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Aizawa Shouta was raising the next generation of heroes. He had students, kids learning under him. And he hated it. Twenty kids, entrusted to his care, his guidance. Twenty kids, entrusting their futures to his ability to train them.
He could not have despised his job more.
He knew the statistics. Aizawa could state them perfectly from memory. Sometimes, it helped him to think of things as simple statements of fact. He ran through them in his head at the start of every class. He had for the past six years.
Within the first five years in the professional field, four out of the twenty children will die. At that point, at least half of the remaining group will already be showing signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Five years after that, two more of them will be dead. One of the deceased six is statistically predetermined to have committed suicide.
And every day, he had to wake up and stare at his students, wondering which, if any, would make it to retirement -- a retirement of nightmares and paranoia. It became an obsession. Whenever he stood in front of the class, he grouped them. Most likely to die in the field. Most likely to develop severe PTSD. Most likely to be placed on psychiatric hold.
He knew what everyone said, that they chose this, they signed up for the hero course, knew the risks of the profession. But they were still children .
He knew the moral justification. Their future deaths and disorders were a sacrifice to make the world a better place. But they were still children.
Aizawa had been to too many funerals of the children he’d taught to distinguish between them. His strongest memory was the guilt. Every what-if ate away at his soul. What if he’d been there to save them? What if he’d pushed them further in training? What if he had transferred them out of the hero course? What if he’d missed something that proved they were unsuited for hero work? What if he’d been more diligent on his nightly patrols and caught the villain beforehand?
What if he could have done better, and didn’t?
Every year, every new class, he searched diligently for any sign that a student was unfit for the heroic profession. And if he thought someone was a risk, he dropped them from his class, just like that.
And with every dream he crushed, he couldn’t help but feel as if he’d saved the child.
It was entirely up to his judgement. No one else got to decide if one of his students was unfit. The pressure was beyond what he could endure.
There was another statistic. One with which he was intimately familiar.
Within ten years of work in the professional hero field, three out of twenty students will develop a dependency on drugs or alcohol.
Aizawa was the latter.
He’d never wanted to be an alcoholic. People rarely do. But having to stand there, every morning, while the children in front of him inched closer to earlier graves or lifetimes of mental instability, was unbearable.
The drinking had started when he was younger. At first, it was to help him relax while he worked two full-time jobs. Something to help him sleep.
It spiraled. It always spiraled.
Aizawa had been given three months off from teaching to work an important case. The drinking was bad before his sabbatical. It was worse after.
But it was okay now, because he was recovering. Because he had the strongest motivation to recover.
Aizawa had to be his optimal self, in both of his professions. He had to give his students the best chance in the field. He had to do as much work in the field as he could, to protect them.
And at the end of the day, he got to pretend it helped with the guilt.
Aizawa Shouta has been sober for over a year. Recovery was hell, every day. But his commitment brought him to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at least once a week. He kept the milestones chips in his pocket, thought he didn’t need to. It was motivation enough to see the children’s faces every day. He thought about ditching the meetings, but he wouldn’t risk it. He couldn’t, not with children’s lives at stake. So he showed up, hood pulled low over his face.
Honesty was only safe when it was anonymous. Other people believed that too. The structure of the program required it. He knew that, benefited from it, respected it.
So when, at the end of a meeting, Aizawa reached for a cup of coffee, and a similarly hooded man reached for the same cup, he said nothing. And he said nothing again when he looked up into the hood to see Dabi’s face, frozen in fear.
Aizawa handed him the coffee, and got a different one for himself. Dabi took it without a word, and left. Aizawa didn’t follow him, didn’t arrest him, didn’t hurt him. Aizawa let a known villain disappear into the night.
If Dabi needed to be there, he wasn’t going to stop him.
Who would care if he let a wanted criminal go, over some code of ethics for addicts? None of his colleagues even knew about the meetings.
Until someone figured it out.
Yamada Hazashi, fellow UA teacher and professional hero, cornered him one night. Aizawa saw the telltale signs of someone who had been crying, but heard anger, not sadness, in his voice.
“I don’t want to ask this,” Yamada rasped. “I never wanted to ask this. But I can’t keep pretending I don’t notice, not anymore.”
Aizawa stood there, face blank and passive.
“I need—“ Yamada took a deep breath. “I need you to tell me. Tell me you’re not the traitor.”
Aizawa should be horrified at that accusation, or hurt, or feel something about it. Instead, he didn’t care to say more than the truth. “I’m not the traitor.”
Yamada’s eyes searched his face for any hint of dishonesty.
“I know you sneak out sometimes. I know you do, Aizawa, I’ve seen it. It happens a lot.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You know how that sounds! I don’t want you to be the traitor, but if you are… You know I’ll report you. You know I will, don’t try me. Just… Just tell me where you go. Please.”
Aizawa wanted to push him back, get out of this stupid, pointless conversation. “I’m not the traitor. Isn’t that enough for you? After all the fucking years I’ve known you?”
“Please.” It was the worst kind of whisper, desperate and afraid.
He shut his eyes tightly. “I go to AA meetings, okay? I had a problem, about a year ago. Was thinking too much. I’m doing better now.”
Yamada looked down. He swallowed. “Okay.” He nodded, reconciling it with himself. “Okay, I believe you.” Yamada met his eye again. “If you ever… I don’t know how to help. If you want to talk, call me.”
“Thank you.” Aizawa didn’t mean it. He didn’t need to talk to someone about it outside of the meetings.
He was never going to talk to Yamada about it. Yamada was the last person he wanted to talk to about it.
But Aizawa didn’t have a choice, exactly.
He had been in his office for an hour, sitting at his desk, very still, staring at the same spot.
Someone he’d helped with something or another had generously gifted him a bottle of champagne. The details were irrelevant to him; the only thing that mattered was the bottle of alcohol standing, proudly, on his desk with a bright red bow on it, taunting him.
Aizawa didn’t know what to do, so he stared at it. He might have kept staring at it forever, if Yamada hadn’t poked his head in his office and seen what was happening. His friend took the bottle, and returned a moment later without it. Aizawa didn’t know what he’d done with it, but he didn’t want to.
Yamada sat down opposite him. “Talk to me,” he said.
Aizawa looked at him, and then looked some more.
“They’re just fucking kids,” he said, finally. “Do you ever think about that?”
Yamada looked uncomfortable.
“We’re raising these kids to go to their fucking deaths in battles we could be fighting . They’re just fucking kids, but we show up every day and we pretend that they’re not going to fucking die. We could stop it. We could shut this school down, expel every student. We could but we don’t, and they die, or they get traumatized, or they become fucking alcoholics. They’re so young . And we’re damning them.”
Aizawa carried that burden with him. He expelled student after student, even with barely an inkling that they weren’t enough. Not a year went by without multiple students expelled.
Not until he met Midoriya’s class.
And for once, Aizawa had hope.