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Shouta knew what it was like to lose heroes.
His problem children were going to be heroes, and Shouta knew that he might end up outliving a few of them. He hoped otherwise, but he was a rational creature, so he knew it might happen. Shouta thought he was prepared to lose some of them.
At least, he thought so.
-
It starts on a chilly December evening. Shouta is busy doing the dishes after dinner when he gets a phone call from Jirou. She’s crying so hard that Shouta doesn’t understand what she’s saying, but all it takes is for her to hiccup Kouda’s name to make his blood run cold.
“There was a villain attack,” Yaoyorozu says after she takes over the phone call. Her voice wavers but she reports the details dutifully. “Kouda got caught up in it while he was evacuating the civilians. He was taken to the hospital, and went into surgery, but.” Her voice cracks, then shatters. “He didn’t make it.”
Through shuddering breaths, Yaoyorozu tells him where Kouda’s funeral will be held.
“I’ll be there,” Shouta promises, numb and cold down to his bones. After he hangs up, he goes looking for his black suit that he wears far more often than he’d like.
When Shouta shows up at Kouda’s funeral, it’s been less than a year since the problem children’s graduation.
-
Shouta doesn’t need a phone call the next time, because he’s watching the live footage of several heroes fending off a huge stone-like villain that creates molten hot lava from her skin. She’s like a volcano come to life; a three-story tall natural disaster destroying everything around her, unstoppable. She’s nowhere near Mountain Lady’s size, but her quirk makes It impossible for anybody to properly make any contact. Even top heroes Lemillion and Ryukyu are having trouble containing her.
Shouta recognizes three heroes working in tandem: Chargebolt, Red Riot, and Dynamight. Chargebolt and Dynamight are using long-distance attacks to deter the villain from colliding into the residential apartment building twenty feet away, and Red Riot is acting as bait to draw her towards the opposite direction.
The journalist covering the scene from a safe distance is narrating the fight, occasionally wondering whose quirk could possibly bring this villain down. Nobody at the scene, at least, seems capable of doing so.
Then, something unexpected happens: Dynamight is struck down with a heavy chunk of drying lava flung from the villain’s hands. It doesn’t kill him or even knock him unconscious; the camera catches him clutching his head on the ground, groaning. But the villain sees he’s still alive, too, and starts moving towards him, her hand outstretched as if she intends to finish the job.
Chargebolt jumps in, unleashing enough lightning to make her flinch, but even his highest voltage isn’t enough to stop her entirely.
Then, Red Riot comes running. He roars, coming to his friends’ aid as he flings himself recklessly onto the villain’s leg and climbs up her side and crawls onto her shoulder.
Shouta watches in horror, because Red Riot doesn’t have the kind of quirk to spare his body from the lava pouring off of the villain’s skin, but even with his limbs burning, nearly melting, Red Riot doesn’t stop. He pulls out a grenade—it’s one of Dynamight’s, because Bakugou has made a habit of handing them out to his friends for emergency usage—and then leaps forward towards the villain’s face, pulling the pin and throwing it straight into her mouth.
She chokes on the explosion in her throat, staggering backwards, and falling down as the other heroes close in on her. Red Riot, who has landed in hardening lava, collapses not far away.
They get the quirk-cancelling handcuffs around the villain, and the journalist sighs with relief.
Shouta doesn’t, because he’s still watching Dynamight and Chargebolt calling for the medics, carefully hefting Red Riot onto a stretcher, his flesh singed black. One of the emergency medics stretches a hand out, gently touching Red Riot’s face, then sliding her hand down to his neck, and Shouta recognizes the gesture; it’s what medics with healing quirks are trained to do. Heal as fast as possible, and check for a pulse if the healing doesn’t kick in.
On the TV screen, the medic pauses, then shakes her head sadly. Dynamight starts shouting, angry and wrecked, and this is when the journalist sees the scene and murmurs in horror that it seems like Red Riot has been pronounced dead at the scene.
