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“Is that really the best you’ve got?”
The words echo in Hitoshi’s head. They’re hollow, he knows. Meant only to knock him off balance in the midst of a sparring match. Yet somehow they still carry weight, and for some reason, they bother him. Maybe it’s the fact that they were spoken by the person he admires most: his former idol and current mentor. No matter the context, Hitoshi tends to take his words at full value. They’re his lifeline.
Hitoshi shakes his head. He can’t believe he’s being this starry-eyed and sensitive, stewing over such a harmless jab. At this rate, how does he expect to become a hero? How can he take punches if a few little words can bruise him?
To take his mind off of things, he decides to go for a run, lacing up his shoes and marching out of his dorm with a sense of purpose. Normally, he prefers cycling - he likes the speed that a pair of wheels gives him, the increased sense of freedom - but today he decides to try something a little different, to knock him out of his current headspace. He needed to work on his endurance anyway. Aizawa never let up on him about it.
No, he tells himself. Let’s not go there. No more guilt-tripping.
He starts out down the route he’d mentally set for himself, heading off of UA school grounds and down the street. Within a few minutes, he’s already breathing hard, struggling to keep up his pace.
Just one foot in front of the other, he tells himself. It doesn’t matter how fast you go, as long as you keep going.
Eventually, he arrives at the beach, heading out towards the water. The sand makes it even harder to run, deadening each footfall with its gritty liquidity. He keeps it up anyway, slogging forward and searching for that meditative calm Midoriya was always going on about, where you stop thinking about the pain your body’s in and retreat to somewhere deep inside yourself. Even after all this time, Hitoshi still isn’t quite there. He still feels the burn of every breath and the strain in his legs.
It gets easier when he reaches the wet sand near the water’s edge. The water-logged granules provide a more stable surface to find purchase on, and he breathes a little easier. He takes time to notice his surroundings: the calm of the nearly vacant beach, populated only by a handful of solitary shell collectors and a chattering flock of black-tailed gulls. The late evening sky is layered in pastel hues, softened by a thin span of clouds. If Hitoshi contrates, he can pick out the different shades: from soft pinks to lavender purples to muted blues. It’s admittedly peaceful.
Coming up on a beachside bench, Hitoshi notices the figure seated on it looks a bit out of place, like they were painted into the wrong landscape. The figure is dressed head to toe in layered blacks, contrasting sharply with the soft pastels of the beach. Even their hair is black, and looks messy and unkempt.
It’s Aizawa.
Hitoshi slows his pace, not sure if he’s ready to have a conversation with his mentor. For one thing, Hitoshi doesn’t really want him to see him in this state, out of breath and completely spent after just a few kilometers of jogging. For another, those words are creeping back to haunt him again, playing over in his head like a recording.
Is that really the best you’ve got?
Hitoshi does his best to make a wide berth around Aizawa, heading back into the soft, dry part of the sand to avoid falling into his line of sight. He slows his pace again, creeping along to prevent the sound of his labored breaths from giving him away. He can’t face Aizawa right now. He needs more time to clear his head.
“Are you trying to avoid me?”
Hitoshi whips his head around, turning to see Aizawa looking over his shoulder at him, one arm slung across the back of the bench.
“You know my quirk depends on a total and constant awareness of my surroundings, right?” Aizawa asks him. Hitoshi swears he sees an eyebrow raise, just a fraction.
“Yes, sir.”
Aizawa stares at him for a few moments, as if weighing something in his head. “Come sit with me,” he says finally.
Doing his best to steady his breaths, Hitoshi makes his way over, taking a seat beside his teacher.
“I come here whenever I need a change of scenery,” Aizawa says, startling Hitoshi. His mentor normally isn’t one to start unnecessary conversation, especially small talk. Now that he thinks about it, Hitoshi can’t remember ever really talking to Aizawa one-on-one, at least not outside of training. “A little distance helps put things in perspective.”
“Makes sense,” Hitoshi replies politely.
Aizawa looks at him through the corner of his eye. “There’s something bothering you, isn’t there?”
