in his sleeping bag, hands tucked under his body and long tail wrapped around himself. His ears were down, nearly resting against his head, and with every even breath he took, his nose and whiskers twitched, as if he was deeply enough asleep to be dreaming.
He looked exactly like a sleeping cat.
He had a blanket over his lower half, but Izuku couldn’t help but to stare at the paw-feet that poked out of the material. He hadn’t actually known that Aizawa had cat feet, complete with little pads on his toes, like a real cat’s. He couldn’t stop staring at them. The class knew from the first day that Aizawa was a hybrid, a human with cat features, but he hadn’t ever really realized how cat-like Aizawa actually was. He’d never seen him act like a cat, and when someone acted like a regular human all the time, it was easy to ignore the cat-nose, ears, and tail.
But now, with Aizawa-sensei asleep, curled up with his arms tucked under him, it was hard to not think of him like a cat.
“Maybe we should… Leave him alone…?” Izuku tried, the rest of the class gathered silently around their sleeping teacher. Aizawa didn’t stir at all, fast asleep, but Izuku still kept his voice down a little, “He had a long night. It looks like he took down a pretty big crime ring. Maybe we should just let him sleep.”
There was silence. Nobody moved. Neither did Izuku. They all continued to stare down at their sleeping teacher.
“We can’t really have a class without a teacher,” Momo pointed out, breaking the silence. “And he’ll be upset if we leave him and Mic-sensei wakes him up.”
Still, no one moved.
Izuku watched Aizawa-sensei, watching his cat-like nose twitch, his whiskers moving with it.
“I really think we should just leave him here,” Izuku argued, still keeping his voice down. “He really needs his sleep.”
No one argued further, not even Momo. They were all too entranced by their cat-like homeroom teacher.
“He looks exactly like a cat,” Mina commented, sounding dumbfounded.
“Do you think he does other cat stuff?” Kaminari asked, voicing the question that Izuku had subtly been wondering since first seeing Aizawa like this. “Like… What would happen if someone had a laser pointer? Or if someone pet him?”
“Don’t be rude,” Jirou scolded him, tone sharp. “Or stupid. Sensei is a pro hero. I think he knows better than to chase around laser pointers.”
Izuku never took his eyes off of Aizawa-sensei, and just then, he watched as the hero shivered, wrapping himself tighter into a ball, the tip of his long tail twitching as his shoulders shook. Izuku didn’t even think, stooping down and crouching so he could reach under Aizawa’s desk. The entire class held their breath, and Izuku did, too, trying to be gentle as he tugged up the loose blanket draped over Aizawa’s waist, pulling it up his curled body and towards his shoulders. He paused, letting go of it, and Aizawa shifted again, pressing his twitching nose into the fleece blanket, though he showed no signs of waking up.
The room was silent, almost deafeningly so. Aizawa’s breathing remained even. Izuku hardly even noticed it at first, but slowly, a rumbling started, growing louder and louder until every student in the room was again looking at Aizawa-sensei, staring at him with wide eyes.
Aizawa was undoubtedly purring.
Purring, like a cat.
The sound was deep and came from deep within his throat, Aizawa’s mouth and nose pressed into the blanket Izuku had pulled up. It was low and constant, rhythmic and calming, almost. Aizawa looked completely at peace—and happy, even.
“Oh my god,” Mina was quiet for once, voice near-whispered. “He purrs. That’s really… cute.”
“Of course he purrs,” Bakugou snapped, standing somewhere near the back of the crowd. “He’s a goddamn cat!”
That did it, and Izuku knew it was happening before Aizawa even opened his eyes.
A moment after Bakugou’s annoyed snapping, the purring stopped, fading out almost as suddenly as it’d started. Aizawa froze, and then his nose twitched and slowly, he opened his dark, tired-looking eyes, staring at the crowd of twenty kids gathered around him, all looking down at him with wide, shocked eyes.
“…What are you all doing?”
Aizawa uncurled himself from the rest of his body, pushing the blanket off of him and sitting up as much as he could under his desk. He raised a hand, rubbing at his eyes with his palm.
“Class started almost ten minutes ago,” Iida piped up, drawing Aizawa’s attention as he looked up at him.
“Did it?”
“Yes, sir,” Iida obediently said.
“Well, why aren’t you all in your seats, then?”
He looked at them all expectantly, stare harsh and almost carrying a threat of getting written up if they didn’t follow his unsaid order. There wasn’t any hesitation, the class dispersing with a murmur. No one said anything, not about the purring or about the very cat-like state they’d seen Aizawa in. Izuku did, however, notice that Aizawa had either just neglected to or forgotten to put his boots on, because every time Aizawa walked from his podium to the chalkboard, the entire class stared at his paw-feet and the little pads underneath him.
Unsurprisingly, Aizawa’s cat-like tendencies were the talk of the entire lunch period, and that night, Izuku doodled an appropriately cat-like Eraserhead in his notebook, adding notes and wondering if Aizawa’s status as a cat hybrid helped him at all in his hero work.
He wanted to ask, but he was honestly a little afraid that after today’s purring incident that Aizawa might give him detention. It’d have to wait.