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Aizawa knows better than to expect things will seem easier after the press conference. Though he’s been rewarded with a secluded lobby where the media isn’t permitted to antagonize him anymore, this leg of the operation is barely past its most nascent stage. Aizawa sits on the couch opposite Vlad King, drinks thin, cold drip coffee out of a styrofoam cup, and ignores the buzz of his phone against his thigh in favor of the small flat screen television perched on the table at the far end of the room. His role, as outlined, is complete. The baton passes to the team of pros at the scene, to All Might himself, who is just as much Bakugo’s teacher. Aizawa has been reminded of this countless times in the past thirty-six hours, as if he did not know, as if he could forget, as if that as a fact alone should be enough to make him eager to relinquish his student into All Might’s hands and stand back to watch.
He knows the moment will come when his body can’t keep up with the adrenaline of crisis. He knows when he stops, he’ll crash, the same as he told Midoriya in the woods. He should find irony in that, but instead he’s met with its truest discomfort: being the one desperately staving off a collapse, knowing that when it comes it will come like a typhoon, and hoping he will be back in his apartment when it wrecks him.
Aizawa itches to go to Kamino despite this. His responsibility to his student chafes an open wound against his side. Logic reminds him that he is exhausted. The press conference adrenaline will make him clumsy in a fight. The lack of sleep will make mistakes easier to make. He drinks his coffee. It’s overly bitter and sticks in his throat. At this point, he feels no more awake, just increasingly uncomfortable as Principle Nezu clicks the volume up on the television while they wait for All Might to do what All Might does. That, as outlined, should be enough.
Aizawa doesn’t trust any plan to carry intact to the end.
The panic in Kamino has been condensed into quick cutaway shots of frightened civilians and smoky skies. It takes the camera crew several back-and-forths to find their action, but when they do, they latch onto the beacon that is All Might with veracity, and the cup nearly slips from Aizawa’s fingers.
All Might’s bright costume hangs on the sharp juts of his bony shoulders. Even if he were smiling (he’s not), it would be lost in the gaunt recess of his cheeks and eyes. Aizawa feels a twinge of—something. Aizawa doesn’t coddle, doesn’t deal in pity, but he knows Toshinori thinks he is more comfortable in the monolith of All Might’s form, rather than as Toshinori. Whether or not that is true is an unhelpful effusion. To be laid bare is excruciating. That’s it. To be stripped of power is, too, and Aizawa can empathize with that.
The scene at Kamino Ward is the tipping point Aizawa cannot keep balanced in wake of. His fingers comb into the knot of his hair and tug the elastic free. He snaps a few wayward strands and shakes them from his hand as All Might takes another blow. Aizawa swallows dry, the cheap coffee rolling through his empty stomach sharp as gravel. He’s too tired for this. To watch All Might do anything other than win single-handedly is foreign and makes his stomach roll again. This coverage doesn’t grant him any idea what’s become of his student, either, or any of the other pros or villains. There isn’t enough information.
Aizawa’s phone vibrates again. He snatches it out of his pocket, meaning to shut it off entirely, but the row of Yamada’s texts is a virtual landslide he can’t help but watch crash down.
are you done with the press?
you need to watch this it’s insane
dude are you seeing this??
He’s suffocating in his suit jacket. Aizawa’s fingers hook into the loop of his tie and pull until it feels less like a noose. On the screen, All Might is bleeding. This is not part of the plan. He has a duty to his students—to Bakugo—and he can’t die here.
Aizawa should be uncomfortable with how fervently he believes this. He dislikes the bravado and the showmanship. He doesn’t understand how All Might thrives under the pressure of a million eyes. Even so. He’s uncomfortable with the waiting, with the helplessness, with the suit he’s going to sweat himself out of, but not the belief that All Might must live. He’s too tired to dissect why this is.
All Might does prevail. The pyrrhic victory leaves him once again in his most vulnerable state, one arm twisted grotesquely, blood lining every crease of his mouth, dripping in little rivers over the thin-stretched muscles on his neck and forearms. Aizawa remains in his seat just long enough to see All Might’s last declaration to the camera, and once the feed cuts back to a reporter on the sidelines, Aizawa realizes how sick he feels.
“Excuse me.” Aizawa forces himself to move by habit, stumbles into the men’s room with one arm out of his sleeve, and manages to lock the stall before he throws up overdone coffee and energy jelly. One hand is bunched into his suit jacket, pressing against the tile floor, and the other is caught up in his hair to keep it back.
He hates this. Hates not getting enough sleep, not getting a moment to ground himself, hates when the days run. The cocktail of constant motion and unknowns reminds him of being undercover, and never being safe or certain. Aizawa pants against the rim of the toilet and coordinates his hands enough to tie his hair at the nape of his neck in a jagged approximation of a bun.
His phone buzzes. It buzzes again. It’s not another slide of Yamada’s little groupings of thoughts, rather the cadence of the ring on vibrate.
Aizawa tips himself sideways, backing against the metal divider in his stall, cold vivid through the thin shirt. He folds one arm gingerly over his stomach and tucks his phone into the crook of his shoulder.
“Eraserhead speaking,” Aizawa croaks. He wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve before he can remember he’s in a crisp white button up. He nearly tears the cuffs as he undoes them and rolls the fabric back.
It’s Tsukauchi on the other line. He explains, with the kind of forced calm Aizawa knows by rote, that Bakugo has just been escorted to the police station by his classmates. Aizawa does not, in that moment, have the coherency to understand what Tsukauchi must mean. What it could possibly mean for more of his students to be with Bakugo, when they have so recently flirted with the edges of law and protocol and their own mortality. He grips the phone to keep it from falling.
“Before you get mad—"
“I’m not mad,” Aizawa says, lies, and knows the anger is there, but it’s so buried beneath disbelief he can’t feel it. He needs the full picture, needs to keep his emotions out of it and deal logically with the situation. “Which students?” he asks, and already pictures a name and face.
“Midoriya, Iida, and Kirishima brought him in. Todoroki and Yaoyorozu just arrived, said they helped, too.”
“Helped what?” Aizawa makes himself ask, drinking in information after hours in a desert of the lack of it. The flutters of a shiver bury in his empty stomach and rock his entire frame. He drapes his suit jacket over his knees.
“Bakugo escape.” Tsukauchi’s voice settles to the lower end of his register, laying the critical information on Aizawa’s shoulders as if he is handling old lace.
Mission success was implied, in Bakugo being present, but the blatant confirmation unhooks hours and days of tension from Aizawa’s shoulders. His head tips back. A hollow, reverberant sound echoes from the metal stall wall. Aizawa scrapes his hand into his hair, tugging as the relief swills through the audacity of what his students have accomplished.
“He’s all right?” Aizawa says. He props his knees in front of him and leans his elbows against their bracket. The stiff fabric crinkles.
“I think he’s probably a little shaken, but he’s unharmed,” Tsukauchi says.
“Tell me exactly what they did.”
Tsukauchi does. There’s a lot of paper shuffling, as he skims over his notes from the disjointed recount the students provided him. The temerity of their stunt alone shocks Aizawa into listening quietly. He knows he’s overwhelmed, and that’s why he can’t find any anger or worry for what his students have done. Again.
