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His hands tap mindlessly at the sweltering poolside tile, brush the ground he sits upon, the gritty grave between enamel and concrete brittle on his fingertips. Over the edge, his legs soak, cool in the shimmering water. And from that spot, Aizawa wonders just how many layers of sunburn Shirakumo plans to accumulate before he finally admits he’s flirting with skin cancer.
Across the pool, the cherry-red Shirakumo flexes goofily with an equally pinkening Yamada, both flaunting their juvenile excuses for muscles under the searing summer sun. No one else is training at the U.A. pool today, so Aizawa’s thankful the showcase is supposedly for him, else he’d be mortified to be viewing Shirakumo’s body as affectionately as he is now. Yamada’s certainly not a bad sight either, but the melodrama of their gestures is far from seductive. Both of them look more like factory reject action figures at the moment, and Aizawa can’t help but chuckle at the thought.
Shirakumo glances over at the sound, and his mouth drops along with his ridiculous pose.
“Aw, Shouta, you already got in the pool!” he whines. “You were supposed to wait for us!”
“I’m literally just soaking my feet,” Aizawa says, shifting a leg lightly under the chill of the poolwater.
“Excuse me, o’ lying one,” Yamada retorts, pointing an accusatory finger, “but those are calves, which is more than feet, which means you totally got in the pool without us!”
Aizawa scoffs, raising his hands from the searing ground. A few specks of gravel rest in his overheated palms. “I’m about to put my hands in too if you don’t hurry up. It’s boiling out here.”
Shirakumo starts to trot over, and Aizawa rises to his dripping feet, watching the cloud-soft locks flap above his friend’s beaming face. “Well, you know what they say, Shouta!” he smiles, shuffling his soles so they don’t burn against the concrete. “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen!”
“We’re at a high school pool.”
“It’s just an expression!”
“Which doesn’t even make sense here.”
“Oh, you—” Aizawa’s thrown off-balance as Shirakumo’s crimson shoulder slams into him, butting him towards the pool. He impulsively snatches at whatever he can to keep from falling—fingers clenching around the goggles at Shirakumo’s neck, other hand surging through the mist of hair before grabbing blindly at Shirakumo’s shoulder—
He takes a second to catch his breath before realizing Shirakumo’s hands have snatched him steady. Both faces drain with disorientation, and Aizawa looks at his friend, who responds with a breathless chuckle. The warm hands are soft on his skin. Aizawa’s certain he’s now as red as Shirakumo.
Yamada’s boisterous shout cuts through the quiet: “Now kiss!”
Shirakumo’s face breaks into a cheeky grin, and Aizawa has no time to respond before the boy is planting playful kisses all over his cheeks, much to the amusement of an incoherent Yamada on the sidelines.
“Ob—Oboro, you’ve gotta be k—” Aizawa squirms under the barrage of mischievous pecks, trying to ignore the fluttering in his stomach; he knows very well that this is just typical teasing from the cloud-quirked boy, for whom personal space among friends is practically non-existent. “Gah—What, are you Recovery Girl now?”
“Exactly!” Shirakumo laughs, squishing Aizawa’s cheeks between his palms and pulling back with a glowing smile. “Congratulations, you are healed from your poolside trauma!”
“‘Poolside Trauma’ just sounds like a damn soap opera…” Aizawa mutters, but Shirakumo is already sprinting after Yamada now, both bellowing wildly as they race across the gravel. Aizawa watches as Shirakumo finally catches their loud-mouthed friend, showering him in an equal attack of lighthearted kisses. He knows it’s all in fun, but he still can’t help but avert his eyes to the aqua pool below, much less envious watching the chlorinated waters shift at his toes.
It had been this way since year one, when Aizawa had fallen hard for the mess of clouds and comforting words known as Shirakumo Oboro. He’d learned early on that Shirakumo was far from afraid to show affection, and at first the gestures had bristled him—the surprise bear hugs in the hall and twirling at Aizawa’s hair during assembly. But the boys had long since learned to communicate, and Shirakumo had respected every boundary set, every request for space or clear show of discomfort. And over time, Aizawa had grown to embrace the distracted touches and snuggles that met him when Shirakumo was nearby. He still remembered the first time Shirakumo had jokingly kissed him, a light peck on the forehead after Aizawa had aced a chemistry test. His friend claimed it was the most direct way to congratulate his brain. The electricity had buzzed inside Aizawa for two weeks straight.