Minutes later, Shouta’s phone starts ringing, but he ignores it and buries his face in his hands. Distantly, he thinks that this is such a predictable way for Kirishima to die: fighting for somebody else. The boy who would always take a hit for his friends. That’s who Kirishima is.
That’s who Kirishima was.
Shouta never wanted to reach a day where he’d have to speak about Kirishima in the past tense.
-
It’s mere weeks after that when Shouta receives another phone call.
Todoroki is the one who calls him, because he was the one at the scene when it happened. For once, his composure is in tatters as he shakily informs Shouta that Yaoyorozu died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
“It was friendly fire.” Todoroki’s exhale is unsteady, and Shouta can’t summon the strength to comfort him. “Another hero’s quirk hit her by accident. I wasn’t fast enough to stop it.”
Shouta wants to make Todoroki say a name. He wants to go grab this hero by the shoulders and yell at them. He wants to tell them they don’t deserve to be a hero after killing one of Shouta’s most brilliant students, who had a whole life ahead of her.
But he doesn’t, because this is what the job is like. Accidents happen.
“I’m sorry,” Todoroki says, his voice hoarse with guilt and sorrow. “You trained us to be better than this, sensei. I should have saved her. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Shouta finally says. He misses the days when the whole class was under his care. When he could protect them and comfort them and never had to lose any of them. “You tried your best, but sometimes even that’s not enough. It’s not your fault.”
Shouta had tried his best, too. Had trained his students as strictly and ruthlessly as possible, if only so they’d survive longer. But his best hadn’t been enough.
It’s not Shouta’s fault, but it feels like it anyway.
-
Months pass by. People fight and get injured and recover and repeat the cycle over and over. Shouta busies himself with his current generation of students, and his heart stops lurching every time his phone rings. Life returns to normalcy, or at least some semblance of it.
That all goes down the drain when Shouji goes missing.
The class thinks it’s the work of an anti-mutant criminal group that Shouji had been investigating with Gang Orca. Everybody makes time to contribute to the search, which goes on for an entire eight days before Midoriya and Tokoyami finally find their friend in a beachside cabin far up north.
Tokoyami doesn’t share the details of what they found, but the gist of it is relayed to the entire class and Shouta: Shouji wasn’t found in one piece. Or even two.
Midoriya cries at the funeral. Shouta doesn’t, but he stares at the closed casket for a very long time.
-
Shouta gets plenty of warning for Satou. Four whole months’ worth, in fact.
It’s a tumor in his lung, growing at a rate that alarms medical professionals. Attempts to slow it down with chemotherapy prove fruitless. The doctors reluctantly tell Satou to get his affairs in order.
Satou quickly becomes bedridden, and the class takes turns visiting him with strained smiles and watery eyes. When Shouta makes the time to drop by, his heart sinks at how small Satou looks, shrunken down and pale. Nothing like the healthy, well-built student that Shouta used to teach.
“I always thought that if I had to die young,” Satou says in a calm voice that gives away his resignation to his fate, “it’d be from fighting as a hero. I never thought it’d be like this.”
“I always thought you’d live a long life,” Shouta says. Satou had lagged behind a little in terms of academics, but he had a generous heart and tended to stay out of trouble. He had been the class’s greatest source of comfort with his home-baked goods and good humor. Shouta had hoped Satou would live a long life, because Satou was sturdy and steadfast and rarely ever caused problems.
“I never thought I’d hear you be so optimistic,” Satou jokes, his mouth stretching into a smile. It’s not as bright as the one Shouta remembers, but the shape of it is familiar. Satou is strong, even at his physically weakest, and Shouta would give anything to let Satou walk out of here, healthy once more.
But Shouta cannot save Satou; nobody can. And as the months pass by, Satou grows weaker and weaker, until he can’t even sit up, and Shouta watches his student wither away until he’s on a ventilator, no longer responsive.
Shouta isn’t there to witness the moment Satou stops breathing, but he gets the phone call in the middle of the night and swallows a scream.
