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open your heart, now let the light shine in
Eri wakes to sterility and white.
She blinks in the dim light of the room, then looks around. It is large and mostly bare, the bed she is in across from the door and close to a large window. When she sits up—slowly, carefully, breathing in quick, shallow breaths that aren’t from fright, they’re not—she sees that the window overlooks a small garden tucked into a courtyard between two other large buildings. Flowers are tiny pinpricks of color far below, and green trees stand tall and proud and still in the shelter of the hospital walls.
The door opens. She turns her head, looks at the tall woman who enters wearing a doctor’s white lab coat. She is smiling, her dark hair gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, and her blue eyes crinkle in the corners.
“Hello, Eri,” she says kindly, coming into the room. A stethoscope hangs around her neck, and a pen and a notepad are tucked into the lab coat’s pocket. “How are you feeling?”
“Um,” says Eri.
It is then that she sees the other man, who had stepped into the room after the doctor. He is tall as well—taller, even, than the woman—and dark-haired and dark-eyed. There are shadows on his face, and his clothes are black like night, though there is a grey scarf looped around his neck. He watches her warily—and she watches him back.
She feels—well, she doesn’t quite know how she feels, and she squirms a little beneath the strange man’s scrutiny. His dark eyes are hollow, but not empty—bleak, but not dead. Not like Chisaki’s. Chisaki’s eyes had never been hollow—had, instead, been filled with fire and fervor, with need and drive and lust, desire, unsatiated hunger. They had been dark, dark, dark like this man’s, but they had been black in a way this man’s wasn’t. If anything, this man’s eyes reminded Eri of bone, rather than flame—bone broken and left bare and open to bleed and hurt and grow back together crooked.
The man smiles.
It is a small, even tiny, gesture. Barely more than a subtle flinch of his lips. But Eri sees it—and Eri knows what it is.
Eri turns to the woman doctor and smiles, her hands clutched together in her lap. “I’m okay,” she says, finally answering the doctor’s question. Her eyes flick to the man again, and his smile is gone, but it seems to Eri that the bleakness, the hollowness, is a little less than it had been.
“I’m okay.”
~iIi~
The man leaves with the doctor, but he comes back when a nurse brings her dinner. He hovers by the door while Eri eats and the nurse chatters kindly, hands shoved into his pockets, his eyes acutely catching every one of Eri’s slightest movements.
Eri wonders who he is. She thinks she remembers him being among the group that accompanied Mirio and Deku, but she can’t be sure. She thinks he must be a hero, dressed as he is, but she’s never heard of anyone that looks or dresses like him before. Who is he, then? And why is he here?
He leaves again with the nurse, the woman taking Eri’s picked-at food away on the tray, but again he returns when a different, male nurse comes in to take her vitals before bedtime. He watches the nurse tuck her in, and show her the button she can push if she needs help, then turns and exits after him.
Eri watches him go, and wonders. She wonders, as she settles down to sleep. She wonders, as she drifts off. She wonders, as she dreams. But she has no answers, even when she wakes.
~iIi~
The man becomes a constant in Eri’s life. The first day he is not there when someone else walks in through the door is like ice to her blood, and she nearly starts weeping then and there.
“Where is he?” she asks instead, her breath weak and shallow in her chest, her voice tiny.
“Who?” the doctor who had come in to check up on her asks.
“The man,” Eri says, and points to the door he always stands beside.
“Oh, Eraserhead? He has class right now.”
Eri frowns. Class? she thinks. Eraserhead?
“Is that his name?” she asks softly. “Eraserhead?”
The doctor smiles and nods. “That’s his hero name, at least.”
So he is a hero, Eri thinks with some satisfaction. But what about class?
She doesn’t ask, though. Instead, she answers the questions the doctor asks, and shakes her head when the doctor asks if she has any questions, and nods when the doctor asks if she’ll be okay. The doctor smiles and leaves, and Eri is alone with only her thoughts and the coloring books one of the nurses had scrounged up from the pediatrics department for company.
She wonders if Eraserhead will come back.
She hopes he will.
~iIi~
He comes back that night.
Eri watches him stand by the door with relief, and answers the questions asked of her more readily and gladly than she has yet. When the nurse leaves, though, she is surprised when Eraserhead doesn’t immediately turn and follow.