“Hey! Shouta!”
Aizawa lifts his head as Shirakumo addresses him again. He must’ve been zoning out for quite some time, because the duo is now approaching from a nearby trash can, hands clasped, and cheeks full with stifled laughter.
“So Hizashi and I are engaged now,” Shirakumo says casually, as if discussing the weather or their latest math assignment. “And check out how fantastic this ring is!”
Shirakumo’s hand shoots into Aizawa’s face, and Aizawa lets out a half-laugh, half-scoff at the sight: A dingy ring of mangled white plastic wraps around Shirakumo’s finger; the kind that holds a cap on a disposable water bottle, or at least did at one point. Aizawa looks skeptically from Shirakumo’s hand to his face, and Yamada finally bursts into ear-rattling laughter, Shirakumo promptly following.
“Congrats,” Aizawa says, concealing his amusement behind a deadpan expression. “When’s the wedding?”
“Right now!” Yamada spits with laughter, and Aizawa wipes the droplets from his face. “What better place than a lovely poolside venue, which that Sensoji guy has no doubt pissed in once or twice during swim practice?”
“You’re right, sounds beautiful,” Aizawa says, nearly unable to hide the smile peeking at his lips from the sheer ridiculousness of the scenario.
“Glad you think so,” Shirakumo pipes up, “since we’re also marrying you. So I suppose you have some say in the venue details!”
Aizawa’s smile drops, all joking forgotten for a split second.
“…Huh?” he finally manages, his tone indecipherable.
“I mean, if we’re gonna start an agency together, this is the best way to get benefits,” Shirakumo rambles, tallying said benefits off on his fingers. “Joint property ownership, we can legally adopt Sushi as our angel-cat-child, you two get life insurance payout if I’m ever eaten by a kaiju—”
“Is that covered by insurance?” Yamada laughs.
The joking banter isn’t wasted on Aizawa; he’s used to these antics by now, especially from the all-too-intimate Shirakumo. But he’d be lying if he said they didn’t snatch at his chest every time, wringing his heart like a sopping towel, drenching his insides in the warm ache of longing.
“I’m thinking a sea-blue palette,” Shirakumo’s voice is muffled through the stuffy heartbeat in Aizawa’s ears. “Y’know. Since the pool water is literally the only decoration we have, so we don’t have much of a choice otherwise.”
Yamada’s laughter rattles in Aizawa’s head, and his eyes sink yearningly to the “ring” on Shirakumo’s finger, which the boy twirls absentmindedly against his knuckle. And Aizawa’s wildest dreams are truly untamed now, trading chewed-up plastic for a band of gold, the oppressive heat for the warmth of shared bedsheets. His cheeks still tingle from Shirakumo’s kisses, and he dreams for those lips to greet him every morning, evening, syrupy-sweet from breakfast, mint-chilled from brushed teeth at bedtime, rough, soft, endless, married—
“Shouta?”
The hand is outstretched to him now, garbage ring glowing under the sunlight, and Shirakumo stares at Aizawa concernedly.
“Hey, you okay?” he asks softly. “Sorry if we’re making things weird…” He chuckles lightly. “I’m just fooling around.”
That’s what he was afraid of.
Aizawa looks from Shirakumo’s hand to his gentle face. Yamada peers from the boy’s other side, and Aizawa realizes they’re both poised to leap in the pool.
“Mhm, I’m fine,” Aizawa says. He tips his chin to the hand. “What’s this for?”
“I just said it!” Shirakumo smiles. “We’re gonna jump in the pool together, make it official.”
“Yeaaah! A ceremony for the ages!” Yamada cheers. “Oh, shit, the towels can be our witnesses!”
“Classy, right?” Shirakumo grins. Aizawa still stares at his friend’s trash-adorned hand.