Satou’s parents put on brave faces at the funeral, welcoming each guest with warm gratitude that their son used to emulate. Shouta watches them and counts their crow’s feet and graying hairs. They’re young, because they had Satou early right on the cusp of twenty and they raised their only son with love and delight. They’re too young to have lost a child.
But then again, Satou had been too young to die this way, too.
And Shouta is too young to have lost a fourth of his class already. He’s only just turned thirty-seven, and he’s already lost five of his problem children. They’d graduated and left his care ages ago, but deep in his mind, he still considers them as his, and they’re leaving him behind one by one.
Please no more, Shouta begs to any higher power that is listening. Please, if somebody must go next, let it be me.
-
Life goes on, and for a while, Shouta thinks that the worst is behind them. They’ve lost good heroes—his students, his children—but there’s still fifteen of them and Shouta dares to think that he might get to see the rest of them grow old. And if not, at least he hopes he dies before any more of them do.
One day, there’s a massive raid that Shouta is meant to join in on, along with several of his former students. It’s not quite the scale of what happened at Gunga Mountain all those years ago, but it’s still a big operation against a villainous organization that has made a name for itself in the past several months. Shouta isn’t as useful as he was back then; age and injuries have taken their toll on him over the years, but he’s still able to provide backup if necessary.
So the heroes charge in while Shouta hangs back, keeping an eye out for villains with deadlier quirks. They’ve prepared thoroughly for this and brought the very best heroes equipped to deal with the villains according to quirk compatibility, so hopefully Shouta’s presence is more of a final resort rather than a necessity.
Things seem to be proceeding as planned. Uravity rains down an avalanche of debris upon the mass of villains congregated in the halls. Kamui Woods is caging the runaways with terrifying efficiency. Suneater is holding off one of the chief executives of the organization, as are Fat Gum and Mirko. Ingenium and Mudman are providing tactical backup; when Lizardy struggles, Invisible Girl is there to help. Everybody’s teamwork is commendable.
But then there’s an explosion that rocks the very earth under their feet, and everybody tenses up.
There’s a villain who has a quirk that amplifies the power of other people’s emitter quirks, and she’s been classified as a priority to arrest to prevent the power boost of any of the villains. They’re aware that her amplification quirk triggers through physical touch, though, so as long as they keep her away from the other villains, they should be fine.
At least, that’s what they thought.
It’s Todoroki who has her pinned down, the rest of the room full of smoke and the ceiling blown off entirely in the wake of his immensely destructive hybrid attack. The villain is squirming under Todoroki’s hands, trying to escape, but Todoroki simply freezes her in place.
Then, Todoroki freezes as well.
“Todoroki?” Shouta calls out. He can’t quite see Todoroki because of the billowing smoke.
“What did you,” Todoroki manages, and then he starts choking, both hands flying to his throat as he starts hacking up smoke from his mouth, frost and flame both crawling up his skin. “I can’t control—”
She amplified Todoroki’s quirk so much that he’d lost control of it entirely, Shouta realizes in horror. He rushes forward, trying to get a good look at Todoroki to stop his quirk from taking over, but Todoroki’s quirk works fast, too fast, and he’s already coughing up ash, and limbs splintering into ice while the other half of him burns and burns and burns.
“Todoroki,” Shouta says, begs, prays. He erases Todoroki’s quirk as soon as possible, but the damage has been done, and it only worsens during the split second Shouta is forced to blink. “Keep it together, just for one more second.”
Shouta pulls out the quirk-nullifying cuffs he had on him and snaps them on Todoroki, which finally stops the spread of his quirk from eating up his body inside out, but Shouta’s old student is now unresponsive, sagging in Shouta’s arms, a mess of frostbitten skin and singed flesh, and Shouta roars for a medic.