It is a lot to bear, even for Aizawa, who’s already taught four classes of UA students before this and dealt with the tumult of being a pro hero. The report that his briefly-kidnapped student is safe is enough to sink him into numb relief, as Tsukauchi’s voice ties slowly closer to the present moment. Aizawa shoves the rest from his mind.
“Do you want to speak with him?” Tsukauchi asks.
“Does he know you called me?” Tsukauchi makes a clipped sound, a negative. As much as Aizawa wants to see Bakugo himself, the timing is wrong. Aizawa says, “No. Take him home, tell him to get some rest.”
He ends the call. As carefully as he can, Aizawa compartmentalizes the conversation he will need to have with Bakugo for later. It will be even more unpleasant than what he’ll have to say to the self-appointed rescue squad, even though there will be no mention of expulsion. Bakugo is not the first of his students to go through a harrowing ordeal, but handling the aftermath always skins Aizawa raw.
So. Students later, when he’s found a way to look like their teacher instead of a vacant husk in a business suit on a dim bathroom floor.
What that leaves is the matter of Kamino Ward, the matter of All Might. It’s just—
All Might isn’t so bad. Aizawa respects him from a professional distance. When he’s dressed down, inhabiting the crooked body of Yagi Toshinori, he’s almost bearable. Some combination of those things should allow Aizawa solace in Yagi Toshinori being the one to have been at Bakugo’s side when Aizawa was precluded from it. Except, Aizawa saw none of that; the only thing he got was All Might bloody and on the brink of losing his life.
It’s a fucking lot to think about. He’s saved from thinking more as the door cracks open.
“Aizawa?” Nezu says, prim and only slightly wary.
Aizawa drags himself to his feet, shucks his suit jacket over his shoulder, and unlocks the bathroom stall with a metallic click. Before Nezu can ask after him with formal niceties and reduce Aizawa to lying again, he brings up his call with Tsukauchi.
He explains the situation to Nezu while hunched over the dingy sink. Aizawa runs the faucet and cups tepid water in his hands to rinse his mouth. Nezu agrees they’ll need to speak with these students privately, and that they should do it when Aizawa has rested. He assumes Aizawa is planning to rest, now. Not happening. He wants to, everything in him screams to, but if he can’t see Bakugo before he crashes, he needs to see All Might.
He needs to see Toshinori.
Aizawa does not expect Toshinori to be awake when he cracks the door to the hospital room. The air conditioning in the room has made it dry, its hum covering the muted tap of his footsteps. Toshinori looks over, anyway. His limbs are a crook of gnarled branches, one arm bound in front of him in rough plaster while the other wears a glove of bandaging, white and skeletal. His knees are knobby roots beneath the landscape of the sheet. The dressings across his forehead ruck his hair even more disorderly than usual. Dried blood is caught in one of the long forelocks. But Toshinori looks at him with the pierce of his blue eyes, and Aizawa eases into the room more carefully than if he were planning an ambush.
“You look awful,” Aizawa says. It’s an easier truth than the others hanging on his shoulders. The extent of his bandaging, the snakes of IV lines burrowing up Toshinori’s loose sleeves, suggests he shouldn’t be sitting up, let alone out of intensive care. The stinging, basic smell of hospital antiseptic and detergent stick in Aizawa’s throat.
Aizawa clicks the door shut behind him, and his words hang for a long moment. Longer than Toshinori usually allows. But his familiar laugh crackles from his throat after Aizawa has felt the acuity of that silence. The laugh is rough, and it fits poorly into the irritation-scarred surface of Aizawa’s patience.
“I suppose I must,” Toshinori says, gazing down at the jagged hilltops of his knuckles and fingers. Though he speaks with the same gentle harmony, his tone sighs like a willow sagging towards the earth.
There’s a plastic folding chair askew between the wall and the bed. Aizawa catches it by the back, turning it as he enters the room all the way. He leaves it facing the wrong way, looping his leg over it and taking a seat. He folds his suit jacket over the back. The chair scrapes a harsh sound against the tile floor, one leg uneven and tipping with Aizawa’s weight.
“I didn’t bring anything,” Aizawa says. No card, no flowers, no fruit. He doesn’t have anything to say, really, even though he tried to come up with something the entire walk to the hospital. The only thing he got was a mega-screen recap of the fight, and to see All Might injured in 4k HD on a screen larger than his apartment.
Toshinori’s hand, the one not hidden in the igloo of bandaging, lifts to wave off Aizawa’s statement. “That’s not a problem.” There’s a brightening in his tone, then, sun through the old leaves. “You brought yourself. I wasn’t expecting to see you.”
Aizawa’s scoff is small. “Yeah.”
Toshinori smiles at him, that sheepish arch of his mouth that rings genuine in a way All Might’s plastered grin never has. It’s focused on him, and Aizawa feels suddenly too close, too exposed. “Thank you, Aizawa. It means a great deal to see you here.”
“It’s not that,” Aizawa says, too quick to be true. Before that rebroadcasted footage was the hidden matter of Bakugo and the truant students. Aizawa clings to that: students, school talk, a reason for him to be here that’s close to logical if he ignores the way All Might nearly died two hours ago.
“Bakugo,” Aizawa says, and Toshinori softens even further. His hand lands suddenly on Aizawa’s knee, and Aizawa wishes he hadn’t taken the chair, had stayed by the door and leaned against the wall. The affection between them is unfamiliar. To say it is unwelcome is a lie Aizawa hesitates to tell himself, as Toshinori’s thumb presses into the divot of his knee. It’s meant as a comfort, and the way it lingers could be testament to the veracity of painkillers Toshinori is no doubt taking.
“He’s fine, Aizawa,” Toshinori says, his voice another point of warm contact Aizawa doesn’t expect. “Tsukauchi told me. I thought he called you?”
Aizawa’s breath hisses out. “He did. He didn’t tell you everything?”
“You mean young Midoriya?” Toshinori’s hand lifts gently away, and Aizawa tries not to resent him for rescinding it so quickly. Toshinori’s hand drifts into his hair, mussing it impossibly further. His nails catch against the edge bandages. “And…Iida, Kirishima, Todoroki, and Miss Yaoyorozu?”
Aizawa nods.
“Forgive me,” Toshinori says, “I don’t know what it looked like from your side. How much did you see of that fight?”
Aizawa sweeps through his mind for a scrap of memory from the beginning of the live coverage. His students are fortunate, to a level Aizawa had previously considered impossible, that they were left wholly out of the broadcast. What Aizawa remembers is All Might standing amidst three blocks of leveled out streets facing an enemy that should have been a bad rumor. He spits some version of this to Toshinori. The air conditioner clicks off, and Aizawa’s eyes shouldn’t feel so dry with it lapsing. His voice just seems louder without it, and he scrubs the heel of his hand against his eye, against the rough scar beneath it.
Toshinori picks up as Aizawa trails off and fills in the context the media couldn’t have provided even if they’d taped the entire incident. How close to losing Bakugo a second time they came, and how it could have been a true loss if his classmates hadn’t been there to give him an out. Toshinori says it as if Aizawa should be proud of his students (and he is, in the back of his mind, but he can’t be proud of them while he’s still furious).
“I was upset, too,” Toshinori says. “Seeing them soaring above Kamino Ward scared me more than All for One ever could. But they didn’t use force, and they didn’t try to fight. I think that counts for something, don’t you?”
“It’s not a class assignment with a point value,” Aizawa snaps. Toshinori has always been too lenient. “They acted rashly and endangered themselves.”
