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Aizawa can’t say he really cares too much about his appearance anymore.
In the Before, he’d really had to work hard on that. Not because he had been an unclean person, but because he was never particularly neat. And, being a school teacher to literally hundreds of young, exceptionally easily influenced school children, he had an obligation to give them the same respect that they returned. That is to say, his children dressed neat.
So Aizawa dressed neat.
In the After, he allows himself the luxury of days without a shave. Days of unplucked eyebrows that give him nice springy bridges over his eyes. He likes to make the excuse that razors are difficult to find and to be used sparingly, but really he found a pack of a hundred last week that he has yet to crack open, and when he scouted through the bathroom in this house, he’d collected about eleven more. It would have been a good opportunity to shave, considering the running water still making loops through the taps, and the full, Uncracked mirror.
Instead Aizawa stripped to his underwear and indulged himself in a can of sliced peaches.
So naturally, he’d been a bit of a scary sight for someone to walk into. Young, obviously exhausted and terrified boys completely registered on that list.
The child can’t be more than eight. Tiny, swaddled in a sweater clearly intended for an older boy, maybe one in their very early preteens. Eyes huge and hung by deep purple smiles, clear indications of sleep deprivation and stress and all the horrific trauma that results from the post apocalypse. His face is small and pale under hair that has all the floof and buoyancy of strands recently run through with a balloon. It’s a bit wavy, which from experience, is a rare circumstance in Japan.
Those round eyes are pretty rare too, come to think of it.
The kid stares at him, hand holding the doorknob of the bathroom with a fierce tenacity since glimpsing the scruffy man in boxers sitting cross legged on the toilet seat. Little fingers barely pop out beneath the burnt orange sleeves.
Might as well be called dirt orange though with how filthy the cloth is.
Aizawa slurps and swallows the last peach from his spoon.
“Beunos Dias?” Panic never shows in Aizawa’s voice or in his face. Instead he defaults to Spanish when he’s stressed. It doesn’t register with the boy, until he raises a single hand in a wave. “You lost...?”
The kid stands stock still, mouth opening in a pearl sliver.
Fuck.
Kid still has his baby teeth.
Aizawa starts to stand, reaching, “Hey, can you understand m—“
The child bolts. He shoves the door so hard it smacks into the wall and comes right back to hit Aizawa when he stands between it, rushing after the boy and holding back a shout.
“Fuck!” Aizawa watches lavender hair round the bannister as the boy runs down the stairs.
He’s going so fast Aizawa can hear him breathing exertion in panicked kiddie wheezes.
He’s so... noisy.
A tiny little kid. All alone. Recreating Bach’s symphony when he runs.
How the Hell had he survived the After?
“Fuck,” Aizawa sighs, pulling his cheek down as the kid stumbles below. Had he taken care of all the Lurkers in the area, or had he done his usual toss a can distraction and snuck inside?
In seconds the man has his coat over his shoulders, bat in hand, whipping around the bannister.
Aizawa can’t call out otherwise all the Lurkers will latch onto his voice and swarm them within seconds. His only chance is to catch up, which hopefully shouldn’t be too hard. He’s been graced with a lanky long body. The peach juice is still drying on his very unkempt beard and he wipes at it annoyedly. He just prays the kid doesn’t scream when he sees some slobbery hobo chasing him.
The little ingrate is out the door and halfway down the street before he decides to check his surroundings, and Aizawa is convinced the child will scream when he slides to a stop to watch the shrivelled corpses lurching toward him. Instead the boy takes several panicky inhales, like he’s fighting the air into his lungs, and recalibrates by trying the handles of abandoned car doors. Aizawa reads his plan.
Hide until they get tired.
Whatever part of the nuclear bomb that created the Lurkers also gave them an impossible patience directly counterintuitive to their loud, watery groans. God forbid they get the urge to scream, because that sounds is straight up nails on a chalkboard, night owl cry in reverse type scary. Those ones, Aizawa called Howlers, screw the lack of originality.
Anyway, the Lurkers physically had an incapability of becoming exhausted. Hollow eyes and paper skin over bones be damned. They did however, tend to become distracted rather easily. Incredibly so, actually. Shiny lights, fast movement, loud noises. Convenient.