Ingenium arrives with a medic in his arms, and he stands motionless once he sees the state Todoroki is in. Shouta leaves Todoroki to the medic, as hard as it is to rip his gaze away from the man who used to be a boy so unsure of his own power, who had struggled to accept his fire and balance it out with his ice. Instead, Shouta focuses on cuffing the villain while Todoroki is hauled off for medical attention.
Later, once the raid is over, Shouta gets an update that Todoroki made it out of surgery, but that things look bad. His entire insides have been ravaged by his own quirk, and the doctors aren’t sure he’ll survive long on a ventilator. Even Recovery Girl is helpless.
Two days after the raid, Todoroki Shouto passes away in a hospital bed.
Endeavor, who had stayed by his son’s bedside for the entire time, doesn’t scream or even say a word. He simply weeps, quietly, unable to even utter his youngest son’s name.
While it’d been several years coming, Endeavor’s resignation as a hero is still a shock to the public, but nobody blames him for it.
Nobody blames Shouta for it either, even though he’d been the one at the scene, the one with the power to make it all stop. But nobody points fingers at him or yells at him. Todoroki’s mother takes one look at him at the funeral and draws him into a hug.
Shouta has no idea what look he has on his face, no idea if the grief is seeping out of him without his permission. All he knows is that Todoroki died a painful death and Shouta couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
-
The thing is, nobody knows exactly how it happened. Asui worked in a more remote environment by the sea for marine rescue operations, often cooperating with other local heroes, but nobody quite kept tabs on her the way they did with urban heroes with plenty of backup nearby.
So it’s a very quiet affair when one day, Asui’s body is found on a rock at the edge of the sea, her body gone cold and stiff by the time she’s discovered and brought to the hospital.
Nobody knows exactly what happened; the autopsy reveals nothing significant. There was no water in her lungs and no significant damage to her body except for a broken leg and a bruised kidney. But there’s also the hint of malnutrition, the cold weather when she’d been found, and the hypothesis is that Asui had found herself injured in a remote location, with little mobility and chilly weather making her sluggish and weak. She’d starved there, but not for long before the cold took over.
That is the theory based on the details, and it’s relayed to Shouta through Uraraka’s trembling voice.
“The doctor said that at least it must have been relatively painless,” Uraraka says, her voice fragile and cracking at the edges, “but that’s not what matters. She died alone.”
Asui, who had been the calm bedrock of the class, beloved by everybody. Not exactly a social butterfly, but her classmates had flocked to her all the same, and she had been content to bask in their warmth and friendship. Asui had rarely ever been alone, even at her home with her big family and at school with the whole class surrounding her.
After Shouta hangs up the phone and goes hunting for his black suit once more, he finds himself hunched over in front of his closet, weeping over the girl who had died alone in the cold, without her friends and family that she so dearly loved.
-
Shouta arrives on the scene with his heart in his throat. The incident had happened near his neighborhood, and he’d come running as soon as he heard of the earth-rumbling fight occurring between a band of villains and a handful of heroes. Shouta knew which agencies operated in this area, and he’d immediately known who might be involved in this battle. And without even thinking it through, he’d rushed here as soon as he could.
The thing is, it’s been a while. It’s been months and months since Asui’s funeral, and there have been dozens and dozens of clashes between heroes and villains in that period. And each time, Shouta’s old students had survived, whether it be without a scratch or with some injuries.
So Shouta shouldn’t be so worried, because his kids—they’ll always be kids to him, no matter how old they grow, if they could only just have the chance to grow old—should surely make it out of this mess just fine.
But when Shouta arrives on the scene, there’s an entire collapsed ten-story building.
Somewhere under the rubble, Jirou and Kaminari are trapped.
Trying to breathe in a calm, measured rhythm, Shouta joins the gathering group of heroes who are coordinating the search and rescue efforts. Ashido is there too, and she flashes him a look tinged with relief, as if she trusts that even after all these years since graduation, Shouta will somehow be able to make things right.