Instead, he walks towards her, stopping a few feet away from her bed.
“The doctor says you asked about me,” the man says softly. It is not a question.
It is the first time Eri has heard him speak.
Eri nods.
“Are you okay?” the man asks—and Eri is surprised at that. Of course she’s okay. Why wouldn’t she be? Even more than that, though, why would this man who has never even talked to her, and who she is irrationally attached to just because he has been there every day for the past week, care?
Some of her confusion must show on her face, because the man says, “No one hurt you while I was gone? No one scared you?”
“Oh,” says Eri, still a little confused, but a little less confused. “No.”
“Hm,” says the man, and he nods. He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, then inclines his head to her. “Goodnight then, Eri,” he says, and he turns and leaves the room.
As Eri drifts off to sleep that night, she thinks about the man saying her name. She thinks she likes it when she hears it in his voice.
It sounds, she thinks, like safety.
~iIi~
It is Eraserhead who brings her breakfast the next morning, not a nurse, and for the first time ever he sits down in the chair pulled up to her bedside while she eats.
“How did you sleep?” he asks after a few uncomfortable minutes, in which Eri picks at her food and eyes him through her lashes.
“Okay,” Eri says. She hesitates, shoving a forkful of sausage around the plate, then asks, “How about you?”
“Me?” Eraserhead asks, sounding surprised. Then, “Oh.” He hesitates too, then says, “I…didn’t really sleep last night.”
Eri frowns. “Why not?” she asks.
The man smiles, and Eri is reminded of his eyes on that first day—his eyes that looked like broken bone.
“That’s not something you need to worry yourself about,” Eraserhead says.
“Okay,” says Eri, because she will not make this man, who she thinks she likes and maybe, maybe is beginning to trust, angry with her.
“You should eat more than that,” Eraserhead says, when Eri makes to shove the tray away from her a minute later.
Eri frowns. “I’m not hungry,” she says.
“The reports say you haven’t been eating much,” Eraserhead says. “I doubt you’re not hungry.”
Eri stops. Thinks.
“Oh,” says Eri after a few seconds. “I guess maybe I am a little hungry. I don’t feel good, though.”
“How about this?” Eraserhead says. “You eat a bite, and I’ll eat a bite. That way all your food gets gone, and we don’t have to tell the doctors that you aren’t the one who ate it all.”
Eri looks at Eraserhead, surprised again by him. “Why?” she asks.
Eraserhead looks at her in return, and says, “Because they look at things like your appetite when you’re in the hospital, and use that to help determine when you’re healthy. They aren’t going to let you leave until you’re eating well.”
“Oh,” says Eri. Then she nods. “Okay.”
They eat her breakfast together, Eri taking one bite, then Eraserhead taking another one. They go back and forth, Eraserhead noticing that she likes the eggs the best and leaving them all for her, while he eats the disgusting oatmeal.
When he stands to leave, he surprises Eri again by patting her on the head. It is the first time anyone has touched her since she woke up in the hospital who wasn’t just checking her vitals.
“Have a good day, Eri,” Eraserhead says, and turns to leave.
“Will you be back tonight?” Eri blurts. She has to know—has to make sure she hasn’t done anything that will make him stop coming.
“Of course,” Eraserhead promises.
~iIi~
True to his word, Eraserhead comes back late in the afternoon. He is carrying a bag that Eri has never seen before, slung over one shoulder, and carries another in his right hand. He puts both down carefully beside Eri’s bed, then sits in the chair.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” he says.
“You aren’t late,” Eri replies, because she hadn’t been expecting him until dinner at the earliest.
“I got you some things,” Eraserhead says.
Eri frowns. “Why?” she blurts out, because she cannot quite fathom why anyone would get her anything they didn’t have to.
Eraserhead shrugs, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. “You looked lonely and bored,” he said. “I thought you could maybe use a friend, and some distractions.”
Eri looks at him, a crease between her eyebrows. “A friend?”
“I guess we can start with that,” Eraserhead says, and he reaches into the smaller of the two bags.
When he pulls his hand out, he is holding a stuffed unicorn. It is purple and blue and white, with a shiny horn and feathers around its plush hooves. He hands it to Eri, who takes it like a saint taking a relic, and looks at it with awe.