“Oboro, you are way too comfortable with us,” he says finally.
He slips his hand into Shirakumo’s. The boy gives his hand a light squeeze, and Aizawa’s breath seizes in his throat. Shirakumo smiles, warm as ever.
“Is that a bad thing?”
And before Aizawa can respond, Yamada triggers the leap. Aizawa feels his feet leave the steaming gravel, the humid air rush past his skin, the cold plunge of water swallowing them in a thunderous splash. He sinks to the bottom with Shirakumo and Yamada, the electricity buzzing once again in his chest, focused fully on the soft palm nestled in his own.
The plastic ring prickles between his grip, but still Shirakumo curls his fingers tighter around Aizawa’s. The breathless boy does the same. He doesn’t mind the sting.
* * *
Weeks later, he is sitting in the pew of a flower-clogged temple, black collar stiff around his choked-up throat, eyes hazily staring at a priest he doesn’t know, and a coffin-consumed body he knows all too well.
The air around Aizawa reeks with incense. He supposes it would be comforting under different circumstances, but the hot scent floods his nostrils, settling sour in his stomach. He sees Yamada shift in his seat out of the corner of his eye, folded shades clinking lightly from where they hang on his breast-pocket. The boy’s anxiety is evident. Aizawa wonders if his own unease is just as palpable.
His tired eyes drift to the coffin. The funeral is closed-casket, of course, and Aizawa hastens to clear the image of what’s likely resting under that lid: Shirakumo’s ruined corpse, bones smashed into lifeless shards, organs crushed into an unidentifiable pulp inside that once-vibrant body. He tries not to picture Shirakumo under that wreckage, the visualization that had haunted Aizawa mercilessly since the incident: bruises battering his friend’s sun-pinkened skin, the blood pouring from twisted jaw, shattered skull, trickling down soft, lifeless lips…
He tries, and he fails. As miserably as any one person can fail.
Aizawa snaps back to reality, realizes he’s mindlessly rubbing his fingers into his own palm, desperate for some semblance of the soft hand that had rested in his just weeks prior. The priest’s aphorisms drone on, and the sound makes Aizawa angry for some reason. Perhaps it’s because the praise is empty; this man likely never knew Shirakumo for more than a second, not the lively, vibrant Shirakumo that should have been the boy's legacy forever. He didn’t know how Shirakumo always kept his ear out for confused tourists just to offer directions, how he doodled tiny suns in the margins of all his schoolwork, how he’d insisted on embroidering Sushi’s cat bed himself so the kitten would know it was loved. To Aizawa, every word is meaningless. Who does this man think he is, to speak about Shirakumo’s spirit when he never even glimpsed it firsthand?
Aizawa's eyes burn with salty tears, but he can’t bring himself to let them fall, and the mist stings his eyes like the sharp twinge of chlorine. In truth, he’d favor that much more in this moment, eyes wide open under that glimmering blanket of water, just to get one more glimpse of that hair, that smile, that ring-wound finger, all so beautifully unhurt—
“Shouta,” the voice next to him is a quaking whisper.
Aizawa turns to find Yamada trembling in his seat, hand clasped tightly over his mouth, eyes wide and swimming with tears as his stare drills a hole through the floor.
“Shouta, I—I gotta go,” Yamada chokes out, nearly incomprehensible behind his own hand. “I n-need to cry…”
“Hizashi, it’s a funeral,” Aizawa says gently. “You’re allowed to cry.”
Yamada fearfully shakes his head, and Aizawa’s face falls with understanding as his friend gestures to his throat. “I—I need to cry, a-and it’s going to be too loud—”
A hiccupping gasp, and Yamada shoots to his feet, ready to flee. Aizawa snatches his sleeve, pulling him back down into his seat and snatching his hand tight.
“I’ll cancel your quirk,” Aizawa murmurs quickly, squeezing the trembling hand tighter as Yamada’s surprised eyes shoot his way. “You can cry. It won’t make a sound.”
