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Nightmares never started like nightmares for Midoriya Izuku.
He wasn’t entirely sure if nightmares were like that for everyone or if it was just him. Everyone can describe the jolting sensation that waking from a falling dream feels like. The adrenaline and the fast breaths, the panic that floods your veins. Is the fact that nightmares happen slowly a universal truth like that? Is it so commonplace that people don’t bother to talk about it? Or is it that only some people are tortured with slow nightmares.
Izuku asked himself these questions as he pulled his blanket tightly around himself and turned on his phone flashlight in front of his door.
Slow nightmares had two distinct flavors. Abrupt and Creeping. The different flavors weren’t better or worse than each other, just different. Creeping nightmares usually had hints of what was to come scattered around the dreamscape. Small hints to show that everything was going to go to shit before you woke up.
Abrupt nightmares were more like real life. One second you were walking through a mall, the joy of going out with friends still painting a smile on your face. And the next second there were four fingers digging into your throat and the smile on your face had become a cruel mockery of a day ruined.
Izuku shivered as he walked toward the elevator. The hallway in the dorms always felt colder than anywhere else, especially in the dead of night. He hit the down button with the edge of his phone and the fist he had holding up his blanket tightened while he waited.
His nightmare that night was an abrupt nightmare. Almost all of his nightmares were, after the mall happened. The first half of the dream was lovely. Just Izuku and his friends hanging out in the common room, laughing over a card game.
And then that familiar grip settled over him. The arm over his shoulders. The heat of another body pressing up against him on one side, making him feel unbalanced and sick. The hand, the dryness of the fingertips that were pressed against him. From the outside the grip had looked relaxed, comfortable, but for Izuku it was deadly.
His friend's laughter continued on, completely unaware of the new threat that had settled so easily next to Izuku. Like he belonged there. Izuku’s jaw ached from the way he had clenched his teeth at the sudden threat, as he had done so both in the nightmare and in the waking world.
Shigaraki Tomura’s breath puffed out across Izuku’s cheek and he licked his lips before he started whispering to Izuku. That was the thing that stood out most both times, how he had the time to prepare, how he had enjoyed the interaction.
In the nightmare he said, “Look at how easy it is for me to get close to the people you love. I could kill them all in seconds, just like I could have done back then. Just do what I say like a good little hero and everything will end well for them.”
Shigaraki’s fingers tapped against Iuzku’s throat, like he was impatient for an answer, the light thumps of every finger making contact resonated through Izuku’s entire body. But he was careful not to let all four connect at once. The pressure of his thumb just behind Izuku’s ear meant that if he did Izuku would disintegrate, just like that.
In his nightmares it was always that care that irked Izuku. Shigaraki didn’t care if Izuku lived or died, he didn’t care that there were children in that mall that would have to watch Iuzku have a slow and bloody death, he didn’t care that he might have to fight his way out of the mall. He didn’t care about a lot of things and yet he did care about the way Izuku had sucked in a startled breath every time his fingers tapped dangerously close to connecting at the same time.
In the nightmare he could somehow see Shigaraki’s face. In the mall he had carefully kept his head forward, and the villain's hood had obscured his profile. In his dream Shigaraki had an ecstatic expression on his face, like this was the highlight of his year. Like threatening Izuku’s classmates’ lives was the best gift he could receive.
At that point in the nightmare all of his friends' laughs started to blur together. Shigaraki hoisted him up off the couch and dragged him toward a shadowed arch that didn’t exist in the dorms, because what kind of student dorm would have a creepy shadowy arc that transported you to your worst nightmare.
Just like back then, Izuku followed along, completely at the villain’s will.
He couldn’t remember much of his nightmare after that. His brain had defaulted to the usual stuff. Eerie echoes of his classmates' screams, sampled and recorded for his nightmare’s arsenal from USJ and later from summer camp. The sensation of blood on his hands. The horribly familiar feeling of his bones splintering and then exploding, shards lodging into his muscles and painting his skin in dark reds and purples from the inside out. Reflections of fearful eyes, always red, always panicked, always pleading. Dread pooling in his gut and pulling at his fingertips, stopping him from saving people, from helping people, making him useless again.
The elevator dinged quietly as he arrived at the ground floor. Izuku forcibly dragged his thoughts out of the nightmare and focused on planning out what he was going to do.
