Chapter Text
Shouta is decent at stitching himself up. He has to be, to stay undercover. Too much travel time is bad for business, a hospital close by is too easily connected to the aftermath. He's proficient with a needle, knows how to string thread, can knot and clip at a reasonable pace. It's a skill best practiced on others but he's no slouch.
The day his bandages come off Recovery Girl touches his cheek where it still throbs and clicks her tongue. "That boy did a good job fixing your face."
"Who?" Shouta's disoriented by the sight of his bare knuckles. He adapts fast. Too fast. "You didn't stitch me up?"
"No, no. Toshinori gave me a hand with your orbital floor. And you still have your eyes! And your quirk!"
She sounds pleased. She sounds like it was, in fact, in doubt, and All Might of all people made the difference. Shouta looks at his own face in the hand mirror she gave him. The whole of his orbital floor and most of his sinuses to repair, but only the one entry wound to work within. It's impossibly deft work. "He did that?"
"Oh, steadiest hands in the business," she says cheerfully. "Go on and rest now."
Shouta contemplates All Might stitching his shattered bones with those long fingers spidery as coils of steel thread, and swallows hard. "Thank you."
Shouta finds him in the lounge. He's swamped in that ugly suit, frowning behind his bangs at a book, highlighter ink on his fingers and a cup of something the same neon shade on the table beside him. It's all too much yellow for Shouta's taste, but this is important. "Have a moment?"
"Oh! Aizawa-sensei, of course." He waves Shouta down. "What can I, er-?"
"Recovery Girl tells me you fixed my face. I want to know why you could."
Yagi blinks. "Why?" He fiddles with the highlighter, caps it. "Well, it's useful for a hero."
That's not what he asked. "Why," Shouta says, "do you have the steadiest hands in the business?"
All Might's smile turns and tilts in a way Shouta knows from a thousand off-colour villains, wry and resigned to a fate of pain and obscurity. "I am here," Yagi says. "Everything will be all right." He's quoting himself like it's a film character and not his own persona. He spreads his hands and shrugs.
"You've stitched yourself up," Shouta says, and on the heels of that: "Your Quirk. A shock absorption secondary is rare."
"Unfortunately," Yagi says. "I had an interest in anatomy as a child. It's served me well."
He can't tell if it's the interest that's unfortunate, or the limitation of his Quirk. Shouta knows it's not a question he wants to ask. The edges of all the things Yagi could have been - terrible, awesome, petrifying - are unpleasant even for Shouta.
"Ah," as though Shouta's said anything. "You're welcome," Yagi says. He's smiling that same villain's self-knowledge. "Best not mention it, though, I think."
"No," Shouta says. "I won't."
"Thank you, Aizawa-sensei," warm and sincere and All Might's smile, and Shouta stumbles unsettled and lurching to his feet. "If I may? You have a lovely skull. That might be too strange..."
Shouta flees. He doesn't mean to, exactly. But what the fuck does anyone say to that?
***
"There's something wrong with him," Shouta says in an undertone. "Have you noticed?"
Hizashi gives him a Look. It's the kind that doesn't need a directional speaker. "There's a list. You're just late."
Shouta sputters. Late? Fuck that. "I am not. It's logical to keep my suspicions to myself until I have evidence-"
"But they're all a little strange past two decades, aren't they?" Nemuri sounds like she's convincing herself. "Everyone's strange then."
"Are they." Shouta makes sure his voice is appropriately flat. "Say that's true. So why is he the fucking creepiest?"
Hizashi shrugs. "Classic overachiever behaviour? Number One can't stop, won't stop?" He pauses, shudders theatrically, and downs the rest of Nemuri's drink.
Shouta just would like to get to the bottom of this. "He fixed my face. Recovery Girl told me. She did most of it but the one who put it back together, that was him."
"Ah," Hizashi says.
"I have a 'lovely skull'," Shouta says.
"Ah," Nemuri says, and flags down a waiter and orders two rounds at once.
Hizashi's moustache twitches. "It was nice of him to help out," he ventures.
"Yeah, very nice," Nemuri says. "He's a nice man, have you noticed?"
"Oh yeah, yeah, exactly, he's... he's nice." Hizashi sounds desperate.
Shouta scowls into his beer. "Why does he like what the inside of my face looks like if he's so fucking nice? I could have died. They all could have -- we all could have -- but -- 'lovely'?"
Nemuri takes his hand and wraps it around one of the drinks the waiter sets down and Hizashi does the same with Shouta's other hand. "Shut up and be grateful," she says.