The excavation process is grueling and tortuously slow. They’ve been trying to reach Kaminari via his communications device attached to his gear, but there’s been no response. There could be a hundred reasons why they can’t get a hold of the duo; Kaminari’s comms device might have been broken, he might be unconscious, there might be interferences in the radio waves. But Shouta still feels his blood slowly go cold at the silence.
When they finally lift away the last of the rubble, neither Kaminari nor Jirou are breathing anymore.
The media talks about it for days, even weeks. The story circulates from the heroes who were present at the scene to the journalists to the public, then goes around and around. Chargebolt had been delayed from leaving the crumbling building because of a foot injury, and Earphone Jack had turned around and ran back in to help him, but then the whole place came down on them, burying them alive in concrete and steel. It’s a dreadful way for two young heroes to die; a senseless tragedy in the aftermath of a great battle.
The thing the media keeps circling back to is this: when Chargebolt and Earphone Jack were recovered from under the rubble, Chargebolt had been found positioned over Earphone Jack, as if shielding her from the collapsing building. In return, Earphone Jack had an arm positioned around his head, as if trying to protect him. It hadn’t mattered, in the end; Earphone Jack was stabbed through the lung with a piece of rebar that they’d landed on when the floor they were on collapsed, and Chargebolt hadn’t been able to survive the weight crushing them, his entire spine and ribcage shattered into pieces as he tried to hold himself up to save his friend.
Two young heroes who died protecting each other. The public is in equal turns heartbroken and enchanted by the story.
And Shouta—he’s barely even surprised. Jirou had always been a little mean to Kaminari, but when he was in trouble, she’d drop the teasing to defend him in a heartbeat. And as carefree as Kaminari tended to be, he turned tenacious and brave when his friends were at risk. The two of them seemed like they were always bickering from an outsider’s point of view, but anybody who knew them well enough was aware that these two had each other’s backs.
So Shouta isn’t surprised. Of course Jirou would run back into an unstable building to save her friend. Of course Kaminari would throw himself over Jirou as a last-ditch attempt to save her. He would’ve been more surprised if they hadn’t done such reckless things.
The only thing that surprises him—catching him entirely off-guard despite the fact that he knew the numbers rationally—is when he goes to the funeral home and finds his surviving students there.
He hadn’t realized that there were so few of them left.
-
“A heart attack,” Shouta says in a flat voice.
“Yes,” Iida says, and he sounds weary. A former class president slowly but surely losing his peers, announcing yet another loss to their old teacher. “They said it must’ve been caused by quirk overuse. She overextended herself.”
Shouta’s voice wavers. “But you said she died while she was cleaning her apartment.”
“Ah, well.” Iida’s voice goes quiet and slow. “It was the exhaustion from all the years of overuse. It kept building up all this time, until her heart just…gave out.”
Uraraka, who had a brilliant quirk when properly applied. Uraraka, who pushed herself to her limits and further. Uraraka, who Shouta had trained to surpass all her limits, even the ones her body could not handle.
That very Uraraka had died this morning, all because she’d spent too much time pushing herself too far.
And Shouta had taught her to do that.
“Sensei.” Iida sounds very young. He is young. He’s only twenty-four. “We’ve lost half of our class, now.”
Half. Ten of his problem children are gone, and Shouta never imagined this could happen. At least, not so soon. Not after everything these kids had survived back in their teenage years. He’d thought they’d live longer than this. He thought that at the very least, they would outlive him.
He’d hoped so, at any rate.
“Which is why you and the other ones should take even better care of yourselves,” Shouta says. His last piece of advice that he can afford to think of for these kids that he’s failed so badly. “Stay alive.”
After that, Shouta resigns from UA.
-
Against all odds, Bakugou dies from a traffic accident.
It’s nonsensical, to think that one of the best heroes in Japan can die in something as trivial as a traffic accident, but that’s how it happens. No villains, no battle, no blaze of glory. It’s just a drunk truck driver and Bakugou sleeping in the passenger’s seat while his mother drives them home through the snow.
