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It had been a long day. The class had an exam in Hero Law, followed by strenuous training in the afternoon, so both their minds and bodies were exhausted.
Most of the class was sitting in the common room, Izuku sitting with his friends on the couch, half laying on Uraraka with his legs on Shinsou’s lap. Iida was having one of those days he didn’t like being touched so he was sitting in one of the armchairs. Todoroki was half-asleep leaning on the back of the couch. Nobody had any idea how he could sleep like that.
Aizawa was in the kitchen, making sure the Bakubunch wasn’t hiding alcohol or vape pens. It had only happened once and he wasn’t letting it happen again. He’d found nothing thus far and was beginning to get sleepy.
Bakugou, a weird teenager, was unsuccessfully trying to sleep in his room while Nosferatu played on the common room tv. Not that anyone was paying attention to it, most of them were having stupid little conversation with their friends.
Uraraka and Shinsou, for example, were having a quiet conversation about how secretly catlike Izuku was. Izuku listened quietly, most of his attention on the vampire acting spooky onscreen.
The room was full of quiet chatter until Kaminari’s voice rose above the rest, “let’s do, like, a bonding exercise or something.”
Jirou sat up from where she was leaning against Yaomomo, “like what?”
“Uhhh,” his head tipped back against the head of the couch so hard it looked like it hurt, “what does everyone have… Parents? Everyone’s got a parent or something, right?”
There were murmurs of agreement. Even Todoroki, since he’d reunited with his mother, could hesitantly say that he had a parent. No, Endeavor did not count.
“Alright then…. Let’s go around the room and say one weird thing about one of your parents. If you don’t wanna say anything, you don’t have to,” he waited for people to disagree, but it seemed everyone was too tired, “ok, I’ll go first. My mom is super obsessed with cartoons, but only ones from the pre-quirk era. She’ll go to antique stores just to search for DVDs.”
“For real?” Sero muttered, “that’s dedication. Uhhh, I guess my dad drinks three energy drinks a day.”
“Seriously?” Mina laughed, “I guess that’s where you get it from.”
He elbowed her, “shut up, I don’t drink them that often,” then, to shift blame, he pointed at Shinsou, “talk to ‘I like my lattes with eight shots of espresso’ over there.”
Shinsou opened his eyes and glanced at Sero, “I have insomnia.”
“No, you don’t,” Izuku interrupted softly, “you drink coffee two hours before you should go to sleep and then you spend hours watching cat videos,” he followed up this shocking revelation with, “as far as weird parental things go…. I don’t think my father has ever gotten angry.”
Aizawa perked up in the kitchen, both from this new Shinsou discovery and what Izuku said.
Uraraka turned to him, “never?”
“Yeah, he never yelled at me or anything, even when I really fucked up. Like, people make this face when they get angry and he never did,” he’d thought it was normal when he was younger but as he got older and spent more time around normal people, he realized it was quite odd.
“That’s crazy,” Kurishima muttered, then spoke louder, “what, so you never got punished for anything?”
Izuku jerked up, “oh, no, I got punished when I did something wrong. He just never got angry.”
Todoroki, fully awake now, stood up, “wait, so he punished you when he wasn’t even angry?”
The mood in the room grew tense, pregnant with silence. Izuku noticed and hurried to relieve the tension, “not like. In an authoritarian way. He just had me write essays about what I did wrong.”
Aizawa, too, was awake.
“Oh, my parents had me write apologies too. It really sucked,” Yaomomo sympathized.
“No, not just apologies. He had me write five page essays if I, like, forgot to take out the trash or something. I had to quote philosophers on the importance of diligence, timeliness and hard work. Stuff like that. It was actually how I started with my notebooks.”
Aizawa looked up the definition of psychological abuse despite knowing it by heart. No wonder Midoriya was always early, always did his tasks no matter how tired he was.
Shinsou stared at his friend, confused and distressed, “I thought you meant when you got into a fight at school or snuck out to watch hero fights, not small shit like that. He had you write five pages for not taking out the trash?”
“Oh my god, if he learned I was out watching hero fights that was a fifteen page essay about safety and recklessness. If he could see what I’ve been doing in UA, I think I would have carpal tunnel from all the writing.”
The room was completely silent, Izuku’s voice cutting silently through.
“Dude… Are you okay?” Kirishima asked. He’d known about how overprotective Izuku’s mom was, but nobody knew anything about his dad.
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s made me really good at writing essays,” Izuku smiled lazily.
“Wait, Izuku, you said ‘if he could see’. What did that mean?”
The parent bonding game had ended. The class had become fully absorbed in learning about the disturbing enigma that was Izuku’s father.
