Chapter Text
“Shinsou’s similar to how you used to be, isn’t he? Do you see yourself in him, Aizawa-kun? Or is it about Shirakumo…,” Hizashi probed.
“If you have something to say, make it brief. I have something after this,” Aizawa responded, his face buried enough into his capture weapon to protect him from any attempts to read his expression.
Hizashi felt like his heart had just fractured, a small hairline crack to add to the others. He was being shut out again.
“It’s nothing. Just reminiscing,” he responded, walking it back, giving both himself and Aizawa a retreat from the conversation before it became a fight.
***
Nemuri looked up from her own grading when she heard the knock on the door. This time, the knocking was the beat of some pop song – it was eerily familiar, but she couldn’t place it, and more of a rapping than a knock for its length and complexity. Still, it was obviously Hizashi.
She set the papers aside – each student had designed a set of logos and graphics for themselves, to be graded on brand strength, graphic design, and over all style – and went to open the door. As Hizashi entered, he stepped out of his shoes and handed her a six pack of Sapporo. Nemuri plucked two beers out of the cardboard caddy, set them aside on the small dining room table, and went to put the remainder in the refrigerator.
Hizashi pulled out his own stack of grading from his tote bag which was screenprinted with the logo of some band Nemuri didn’t know. The papers were uncharacteristically misaligned with bent corners. He was clearly agitated, she could tell. His hair freed from his usual obnoxious style and a messy bun was a standard look for him when he was out of his costume. This messy bun was messier than usual, though, she noticed. It was if he had tied it and untied it a dozen times, searching for it to feel just right at the back of his head.
Hizashi had already cracked open his own Sapporo. Nemuri set hers aside and set to finishing her soda, while making a note in her gradebook that Monoma’s consistent clock motif throughout his assigned was a nice touch. She tipped her head back to finish the last of the soda and then handed the can to Hizashi.
“Can you toss this in the recycling?” she asked.
He took the can from her and crushed it, quickly and easily, with clear anger before tossing it into the recycling bin by the doorway.
She’d expected that, honestly. The can was a worthy sacrifice as a test subject to gauge Hizashi’s bad mood. She cracked open her own beer and took a sip before she spoke.
“Alright, I’m giving myself two guesses. Either, one, the kids are still putting kanji in the middle of their English sentences because they’ve forgotten the word they want – and it’s way too late in the semester for that to be acceptable for you,” she paused, “Or, Shota’s acting up again.”
Hizashi huffed.
“Both are true,” he admitted, “but one’s gnawing at me more than the other.”
“…I get one guess?” she asked, with false brightness in her voice, as if this was just a guessing game.
He shrugged.
“Alright,” she continued, “I know you write all your questions in English now, so if even if they put Japanese words in as place holders…I know that you know that that means they can at least read the question, which is progress, so it can’t be just that. I bet it’s Shota.”
Hizashi offered her a weak thumbs up, “He’s shutting me out, again.”
Nemuri hummed. The word ‘again’ was heavy here, a indicator of repeated betrayals. She searched for something to say. Just then, Sushi extracted himself from the closet and pattered over to his empty dish to yowl, protesting the lack of kibble in it. Hizashi looked at the cat, tears welling up.
Nemuri got up and headed to the closet to retrieve a cup of kibble and pour it into Sushi’s dish. She gave him a couple scratches behind the ears as he started to dig in and turned back to Hizashi. Hizashi’s eyes were welled with tears but none had fallen yet.
Nemuri held her hand out, “Key.”
“What?”
“Your grading key. Give it to me.”
“…why?”
“I’m grading the rest of your papers, you’re going to deal with,” her other hand gestured wildly in the air, towards Sushi, towards Hizashi, towards some other direction possibly meant to suggest Shota’s absence, “whatever the hell this is again.”
“It’ll just turn out to be a fight, and,” he wiped his eyes and laughed just a little, “your English isn’t that good.”
