Work Text:
Shouta looks down once again at the newly bought eyebrow razor sitting on the bedside tablet. He looks up to the wall and sighs.
The ache in his leg where it connected with his new prosthetic fades when he sits back down in his ('the', not 'his', he had to remember. 'The.') chair. Scanning his eyes over the items on the bedside table once more, Aizawa suppresses a second sigh.
Since walking in holding the bag from the nearest drug store he had not looked at the other man lying still in the bed. Every day he came and couldn’t bear to look at his friend for more than a few moments at the end of his stay to say a quiet “see you tomorrow” before leaving.
Two days ago he was struck by the thought that the nurses hadn’t been shaving their patient and he was starting to grow a patchy beard.
The memory of a passing comment had sent a cold jolt down Aizawa’s spine and today he came in with shaving supplies, a razor, and a mission.
The nerve damage in his arm thankfully didn’t reduce his grip strength, but it did bring with it a subtle, ignorable, tremor. Ignorable right until the point where Aizawa Shouta puts the razor to the face of the far too still Yamada Hizashi.
A nerve wrecking 20 minutes later and a few wipes with a damp cloth and the clean chin and jaw of the one and only Present Mic was once again on display.
The manta of “I’d rather die than be seen with stubble by my adoring listeners!” in the DJs own voice fades in his mind slightly when Aizawa sits back down, and he can’t help but feel… alone now that his friend looks more like himself again.
If he was awake no doubt Hizashi would be staring in a mirror exaggeratingly tilting his face to look at every conceivable angle before announcing that it wasn’t a bad job and jokingly tell Shouta that even still maybe he should practice on himself more often. If they were sober, Shouta would huff something back. If they were drunk no doubt it’d end with a tussle and Shouta trying to scratch at his friend with his ever present stubble.
But Shouta was very much not drunk now, and his semi success had left him with a new problem. The mustache. That damn ridiculous mustache. Oh, and mister blonde hair himself might pretend that he had naturally sparse eyebrows, but Shouta knows better, knows the other would whip out that ridiculous German imported small shaver to go at both moustache and eyebrows.
“If I didn’t sweat so much in my leathers I’d just shave em right off and draw on something fun every day. As it is, they’d just melt off!” he confessed to Shouta and Nemuri one random night at one of their apartments, eating takeout and ignoring the random movie playing on the tv. It had led to Nemuri and Hizashi drawing on each other with eyeliner and later drawing a curly mustache on Shouta, to his token protests.
Coming back to the present, Shouta lets himself focus on his friend’s face. Hizashi looks better with the relatively clean shave but there was no denying that he doesn’t look well. Pale, tube in his nose, and naturally sharp features looking more so in his unnatural stillness. The same as the last 2 weeks. Hizashi would call him maudlin for staring and frowning so much.
Nemuri would laugh and call him a dumbass before moving in to take over. With that thought came the reminder that she would never laugh at him again. Or pat his shoulder while putting down a fresh coffee after a rough night on patrol. Or stroke his hair when he gets to the stage of drunkenness where all his hidden hurts came pouring out of him, which he always pretends he couldn’t remember the next day. She always pretends to believe him. Pretended.
Now everything about her is past tense.
And it hurts so much he sometimes can’t breathe.
Her absence is as sharp as the phantom pains he gets from his missing leg.
Another part of him gone.
And Shouta will be damned if he lets another part of himself leave. Lets another friend leave.
So with a grunt he rises from his chair once more. And with unsteady hands, shaves blond hairs away.