“But you—I can’t pull you from this, man!” Yamada objects, and Aizawa swallows thickly as the first of the tears begin spilling from his friend’s eyes. “You’ll have t-to stare at me—You need to focus on the service, on Shirakumo—”
“I can’t.”
The words catch in his throat, and at this point, Aizawa fears he’s going to break Yamada’s hand with how hard he’s gripping it. His wrist aches. His own tears singe his eyes, and he blinks away the sting until his vision dries again. The effort burns in the back of his skull. Yamada looks at him, still uncertain.
“…I can’t,” Aizawa repeats.
The hair flutters from his shoulders. He locks his attention on Yamada, unblinking.
He watches his friend’s face crumple at the gesture, flickers of gratitude, denial, grief—and within seconds Yamada has collapsed into mourning, mouth wide with noiseless sobs as he tremors next to Aizawa. The dark-haired boy doesn’t let go of his hand, nor tear his gaze from his quivering frame, not as long as the tears spill down Yamada’s cheeks, and the silent wails shake through the tunnels of the blond boy’s chest.
By the time he’s forced to blink, Yamada has finally gathered himself, hiccupping down the last remnants of his tearful sobs. A gentle hand taps Aizawa’s shoulder, and he turns to find Kayama leaning over the pew behind them, quietly offering forward a bottle of water.
“They had them in the back,” she whispers, tears brimming in her own eyes. “Sorry I could only grab the one. But if you two need…”
Aizawa nods, taking the bottle gratefully and mouthing back a word of thanks. He hands the bottle to an exhausted Yamada, who sniffles sharply before downing half of it in a single chug. Yamada hands the bottle back to his friend, and Aizawa takes it blankly, eyes tinged red with dryness and exhaustion. But he doesn’t drink—instead, he mindlessly unscrews the lid and sets it aside, then begins wriggling the ring of plastic from the neck of the bottle. It separates with a resolute snap, and Aizawa lets it rest in his palm. The tiny hoop stares back at him, white as a midmorning cloud.
They will cremate Shirakumo’s body after the services. Toss his ashes in some unfitting urn and shelve him to collect dust in his own home. It’s likely his family will build him an altar or shrine, pay their respects during evening prayers or the quiet moments they catch a glimpse of his empty bedroom. And for all those days to come, Aizawa knows he will do nothing but exist. It’s all he can manage, just the bare minimum of living in a world without Shirakumo Oboro; and he can already feel himself clawing through his memories, reaching for a beaming boy at the bottom of a swimming pool, desperate to replace the corpse buried at the front of his mind.
Aizawa slips the plastic ring around his finger. Feels the last scraps of sunburn still peeling at his skin.
* * *
“No, Shouta, I mean it, just guess!”
“Mic, can’t this just wait ‘til morning?” Aizawa grumbles into the phone, rubbing tiredly at his stubble-patched jaw. Before him, the computer glows the hues of some mindless website, the result of some distracted internet rabbit hole that insomnia had dragged him down. But now the exhaustion has finally set in. His eyes flit to the time in the corner of his screen: 3:17am. He has a class to teach in the morning, he needs to get the hell to sleep.
“I don’t think it can!” Yamada’s voice blares through the phone’s speaker, and Aizawa winces, increasing the space between his ear and the device. Thank goodness his friend wasn’t also assigned a dorm to care for, or there’d be a whole class of sleepless students on the regular. “Look, okay, I won’t ask you to guess anymore. But, man, at least let me show you, I promise it’ll be worth your while!”
“Hizashi,” Aizawa says, “you know I have a whole dorm of students to handle—”
“Who are asleep, Shou!” Yamada interrupts. “Therefore, I will be outside of that dorm in ten—no, five minutes, and you’re gonna see this thing in person, ya dig?”
“No, I do not ‘dig,’” Aizawa grumps. But Yamada has already ended the call.
The exhausted man sighs, setting down his phone and scooping his raven locks into a sloppy ponytail. He ties back the tangle of hair, kicking from his desk and letting his chair roll lazily across the room. The teachers’ quarters for Heights Alliance are nothing special, but they’re nice as far as dorms are concerned; and as he glances to the unkempt heap of blankets that top his mattress, he’s certain this room is way nicer than any outdoor excursion Yamada had planned for three in the morning.
