Chapter Text
“Forgive me for asking, but at what point exactly did you stop listening to me?” Nedzu asks.
Shouta blinks, needing a moment before he can even process the question. He’s long past second wind, long past third - his body throws out signals to sleep, louder and louder, until his head feels like he’s pitching around on rough seas. He can’t help but find it irritating - he’ll sleep when he sleeps. If he isn’t imminently going to pass out, there’s no point to any of this noise and discomfort.
“Maybe I’d listen harder,” Shouta says, rubbing a hand over his jaw, “if you were saying anything I haven’t heard before.”
Nedzu smiles; sharp, hollow. “You think you’re just paying a toll, then? That if you sit here and wait for me to be finished, everything will go back as it was?”
Shouta shrugs. He doesn’t relish giving Nedzu the wrong answers, even after all this time since he was his teacher, but he’s running on nothing and he doesn’t see the point of pretty lies. “What else is going to happen?”
“What, indeed?” Nedzu says cheerfully. “Would I really let you go, when you provide such an obvious and irreplaceable benefit to a class that has already undergone such turmoil? Of course not.”
Irreplaceable, Shouta thinks. Surely that’s why he was here, too - because he thought he was giving these kids something they wouldn’t get from anyone else. Still, hearing it spoken like that makes something catch in his chest. Shouta views himself more as a necessary evil than as something to be prized.
Nedzu takes a long drink. Shouta wonders if he’s imagining the exhaustion in Nedzu’s posture - if he’s reached the point of being tired where it’s all he can see in others, too. Nedzu carefully replaces his cup on the table. “Truly,” he says, “what I wish for most is that you felt the same.”
Shouta can’t follow his meaning, and Nedzu smiles slightly, black eyes boring into his. “I wish you, too, valued the care and stability you provide for our charges. I wish you viewed it as an asset, the loss of which would cause harm to many.”
Shouta stares. “You can’t possibly connect the progress of my students with my...ego.”
“I connect their progress with your continued existence,” Nedzu replies. “Existence which, as you well know, is not guaranteed. I think you do an admirable job of caring for these children, and I think if you do not change your ways soon, this will be the last class to benefit from that care.”
For a moment, Shouta thinks Nedzu really is threatening to fire him - then he takes in the solemn look on the principal’s face and understands. “If that’s what it takes to do right by them,” he says, “then that’s an acceptable outcome for me. And it should be for you, too.”
Nedzu gives that clipped smile again. “Perhaps I have a wider perspective.”
“You want me to prioritise some hypothetical future class over the one I actually have right now, the one I can actually help-”
“You can’t have it both ways, Shouta,” Nedzu interrupts. He can’t remember the last time he saw Nedzu’s composed, polite facade slip like this. “If what you do is vitally important, it matters that you stay alive to continue doing it. If it isn’t vitally important, well-” Nedzu smiles, once again calm and benevolent, only the barest hint of sadness in his eyes, “-then there’s no need for you to die for it, is there?”
Shouta lets out a long sigh, unsure if it’s anger or exhaustion weighing him down now. “You could talk people into believing east is west, once you get going,” he murmurs, then looks up at his former teacher. “That doesn’t mean you get to just...talk, and undo everything I’ve been building.”
He swigs at the tea Nedzu had laid out for him, knowing it’s unlikely to be caffeinated given the subject of this conversation, but hoping for some sort of conditioned response to kick in and let him wake up just a little.
“If this is so important,” Shouta adds, grimacing and placing the lukewarm tea back down, “why now? It’s been years and you’ve never raised serious concerns about the way I run my classes." Regardless of how many of them I expelled, Shouta lets remain unsaid; he’s lost enough ground here without bringing that to the forefront of Nedzu’s mind.
“As I said, perspective,” Nedzu answers, then grows solemn again. “And I would also like to extend my apologies, for not raising this sooner.” He bows his head slightly. “You were a child in my care, too, at one time.”
Shouta shakes his head, not even sure what part he wants to deny most. He feels like a child, or like he’s spliced between the two; halfway back to being small, stubborn Shouta, summoned to the principal’s office, sure he knows what’s right but never quite able to articulate it in a way that makes people listen.
“Do you know the paradox of teaching, Shouta?” Nedzu asks brightly.
Shouta gives him a do you really think I have the energy for this look. Nedzu chuckles and continues. “The body of evidence thus far strongly suggests that our minds are not changed by the arguments of others, at least when it comes to strongly-held beliefs. Those undertaking this research suggest that it is impossible, or at least very unlikely, to change someone else’s mind, regardless of the logic or evidence we bring to bear.”
He pauses to sip at his tea, and Shouta suspects it isn’t a coincidence that this lets him actually catch up a little and process Nedzu’s words.