“It’s always a fight with you two, and I haven’t seen a fight you didn’t come back from yet,” she said, snatched the key off the table, “and it’s not freaking Hemingway, I think I can grade –“ she held the key up to read it and switched to English to read off the example sentences – “’Cats are nice.’ and ‘Fish swim in the ocean.’ and ‘Sharks eat fish.’”
He scowled at her pronunciation of ‘sharks’ but she raised her eyebrow back at him, daring him to snatch the key back from her.
“Go. The tension in the air with you two can be a fucking nightmare, go deal with it. Consider the rest of the beers my payment – you’re welcome, by the way.”
Hizashi finished his own beer, a bit too quickly, and dropped the bottle in the recycling while Nemuri reorganized his stack of weekly homework practice sentences. He left the grading bag with her and before slipping out the door, asked, “Grading party next week, though? For the exams?”
She smiled, “Yea, of course. Always,” and cracked open the second beer to dig into her now doubled stack of grading.
***
Shota was curled up in his sleeping bag. He had elected to spend the night at the dormitory that UA had provided for him as part of the dorm system rather than returning home, although he wasn’t on duty that night, and could hear the students through every hastily constructed wall. Mina was cackling and the small pops that sounded a bit like firecrackers suggested that she was, once again, goading Bakugo. Midoriya’s laughter rang through the drywall, accompanied by a girlish set of giggles that he suspected belonged to Uraraka and perhaps, Hagakure as well.
The kids seemed so much more resilient than he thought he was at that age.
The year had been hard. Kidnapping. Surprise attacks. Violence. The carefully constructed image of Heroes, the very idea on which these students had pinned their dreams and aspirations and lives, was falling apart like a house of cards. And they could laugh and decorate and cackle and tease.
And all Shota could do these days, it felt like, was push paperwork and hide in a sleeping bag.
It was deeply unfair that Hizashi had seen past every wall. Every barrier he put up was transparent to his best friend. He supposed that was what the phrase ‘best friend’ entailed, a term Hizashi had greeted him with in English many times, in the places in his endless chatter where Shouta’s name might have gone.
When Shirakumo had died, a light had gone out in the world, extinguished forever. Hizashi had felt it too, he knew. There were plenty of lights in the world, Nemuri and Eri and Hizashi and Thirteen, but none fit that exact space like Shirakumo. It was like the North Star, Polaris, the brightest one in the sky had been ripped out of the void of space and had left the Little Dipper to be a forever incomplete dot-to-dot. There was no star to serve as his compass anymore and the constellation was forever damaged, incomplete. Almost an image, but not quite.
And maybe it felt like that for Hizashi too. But what Hizashi could not understand was the problem of planes and fireflies and fireworks and comets. The illusion of false hope, imposter stars. Hizashi knew Shirakumo was gone and he had adjusted to lacking a North Star, for the most part. He never expected to see the Little Dipper complete again. He was able to navigate his world without Polaris, leaning on Rigel and Betelguese and Schedar.
But the sky mocked Shota. Just when he got used to missing his North Star, something would trick him into thinking the sky had healed itself and the constellations were complete again. It was like stargazing and seeing a slow-moving plane lit up in the night. For a moment, it seemed to be a star and one could be tempted to attach it to the others, to form a constellation and then the plane would continue flying and the illusion was broken. The image, already a tenuous dot-to-dot leaning heavily on imagination and stories and myths, would shatter. It was like sitting on the school’s roof in the summer night and having a firefly wander way too high above the ground to impersonate a star. For a moment, the constellation would be filled in and then the little insect would flicker its light off, leaving an incomplete image. An incomplete life.
The radio, playing Shirakumo’s voice had been a particularly convincing false star, that day. Sometimes, the shade of Hado Neijire’s hair would make Shouta feel like his eyes were playing tricks on him as she ran through the hallways during passing period. The worst had been Kurogiri, an actual specter in his face, a tempting star to chase into a suffocating void. It was one thing to lose somebody. It was another to be tricked again and again by your own mind into thinking that just maybe they might be back.
This spiral of messy thoughts was interrupted by the vibration of his phone. He touched the screen to reveal one message from Hizashi – “I want to talk,” and a map location.