“Aizawa-kun,” Toshinori says, “I know your answer won’t change, but what would you say if I told you they were a critical part in the success of my defeating All for One?”
“They were two seconds away from undoing all the work from the press conference.”
Toshinori can’t refute that. He bunches the hospital sheet in his hand, then splays his fingers into the crevices it makes. The silence that follows is a cumbersome one Aizawa wants to leave in wake of. Arguing about what-ifs, particularly those that have already fallen into the immutable past, is pointless, and Aizawa knows better. The quills of his anger are slow to settle, even so. He’s about to make good on leaving, just needs to shove up from the chair, but he’s waited too long already, and Toshinori decides to fill the silence.
“It’s a little unfair,” Toshinori says, steering the topic and his tone away from the ground zero of Kamino Ward, “that you got to watch my television broadcast, but I missed your press conference.”
“What, Tsukauchi didn’t tell you how it went?”
“No, no.” He looks up, and Aizawa meets that gaze half-behind the fall of his unruly hair. “He did. But it’s not the same as hearing you speak. I heard you gave those reporters quite the talking to.”
Aizawa doesn’t remember what he said. It was something half-rehearsed and half-dredged up from his own conviction. He thinks that one of those texts from Yamada commented on it. He hasn’t replied to any of his messages. “I did what I needed to.”
Toshinori’s hand is back, long fingers fitting over the curve of Aizawa’s knee. How Toshinori can reach for him so easily is baffling. It settles unyielding this time, the pressure attentive, and the wool slacks don’t let him feel the warmth of it all the way through.
“You care a great deal about those children,” Toshinori says.
“Isn’t that my job?” Aizawa’s voice is forcibly bland. Anything more will open the cracks again, and there’s nothing left in his stomach to give up.
Toshinori accepts him easily, with his careful laugh. “Right.”
The air conditioning kicks on again. It makes his eyes drier. Aizawa folds his arms on the back of the chair and rests his chin on his hands. The weight of Toshinori’s palm isn’t as constricting as it felt earlier. His touch cannot be a blanket in the frigid hospital room, but it’s all Aizawa has.
“I should let you get going,” Toshinori says, and doesn’t take his hand away. “We need those young heroes now more than ever. You’ve got to be at your best for them, right?”
Aizawa’s stare is flat. He hasn’t bothered looking full-on in a mirror since he got the suit on last night. He looks tired. He feels tired. He always does. This is nothing new, nothing that Toshinori should comment on.
“I’m fine,” he says, and can still taste the acid of bile and coffee in the back of his throat.
Toshinori looks like he is considering contesting that. Instead of telling Aizawa to rest, he keeps him effectively pinned, fingers smoothing the outer edge of Aizawa’s thigh in the same way they did the sheets earlier. The chair back between them keeps Toshinori from reaching further than that, and Aizawa can’t decide if that’s a relief or a disappointment.
“Are you going to sleep today?”
“Probably.”
There is a troubling gleam of mirth in his eyes. “Should I feel special that you came here, rather than did that?”
Aizawa bristles. “I wasn’t leaving this unfinished.”
“Ah,” Toshinori says, with a pitch of understanding that hits the most resonant point within Aizawa he didn’t realize was there. “Well. If I’m last on your debriefing list, you can rest easier.”
As if it should be simple. As if Aizawa won’t toss and turn in his bed in the daylight, overwrought with exhaustion until he’s wrung himself out.
They both notice when the text messages thrum the phone in Aizawa’s pocket.
“Yamada,” Aizawa says, before he’s even pulled his phone. “Sorry.”
heeey are you alive, shouta?
The screen of their text thread is entirely dominated by Yamada’s half of the conversation. Aizawa will never even it out, but he taps a reply in hopes it will stop the barrage and Yamada’s well-meaning but overbearing insistence on checking up on him for a while.
When he looks up, Toshinori is watching him gently. “You two are close?” he says.
Aizawa’s shoulder lifts in a shrug. “I’ve known him since high school,” he says. “My friends think they need to worry about me.”
Toshinori chuckles. “Good friends, those.” He squeezes Aizawa’s knee, then untethers his hand from him.
This time, as the gentle clatter from the hallways and the machine noise overtakes their conversation, Toshinori lets it. In the liminal hang of their conversation, Aizawa folds over his suit jacket, limp and exhausted. His arm slips over the chair, the circulation slowly compressing, his fingers pricking with pins and needle numbness. It’s not enough to convince him to move.
He could fall asleep here with relative ease. Toshinori seems content to let him, but hasn’t accounted for the fact Aizawa will fall out of his chair if he dozes in it. He could sleep on the floor, and has, but to do so in All Might’s recovery hospital room would give support to the idea that he’s not okay. Aizawa, eyes barely half-lidded, watches Toshinori watch out the window for several minutes. Blue sky and daylight preside over what looks to be another hot summer day. The facing of the window is wrong to show him Kamino Ward, but he wonders if it’s visible from this distance, and if it looks as wounded from afar.
Aizawa slowly collects the wherewithal to leave.
“I’m going, then,” he says, because voicing it between them commits himself to actually doing it. He untangles his legs from the chair without tripping. Toshinori accepts this gracefully.
“See you at school,” he says. “And thank you, truly.”
Aizawa grunts, deflecting the gratitude, and wonders if there is anywhere left in the cubby-space of his brain to stow the piquant memory of Toshinori’s hand on his leg. He does not concern himself with what Toshinori will do with it. He’s probably so high on painkillers he won’t remember, anyway.
Aizawa leaves a trail of dress clothes from his door to his bathroom when he finally arrives home. His apartment receives him without judgement. The smooth sigh of his air conditioner is more considerate than the rattle from the hospital, and here he can choose to leave the lights turned off to soothe his aching eyes. Though he cleaned up before the press conference, he’s a gritty, sleepless night past it. There’s gel still crunching strands of his hair together, even though he’s tugged his fingers through it over and over again.
Aizawa blinks a round of eyedrops into his eyes and leans against the bathroom counter. He brushes his teeth, spits, and works his slow way through a glass of lukewarm water from the tap. The prospect of standing in the shower is enough to make him nauseous despite the mint of his toothpaste. He knows he should eat something, but he’s been long enough without food that the thought of it is unappealing. He wanders into his bedroom, thoughts slowing and simplifying as he curls up on top of his sheets and falls asleep before he can berate himself for failing the simplest of hygiene.
He startles awake just as his body had edged into sleep and chosen a vague paint of blood and viscera to dream about. There is no one in the dream, but he knows in his gut it belongs to All Might. Aizawa’s heart beats fast and hard. He’s not exhausted enough, apparently, to sleep into the nightmares yet. The need to distract himself is urgent.
His phone clings to fifteen percent battery when he opens it. It’s noon. His missed call this time is from Principle Nezu, and he listens to the voicemail from beneath the veil of the spare blanket he’d twisted into in his sleep. It’s about the dorms. He and Toshinori will need to meet with the students and their families within the week to obtain permission for the students to stay on campus.
One thing after the other. Coming up with something to say to the parents of the students he let get attacked feels like reliving the press conference, only on a more intimate, excruciating level. He is absolutely not dealing with that right now.