Aizawa scoops a beer bottle from the pavement. full, but in this day and age it could be piss in there instead of alcohol. He’s not much of a drinker anyway so he feels zero remorse as he lugs it overhead, smashing to pieces on the opposite side of the street. The bulk of the mindless, brown forms gurgle after the noise. Aizawa looks back to the boy, still being followed by two Lurks.
The kid gets lucky and scrambles into a sedan just as Aizawa catches up. He easily shoves back the creature that had been gaining on the boy, now thumping its lumpy hands against the window uselessly. It gurgles and moans. Makes a slow swing. Aizawa kicks it, hard. Not even bothering to look as he does so, more intent on the boy. He tries the door handle.
Locked.
“Hey,” He hisses, glaring. “Open this door.”
The kid, curled on the opposite end of the car, shakes his head.
Aizawa smacks the glass himself. “I’m trying to help you, you idiot.”
The boy jumps at the sound on the glass, and his eyes water but no tears fall. He covers his ears and squeezes his eyes shut, mouth moving. Likely to drown out Aizawa. He juggles the handle in vehemence, pointer finger outstretched and accusing uselessly.
“I swear to God, listen you brat, you better open this door right now or I’ll...!”
Come to think of it, He’d never been a particularly nice teacher.
The kicked Lurk has managed to crawl close enough to Aizawa again that it starts reaching for his legs. He shakes off its gummie fingers in agitation. The other Lurkers are slowly becoming bored of the scattered glass remains of their distraction. Even though Aizawa is quietly hissing, it’s still noise, and the creatures have been blessed with the single most incredible set of ears known to man.
“Shit.” He wipes his mouth again, though it’s now covered in that unpleasant dry stickiness that can only come from sugary fruit. He taps the length of the bat against his skull, trying to think, stepping back from the scrabbling fingers.
Why does he even care? It’s not his kid. Even in the Before, he’d deliberately made the conscious decision to never have children. They were a nuisance. One he could make a living off of, sure, by imposing his eclectic moral compass and manners, but still a hinderance.
He knows though, somehow, from the rough way the kid had looked, the desperate way in which he wandered, the lack of shouting out for help, that this little twerp has absolutely nobody out here. And unlike Aizawa, he doesn’t have a skewed code of ethics and a general lack of caring about people’s shot to get him by.
“Just, just stay there, alright?” The man orders the child, though the scared purple eyes that peek at hi before snapping shut tell him there likely no way he was heard. Or will be obeyed. He’s out of options though, so he jogs off anyway.
Even with all the vegetation overtaking the suburbs, clearly not much has changed in the quaint aesthetic neighbourhood. In fact, there’s probably more trash covering the streets of Tokyo now than in the Before. The results of plundering and savagery from the first couple weeks of the bomb drops. The homes stack atop stores in pastel LEGO pieces with Asian accents. Sliding doors, slat windows.
Where the kid had brought them is a four-way clogged with cars. Aizawa takes a narrow offshoot to the next street over, having to go almost a block before encountering the next vehicle. It looks new enough to maybe have a working battery, solar panels registering a single red bar of energy on the roof display.
“Batter up,” Aizawa grumbles, then twirls his bat before bringing it round with mighty force.
The windows shatter and part of the frame crumples, and the alarm gives a lazy couple blares until Aizawa smashes at it again, and the noise becomes a wail.
In the distance, he hears the sputtering of lurkers as they swell toward the splitting sound. Then there’s the unmistakable shriek of a Howler, and Aizawa bares his teeth. He slips back down the alleyway quickly, hiding behind a mailbox when the Lurkers from his street wander through in excited shuffles.
God those noises. Wet breathing. It’s unnerving.
The car alarm is blazing loudly, probably enough to bring in zombies from the next twenty blocks. So Aizawa feels little concern when he returns to the sedan and gestures for the staring child to cover his eyes.
Then he jams the bat handle into the door window. It fractures like sugar, and Aizawa reaches through to unlock it quickly.
The kid gasps and flings himself around.
“Hey,” Aizawa calls. The boy fumbles with the other door, getting it open just as Aizawa bends inside. “Hey!” He reaches after, fingers grazing a sneaker as the boy fumbles outside.
This time Aizawa is faster though, tossing the bat and scrambling through the car after him. He’s caught up in two strides and yanking that orange hoodie into the air, child attached.
“Can you stop running, you moron—?” Aizawa grouses, and makes the mistake of yanking the little kid towards him.