Hitoshi is silent. He watches the waves for a few moments, tracing the cresting foam as it spread over the wet sand, hoping if he stays quiet long enough, Aizawa won’t ask him again.
“I can tell, you know,” Aizawa says. “We’ve trained together long enough that I know when you’ve got something on your mind. It’s pointless to try and hide it.”
The boy rubs the back of his neck. He’s backed into a corner, and he knows it. Nothing left to do now but blame his bad mood on something else. “Yeah, I’ve been stressed about midterms. They’re the first ones I’ll take as part of the hero course, and I want to make a good impression.”
His mentor stares at him flatly. “Is that the only thing?”
Hitoshi furrows his brows, dropping his gaze and scowling into the sand. “No,” he admits.
Instead of pressing him, Aizawa just waits, sitting in silence and allowing him to start talking whenever he feels comfortable.
It’s one of the things that irks Hitoshi most about Aizawa: his never-ending composure. For a man who subsists on protein pouches and naps between classes, he can wait the teen out endlessly, never pressuring him into responding or talking about something uncomfortable. It frustrates Hitoshi. Just once, he wishes Aizawa would lose his cool and blow his top at him. He’s not worth all this patience.
But no matter how far he tries to press his mentor, he never wins.
Hitoshi sighs. “It’s just… I keep thinking about something you said during training the other day. It’s really stupid, I don’t know why it’s bothering me so much.”
“If it’s bothering you, then it’s probably not stupid.”
The teen huffs. “It is stupid, okay? I’m just too sensitive. I need thicker skin if I want to be a hero.”
“What did I say?”
Hitoshi pauses, mustering up his strength to repeat the words. He looks back out at the waves, letting their rhythm lull him into a renewed sense of calm. It isn’t worth getting so worked up, and the last thing he wants is to lose his cool around his mentor. “When we were sparring, you were like, ‘Is that really the best you’ve got?’ And I know it was just a dumb ruse to divert my attention, but for some reason, I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Aizawa is silent for a while, also watching the waves. “It was a pretty terrible ruse. It didn’t even distract you for a second. You landed a punch straight to my solar plexus right after, remember?”
“Yeah, I do. It doesn’t change that I still keep thinking about it,” Hitoshi says, keeping one hand on his neck.
Aizawa turns and looks at him, waiting until Hitoshi did the same. “Do you want to know why I’m so tough on you?”
“Respectfully, sir, I don’t think you’re tough enough.”
Aizawa stares at him blankly for a moment and sighs. “I was going to say it’s because you remind me of myself at your age. But I suppose that just proves my point. That’s something I probably would’ve said too.”
The two of them sit in silence for a while, watching the gulls skim the top of the waves for fish. The sun is almost below the horizon now. The bands of layered pastels in the sky have been replaced by a warm magenta glow, softening the edges of everything on the beach.
As the silence stretches on, Hitoshi feels a calm start to settle over him at last. He focuses on his breathing, noticing Aizawa has started to do the same. He lets himself linger in the moment, enjoying the warmth of the fading sunlight and and rhythm of the waves crashing against the shore. After a while, he stops thinking so much about Aizawa’s words during the match, replacing them with what he’d just revealed.
You remind me of myself at your age.
It’s not really a surprise. Lots of people had drawn comparisons between the two of them over the last few months, especially once Hitoshi had begun studying under Aizawa and working to master the technique of his signature weapon. Between that and their mirrored expressions of perpetual exhaustion, the resemblance was pretty striking. Kayama loved to make offhand comments in her class about how Hitoshi looked like a miniaturized erasure hero, and Todoroki had more than once pressed him to reveal if he was secretly related to Aizawa somehow.
But it was still pretty surprising for Aizawa to admit something so personal himself. Hitoshi always got the sense that he didn’t like talking about his past. Usually he didn’t like talking period. Something about the fresh ocean air is causing him to open up more than usual.
Or maybe it’s just that he knew what Hitoshi needed to hear, once again.
Hitoshi smiles. “Thank you, sir.”
Aizawa raises an eyebrow. “For what?”
“For everything.”