“He disappeared when I was nine. Before that, he mostly communicated through phone calls and facetime and, don’t get it wrong, I still had to write essays because somehow he always knew that I’d done something wrong despite being in another country. He totally went off-grid when I was nine though. No more essays.”
Izuku didn’t seem sad when describing this, more like he was simply recounting the situation. None of the angst and hurt of a child abandoned. Nobody knew whether they should comfort him or not. Given his father was Like That, in his position none of them would have missed him either. Aizawa listened intently and considered whether Hound-Dog would have capacity for Midoriya too. He’d been intending to get the problem child therapy for a while, and this was yet another reason.
“Man, I can’t even imagine your dad,” Kaminari said in a sad attempt to lighten the mood, “you look so much like your mom.”
“Oh, I can draw him if you want. It’s been a while but I still remember what he looks like.”
Before Kaminari could refuse because he didn’t actually want to know, Izuku had pulled out his notebook and pencil and began on the drawing. He also pulled out a red pen.
“For the eyes,” he said to Uraraka’s questioning expression.
He began to sketch out the head and shoulders and Shinsou asked another question, “you said you had to write essays if you went to hero fights. What about when you got into fights?”
“It depended on how I explained the fight,” Izuku said offhandedly.
That was odd. The many members of the class looked at each other and then back to Izuku.
“What do you mean?” Yaomomo asked.
“If I said I jumped in to help someone, I had to write the essay. If I said I had no choice but to fight, then I didn’t have to write it.”
That…. Made sense. Now Aizawa understood why Midoriya was so willing to be punished for doing what he definitely thought was the right thing.
“Oh,” Shinsou said, and the conversation, for the most part, ended. They were all tired, Izuku was distracted, and nobody wanted to be bothered with thoughts of Izuku’s father before they truly slept.
They turned back to the tv? which was now showing some campy monster horror movie. A B-movie with terrible special effects.
About twenty minutes into this, Izuku threw the notebook onto the table, “it’s done.”
His friends were the first to see it. He looked to be wearing a suit, had a strong neck. He had an angular face very unlike Izuku’s, but ultimately a very ordinary face. A forgettable one. His coloring, however, with sharp red eyes and curly white hair, was anything but forgettable. His expression, too, was odd. His eyes were sharp, cold, but his face was placid, almost smiling.
He really did look like the type of person who would assign his child essays for minor mistakes. Aizawa slinked out of the kitchen, curious, and got a good look at the man. There was an unpleasantness about him. He could recognize some similarities between the problem child and his father, though they looked far more innocent on Midoriya. The hair, for one, the eyebrows, the freckles too.
Todoroki squinted at the drawing, feeling that he recognized something of the face. Not something that resembled Izuku, something… Else.
After that, Izuku fell asleep on Uraraka’s shoulder and Aizawa slunk into one of the chairs after Iida vacated it. The boy had managed to fall asleep through the whole thing and only woke up from a fake scream in the movie.
Most everyone was asleep when Bakugou wandered out of his room, grumbling about a healthy midnight snack.
Kirishima stopped him when he walked by, “yo, we were talking about Midoriya’s dad. Was he really…. Like That?”
Bakugou sneered, “bastard was fucking psychopathic. Back before we got quirks, sometimes I’d go see Izuku and he’d have to stay in all afternoon because he was ‘writing an essay’. When he was fucking four. Dude gave me the creeps. When we were six, he was home for the holidays and I was mad at Izuku for some stupid reason,” he swallowed, “and the way he looked at me. Like he was a snake in human skin.”
Aizawa was still awake, and remembered that. Having a child write essays when they were four… What the hell was Midoriya’s father? Hopefully, considering his disappearance, he was dead.
After this short incident, the kids filtered out of the room to sleep, it was a weeknight after all and if they hadn’t left, Aizawa would have made them. Hours after they were all gone, the drawing of Izuku’s father, Midoriya Hisashi if Aizawa remembered the records correctly, still laid on the table.
It was a few hours later, Aizawa sinking into sleep, when Yagi entered the room, presumably to ensure that the children were asleep or something of the like.
Aizawa watched him as he surveyed the room and then froze, fear in his eyes, then coughed, pulling a handkerchief to his mouth to catch the blood. Aizawa followed his eyes to the picture on the table.
“Do you recognize him?”
Yagi practically jumped out of his skin, and whipped around to Aizawa, “do you know who this is?!”
His voice was high pitched, strung with tension.
“Midoriya Hisashi. The problem child drew it himself,” though judging by Yagi’s reaction, he was more than just a bad father. Aizawa didn’t think he’d ever seen so much horror in the number one hero’s eyes, “who is he to you?”
Yagi stared at him, looking as if his world had just imploded.
“All for One.”