Nevertheless, he eases from the chair, joints popping like firecrackers as he stretches his aching spine. He wanders from his bedroom, through the dim lights of the 1-A common area, and then finally out to the front steps, where he slumps tiredly against the rough backbone of a pillar. He glances up to the sky. Watches clouds curl past the luminous claw of a moon.
Yamada is true to his word, and it’s only a matter of minutes before Aizawa hears the footsteps pounding in the distance. He glances over in his friend’s direction, where he first spots the man’s un-gelled mop of gold flailing behind him in his haste. Yamada’s face slowly clarifies as he nears the dorm, and Aizawa sees he’s waving some technicolor thing wildly in his hands.
“Hizashi, slow down,” Aizawa says, descending the patio steps. He narrows his eyes, finally identifying the object in question as a multi-colored pouch. “What, you confiscate your first pencil case today—”
“It’s Oboro’s!”
Aizawa feels his blood run cold, and he watches as Yamada skids to a stop before him, hair spilling over his face as he keels over, panting heavily. Finally, he peeks up through a gap in his locks, eyes swimming bittersweet behind his glasses. He holds out the pouch before Aizawa, swallowing another deep gulp of air.
“It’s…it’s Oboro’s,” he pants again.
The pouch in Yamada’s hands seems sacred, a blessed relic of a thing, and for a moment, Aizawa feels unworthy of even touching it. But his trembling hands finally ease forward, and he takes the case with the gentlest touch he can manage, turning it carefully in his grasp. It’s a soft, zippered container, the fabric dust-caked, corners slightly moth-gnawed, but Aizawa still remembers it vividly: Shirakumo’s pencil pouch, adorned in an abstract rainbow of color, which frequently joined the boy at his desk as he buried his bandaged nose in the day’s assignments. Aizawa unfurls the tag in his shaking fingers. The signature of Shirakumo Oboro stares back at him in faded blue ink, punctuated with a tiny sun.
“Wh…where did you find this?” Aizawa’s voice is strained.
“One of the kiddos got his locker door jammed near the end of the day,” Yamada explains, brushing the hair from his face. “Power Loader goes to get the thing open, and blam-o! Rocks it so hard that thing ends up falling from a space in the top!”
“Shirakumo’s locker…” Aizawa realizes quietly.
“It must’ve been stuck there for years, Shouta!” Yamada is gushing now, but Aizawa can’t tear his eyes from the signature. “Lodged in a corner inside where you couldn’t see it or something! So it goes through the teachers, they’re tryin’ to find the owner, finally Kayama gets ahold of it and, well…” Aizawa looks up to see Yamada smiling, though his are eyes tinged with a heavy sorrow. “…She knew we were the closest it’d have to a home.”
Aizawa nods, eyes dropping back to the pencil case, cradled in his palms like an injured kitten. He reaches hesitantly for the zipper. Curls his hand with unease.
“It’s Oboro’s,” Aizawa says, sinking to a seat on the steps. “It feels wrong to open it.”
His friend settles next to him, and Aizawa glances over as Yamada gives his shoulder a gentle squeeze.
“It’s your call, Shou,” Yamada says. “But you know Oboro. I really don’t think he’d mind.”
Of course he wouldn’t. Aizawa nods, knowing deep down it wouldn’t have bothered Shirakumo a bit. But it doesn’t stop his hand from tremoring as he takes the cold zipper in his fingers, easing the pencil case open against the gritty grind of rusted metal.
His heart surges straight into his throat.
As expected, a medley of pens and pencils form a honeycomb of color at the core of the pouch. But atop them rests a single oddity, a familiar piece of mangled trash, still mottled with dirt and wear: The plastic ring of a water bottle lid.
“Is that—” Yamada speaks first, but Aizawa’s free hand is already at his forehead, nails digging into his scalp as the painful nostalgia threatens to strangle him. He can’t respond, he can’t even breathe, not until he reaches into the case with a quaking hand, easing the memory into his palm. He finally manages to inhale deeply, feeling the plastic prick at his calloused hands. Without a word, Aizawa sets down the pencil pouch, and slides the ring down his own finger. It’s snug. More so than before. He realizes truly how much he’s aged.