Bakugou had just returned from a long trip to America, and he’d been jetlagged enough to fall asleep during the long drive home from the airport. If he’d been awake, even at his most exhausted, he never would have let a mere truck kill him.
Bakugou’s mother survives the incident, though she does lose one arm. Shouta can tell in a heartbeat that she’d trade anything to be the one buried in the ground instead of her son. She’s full of a crackling fury that ignites every time somebody tries to offer her sugar-coated platitudes about how it’d been too soon for her son to go, how at least he must’ve felt no pain.
“He was stronger than that,” Bakugou Mitsuki snarls, her grief and tears spilling over as she bares her teeth. “He shouldn’t have died so easily!”
Bakugou’s father bows his head, wordlessly guiding the guests away.
“She’s right,” Midoriya mumbles. “Kacchan shouldn’t have.”
The remaining members of Class A have gathered in a corner away from the other heroes and acquaintances, as if they can protect themselves against a world that seems hellbent on culling them down. Shouta finds himself sitting at their periphery, not quite joining the circle but unwilling to stray too far from them. There’s a few other UA staff members milling about, but Shouta doesn’t want their pity. He doesn’t need them to offer him condolences and sympathetic words; none of those can soothe the aching chasm within him, deepening with each loss, each name crossed off his metaphorical attendance sheet.
“He was one of our best,” Ojiro says. His eyes are haunted as he looks at each of his old classmates. Not many of them are left. “You’d think it’d take something as big as All For One to kill him. Not a drunk driver.”
“He would’ve blown that truck to bits even with only one hand and a concussion.” Sero sounds tired. “Dammit, this isn’t fair.”
“None of it is fair,” Tokoyami murmurs. “We’ve lost more than half of our class.”
Hagakure sniffles, wiping at her face with her sleeves. “You guys aren’t allowed to die, okay? I don’t wanna go to any more funerals.”
“We must live,” Iida says gravely. “We owe it to our friends who died before us. We must live long lives in their stead.”
Midoriya watches Bakugou Mitsuki cry into Midoriya Inko’s shoulder and clenches his fists. “We have to live. We can’t let our parents bury us. It’s the last thing any parent should ever have to do.”
No parent should have to bury one child, let alone nearly a dozen of them, but Shouta has buried eleven problem children. He doesn’t know if he can survive burying any more of them.
Just as he thinks that— Shouta isn’t sure if it’s purely by chance or if it’s intentional—Midoriya fleetingly meets Shouta’s gaze before he looks back at his friends. “We can’t do this to them anymore.”
-
As the months pass by, Shouta settles in a routine. He’s not as much of an asset in the field as he used to be, but he still keeps himself busy with collecting intel and acting as backup for more complex operations.
Hizashi pesters him regularly for drinking sessions, and Yagi also makes his occasional overtures of friendship, trying to draw Shouta out of his workaholic lifestyle every once in a while. Neither of them ever tell Shouta to consider teaching at UA again, which is the only reason why Shouta doesn’t turn them down.
It’s during one such evening when his phone starts ringing. Shouta is out in a private room in an izakaya with Hizashi, drinking and eating while they talk about how Hizashi’s radio show is faring. Shouta is chewing on pork skewers when his phone rings, the caller’s ID flashing as an unfamiliar number. Shouta frowns. Not many people have his personal number, and he’s not in the mood to talk to a telemarketer. But still, he always makes a point to identify his callers, so he glances at Hizashi, who gestures at him to go ahead and accept the call.
“Who is this?” Shouta asks when he picks up.
“Aizawa sensei, is that you?” It’s a familiar voice, and it takes Shouta a moment to place the voice. “This is Kodai, from Class B, graduation class of—”
“Why are you calling?” Shouta’s voice goes sharp without his permission. There’s no reason for Kodai to be calling him out of the blue like this…except, Kodai works at the same agency as Ashido does. “Is this about Ashido?”