"I think I can still feel his fingers," Shouta says.
"Please shut the fuck up," Hizashi says.
They all drink.
"It could be a hobby," Nemuri says.
"You shut up too," Hizashi says.
They all drink again.
***
Shouta gives in and goes to the source. "Excuse me."
"Ah, ah, what do you need?" She has her feet up on a stool, hands poised on the home row of her keyboard. Recovery Girl is an old-fashioned sort and Shouta appreciates it about her.
"I was wondering about Yagi's surgical skills," Shouta says. "Surely he doesn't have a license." He touches the scar on his cheek. It's hard not to sometimes. A bad habit to develop.
But when he thinks of tools and fingers reaching inside, of the shatter of his future being called lovely, he fails to sleep afterwards.
There are worse habits.
She shakes her head. "Why are you asking me?"
"I prefer to ask you," Shouta deflects. "Is it secret?"
"No, no. We used to work together. Operating on you was like old times. He would set bones and put together arteries, I would heal them enough to survive triage, and we would go on like that. Sometimes for days." Recovery Girl's face wrinkles into a smile. "This is a nice holiday for him."
Shouta contemplates a lot of things in the next few moments.
UA being a holiday: Yagi doesn't act like it is one.
Work together: well, it has been thirty years of All Might.
For days: some of the powerful Quirks were unopposed or uncontainable back then.
Like old times: All Might was ever involved in the aftermath of search and rescue?
And one last, terrible point. "Even with what happened at USJ?"
"Oh yes." Recovery Girl turns back to her computer. "None of the students died. It's always a shame when we have to mark the children." She draws an X on her cheek. "You wouldn't see that, though, of course! These privacy laws nowadays."
Privacy laws being the only reason they don't regularly see dead, catalogued children on television. "He assisted you with catastrophic injury," he says blankly.
Her expression is very patient. "He caused a lot of the catastrophic injury. Of course he did."
Every time he thought Yagi threw a wind-generating, massive punch in an urban area without thinking about the consequences... "He went that far?"
"Wouldn't he be a villain otherwise?" she points out. "A hero should rescue their own victims. Don't you think?"
Shouta recalibrates. Maybe all the press conferences aren't just hogging the limelight. Maybe they're Yagi reminding himself that he is a hero. To care about his own consequences. "He thinks I'm one of his victims?"
Recovery Girl hums. "He was supposed to be there. Aren't you?"
He doesn't think about himself like that. "No."
"Interesting," she says, and very kindly kicks him out.
***
Shouta finds a link in his email after the last bell. It's to the intranet page of one of the old class units from before he was a teacher, before he was a hero at all. Emergency Treatment, modules one through to sixty, with a short video and suggested questions, plus example essay topics on the subcollections. Enough for a semester.
Taught by Recovery Girl with assistance from heroes at the scene and a warning that every video is real.
The first video is in clear mid-century quality, a little shaky but focused on a younger Recovery Girl and a broad blond man wearing a particulates filter and green-framed glasses, the kind with a digital mask to defeat facial recognition.
Shouta knows who the assistant is. How could he not know?
The limb in those big hands is a mess of bloodied shards broken through skin. Recovery Girl is talking about useful, interesting things, how to accommodate healing quirks, how to support them in search and rescue. Basic teamwork.
Whoever they're handling is crumpled unconscious. Shouta watches Yagi wash pieces of bone and thick arteries as Recovery Girl talks on about rejection syndromes, septic shock, blood loss, the importance of marrow pieces even if crushed, the lesser importance of straight bones.
He's shifting pieces around under broken skin and frayed muscle like picking up a cup fractured on the floor, holding them up for the camera as Recovery Girl talks and talks and finally, finally heals the poor bastard with a kiss.
"Because of my assistant here, if this fixing process is repeated a hundred times, I am able to heal a thousand smaller injuries with energy that would otherwise go to cellular development and realignment. That may not seem like much, but it makes a difference!" She laughs and pats the victim, their leg straight and whole if ferociously bruised, and uses their shoulder to push to her feet.
Not much, she says. Not much.
How much do they all know about the days of the first heroes, really? How much have the old timers never said?
Shouta can see why this class isn't taught anymore, its grim lessons lost to multiple hero agencies, overlapping patrols, search and rescue specialists, hospital investments, support items, federal subsidies for nursing and surgical professions.
But it shouldn't be forgotten. Not so easily.