He loses six hours, this time, and if he dreams, he’s forgotten it upon waking. With actual sleep bolstering him, Aizawa recognizes he needs something to tether against while everything he’s done in the past several days drifts in and out of his mind, distracting enough to make anything other than lying in bed difficult. If he wants to be in a state to visit his students’ families, he’s going to have to do something about it.
Aizawa texts Yamada: Will you pick up food if I order it?
Yamada replies before Aizawa can even navigate out of the text thread. ‘Course, man! Just send me the info.
Aizawa places an order with the donburi place down the street. He finds a shirt to wear that’s not his filthy dress button-up. The sliding glass door to the balcony shakes the frame when he tugs it stiffly open, letting the dusky breeze push him to the couch to receive his friend. It smells like it might rain, cool but pricking with ozone and overwhelmingly crisp when it cuts into the stale, tepid air in the apartment.
Yamada arrives as scheduled, does not yet comment on Aizawa’s vacant breakdown, and arranges the food on the coffee table. He’s talking the whole time, something about the waitress at the restaurant, but Aizawa barely picks out the words. The plastic bags rustle as Yamada sets the table and snaps his cheap restaurant chopsticks apart and scatters a litter of soy sauce packets. Subjecting himself to Yamada’s company is loud, but grounding.
“Nemuri said to tell you that you were great in the press conference,” Yamada says, bumping his shoulder into Aizawa’s. The couch has room for both of them, but the small coffee table keeps them tipped close to each other for access to the food. “She’s right. You rocked, dude.”
Aizawa snorts. The takeout container creaks in his hand. Diplomacy under duress is hardly what he’d consider a rocking performance, but the world’s a stage with Yamada. His voice is a different kind of warm from Toshinori’s, and of course that is the moment that he remembers, in startling clarity, the hand on his leg.
He really hasn’t slept enough for this.
Aizawa’s appetite hasn’t returned, but the rice is inoffensive enough he can choke down a few mouthfuls. The food is more for Yamada, anyway: it’s Aizawa’s apology for all the texts he didn’t read since the end of the summer training camp. Yamada may or may not recognize this in the moment, but he seems happy to be included, and that’s the best Aizawa can do.
Aizawa comes slowly back to himself as Yamada talks. He lets himself rest against Yamada’s side while he picks whatever seems most palatable out of his bowl. For some people, a sharp one-sided conversation would be a deterrent, but Yamada is a generous enough friend to take Aizawa’s leaning presence as contribution enough to keep going until he’s out of food. Aizawa, by contrast, has managed close to half his portion. The meat seems too heavy. His egg is bitten into and been left to rest on the remaining rice and vegetables.
“Were you sleeping when I texted you this morning?” Yamada says. “Sorry if I woke you. I just hadn’t heard from you in a while, y’know?”
“I stopped to see All Might,” Aizawa says, loose and thoughtless in the safety of his own home and Yamada’s company.
The pause is Yamada recalibrating whatever he had planned on saying in response. For Yamada’s train of thought to fracture, even briefly, is a waving flag to Aizawa.
“Huh,” Yamada says. “Yeah?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
As close as he is to Aizawa on the couch, Yamada only has room to gesture with one arm. He tries to flap both, anyway, and ends up looking puppet-like with one string cut in his management of the motion. “I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t visit me in the hospital unless Nemuri dragged you!”
“Untrue,” Aizawa says. He takes a sip of water. “Besides. It was regarding my student, not for sympathy.”
“Oh, I see how it is,” Yamada says, amusement edging into his voice. He pokes into one of the takeout bags with his chopsticks and flips open the small container with pickled veggies. “All business with you, anymore. Is it the suit? I bet it was the suit. You couldn’t help yourself.”
“Maybe I should get you a suit.”
“Hey, now!” Yamada selects a slice of radish and pops it into his mouth straight from the container. “I’m always dressed and ready.”
“Ready to be obnoxious, yeah. Don’t spill those.”
Yamada makes a noise, protesting around the radish. He eats several more pieces, leaning his elbows on his knees. It’s the longest he’s gone without speaking. Food seldom stops him, but he finishes the dish in silence. Aizawa breathes the fresh air and considers another mouthful of rice. When Yamada is satisfied, he closes the lid, lays his chopsticks atop it, and leans back, kicking one foot against the edge of the table. He sinks into the old, plush cushions on the sofa.
“You got details?” Yamada asks. “Bakugo okay?”
Aizawa doesn’t know yet. “Would you be?”
“No,” Yamada says, immediate and honest. “But he’s made outta something else. You never know with kids like that.”
Aizawa shrugs.
“What about All Might?” His other foot joins the ridge of the coffee table, and Yamada sprawls back without kicking any of the food off the edges. “I bit my nails off watching all the coverage.”
The question is warranted enough. The personal interest is in their colleague; the wider, more looming question is of the Symbol of Peace and what they will do now that he’s snuffed out. When they were in school, All Might was the lighthouse beacon for heroes to rally around. Aizawa remembers, all too clearly, what it was like to scramble towards that shore as a student. Even if it was blinding, it was impossible not to look towards. Even if he turned away, it got in the corners of his eyes.
The landscape of heroics is changing. Has been, for several months. This incident is just the fulcrum over which it finally tips. Even if All Might can’t be All Might, knowing he is whole, if powerless, softens the loss of him as a symbol, and it is around that fact Aizawa shapes his answer.
Aizawa says, “Surprisingly cogent for someone with a morphine drip.”
It occurs to Aizawa, then, that All Might is no stranger to a hospital room. He knows the most cordial facts about why All Might has come to UA in the first place. About why he hasn’t an ounce of fat on his body, and why he declines to eat with them most of the time. Life-altering injuries. Extensive surgeries. The kind that make one familiar with a hospital and all its tricks. The haze of pain meds is navigable as anything else, when you’re All Might.
It occurs to Aizawa that perhaps the comfort he offered was less haphazard than it seemed.
Yamada winces, but he doesn’t lose his spark. “Ouch. Man, bet you brought him the best news he heard all morning, hearing his student’s safe.”
Aizawa wants to correct Yamada, in that moment. My student , insists a cool voice in the back of his head. Unfair. Irrational.
“He already knew,” Aizawa says instead.
Aizawa withholds the rest because Yamada doesn’t ask after it. The sun goes down, the summer breeze approximates something chilly, and Aizawa finally gives up on his food. Yamada helps him clean up, stow the leftovers, and is gone.
There is no rest for Aizawa after that. There never really is. He kicks his suit towards his bedroom one piece at a time as he considers each student and their family, formulating strategies and tailored words and twenty apologies. The fact of the matter is, Class 1-A needs to be unified. They’re nearly all of them complicit with the stunt, and he will handle that. But they will need each other. He knows this.
He runs the shower. The drone of hot water edges out the rest. His hair melts down his shoulders in dark streaks of ink beneath the spray as he fades into the foggy reality of steam and narrow tile around him.
Camaraderie is necessary for heroes. It’s logical. It’s foreign sometimes, even now, to be surrounded at all times by students and teachers and daylight. Once, Aizawa would have walked into Toshinori’s hospital room in the dead of night. He wouldn’t have spoken with him at all. Would have just watched, confirmed whatever it was he needed to confirm seeing him alive, and left as quickly rather than pausing to rest in the shade of him. The blue vista outside the big hospital window, Toshinori turned towards it like a sunflower, is the most neutral recollection Aizawa has of the past few days.