“You were listed as her emergency contact,” Kodai says, which answers nothing, but Shouta refrains from snapping at her to get to the point. He’s been Ashido’s emergency contact for the past two years, ever since her single father passed away and she’d been left without any family except for what remained of her class. “There was a villain attack earlier, and Pinky went missing during the fight.”
Shouta switches his phone to his other hand, already grabbing for his jacket. “Where are you? I’ll go join you as soon as—”
“We found her,” Kodai says. Her voice fractures on the last word, and Shouta’s blood freezes. He stills, suddenly dreading the next words out of Kodai’s mouth. “At least, we found what’s left of her.”
When Kodai tells him what they’ve recovered of Ashido’s body, Shouta can’t help but thank the universe, in a twist of irony, that Ashido’s parents died before she did. They didn’t deserve to have only so little of their daughter returned to them.
Kodai gives him the address of the hospital where they’re taking Ashido’s remains, and Shouta tells her that he’ll be there as soon as possible.
After he hangs up and tells Hizashi what happened, his friend says in a very quiet voice, “You don’t deserve this, either.”
Don’t I? Shouta doesn’t ask aloud. Instead, he finishes his drink and stands up. He has to go see what remains of the girl who used to laugh and dance and shine so bright that Shouta had deluded himself into thinking she would live longer than he ever could.
-
Almost a full year later, Shouta is the one who makes the phone call.
“What the hell is happening?” He asks, trying to not let his panic and fear seep out of his words, but he can’t help how terse his words are. “I thought the injury wasn’t that bad. Why aren’t there any announcements about his condition yet?”
It’s been over two hours since pro hero Deku was injured during battle and taken away by ambulance. The fight had ended with the heroes’ victory, which the media had reported with gusto, but there hadn’t been any official updates about Deku’s status. From what Shouta could tell, Midoriya hadn’t even been critically wounded; he’d survived much worse during his first year at UA.
But there’s something ominous about the radio silence, and Shouta had finally given in and pulled out his phone.
Ojiro, who had been at the scene and went to the hospital to check on Midoriya, says, “We’re not sure. He’s been in surgery for longer then we thought. We’ve tried asking the nurses but nobody will tell us anything.”
Shouta doesn’t like the sound of that. “Which hospital are you at?”
After getting the hospital’s name, Shouta takes a cab and goes as soon as he can. It takes him twenty harrowing minutes, but when he arrives at the waiting area, there are a dozen other people gathered there. Shouta identifies some of them as Midoriya’s sidekicks and fellow pro heroes who were at the scene.
He also finds Ojiro and Tokoyami there with Midoriya Inko and Yagi between them, trying to reassure them both despite their own uncertainty.
“Sensei,” Tokoyami says, straightening up at the sight of Shouta. Ever serious about reporting for duty. “We have not received any updates since your last call.”
“They better give us something,” Shouta growls.
It takes another four minutes, but then a surgeon walks into the waiting room, and all of them fall deathly silent.
“We’re so sorry,” the surgeon says, and Shouta hears sharp inhales and choked gasps. Beside him, Midoriya Inko utters a weak no before she wobbles, and Yagi steadies her instinctively even as his eyes darken with despair.
“What went wrong?” Shouta asks, and once again everybody falls silent. “That injury shouldn’t have been fatal. What the hell happened?”
The surgeon sighs, heavy and sad. The way a person does when they’ve been burdened with too many losses for too long. “He was conscious when he came in and wasn’t in bad condition when he went into surgery, but there was an error in his medical information.”
“An error,” Shouta echoes.
“Apparently he was allergic to the type of anesthesia we put him under, and he had a seizure,” the surgeon says, and Shouta feels numb all over. “It wasn’t in his medical charts, so we weren’t prepared for it.”
“That makes no sense.” Shouta knows how often Midoriya has been put under for a surgery over his career. Too many times. Midoriya was never allergic to any anesthetic, as far as Shouta was aware, but—
“He developed a mango allergy a while ago,” Midoriya Inko murmurs in horror. “The doctor said he might be developing new allergies.”