The boy lunges and those tiny little teeth sink into the hairy forearm tethering him to the former teacher.
An hour later, Aizawa is using a frozen pack of string beans to calm the swelling from the bite. The kid is shut in the bathroom, sans razors. He leans against the door and moves the vegetables from his arm to his bruised forehead, another battle scar, wincing.
“Brat,” He grumbles. The knob twists and he yanks it shut again easily. “What’s your name?”
He’s rewarded by silence.
“Do you understand Japanese?”
More silence.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. So either you’re an immigrant, or you’re a moron. Fantastic.” He waves his hands skyward.
“Shinsou.”
Aizawa stills. “What?”
“Shinsou Hitoshi.” The boy’s quiet little squeak barely registers as audible.
“Your name is Shinsou?” There’s a shuffling sound. He realizes the kid is nodding, forgetting about the door. “Where are you parents Shinsou?”
“I don’t know,” comes the reply.
“What were you doing here alone?”
The silence that follows is near pregnant before Shinsou whispers, “I was hungry.”
There’s a burn that goes through Aizawa’s lungs, probably heartburn from the peaches. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“Fr-Friday?”
Two days ago, if they’re both counting the same time. It’s easy to lose track of these days. Aizawa squeezes his hand over his chest as he fights another swell of stomach acid. He scoffs. “So you thought the best response when you were hungry was to run away and bite the person who might have food for you?”
Shinsou begins to cry. There’s a peal of a whimper that gets cut off before the boy clearly buries his face in something to muffle the sound. It’s hiccupping. It’s lonely. It’s pathetic.
This time the pain Aizawa feels has him gritting his teeth. “Shit!” He tries to open the door and meets a resistance that is clearly Shinsou’s body. The kid moves after a moment, still sobbing. He pushes open the door, stepping inside softly, and it’s a testament to how hungry and tired Shinsou is that he just continues to cry. He looks up at Aizawa through his shudders, scrubbing over his face with his filthy clothes. Sleeves forming paws with those tiny fingers.
“Shi—I mean shoot, listen Shinsou, don’t cry, okay? Don’t cry.” He squats, watching the child awkwardly, hands outstretched but confused as what to do next. When children cried in his class in the Before, he would just send them out of the room to compose themselves. He puts on a stern voice. “Don’t cry, you’re going to draw the attention of the Lurkers.”
“I c-c-can’t st-st-stop.” Shinsou makes a valiant effort by clamping his hands over his mouth, rivers still pouring from his huge eyes.
God damn, Aizawa won’t ever have peaches again. His chest is aching.
Slowly, nervously, he reaches a hand out to the boy. It’s an unsure motion. A scared motion. Not that he’ll get bitten again. Though that really had hurt.
Aizawa isn’t really sure why this frightens him, but it does, and he calls himself every name in to book to keep his shaking hand moving forward, slowly coming to pat that surprising soft mop of hair. Shinsou looks up at him, blinking, hiccupping, inhaling loudly through his nose to keep some kind of fluid inside him.
When Aizawa begins to pet him, Shinsou slowly stops crying, shifting into a tremoring, face wiping mess.
“It’s going to be alright. Okay?” He can’t make his voice high and squealy the way parents make it. But he fumbles through something that is soft, if a little stuttering and awkward. “Look, I have food okay? I can give you some. And, uh, have you slept recently?”
“N-not real-really.”
“Well you can sleep here, alright? I’ll keep you safe.”
Suddenly Aizawa is accosted. Small arms constricting his waist. He looks down, and sees Shinsou squeezing him a fierce, trusting hug.
Had any of the school children he taught ever considered the thought of touching him?
He’s sure it was thought of as a death wish.
“Damn, you’re trusting.” Aizawa sighs. “How in the Hell have you made it all this time.”
He wants to remove the kid from him.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he asks, “Have you ever tried canned peaches? They’re a diabetes inducing American food.”
“Die-ah-bet-us?” Shinsou mispronounces in a muffle against him, looking up but not letting go.
“Yeah, diabetes. It’s a condition caused by the lack of insulin production in some individuals. You don’t know it, huh?”
Shinsou shakes his head. If possible, those enormous purple eyes grow wider in awe.
Aizawa whistles. “Boy, am I going to have a lot to teach you.”