The memory lifts towards the bathroom ceiling, and he lets it go.
Aizawa finishes washing his hair and scrubbing his skin. It’s getting hard to breathe in the steam, heat hazy at his temples and warm through his lungs like he could exhale flame if he tries hard enough. He cranks the water down, not icy but cool, and seals himself back into his body.
Aizawa will not expel seventeen students from class 1-A. They would be worse off without the structure. They would be worse off in someone else’s hands.
He tells the first two points to Toshinori and keeps the last reason to himself. They have finally secured each student for the dorm system, abandoned the taxi, and chosen to walk back to campus in the long summer dusk. The dwindling sun would be easier to enjoy if his clothes breathed. He’s never needed the suit so much before this. He never wants to need it again. It should stay a fixture in the back of his closet.
“It’s something of a relief to hear you say that,” Toshinori says, of the expulsions that will not be happening. For a man who does need suits, and need them often, Toshinori doesn’t seem to have a single one that isn’t tailored to All Might’s frame. Aizawa is a little envious. Toshinori’s flapping loose sleeves are probably keeping him cool.
Toshinori’s walk is a little sluggish, but his gait is so long it puts him and Aizawa nearly at pace with each other. Aizawa, in turn, walks more briskly than is typical, overstimulation making him feel like he has more energy than he does. His dress shoes are too loud on the sidewalk.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said. I still believe that the students’ involvement is what allowed Bakugo to escape,” Toshinori says. His shadow stretches halfway into the street. “But I see where you’re coming from, too. You’re a good teacher, Aizawa. You knew each and every one of those kids today, and I’m sure that’s what made their parents agree to our proposal.”
Today may well be the first time Toshinori has actually seen him work. Really seen him with his students. Aizawa, despite the fact he’s in layers of formal dress, feels suddenly exposed. He barely remembers what he said to the first few students they visited, or the last. He hears his own voice echo in his head with the opening line that stayed between all the encounters.
My name is Aizawa Shouta. I personally apologize on behalf of myself and UA for the negligence shown to your student at the summer training camp…
He has no idea what Toshinori said, either, but he remembers thinking Toshinori never said quite the same thing twice. He’s good at this. Not Aizawa.
“They’re better off at UA full time,” Aizawa says, harsh and aware of it. Aizawa remembers Bakugo’s apartment and thinks this, this is why he can’t trust anyone else with his students. His job isn’t just to shape their powers; it’s to show them how to shape their lives, their morals, despite what they’ve been told about themselves.
“You see that full potential in all of them, now?” Toshinori says. His voice is so calm, so easily conversational, Aizawa cannot decide whether it is a deliberate attempt to assuage him, or simply so a part of Toshinori it is unavoidable.
“I do.” All of them, together, will give each other what other classes have not. They’ve created an ever-changing scaffolding, pulling each other up and over. It’s really quite astonishing to watch. Aizawa would be foolish to cut a piece out of their own internal stability.
He did not think the same four months ago.
“That puts you at UA full time, too,” Toshinori says. He falls briefly behind Aizawa as they pass a few people on the other side of the sidewalk. Aizawa looks them over on reflex and doesn’t blink until they’re far behind and Toshinori is back in place alongside him.
“Yeah. It’s going to be great.” His voice is flatter than the sidewalk. Though Aizawa has already arranged to sublet his apartment, the prospect comes with a twinge of regret. He likes his work, but he likes his space. The dorms will be completed within the week, which means he has even less time to cajole Yamada and Nemuri into helping him move. They’re not homeroom teachers. They’re taking their time deciding on whether or not they’ll change their living situations. Aizawa has seldom been afforded luxuries, and he doesn’t expect that to change.
Toshinori’s sound of amusement worsens into a cough. The white flag of his handkerchief surrenders the rest of the conversation. Aizawa slows to a stop. Waits. He’s half turned over his shoulder with a chasm of four feet between them. The cough used to be a warning. Now it just seems a cruelty. Toshinori bows forward and weathers it, hitching through the full coughs until he wheezes without them. It’s like watching a hurricane hit him, even though the twilight is tepid and still.
Toshinori looks weary when he finally folds the cloth into squares, hiding the blood from view. Toshinori knows his own limits, but Aizawa wonders if they should have kept the cab after all. This is his first day out of the hospital, and he’s spent it talking nonstop. He’s at his physical limit, which is fortunate, because Aizawa is at his social one. Inanely, Toshinori chooses not to recognize this.
“That drink I promised in the cab,” Toshinori says, voice a recovering rasp, “how about it?”
Later. Things like that are for later, when Aizawa doesn’t have to pack his apartment and scrub product out of his hair for the second time in a week. The prospect of a noisy izakaya, or worse, a restaurant, helps him cling to the irritation from earlier, transplanting it, nursing it. He’s declined innumerable invitations to drinks in his time at UA. He could do it again and leave this conversation with Toshinori cut a little close to the quick, like most things between them. Toshinori makes him raw without meaning to. For all their differences, though, Toshinori keeps finding common ground between them and bolstering the strained threads of their initial acquaintance at UA into something that can take their weight.
People seldom go to that sort of effort for Aizawa. He hasn’t been made into a friend by anyone since his own schooling and almost doesn’t realize that’s exactly what Toshinori has gone and done.
Aizawa sighs. “I could go for a beer out of the vending machine and a bench in the shade.”
If this is not what Toshinori wants, he keeps it to himself. The only thing he lets show is a stretch of his smile, like Aizawa has done something very endearing. There is no blood on his teeth.
They find a vending machine. Toshinori adds the coins and scans his ID, stepping aside and gesturing Aizawa to the buttons. While Aizawa searches for a familiar label, Toshinori drifts to an adjacent machine. Their drinks clatter down around the same time, and when they turn to each other, Toshinori is holding green tea. The can is utterly dwarfed in his hand.
“You didn’t let me pay for yours,” Aizawa says, deadpan, and Toshinori laughs.
“Another time,” he says. “Come on, the park isn’t far.”
The street lamps flicker on as they settle against a wooden park bench. Its peeling green paint flakes away as Aizawa perches on it. Toshinori sits further back, but his long legs are still hunched in front of him. He’s chosen nearly the center of the bench, leaving Aizawa his space, but only just. Aizawa is humoring Toshinori for as long as it takes him to knock back the beer. Then, he’s going home.
The crack of the tab on the can seems to bounce through the park. It’s dark enough that children have abandoned the play equipment, leaving the area open and silent. Aizawa presses the can briefly to the side of his neck, cold condensation shifting onto his skin. It lingers and seeps into his shirt collar once he removes it and takes a long mouthful, head tipped back, throat bobbing. It’s malty and light and not going to get him drunk. He catches Toshinori watching him, raising a brow as Toshinori looks away, chastised without hearing a word, and drops his eyes to his tea.
Though summer warmth still clings to his shoulders, his skin is already cold around the beer. He transfers it to the other hand. The smell of cut grass is heavy in the air. The sprinklers on the other side of the concrete sputter to life.