Shouta stares at what he can see of Yagi's face. His hands are steady and grisly to the elbow, his expression relaxed without a trace of the famous smile. That, more than the analog and digital masks, makes him difficult to recognise.
Snipe teaches the history courses. Shouta forwards the link to the teacher's chat, adds 'did you know about this?'
'It was my idea', Snipe replies right away, and stands up from across the lab, clears his throat. "Perfect Focus is good for weapons and wounds, Aizawa."
"Shigaraki. At USJ. You aimed for his limbs. Would you have...?" He's not sure what he's asking.
"If he deserved to be fixed up," Snipe says. "Not my call."
Shouta thinks about triage and feels a little ill. There's knowing Yagi carried all their lives in his hands. Then there's knowing that meant deciding their pain and wholeness too.
It's a hard burden. Shouta's never envied a healing Quirk.
"It would have been All Might's decision." He isn't really asking Snipe.
Snipe nods anyway. "He wouldn't have left him too long."
Not too long. That's different from his injuries being important. The report said Snipe shot through both arms and legs.
Shouta thinks about the ability to choose to kill, and maim, and mangle. If Yagi is ever tempted, and human enough to indulge.
Of course he is. All Might's been around thirty years. There must have been a moment of casual, deliberate neglect. A sense of the cascade of small actions rippling large.
He considers the coldness of that triage, and lovely skulls, and the ghost of steel and strength in his cheek, and how fucking lucky he is to be alive. To have his Quirk. His eyes.
For whatever reason Yagi did not indulge his humanity on Shouta, frustrated and injured and tired as he must have been. If appreciating his bones as he jigsawed his face together is all Yagi allowed himself, then Shouta will force himself to be content.
Not grateful. Not now that he knows. But content with escaping. It'll have to be enough.
***
Yagi is still creepy, though. He's abnormally still for such a large man, his touch extraordinarily precise, and Shouta now suspects he's staffing for Recovery Girl as much as Nedzu.
He doesn't see it in action until one of his patrols. Its a risky choice, a risky place, a risky target, and he misses his throw just a little, and wrenches the villain's arm out of joint before they can touch Yagi. There's a bulge in the forearm. Shit.
"Never fear," Yagi says in his quiet voice, looking up at Shouta, and kneels beside the villain. "Shh. You're hurt. Can you show me where?"
"I'm a villain!" the villain snaps. "I'm going to kill you-"
"Yes, yes," Yagi says, tone all indulgence, and beckons. "Show me your arm, please? It is your arm?"
The villain puts their arm in Yagi's hand before they ask what for in a show of trust so absurd Shouta can't help but sigh at this villain with the self protective instincts of a mayfly.
Yagi runs his hand over the arm, clicks his tongue, and says, all kind pleasant steel, "this will hurt," and sets the villain's arm back in the socket.
They howl. "What the fuck?"
"This too," Yagi says, not letting go, only shifting his grip crablike sideways, and runs his thumbs over the bulge. "Ah. Excuse me. Once more."
His hands tense, shift, and jerk. It's a wet, bloodied sort of noise, and the villain cries, snot running down their chin, feet jerking wildly, but their arm is straight again. Yagi takes a length of discarded pipe, rips his own shirt, and splints the arm so matter of fact Shouta stares as much as the villain.
"Learn to run away when you're outclassed," Yagi says, knotting even more of his huge shirt and the villain's together into a sling, and lets go.
The villain bristles, struggles to their feet. Shouta braces, readies his eyes. "The fuck? I could still-"
"Young man. What did I just say?" He's smiling up at the villain, soft and kind, his hands spread like harmless twigs on his knees.
All the hair on Shouta's body stands on end and it's nothing to do with his quirk.
The villain makes their first wise decision all damn night and flees.
Yagi pushes to his feet using the wall and sighs, that heavy presence not quite fading but folding. Tucking on itself like a switchblade. Always sharp, not always safe to show. "Are you out this late for a reason, Eraserhead?"
Shouta realises he's holding his breath and breathes out hard. "Yeah."
"Ah. Better luck the rest of the night," Yagi says, and gives every sign he plans to plod on with bloodied hands like he didn't just face down and fix up a mugger.
What the fuck is this man they're all stuck with, honestly. "Let me walk you home."
He shrugs. On a man his height, with limbs so long, it's an undertaking. "Your ulterior motive being..?"
"Questions," Shouta says.
"You too?" Yagi asks mildly.