“This is for me?” she asks.
Eraserhead nods. “I saw it and thought of you,” he says.
Eri draws the unicorn stuffed animal to her chest and tentatively hugs it. It is soft, and the unicorn’s hair is silky as Eri runs her fingers through it. It is the perfect size to be hugged, and the perfect weight to hug her back.
Eri starts to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Eraserhead says, and Eri is startled by how scared he sounds. He is not, she realizes, someone who she thought was ever scared of anything. “I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s for me?” Eri sniffles, trying to swallow back her tears. “It’s mine?”
Eraserhead nods, looking uncomfortable, but a little less…panicked. “It’s yours,” he says. “I bought it just for you.”
“Why?” Eri asks, voice tiny, tiny, tiny.
“Because you needed a friend,” he says.
“Aren’t you my friend?” Eri asks, before she can stop herself.
Eraserhead stops dead, even the breath freezing in his chest. Then he smiles, just a little—a twitch of his lips that is barely more than the flinch that Eri had seen the first day.
“Yes,” he says. “I’d like to be your friend.”
Eri nods, then buries her face in the unicorn’s back.
The bed dips—and then Eri is surprised yet again at the feeling of a hand on her back, large and warm and stolid. “Can I give you a hug?” Eraserhead asks quietly.
Eri nods into the unicorn, not daring to look up—not daring to believe this is real, not daring to see him in case this is all just some sort of trick and he’s about to hurt her. She doesn’t think she can survive it if this is all just some farce.
Large, warm, stolid arms wrap around her, and Eri stiffens. But they don’t hurt. They just hold. And then there is a hand in her hair, stroking softly, slowly, gently.
Eri’s tears redouble, the unicorn trapped between her arms, Eri trapped between Eraserhead’s arms. This time, though, Eraserhead doesn’t seem to panic. He just holds her, and holds her, and holds her.
~iIi~
Eraserhead stays until her bedtime.
He’d also brought games, still in their wrappings and packaging, to play with her, and they spent a fun few hours after Eri had cried herself out playing them. He sat on the end of her bed, or in the chair pulled up to her bedside, while Eri sat cross-legged on top of her covers with her back to the pillows.
He waits in the room while she brushes her teeth and uses the bathroom, then takes the nurse’s place to tuck her in after her vitals were read. “Goodnight, Eri,” her murmurs softly, resting a hand on her hair before straightening. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promises.
Eri watches him leave, turning off the light as he goes, and goes to sleep actually looking forward to the following day.Top of Form
~iIi~
He comes back the next day, just as he promised, and the next, and the next. Sometimes he grades papers while sitting by her bedside, sometimes they play the games he left stacked on her bedside table, and sometimes they just talk.
“What do you do?” Eri asks him one day, as rain beats the windows and thunder rumbles in the distance.
“I’m a hero,” Eraserhead says. He frowns. “I thought you knew that.”
Eri nods. “Do you do anything else, though?” she asks, looking at him from the corner of her eye. She still wonders, almost every day, what the doctor had meant by “class” that day.
“Yes,” Eraserhead says. “I’m a teacher at UA.”
Eri gapes. She’s heard of UA, of course—had even watched the Sports Festival one year. “Isn’t that the best hero school in Japan?” she asks, though, because she has to make sure it’s the right UA.
Eraserhead smiles the soft, secret smile he seems to only ever smile at her, and nods. “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”
“You must be a really good hero, then!” Eri says brightly, wriggling just a little on the bed. She hadn’t realized that Eraserhead was, like, an important hero.
Eraserhead, though, just shrugs. “I suppose,” he says, sounding a little uncomfortable.
Eri frowns then. “Why haven’t I ever heard of you?” she asks.
Eraserhead grins again, but it’s a different sort of grin. This one is like steel and blood, and if it was anyone else who had smiled it, Eri thinks she might have been afraid.
“I’m what’s called an Underground Hero,” Eraserhead says.
“What’s that?” Eri asks, before Eraserhead can go on.
“It’s a kind of hero that does the sort of work no one else wants to do,” Eraserhead says. “We stay out of the limelight because that would get us killed. We do a lot of undercover operations, as well as shadow work.”