“The last thing I did as a hero,” Toshinori says, lifting his eyes from his lap to the silhouettes of a swingset a few dozen feet ahead of them, “wasn’t only about defeating All For One. I got to help rescue Bakugo. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”
Aizawa gives this confession the time it warrants, turning it over in his mind like a thoughtful answer to a class discussion question he hadn’t considered. All Might’s career began with rescue. He fought a villain that night, but no one plays the footage from the start. It’s always the people he saved. A legacy of service secondary to individual triumph. It shouldn’t surprise Aizawa that Toshinori values the protection of life most above all, above the praise and press and world renown, but maybe it does, just a little. It clashes with the media polished image of All Might that is as much a part of the landscape of the last twenty-odd years as much as the tall buildings on Musutafu’s skyline. Aizawa can’t know what Toshinori was like before all that, but he thinks this thread carried from beginning to now. And if it is so important, if it is what holds Toshinori together, he shouldn’t be trying to unravel it.
“You say that,” Aizawa says, “like you’re not going to save anyone else.”
Toshinori’s eyes tighten a little, blue barely visible in the shade and the evening. His hands tighten around his tea, the flimsy aluminum denting. Before Toshinori can refute, Aizawa speaks again.
“Bakugo doesn’t need you any less now than he did four days ago.” Aizawa lays his arm across the back of the bench, opening his posture towards Toshinori. A weathered sliver of wood tugs his sleeve. “And don’t even try to tell me Midoriya would refuse you.”
The shake of Toshinori’s head seems reflexive. “I…that’s very kind of you to say.”
Aizawa has to toss back a long draw of beer before he can deal with that. Kindness is seldom the metric to which he holds himself. Toshinori can think what he wants, but he needs to know it’s not sympathy driving his words.
“I’m not flattering you,” Aizawa says.
“Ah, of course, that’s—”
“A rational train of thought.” Aizawa is running out of beer to space his words around, tasting the metal more than the drink. The sheen of mist from the sprinklers carries over in the breeze, cool and feather light. “You don’t have to look like All Might to be All Might.”
This is the trouble in separating hero from identity. It is useful, in some ways, but creates its own set of problems. A divided sense of self is one of those. Some heroes have their birth names available publicly. Some do not, be it for privacy or safety or something else. A person with a quirk isn’t separated into a hero and a civilian, but it’s hard not to feel that way when the hero has their own name and set of acquaintances consisting only of other heroes. They talk about it with the first years. Toshinori should know. They just helped the students pick their names. But Toshinori has spent half his life tamping himself down to leave room for All Might.
Toshinori opens his mouth. When he doesn’t find any words to say, he raises his own drink and takes several small sips. His thoughtful posture evolves, finally, to a small smile.
“No logical deceptions for me, then? I should be grateful.”
“You don’t need me to trick you,” Aizawa says. Toshinori is not one of his students. If there is one mercy in the universe, that may well be it. “It wouldn’t work, anyway.”
“Are you calling me dense, Aizawa-kun?” Toshinori leans his elbow on his knee, hunched forward, peering up at Aizawa with a curious twist to his mouth. His true smile is so much more relaxed.
“Am I?”
Toshinori laughs, this time without the petals of blood. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
“Just don’t let them down,” Aizawa says, on the last drops of his drink. His patience has run out. It’s no fault of Toshinori’s, for once, just the product of interacting with his twenty students and their roughly forty parents. That’s way too many people.
Aizawa rises. He palms Toshinori’s shoulder briefly as he retreats.
“I promise,” Toshinori says, quieting like the end of a poem. He nods to Aizawa, then to his tea, and does not follow.
He sees Toshinori again less than a week later. Aizawa isn’t quite able to conceptualize his new theory until the training gym. Aizawa’s wonder is leveled when he spots the book in All Might’s back pocket, but it begs to argue:
Perhaps Toshinori’s hands aren’t a bad second to Aizawa’s.
Aizawa finds Toshinori alone in the teacher’s lounge and red-handed with his instructional book. It’s almost endearing how engrossed Toshinori is in it, his shoulders hunched to his ears as he studies the pages like a crow with something that glimmers. It’s a much different picture than he presented the first time Aizawa found him in the teacher’s lounge at the start of the school year. The initial sight of him, no lesson plans or notes, hands folded and smiling that plastic smile, had made Aizawa think him arrogant. Ignorant isn’t much better, but he’s doing something about it.
This diligence is a thin veneer of gold across the sharp rhythm of Toshinori’s shoulders. His concentration is caught in the corner of his mouth. He barely fits in his assigned seat at the teacher’s station, knees crammed against the underside of the table and elbows braced far enough apart that, were anyone beside him, he would be half in their space. It can’t be comfortable. There’s a mug out of the way of his sprawl of limbs, but whatever is in it has been left cold or drunk already.
Aizawa is aware he’s staring. He’s been standing in the doorway more than long enough to be noticed, but Toshinori just turns another page. His fingers are delicate on the cheap paper. It’s a different touch to the one he showed Aizawa in the hospital. He was no less gentle with Aizawa, just unafraid of damaging him in the process. That merits its own accolades. There’s comfort in an unwavering hand.
Summer coursework is geared towards the students’ quirks, and the chances of anyone other than the core faculty interrupting them are slim. The only sound in the room is Toshinori’s quiet breathing and the occasional sigh from the industrial copier. As Aizawa crosses the distance, he walks as though he’s trying not to snap twigs underfoot. He arrives at Toshinori’s shoulder.
“Did some reading?”
Toshinori jumps in his seat. His bandaged hand knocks against the desk, and his aborted sound of pain almost makes Aizawa feel bad for startling him. Almost.
“Aizawa-kun!” He tucks his hand briefly against his mouth, a muffled cough trapped there. Through his fingers he says, “You gave me a scare.”
Aizawa sobers and hopes there isn’t blood. He snags the tissue box from Nemuri’s station before Toshinori can go digging through his pockets. Toshinori pulls a tissue from the box, taking a steadying breath.
“Sorry,” Aizawa says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Toshinori says. His voice is reserved, but he makes it through another breath and his shoulders relax a fraction. “I’m used to it.”
Hearing him say that brings about the same twist Aizawa remembers from watching the news coverage from Kamino Ward. It’s uncomfortable watching Toshinori in pain. He feels powerless and very far away. Somehow, Toshinori seems unconcerned, if resigned, so Aizawa takes his lead and offers the conversation he’s had in mind from the start.
“I noticed,” Aizawa says, “you had a lot to say to the students today.”
Toshinori wheezes a laugh, cuts it with a brief cough, and glances around his desk. He pulls the mug closer. The fluttering tail of a teabag is draped over the edge, and inside are cold dregs.
“Could you—the kettle?” Toshinori says.
Aizawa takes the mug from him. His thumb presses against the shallow chip in its handle. The electric kettle is half full and still warm, sparse curls of steam rising as Aizawa fills the mug. The faint scent of lemongrass rises up to meet him, made less potent from being steeped once already.
“Thank you,” Toshinori says when Aizawa brings it back. Toshinori draws the mug to his lips and breathes in the steam, then takes a mouthful. When it’s clearer he’s found his equilibrium, Aizawa sits down next to him and leans his cheek against his hand.
He knows Toshinori’s skills are, primarily, being a hero, that teaching is considered in his wheelhouse because he is outstanding in general, and not because he actually knows how to help others be the same. He seems to be awakening to this shortcoming, which is more than Aizawa can say of most people. He flicks his eyes towards the book, then meets Toshinori’s gaze, inviting him back to the conversation when he’s ready. Toshinori gives a careful chuckle.