Shouta can't tell which of them he's making fun of. Maybe both. Maybe the world. "With your skills, why didn't you go into search and rescue?" That was a textbook field reduction, correction and splint. Sure, the kid still needs a hospital, but his bones are in the right places now. They'll hold through however long emergency care will take to get to him.
"It wasn't sensible to start my career under yakuza control," Yagi answers, still placid. The perpetual cheer of All Might translates into something unshakeable about Yagi.
"Yakuza," Shouta echoes. These days that word is an echo of history, swallowed up by villain groups and Quirkless rebels. But Yagi says it like if it mattered once, it still should. Illogical. And a reference to himself. Shouta won't touch it. "You broke them up."
"Mm. I had an advantage. I grew up in tax shelters. Not like villains these days. No head for business." He sounds faintly disapproving.
Shouta finds that as much as he expected working with All Might to be frustrating and irritating, he didn't expect to learn anything. To be pushed to think like he's a student himself. A tax shelter is a very different specification to an orphanage and the mental image of All Might being just another undersized, closely packed cog in the creative accounting machine is a heat haze, wavering and unreal.
"Shie Hassaikai," Shouta starts, unsure how to finish.
Yagi sighs. It sounds irritated for the first time tonight. "Handling that child the way they did was utterly counterproductive. Of course her loyalty switched. They didn't bother to establish it to start with! So easy to do at that age and yet-" He clicks his tongue.
Shouta has no idea how to handle Yagi so... detached. Disapproving of the methods and not once mentioning the morals. "If they were that competent Midoriya would be dead. A lot of people would be dead."
"Ah, yes," Yagi says. "Sorry, I shouldn't speak professionally."
Shouta turns his head to stare. "Your professional opinion of how to manipulate children?" Awareness dawns cold and terrible. Not children. Yakuza. "You've thought about if it was your operation."
Overhaul was terrifying. But All Might as the head of Shie Hassaikai - "Aizawa-sensei," Yagi says. He looks stricken. "I'm sorry, I didn't think. I'm - I forgot. I forget myself and speak too freely." He rubs the back of his neck, elbow a blade. "Don't worry about it, okay?"
"No," Shouta says. This is important. All Might thinking like a villain is not a surprise. It's even logical.
That he's willing to show a little of the cold calculation that must go into leaving all of his enemies alive despite causing massive destruction with a flick of his fucking pinky - that's the surprise.
That deliberate man is the one who sewed together Shouta's skull. "How would you stop it from happening again?" He presses on. "The Liberation Front. How would you stop them?"
"What a question," Yagi says.
Shouta stops in his tracks. "They haven't asked you?"
"I am just a retiree, Aizawa," Yagi says. "Yes, I was All Might, but -"
"Bullshit," Shouta snaps. "Tell me what you would do."
He hums again. There's a crooked little smile on his face. "Ideally? Give them what they want. No, Aizawa," interrupting Shouta's protest. "What they really want. They feel powerless, ignored, isolated. So talk to them."
"We don't have time -" He cuts himself off. Yagi is smiling. "What?"
"You have time because Shigaraki has time." It's relentless. Steady. "If he did not have time this city would be under martial law and we would have this conversation in a warehouse of bodies."
Shouta does not fucking understand this man. "It's not that simple, we won against Overhaul but there were losses-"
"Very few."
"What?" Sir Nighteye is dead, Midoriya almost died. Mirio lost his quirk.
"As far as they are concerned, this is a hostage negotiation," Yagi says, firm but kind, and the gentleness makes it worse. "You are the hostages. Talk to your captors. Divide their loyalties and figure out their priorities. Organisations don't combine smoothly," voice turning reflective. "There's bound to be terrible gaps in protocol."
Shouta swallows hard. "Those Quirk bullets were bad enough."
"You have to survive for the effect to matter, Aizawa," gentler still. "Murder wasn't the point. And still, individual targets, specialised handgun casings requiring far too much factory investment, not even a sniper caliber or flechette? No shrapnel grenades laced with a secondary solution?" He shakes his head. "Overhaul had large dreams and a small mind."
Shouta has never, ever thought of All Might as a terrorist. Perhaps the villains did. Had to. There isn't a lot about his career in that sense. The flashy rescues, yes, but everyone skips over the yakuza breakdowns and praises the depression of crime rates.
He used to skip over that too, and think of All Might as all flash and no substance. He's learning better, moment by moment. "Is that how you would have done it?"
Yagi looks at him. "No. He would have if he meant what he said." His smile is a crooked little thing.
Curiosity, in the quiet of walking with this man who shaped the world, is an awful temptation. "How would you do it?"