Aizawa and Yamada study the shabby band in silence, the dark-haired man slowly turning his hand to take in every angle. The faint scent of chlorine and sunshine wafts through his senses.
“…You loved him, didn’t you?”
Aizawa freezes at the question, but he lets his shoulders settle before the implications get the best of him. His tired eyes stay locked on the ring.
“Of course I did,” Aizawa responds simply. “So did you.”
“I mean, yeah, of course we both loved him! Still do!” Yamada corrects himself quickly. Aizawa watches his friend’s hands fiddling out of the corner of his eye, and he locks his jaw, already knowing what’s coming. “He was our best friend! But you…Shouta, did you…”
Aizawa raises his stare to meet his friend’s, and his heart sinks as he catches a glimpse of his own reflection in Yamada’s lenses: This is not the bare-faced boy he knew; he is a man, face carved by years of denial and depression, eyes exhausted, grieving, tear-brimmed. He untenses his jaw, and he feels his lip begin to quiver. The sensation is painfully foreign.
“He was supposed to grow old,” the strangled whisper finally seeps from him. “He was supposed to fucking grow old with us.”
And the tears are pouring from him now, and Yamada’s arms are around him, and Aizawa’s teeth are clenched so tightly his head is pounding. He claws through his mind for some kind of comforting memory, but he’s met instead by a landslide of youthful, unfulfilled dreams: Food-choked laughter as they share meals on the rooftop of their hero agency; racing through a pet store as their overstuffed cart buckles under the weight of spoiling Sushi rotten; the smell of rainwater as he buries his fingers in his love’s misty hair, feeling his heart race as Oboro kisses him; and the chance to say I love you, I love you, Shirakumo Oboro, I fucking love you—
Aizawa’s sobs are quiet, but seemingly endless; he cannot tell how long he sits on those steps with Yamada holding him tight, shoulders heaving with grief, a decade’s worth of bottled-up tears spilling from his tightly shut eyes. He couldn’t cry like this at the crime scene, not at the funeral, not at any time he could remember. But by now, the ache had ripped through every nerve in his body, torn the child from his core and left this broken shell of a man behind. He’d have traded the husk for Shirakumo without question. If his friend could have witnessed a future through those brilliant blue eyes, instead of the red-rimmed, drained perspective Aizawa stared through each day…He’d trade every year of his own adulthood in an instant. But he can’t. He never can. Shirakumo is dead, and Aizawa’s childhood died with him.
So he cries in Yamada’s arms, the band of litter tight against his clenched fist, until he can finally excavate a clear image from the graveyard of his memory. It’s the redness of Shirakumo’s sunburn, and the way his skin flushed white as Aizawa’s fingertips met his hand. It’s a vivid yet fleeting glimpse, but Aizawa knows it’s the closest he’ll ever be to Shirakumo again.
He relives the soft touch on loop until sunrise.
* * *
He will forget to remove the ring in the morning. Twirl it mindlessly during last-minute grading, run his thumb along the plastic as he lectures. The students will question, and he will avoid the topic with a subtle sidetrack or a stony glare. Eventually, the interrogations will cease. Sometimes things just don’t have an answer.
He will spend his lunch alone at the U.A. pool, lock the doors tight for a half-hour of silence. He will remove his shoes. Roll up his pant legs. Let his calves soak in the shimmering aqua chill, sunspots dancing on the water’s breeze-kissed skin.
He will take in the feel of the ring against his knuckle. Whisper vows not to be shared with anyone else. Watch the clouds brush their soft palms along the azure face of the sky.
When he returns to his classroom, it will be with sunburnt hands. He will ease the hoop from his finger, slip it into his desk, and slide the drawer securely shut, and for a moment, he’ll survey the skin now left bare. And he will smile, ever so softly, as he looks to the pale anomaly along his tan ring finger.
A single untouched band remains.