“I may have tried to add a few skills to my repertoire,” Toshinori says, smiling over the edge of the mug. The book, conspicuously bursting with a confetti of sticky tabs, rests half open in the circle of his arms. It isn’t academic. Aizawa glances down to read the chapter heading and two sentences before judging it.
Aizawa says, “It’s not a bad start.”
“It’s not?”
“No.” It’s barely beyond surface level, but at least something that shallow can do little harm. “You’ll need more if you really want to get anywhere, though. I’ll lend you something.”
There’s a bookshelf in the corner of the room with the filing cabinet, and Aizawa hasn’t touched his section of it since completing his first year of teaching. His books are less aggressively used than Toshinori’s, his notes computerized instead of stuffed into the margins. He dogeared pages, sometimes. Sticky tabs weren’t even in his comprehension. He pulls a foundational volume from its place, dust trailing from the tops of the pages, and skims quickly through the table of contents before bringing it back.
“This is yours?” Toshinori says, and Aizawa hums. “When on earth did you have time for university?”
Aizawa laughs once, mirthless, his teeth showing. “I didn’t,” he says. “Most classes took place in the morning or afternoon. I always worked nights.”
Aizawa sits again, turned in his chair towards Toshinori. It is impossible not to bump their knees together. It’s a little testing, if Aizawa is honest. He wants to know the shape of whatever is forming between him and Toshinori. There’s a difference in this moment: it’s closer to the seclusion of the hospital room, not riding on tired coattails like the evening at the park.
“Would you mind giving me a brief overview?” Toshinori traces the cover.
Aizawa doesn’t mind. Teaching settles something in him that otherwise never knows rest. To speak on a subject he knows is like pulling his sleeping bag over his head. It draws him into a trancelike between-space where his mind is engaged without being exhausted. He was surprised, when he started, the foundation of confidence it granted him. While he’s always found speaking to a larger audience easier than singular tutoring, walking Toshinori through the textbook is far from excruciating. Once, he would have cut the session short. At the beginning of the year, when he taught Toshinori how to use the online learning interface, his endurance ran dry in minutes. Now, however, he sees how Yagi Toshinori is part of the blueprint building up Class 1-A. This loosens the words in his throat and gives him a steady tempo to follow as he picks through the book to give Toshinori a way to navigate it.
Having an attentive audience makes it that much more comfortable, and Toshinori gives his rapt attention. He taps Aizawa’s foot with his own when he wants to interrupt to ask a question. They spend the rest of the morning with the book between them on the desk, and by the time Toshinori is at the limit of what he can absorb in a single session, his ankle is hooked around Aizawa’s. Aizawa’s arm is snaked through Toshinori’s, and though he’s no longer pointing out relevant passages or turning pages, he’s stayed laced in the lattice of Toshinori’s arm and elbow.
“You won’t get through the whole thing in a week, so don’t try.” Aizawa says. He rests his cheek against Toshinori’s arm. Even slouching and seated, Toshinori’s shoulder is out of reach. Aizawa’s stubble scratches against the cotton dress shirt. “But when you do finish it, I’ll give you the next one.”
“Do I get your expertise along with it?” Toshinori asks.
“Sure,” Aizawa says. He’s staring again, watching Toshinori’s thumb brush along the fanned textbook pages. His hands are feathered with dozens of bark-rough scars. Toshinori’s hero costume has never featured gloves.
Aizawa yawns. The sitting has made him sleepy. The teaching pulled the elastic of his thoughts looser. He could drag his sleeping bag from behind the couch and nap, but that would mean giving up Toshinori’s arm. Toshinori smells like the lemongrass from his tea and clean laundry. His warmth has the same lull as the full mug did when Aizawa poured it. Aizawa shuts his eyes.
Aizawa can’t have dozed long, but he jostles quickly awake as Toshinori shifts carefully in his chair. Aizawa lifts away on reflex, giving the space back and blinking himself back into the moment.
“Sorry,” Toshinori whispers. “My hand was starting to go a little numb.”
Aizawa tips himself back into his own chair. He rubs his eyes and stretches his arms above his head, arching his back. There’s a resounding domino effect of little cracks from his spine as the tension peels away from his muscles.
“S’fine,” Aizawa says. He can’t remember what he was doing before coming to the teacher’s lounge. It seems utterly trivial. He wants to pull Toshinori over to the couch and go back to sleep.
To think, he desires Toshinori’s presence. Behind the fuzz of grogginess, exploring that thought is like staring over the ocean. From his vantage, its glistening waves and blue water taunt him with respite. It has been so long since Aizawa has granted himself a moment to float, suspended, and depend on something other than his own strength to hold him. But Aizawa has no idea how deep it goes or when the bottom will drop out from the shore, or if he will be left over a chasm without means to tow back to land if a storm breaks loose. This is the sort of thing to explore one water-slowed step at a time, and taking on too much at once will exhaust him.
Aizawa excuses himself to lesson plan in his classroom. On the way out, he steals Toshinori’s terrible little instructional booklet, plucking it like a berry from a vine and tucking it in his own back pocket. The obvious theft makes Toshinori laugh. Everything makes Toshinori laugh. Aizawa decides he can live with that.
Bakugo and Midoriya fight, and Aizawa is not there to break it up. Not for lack of wanting. But Toshinori had asked, and Aizawa had let him, and now that he’s sent the boys back to their dorms, he’s quelled his agitation and is left with his own faultline to pick at. He wasn’t as mad at them as he’d postured. All that work, and he missed something that should have been obvious. He’s had an eye on Bakugo ever since moving into the dorms, but it wasn’t close enough. Critical failure on Aizawa’s part, and the only reason it’s not worse is because Midoriya is one of the kids who bounces back when Bakugo strikes out.
Aizawa and Toshinori are in the first-floor lobby in the teachers’ lodgings when all is said and done. It still smells like new paint. Aizawa sits on the arm of one of the stiff sofas and thinks he might be the first to do so. It’s squared off and holds his weight. He’s in socks and without his capture weapon. It feels like disarray.
The hang in Toshinori’s movements and the way he clasps his hands together in front of him, uncertain, means he’s waiting on Aizawa.
“You were the only one who could have done any meaningful damage control, back there,” Aizawa says.
Toshinori blinks, surprise raising his eyebrows briefly, and Aizawa shrugs, letting him settle in this truth. The rushed, sotto voce explanation Toshinori had thrust at him when he’d brought the students back drew everything into sharp clarity. Aizawa was not at Kamino Ward. He has come to accept this. Toshinori was, and shares the firsthand trauma of it with Bakugo in a way Aizawa will never understand. Aizawa could have stopped the symptomatic fighting between his students, but not addressed the cause of it.
“I should have seen that coming. I’m sorry,” Toshinori says.
He’s used to this, Aizawa remembers. Used to being the singular pillar shoring up everyone around him. The blame Toshinori wants to lay on himself is probably dappled with all the lives and structures from Kamino Ward, too, distilled down into the students he can still help. But Midoriya and Bakugo don’t need saving. They need to problem solve without punching each other. That, Aizawa thinks, might be an entirely futile effort. At the very least, suspending them is a short-term solution to buy Aizawa a few days to figure out where to redirect their energy and encourage them to communicate like heroes. Toshinori certainly doesn’t need to be putting that on himself. Aizawa doesn’t want to think about it anymore, frankly.