"If my goal was to destroy society's perception of Quirks? I would figure out the exact chemical limits, then use them as intermittent poison. Food supply, fields, processing plants, medical tubing. Sugar, flour, dye. Dialysis solution, saline solutions, plasma adulteration. A new angle every fortnight, a red herring every other, ten to fifteen bribes of perhaps ten thousand each." He spreads long fingers, hums. "Three months of uncertainty would be enough."
The chaos and panic of multiple sources of quirk removal - of being unable to trust water, food, air, medical care, themselves, each other - waves of new sources - it would be an epidemic of fear and hate and violence - it would destroy everything All Might built - it would destroy all of them, unbalance the economy, restructure power, create shortages -
And into that void, All Might.
Do not fear! I am here!
Shouta swallows nausea, his eyes threatening to wobble, the ground tilting unreal. If Yagi was any worse a person, any more easily tempted...
"Everyone praised me for going beyond," Yagi says, so clearly tracking the chaotic emotions in Shouta's head. "Plus Ultra. None of them thought about what it means. Except Sir Nighteye. There were days he took one look at me - without his quirk! - and told me to stay indoors."
"But you're retired," Shouta says carefully.
Yagi shrugs, that same loose gesture. "I have my days. You need them. Don't you?"
Shit. Shit. He sucks in a breath. They're lucky. They're so lucky, no one knows what they missed by the skin of Yagi's teeth, the future that could have been. The power All Might had. Could have been used just a little differently, and made - made -
Shouta once thought they were living the worst of All Might. This puffed up, vapid thing with too much power and too unaware of it.
They weren't. Yagi wasn't unaware.
"I'll walk you back," Shouta manages to say. Letting Yagi out of his sight right now is even more unsettling than the man himself. Than the throbbing between his eyes.
"Sorry, I think I alarmed you. It's all theory. Baseless speculation!" He's laughing it off.
"Except for the warehouses of bodies," Shouta says, like poking a sore tooth. "You've had conversations like that."
"Mmm. I don't miss it. Always made me want cheeseburgers!"
He struggles for a moment to connect that statement with All Might and corpse warehouses. "Really."
"Yes! I woke up after Kamino and something smelled delicious, but it was me!" Yagi laughs, scratching the back of his neck with those bloodied hands, and for the first time Shouta notices the strange tuck of the loose skin at his elbow, how on that side the bend doesn't have the tanned, freckled wrinkles of the other.
The elbow skin doesn't look like an elbow. It's too smooth, but it doesn't look replaced. Just sewn together into sharpness over the bone.
Shouta assumed the new colour of the skin of his repaired elbow was an effect of some surgeon's quirk. He's never thought - why would he think - but its exactly what All Might would do, isn't it? Forget the shirt off his back for villains, All Might had to go Plus Ultra for his colleagues. Of fucking course. "You gave me your elbow."
"Ah, just the skin. I had plenty to spare, as you can see! I lost a lot of weight even in my hero form," he says earnestly. "It wasn't a problem at all."
"I don't understand you," Shouta says honestly. This shift from creepy-pleasant to creepy-self-aware to creepy-generous is giving him whiplash. "Does anyone? Is that deliberate?"
Yagi is still smiling but it looks very tired. "No, you're just in the same boat as me. I hardly understand myself."
He doesn't want to get any closer to Yagi than this. It's all already too much for one night. But. "You have time too," Shouta says carefully. "If it's true that this is a hostage negotiation, it also applies to you."
"I wonder," Yagi says. He isn't smiling now. "So, that villain you were chasing..."
Shouta jumps onto the subject change, relieved to talk about things he knows and understands, to let his unease circle in the back of his mind.
Hizashi was right. There's a fucking laundry list of shit wrong with All Might. The man's an iceberg, one eighth pretty smile on top, seven-eighths... what? Not menace or hate or spite or cruelty, or even indifference.
One-eighth All Might, seven-eighths Yagi Toshinori, and that guy -
Shouta isn't actually sure who that guy is.
***
Detective Tsukauchi has a scowl that can be heard on the phone. "About Toshinori? Why?"
"I've heard you're his friend."
"Yes," clipped. "And?"
There's no good way to say it. "Has he ever said things a villain would say? Been creepy about criminals?"
There's a soft sigh down the phone. "Ah. Congratulations. You're getting the friend treatment."
Shouta blinks. Tsukauchi doesn't sound surprised in the slightest. "This isn't a new development."