“Shadow work?” Eri asks.
“Yeah,” Aizawa says. “Shadow work. Like…” He hesitates, then says, “You know how the operation to rescue you was really big? It involved a lot of heroes, and a lot of police, and there was a lot of media coverage.”
Eri nods.
“Well, there are some kids in situations where a big operation would just get them killed—and they don’t need a big operation to rescue them. They need to be saved from family members, or from a smaller and less powerful gang than the Shie Hissaikai, or from a different sort of bad situation. Something where they would have just killed the kid rather than let them escape.”
“Oh,” says Eri. She puzzles for a moment, not quite sure she can wrap her mind around that being a situation that really happens—but if Eraserhead says it is, then she believes it is. “And you help those kids?”
Eraserhead nods. “I try, anyway,” he tells her, and something black and rotted flashes through his eyes, from one to the other before disappearing back into his mind. Eri’s heart twists at the sight of it, and once again she is reminded of the broken bone, and she wonders if this has something to do with it, or if the thing that birthed the brokenness was something else entirely.
“I…” Eri trails off, and Eraserhead looks up at her from the game board sitting between them.
“Yes, Eri?” he asks, pressing gently.
“I never said thank you,” Eri whispers at last. “You were there. You helped save me. And I never—”
“It’s okay, Eri,” Eraserhead says. “You don’t have to thank me.”
“But you’ve been so nice,” Eri all but wails. “And you don’t even—you won’t even—I don’t understand!”
“What don’t you understand?” Eraserhead asks.
“Why you’re being so nice,” Eri says, and hugs the unicorn she’s named Purple against her chest. “You don’t seem to want anything, and I don’t, I mean, I don’t want, I want—”
Eraserhead sighs, stands, then shifts around the board and sits again beside Eri. He opens his arms in a silent invitation, and Eri carefully, nervously, warily fits herself against his side. His arms settle around her, drawing her close against him, and he holds her there against his body, stolid and warm and inexplicably safe.
“Only bad people want a child to do anything for them,” Eraserhead tells her. “I mean, it’s one thing I guess to want a kid to do the dishes or sweep the floor. But anything more than that isn’t okay. Children are people too, and so they aren’t meant to be abused. They’re—you’re—here to be loved, and to be taught what’s right and wrong, and to be raised to be a good person. You’re not here to give me, or anybody, anything.”
Eri’s frown returns, and she cranes her neck up to look at Eraserhead. “I don’t understand,” she says softly. “Aren’t I—I mean, Overhaul only wanted me for what I could do. And so I’ll only be good for what I can do for you, and whoever takes care of me next. Aren’t I?”
Something dark and ugly flashes over Eraserhead’s face again—something Eri can’t quantify. Then it’s gone, as quickly as it had come, replaced instead with something soft and kind.
“That’s not true,” he tells Eri. “It’s not true, and if I have to take the next 20 years teaching you that’s not true, then I will.”
Eri stiffens, then looks up at him, and says, “20 years? You mean, you aren’t going to leave me? You’re going to stay?”
Eraserhead looks awkward, then shrugs. “Maybe,” he hedges. “If you want me to.”
Eri nods, and buries her face against his side. “I do want that,” she says into his ribs, into his chest, into his heart—and above her, Eri can feel him nod.
“Okay,” he says, his chest rumbling with his voice. “Then I won’t go anywhere.”
~iIi~
As the third week draws to a close and the fourth week of Eri’s hospital stay begins, she begins to wonder what will happen to her once they’re tired of having her there. She broaches the topic with Eraserhead on Monday when he comes to see her after class.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she asks.
Eraserhead frowns, just a little. “What do you mean?”
“When I leave the hospital.”
Eraserhead goes very still, then says, “They’ll find you a home to go to. Someplace you’ll be safe, and someone can help you learn to control your quirk.”
“Oh,” says Eri, feeling uncomfortable. She had hoped—but no, that would be too much to even hope for.
“What’s wrong?” Eraserehead asks.
“Nothing,” Eri lies.
Eraserhead eyes her, but lets her have her little lie, instead going back to his grading, and that is the end of that conversation.
~iIi~
Eri brings it up again the next day, however.