He was going to exit the elevator, he was going to walk to the kitchen, he was going to get out a pot, he was going to pour milk into it, he was going to simmer that milk, he was going to pour hot chocolate mix into the milk, he was going to pour that into a mug, he was going to put four marshmallows in his hot chocolate, he was going to stand in the middle of the kitchen and drink his hot chocolate and think about things that wouldn’t clog is throat with terror and make his hands shake, he was going to put his mug in the sink and rise it out and then return it to the cabinet, and then he was going to go back up to his bed and go to sleep and not mention this to anyone.
Izuku liked to pretend that he didn’t have nightmares. He wasn’t alone in that. He was half sure that everyone in class liked to pretend the same thing. ‘I’m fine’ was not a phrase that was lost on anyone in class 1A. The difference between Izuku and the rest of the class was that while they pretended for the teachers and their parents and themselves, they didn’t pretend for their friends.
Izuku knew this because he had sat up with nearly every member of his class at some point. Nodded along silently as Uraraka described every detail of her night horror to him. Put a hand on Iida’s shoulder when they met in the hallway and the taller boy was shaking. He’s even made a late-night snack with Kacchan seething at the counter. Izuku would mumble a quiet ‘you can tell me about it’ and then Kacchan would glare down at his hands, shake his head and whisper to the wall (always the wall or the table or the floor, never Izuku) about what he saw. It was cathartic for most people to talk about their nightmares. Izuku had always been a good listener.
He had never talked about his night terrors. He had given out platitudes and reassurances and wishes for the future that made his friends smile tiredly at him but he didn’t admit that he saw the same things. He didn’t want them to think that they were making his nightmares worse, or that they were bad friends for not listening back. It was just that he-
Everybody wanted to be listened to. Attention is a human desire that is ingrained down into our bones. A baby cries for help, but it also cries when it just wants to see it’s mother. Izuku has found, through his nighttime comforting escapades, that people desperately want you to ask them questions so that they can try and explain to you what is wrong. They want to hear the words ‘are you okay’ ‘do you need anything’ ‘you can tell me about it’. They want to be shown that someone cares enough to ask these things, they want to know that they are worthy of those questions.
Izuku has never been comforted by words. Words are used for communication and thinking and planning. Words are about telling people things. Izuku has been told a lot of things his whole life and less than half of them have been true.
His first step out of the elevator felt like he was taking a step out of a rocket ship. He had distanced himself from his surroundings and now his footsteps were light. He was in low gravity, on the dark side of the moon, alone and isolated, nothing left for him to fear. Logically, he could hear his feet connecting with the hardwood, the soft pats of his heel meeting the ground, and the slight dragging of the ball of his foot against the ground as he walked forward.
His blanket was dragging against the ground but Izuku felt like it was hovering around him, barely providing any warmth. After all, if he was warm then why were his hands still shaking. His phone flashlight turned the common room into an ominous collection of shadows that twisted and shrunk and grew with every minute twitch of his hand.
He was halfway to the entrance of the kitchen when he realized that the light was on. In sharp contrast to the bright white of his phone flashlight the kitchen light that spilled out of the doorway was yellow and warm. Izuku gravitated toward it without thinking. His fingers swiped over his phone and turned off the flashlight.
He only realized what the light meant when he was already hovering in the entrance to the kitchen. A light on meant that someone was in the kitchen. This, in turn, meant that Izuku could not silently move through the kitchen and drink his hot chocolate while staring at the far wall and basking in the silence.
Izuku abruptly turned around. He couldn’t- he couldn’t face anyone in his class right now. He couldn’t look at them and have them know. He didn’t have the energy to be comforting or to listen or to be anything but shaken up. He couldn’t be how he normally was, he couldn't be what he wanted them to see.
Izuku moved quickly away from the warm light and toward the pale green numbers that blinked above the elevator. However, he had turned around too violently. His blanket flared out and smacked against the wall, and Aizawa, who was standing in front of the microwave, heard it and abandoned his stolen leftovers to the electronic so that he could check out the noise.
This meant that Izuku barely made it half the distance back to the elevator when Aizawa’s grumbly voice called out to him. “Midoriya?”
Izuku turned around slowly. Aizawa was silhouetted in the doorway. With his features indistinguishable in the darkness Iuzku couldn’t hold back his flinch at the intimidating figure he created. He tried desperately to smooth his expression out into something that looked sleepy and confused instead of fearful and on edge and tired, so so tired.
Aizawa, in turn, tried not to show too much concern for his student. Midoriya was the type to deny everything if he thought that it would inconvenience somebody. The timid smile he was offering Aizawa did nothing to hide the pale pallor of his skin or the trembles that wracked his body.
“Yes sensei?” Izuku replied, hoping his voice didn’t sound too raw. He had woken up gasping for breath, it always took him a bit to recover from that.