"Oh, believe me, he's mellowed. Nothing like he used to be. A good thing for all our sakes, too."
Mellowed. Well, yes. All Might is retired. But Tsukauchi sounds like he has direct experience. "His injury," Shouta half-guesses. "The pain affected him."
Tsukauchi clicks his tongue. "Not exactly. It made him hide less. More like he used to be in his yakuza days. The stories the old timers tell about that would curl your hair."
Shouta eyes an unwashed lock hanging in his face. "That'd be a feat."
"Hah! The point is, Toshinori shows his fangs to people he decides are worth the effort of getting past their reactions. Whatever you did with whatever he told you, he'd have carried you home and tucked you into bed with a bucket if that's what you needed."
"And never mention it again. Because that's the kind of person he is."
Tsukauchi makes a satisfied noise. "Exactly."
"How do you cope?" Shouta doesn't bother being specific. It's all of it, the whole of the man, his skills and his comfort and the way he talks about himself like a bundle of parts to be shared around down to the skin, maybe to the bone. It's how Yagi wears the blood on his hands like a second skin.
"I remind myself," Tsukauchi says, "that he is a good man."
Shouta thinks about that. "If he weren't, we'd know."
Tsukauchi snorts. "It would be a very, very different world. No heroes. Just cattle management and all of us as the cattle. You thought Overhaul was bad for using one little girl."
Shouta frowns and ignores the tone. Tsukauchi has his own sharp edges. He would have to. "He was planning on Erasing quirks." They'd studied Shouta. Hadn't that been fun to find out.
"That is irrelevant to the point, Aizawa-san."
"He was abusing her, taking her apart. That isn't irrelevant, Detective." He's sick of this disregard for Eri. Yagi did it, and that was bad enough, but Tsukauchi too? "It could have been the end of society as we knew it."
"Society, yes." Tsukauchi makes a humourless noise. "That Toshinori shaped. But none of you once considered asking him what he knew about the organisation." There's no obvious bitterness in that calm, pleasant voice. Shouta can't help hearing it anyway. "Did you think they existed without his permission?"
His first instinctive impulse is to say but that would be too clever for All Might, and he tastes shame. Shouta almost doesn't want to know. If it had all been for nothing - if they'd done it to themselves by overlooking the one man who should have made it impossible, did make himself impossible to ignore - "If we had asked?"
Tsukauchi sighs. "One phone call to the other organisations to come together and do the right thing to protect the legacy of an oyabun they respected. The girl would be earmarked for special extraction and handed to him directly. None of it had to happen."
Shouta grapples with the horror of it. One call. A network of other yakuza who toed the line, who would answer if All Might called on them to protect themselves and their own reputation and existence. It would have been perfect self-interest. Failing to answer would be illogical.
It reminds him of the ones who hated Overhaul, who served out of loyalty even as they complained. Loyalty to their old boss, wasn't it? And replicate that loyalty by the hundreds, self-preservation hand in hand with All Might...
There's no telling if it would have worked. If the casualties would have been so much worse, so much more brutal. Yagi implied they got off easy with only one man dead. But they could have tried. Someone could have thought of telling Yagi.
But he found out after there was nothing more to be done. No wonder he was so... casual.
"Toshinori doesn't blame any of you," Tsukauchi says. "He chooses not to."
Shouta drags himself out of shocked revelation. "You make that sound like he actively chooses his feelings. That doesn't seem logical. He's passionate, not indifferent."
A breath. "Aizawa-san. He decided everyone was a person to him regardless. He chose it to be true. Only then was he was passionate about it. If he didn't decide on everyone being a person, well. It keeps me up at night sometimes."
"He never could protect everyone."
"He could have decided only some were worth protecting, Aizawa-san. I don't want to be difficult but I don't think you understand me. Maybe you're too caught up in the image, I don't know -"
Caught up in the glossy bullshit of All Might? "I never took it at face value, Tsukauchi-san."
Tsukauchi sounds very tired. "Then why can't you accept that he could have chosen to believe some lives were worth more than others?"
Why? Because - oh, fuck it, because of All Might. I am here. That's why. "The trolley problem is not a moral argument," Shouta grits out.
"When you're the trolley," Tsukauchi says, "and the track, and the train, and the switch, it is. Isn't it frightening?"
"What is."
"He looked at everything we are and knew we were worthy of him."
"Thank you for your help," Shouta snarls, his skin crawling, cowardice thick on his tongue.
"Sweet dreams, Aizawa-san."
Smug, informative bastard.