“What kind of house will I go to?” she asks Eraserhead, who looks uncomfortable, fiddling with the red pen he is holding to mark essays with.
“I’m not sure,” he says. “Probably one with other kids. It’ll be fun—you’ll have people your age to play with, and parents to watch over you.” He does not, however, sound convinced, and there is something steely and cold in his eyes, like an old wound that had never quite fully healed over.
“Oh,” says Eri. Then she asks, “Will you still come see me?”
“Of course,” Eraserhead says quickly. It is maybe too quickly, and the pain that Eri had seen seems to multiply.
“Are you okay?” she asks quietly.
Eraserhead smiles at her, and reaches up to pat her head. “I’m okay,” he says. “Just thinking of an old hero I used to know, who said almost the exact same thing to me.”
“Oh?” Eri asks. “Who was it?”
“He was dead long ago,” Eraserhead says. “You wouldn’t know him anyway, though. He was an Underground Hero.”
“Like you,” Eri pipes up.
“Yeah,” Eraserhead says. “Like me.”
~iIi~
Eri thinks about it for the next day, and the next, before asking Eraserhead about it again.
“Mr. Eraserhead?” she asks.
“Yes?” Eraserhead says, looking up at her from the cards in his hand.
“Do you know where I’m going to be going yet? When I leave here?” The doctors earlier in the day had been talking about discharging her soon, and that meant her time here was drawing to a close—that her time spending every afternoon with Eraserhead was also drawing to an end.
“I wanted to talk to you about that, actually,” Eraserhead says.
Eri looks at him, confused. “Why?”
“Well,” Eraserhead says slowly, carefully, as if thinking every word over before he says it, “it’s become a possibility for you to come stay with me at UA. If you want. If you don’t, that’s okay too, we can always find you someplace else to go, with kids your own age, but I thought—well, I can help you control your quirk.”
“How?” Eri asks.
Eraserhead looks at her, a little surprised. “Has no one told you my quirk?” he asks her.
Eri shakes her head.
“Oh,” says Eraserhead. “Well, I can erase the quirks of other people. Not permanently,” he adds quickly, as Eri opens her mouth to ask if he could take hers away for forever, “just until I blink, or something obstructs my view of them. But if you lose control of it, I can stop your quirk from hurting anyone.”
It is Eri’s turn to say, “Oh.” She looks at him, hopeful. “And you—you’d help me learn? To control it?”
“Of course,” Eraserhead says. “That would be part of my job as your guardian.”
“Oh,” Eri says again.
“Only if you want to come live with me, though,” Eraserhead says again. “This part is up to you.”
“Okay,” Eri says.
Eraserhead frowns. “Okay what?” he asks.
“I want—” Eri gulps.
“What do you want, Eri?” Eraserhead asks, and his voice is softer and more encouraging.
“I want to live with you,” Eri blurts, barely able to process that this is really happening, that the dream she had not even let herself dream is coming true. “I want…” She trails off, unable to say anything else for fear that it will all turn into some horrible joke and everything good and happy in her life will disappear like smoke.
“Okay,” Eraserhead says. “Then you’ll come to live with me.”
And with that, he lays a card down on the bed and says, “It’s your turn, Eri.”
~iIi~
Two days later, Eri leaves the hospital.
She walks out of the front doors, her hand ensconced in Eraserhead’s, It is a clear day, the sky blue and brilliant, the sun lowering toward the western horizon and the air arm with the afternoon. She is clad once more in the red jumper that the nurses had bought her, though Eraserhead has promised she and he will go shopping for more clothes tomorrow.
They wait for the cab together, sitting on a bench outside of the hospital’s main doors. Eri clutches to Eraserhead’s hand, not daring to let go, afraid that if she does, he’ll disappear into smoke, as will the last month. She still is not convinced that this isn’t just a dream.
“We’ll go see Deku and Mirio when we get to UA,” Eraserhead promises.
“Okay,” Eri says, not really hearing him, still lost in her thoughts.
“Oh, and Eri,” Eraserhead says, finally drawing Eri’s attention. “It would be best if you didn’t call me Eraserhead anymore. At least not when out in public.”
“Okay,” Eri says. “Then what do I call you?”
Eraserhead smiles. “Just call me Aizawa.”