“Me, too,” Aizawa says sharply, before Toshinori can dig himself into a rut. “Things happen. Students surprise you in the worst ways, sometimes. So, stop apologizing to me.”
“Thank you, then,” Toshinori says. He drifts to Aizawa’s side and lays his hand in the center of Aizawa’s back between drawn shoulder blades. “For trusting me with them.”
The touch marks a shift in their conversation. Toshinori is obtrusively tall, an aspen golden at the tips. The fact Aizawa is sitting accentuates this to almost comical levels. Aizawa has been in the canopy of All Might before this. Or so he’s told. He was unconscious. He doesn’t remember. As far as he’s concerned, it never happened. But his students confirmed it. Aizawa is alive because Toshinori intervened at the USJ. He was determined, at the time, to make that the only instance of weakness. He tried to lock it out of his mind. He was never supposed to rely on Toshinori, least of all with his kids.
The edges have worn away from that vow. It’s a hard one to keep when the weight of Toshinori’s hand tranquilizes the tense draw of the muscles in his shoulders. Aizawa realizes, then, how far he’s truly walked out from the shore.
Aizawa takes a breath that stretches the circle of his chest and leans back against Toshinori’s hand. The pressure reminds him of the present moment. The back of his thigh is starting to ache against the arm of the sofa. There’s soft lamplight beyond the line of glass windows framing the lobby. For the quickness with which it was composed, the housing building is quiet. Beside him, Toshinori breathes like a psithurism, unhindered by the wet cling of blood. Toshinori lets him push, palm a counterbalance, fingers kneading gently into the column of muscle along Aizawa’s spine.
“That’s what I meant,” Aizawa says, “when I said Kamino Ward doesn’t have to be your last rescue. You get that, right?”
The pause suggests Toshinori has thought about it on a distant, academic level only, rather than a personal truth.
“I guess you’re right.” His laugh rustles in a way that sounds very private. “I just acted. I knew I had to be there.”
“Keep being there,” Aizawa says. His voice is suddenly firm. “Kids are idiots.”
Kamino was All Might’s final fight, but it could have so easily stolen away Toshinori’s life with it. Aizawa had berated himself, when all was said and done, for worrying All Might could have died. He’s been sleep-deprived and anxious. New broadcasts make events seem so much worse than they truly are. All Might is All Might, even at Kamino Ward. But honestly? The fact All Might is not in the ICU rooted precariously to life is miraculous.
“I am here,” Toshinori says, and the phrase is quirked so wry, attenuated softly in Toshinori’s true voice.
Aizawa rubs the side of his neck. His fingers follow anteriorly across the loose collar of his shirt until he’s absently kneading a spot of tension in his opposite shoulder. He supposes it might be his bad shoulder, the arm that broke first at the USJ. His recovery was successful, but the muscle agitates more easily. Toshinori’s hand sweeps higher on his back. His fingers brush Aizawa’s, tender over the spot Aizawa is massaging, then glide back down. The time he’s spent with Toshinori marks this another invitation, and Aizawa is finally in a position to accept.
“Then stay,” Aizawa says, “for a while.”
There is little to distract him from the heat of Toshinori’s hand, this time, as well as the strength in it. Aizawa snags at Toshinori’s fingers when they brush up again, grafting their hands together over his shoulder. Toshinori draws closer with confidence, angling alongside Aizawa. They curve together like two kindling logs settling into flame. Heat blooms up between them. For the first several seconds, there’s a stiffness, a hesitance of lip and teeth and tongue. Toshinori gives Aizawa every opportunity to change his mind. This is unnecessary; when Aizawa makes a choice, he has considered his consequences. He can’t find one that would make him break away.
Aizawa levers his weight towards Toshinori, balancing precariously on the sofa’s arm while he chooses a new anchoring point along Toshinori’s side. The hesitancy cracks in half so the embers can fly. His fingers curl against the distinct ridges of Toshinori’s ribs. Toshinori smells like sun, like he’s been outside all day. Toshinori’s forearm braces diagonal across Aizawa’s back, their hands still joined, Aizawa tipped into the hollow of his shoulder. Aizawa’s heel digs into the side of the sofa as he gives himself the push he needs to deepen the kiss and give Toshinori his peace of mind.
“What’s this?” Aizawa says, amused and at ease when he finally draws back to breathe. It’s a rhetorical question he still wants an answer to. He knows: this is a gamble. They’re in a brightly lit lobby with wide windows. They shouldn’t be caught fooling around. On a deeper level: this is uncertain for both of them. They’ve each endured their lives largely alone, and there is an undercurrent of togetherness in the kiss that stretches far beyond the abbreviated moments they’ve spent with each other so far.
“Part of being here,” Toshinori says. He hesitates. “If you want.”
Aizawa does. He has lived the lack of companionship on necessity, on preference at times, but is not immune to solitude. His free hand finds the edge of Toshinori’s collar, tugging, and seals their lips again. Aizawa isn’t one to rush, but he devotes his focus to the narrowing space between them. Toshinori’s height should make him easy to topple, but Toshinori meets him with controlled movement. No matter the appearance of his body, he is not devoid of strength. Maybe that’s what’s so stunning about him. His truest strength is his conviction, and injury cannot take that from him. That is what the students see in him. That is what magnetized Aizawa to the television in the conference break room.
They kiss until they’re breathless and Aizawa is in danger of falling backwards from the arm of the sofa. His whole body buzzes with an utter void of tension. He should curtail things here. Even if it’s late, privacy isn’t guaranteed. He’s got an unfinished syllabus on his computer upstairs. Despite this, Aizawa takes Toshinori’s wrist and pulls until they are both seated properly beside each other on the sofa. Having his feet on the ground makes the moment feel more real. Toshinori’s pulse flutters beneath Aizawa’s thumb.
“Do I want to know how long you’ve been thinking about this?” Aizawa says. His voice is rich and teasing.
“Don’t worry,” Toshinori says. “I thought you were an ass the first time I met you.”
“Good.” Aizawa tries to sink into the sofa cushions. They’re a little too new to envelop him. As he reclines, he folds his leg over Toshinori’s knee. “What changed?”
“You’ll have to excuse the cliche,” Toshinori says. He slides bandaged fingers against Aizawa’s, taking his hand again. “I survived. I got the opportunity to reassess a few things.”
It’s a fair answer, cliche or not. Aizawa returns Toshinori’s gesture with careful pressure, unwilling to cause him pain, but wanting to offer acknowledgement. Heroes, Aizawa thinks, are particularly susceptible to life-changing revelations from the vantage of a hospital bed.
“May I ask you the same?” Toshinori says.
Toshinori has weathered more than Aizawa. However long Aizawa lives, and however long Aizawa is a hero, will likely not outweigh this. Being a symbol demands more than just being a hero. Toshinori has stood alone in the heat of the sun, the lash of rain, the drag and puncture of hail. He’s been stripped of his leaves, but cannot be torn down. His foundation is dug too deeply. Very few things in Aizawa’s life have such staying power. He does not know how to articulate something like that amidst their closeness.
“You’re a good pillow, and I’m tired,” Aizawa says. He slouches all the way against Toshinori to prove his point. It earns him a snort of laughter. Toshinori will not, Aizawa suspects, let him get away with a topical answer forever. Grafting two lives together only complicates with time. It is the nature of such attachments. What Aizawa knows, so far, is this: it is better here, with Toshinori beside him. For now, that is enough.