“Instead, people change their own minds - based on emotion, usually. Our only power is to offer them further pieces, further tools, which they might utilise to alter their own conclusions.”
He meets Shouta’s eyes and begins tidying away the tea set, the silent signal that he’s free to go. “I hope you change your mind about this soon, Shouta.”
A wave of dizziness hits Shouta when he stands, but he pushes forward and keeps walking anyway; this happens all the time, and he’s only actually blacked out once or twice.
His vision has almost entirely cleared by the time he’s out of Nedzu’s office, such that he can see Hizashi lurking around outside - Shouta will never understand why a man with hair that tall attempts to lurk.
“Hey, hey!” Hizashi says. He falls into step beside Shouta, and Shouta feels briefly out of time again; how many times did they walk these same halls, one of them trailing after the other? (Or Shouta bordered on both sides by loud, bright people he wouldn’t have traded for anything).
“He give you a hard time?”
Shouta grunts. He isn’t sure he has words, and he blames Nedzu entirely for putting him back in the mindset of his teenage self - there were still days as an adult where words didn’t want to come, but they were fewer and farther between. Like everything else, Shouta had learned to push through.
“I don’t envy you, man,” Hizashi says. “You’re still patrolling later?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Shouta has known Hizashi long enough to know that whatever expression he’s making right now, looking at it won’t help. The concern’s practically radiating off him - he even does that loudly. Luckily, Hizashi has also known Shouta long enough to know when he can take more pushing and when he can’t.
“Sure, sure,” Hizashi says, letting Shouta pull ahead of him. “Save some of that Eraserhead magic for the kids tomorrow.”
Sure, when Shouta comes across someone who needs help, he’s going to tell them he’d love to step in but he’s got a class full of teenagers to wrangle in the morning. As much as people liked to look up to heroes like they were gods, the number of people they saved was vastly outweighed by the number they never reached, who died without a hero in sight. One street protected meant dozens in darkness and out of earshot, beyond help.
Shouta would patrol and do what he could. He’d show up to class the next day and do what he could there. He’d do this until something tore him up to the point where he couldn’t anymore, and Nedzu’s tea parties weren’t going to change that.
Shouta does actually try to get some sleep before patrol, out of some strange brand of spite, and because his attempts to do paperwork instead had his eyes burning in less than a minute.
He lies on the mattress, curled in his sleeping bag, the hood creating a halo of comforting warmth - and yet, he’s no closer to sleep. His head throbs with every beat of his heart. There’s that gritty feeling in his eyes even when they’re closed. He’s hungry and nauseous all at once. All signs his body needs rest, but the discomfort keeps him hovering just on the edge of sleep for minutes that stretch into hours.
He gets up, swallows down several jelly packets, paces, tries to physically and mentally reset himself, then tries again. Nothing. He wants to call Nedzu and tell him trying to take care of himself is a fool’s errand. Shouta knows the theory of how a body works, knows what’s needed to function, but in practice it’s like dragging around some jangling, yelling, illogical creature. Exhaustion is an alarm bell, a signal to sleep, but what was the point of that when it was blaring too loudly to let him rest?
He resolves to give up once it’s half an hour until he has to leave, and finally drifts off minutes before, waking in a haze.
Patrolling always made Shouta’s surroundings feel slightly unreal, his world narrowed down to shadows and the things that emerge from them, and tonight that was only amplified by sleeplessness. He was used to this, but also he never was; pain excels at making itself new again. He passes under a streetlight and for a second he feels restored to some parody of normality, like his body has finally decided rest just isn’t necessary. One block later and his hands are shaking, a strange phantom panic rising in his chest, signals firing in his head uselessly, randomly.
Some nights he meets nothing at all, leads vanishing like mist when he gets too close. A few of those in a row - days spent surrounded by loud, clamoring, bright-eyed kids, and nights alone in the silent, shifting dark, walking, waiting, listening for chaos that never comes - a few of those and he starts to wish for a good fight.
He’s not stupid enough to wish for that tonight, but it comes anyway, in the form of an amateur villain tackling him from the shadows as he’s crossing a rooftop, form clumsy enough that he shouldn’t have been able to get the jump on Shouta. The surprise of that knocks him further off-balance, and what the villain lacks in skill he makes up for in heavy, harsh blows, enough lead-up to them that Shouta should be able to find an opening easily - but the haze won’t let up, and he misses one opportunity, two, and suddenly the villain straight-up headbutts him and there’s no ground under his feet anymore.
He’s sure there should be a moment, among the rushing night air, where he could throw out his capture scarf, spy something to anchor onto, stop or even soften the fall - instead, he has half a second of disorientation, cold and dizzy, unsure if he’s looking at dark sky or dark ground, and then pain.