“What are you doing up at,” Aizawa’s eyes searched for the clock that he knew was on the far wall, he squinted to see through the darkness, “four twenty-three in the morning?”
“Um-” Izuku gripped his blanket cape tighter, hiking the comforter up on his shoulders so that it brushed against his ears, “I- What- What are you doing up sensei?”
Aizawa wandered far enough out of the doorway that Izuku could see it when his teacher raised his eyebrows at his counter-question. “I just finished a patrol.”
“Oh,” Izuku said.
The microwave started beeping.
Izuku flinched at the sudden noise, Aizawa threw him a glance and gestured for Izuku to follow him in the kitchen as he went to retrieve his food.
Aizawa took his food out of the microwave and stirred it around with his chopsticks before shoving a few noodles into his mouth. Izuku, who had dutifully followed his teacher, was now clutching his blanket with both hands while he stood in the middle of the kitchen. He had slipped his phone into his pajama pants pocket while Aizawa was getting his noodles out of the microwave.
Aizawa pointed at Izuku with the aforementioned chopsticks and spoke around the hot food in his mouth. “I’m not going to force you to tell me what's up with you. I’m not the guidance counselor. But if you need something I am here for you as your homeroom teacher and mentor.”
Izuku kicked a bare foot out at the tile and looked down. “No, no I’m fine sensei.”
Well that's bullshit, Aizawa thought to himself as he ate another mouthful of noodles. Maybe it was the late hour, or the fact that Aizawa hadn’t slept since his brief nap at lunch that day. Maybe it was his fondness for Midoriya, the problem child of class 1A. Maybe he was just remembering when he was a teenager and his mother would hang out with him in their living room when he couldn’t sleep. It was probably a combination of all these things that made Aizawa say what he said next.
“Do you want me to sit with you? Or make you a glass of milk or something?” He was still talking around the food in his mouth. He had found that looking unprofessional in front of Midoriya often lowered his inhibitions when it came to asking authority figures for help. Why he had hold-ups about that sort of thing, Aizawa didn’t know, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to find ways around them.
Izuku’s fists clenched imperceptibly at the words, shifting his blanket the tiniest bit. Izuku, later, wondered over how easily he had acquiesced to Aizawa’s comforting presence, chalking it up to a mixture of leftover terror, lack of sleep, and his teacher’s odd way of putting him at ease. Aizawa was by far the best teacher that Izuku had ever had. He didn’t often forget that.
“I was-” Izuku mumbled under his breath, Aizawa had to strain his hearing to make sure he caught what his student was going to say, “I was going to make hot chocolate.”
Aizawa shoved the last bites of food into his mouth and then set his bowl in the sink. “Sit down then,” He grunted, already looking through the cabinets for where his students had moved the pots.
Izuku sat down at the kitchen counter. More accurately he balanced on the very edge of the stool and watched Aizawa with wide eyes as he moved around the kitchen. At some point, his body remembered that he was tired. His tense posture slumped until he was looking at Aizawa get out a bag of mini marshmallows through half-lidded eyes. His cheek is mushed into his arms and his blanket is slowly falling off of him, but he can’t bring himself to care.
“Four,” Me manages to mumble as Aizawa reaches into the bag.
Aizawa raises an eyebrow at him, again, but dutifully pulls only four marshmallows out before putting the bag back in the cabinet. He sets the drink in front of Izuku and the smell hits him all at once. Chocolate and sugar and cream and home. Izuku only barely manages not to cry in front of his homeroom teacher when his fingers brush against the warm ceramic and he takes his first sip.
Izuku can vaguely hear Aizawa muttering under his breath about ‘problem children’ as his teacher rounds the counter and sits on the stool next to him. A hand pulls his falling blanket up and over his hunched shoulders as he takes another long sip of his hot chocolate.
Aizawa sits with him and lets Izuku drink his hot chocolate in silence. He doesn’t ask questions, or force Izuku to try and articulate things that only exist, dark and bleeding, inside his head. He doesn’t try to fix anything. Izuku thinks that this is much better than his original plan of standing in the middle of the kitchen all alone in the dark. Aizawa’s hand rubs up and down his back while they sit in silence. The familiar motion brings Izuku a sense of comfort that he cannot describe, he swipes his thumb against the ceramic of his mug to the same rhythm.
When he's finished with his drink Aizawa takes the mug and washes it out. Izuku slumps against the counter again. His blanket and the yellow kitchen light bathes him in warmth. His hands aren’t shaking anymore.
He wakes up the next day in bed, the blankets tucked around him just like how his mother used to tuck him in when he was little. He feels well-rested.