“The allergic reaction wasn’t fatal, but it caused too many complications.” The surgeon bows his head. “By the time we had everything under control, it was too late. We’re sorry.”
People develop allergies over time. It’s a fairly common thing. It’s such an ordinary thing, and somehow that was what took down one of the best and strongest heroes Shouta has ever known.
“This isn’t fair,” somebody mutters in a voice choked with tears, and Shouta agrees. It isn’t fair that Midoriya Inko lost her only son at such a young age. It isn’t fair that such a bright generation of heroes with so much potential is dying out faster than anybody could have ever expected. It isn’t fair that Shouta is outliving so many of his own problem children.
But the world has never been fair, and Shouta knows that too well. When he meets Yagi’s devastated, haunted eyes, Shouta can see the understanding there, too. The kind of despair you only learn after losing too many people that you should have saved.
For a fleeting moment, Shouta wishes he’d expelled Midoriya after all. He wishes he’d expelled the entirety of 1-A on that very first day of school. Maybe that would have spared them.
Maybe that would have spared Shouta.
-
Hagakure is there one day, gone the next.
For somebody who is invisible, Hagakure is a conspicuous presence wherever she goes. Loud and full of energy, always eager to remind people that she still exists among them. Always striving to be noticed, if only to save herself from being forgotten.
So when Hagakure goes missing, people notice. Her friends notice, as do her small but devoted fanbase, and then the community is plagued with the mystery: where did their Invisible Girl go?
The problem with searching for Hagakure is that she’s impossible to notice unless she’s trying to garner attention. Without any visible clothes, she’d be nearly impossible to discover.
They send out the heroes with enhanced senses to see if they can hear her or smell her. They employ robots with infrared sensors to search for a girl who can’t be seen otherwise. They search and search and search, and it’s only two weeks later that they find her. Not by hero or by robot or by anybody who was looking for her in the first place.
They find her because somebody reports a nasty smell in the apartment beside theirs, and when the police arrive, they’re surprised with the nasty smell of something rotting, but they can’t find the source of the smell.
It’s only when one of the local heroes with a quirk that can analyze every object within a certain radius comes in that they realize it’s Hagakure’s body decomposing in the living room.
Eventually, the body is taken to the hospital and identified properly. Shouta gets another phone call from a weeping Iida, and the police join forces with heroes to investigate the matter.
They classify it as a homicide—head trauma caused by a blunt weapon, they finally conclude after many examinations—and search high and low for the culprit, but there are no leads. No suspects, no evidence, nothing at all. Shouta pitches in on the investigation, but any possibilities are as invisible as Hagakure herself.
In the end, nobody finds out what happened, and Shouta has to live with that for the rest of his damned life.
-
Sero dies several months later, and Shouta is furious about it.
“That was a rookie mistake. He’s twenty-fucking-seven years old. He knows better.” Shouta grits his teeth and corrects himself. “He knew better.”
He’s having drinks with Hizashi and Yagi after the funeral in the privacy of Yagi’s apartment, because it was closest by. Here, Shouta doesn’t have to sit in silence and seethe anymore, so he rants and growls and vents his frustrations while the other two men listen with sincere attention.
“You taught him better than that,” Hizashi agrees. He looks tired. Sero might not have been one of Hizashi’s homeroom students, but he taught the boy all the same. Yagi also taught these students. They might have been Aizawa’s problem children, but they were students to the others, too. “Goddammit, we taught him better than that.”
It was a mistake. A simple mistake, the kind that only the most inexperienced rookie should have made in the field, but Sero had made it all the same and paid for it with his life.
Sero shouldn’t have died like that. He should have died from old age surrounded by friends and family. He should have died saving somebody. He should have died in a real fight, a final blaze of glory.
Instead, he’d died in a covert mission because he’d moved in on the target before properly checking that the room was clear.
“That idiot,” Shouta hisses through his teeth, and curses Sero’s name over and over. If tears starts spilling over as he does so, neither of his companions mention it, and they simply drink in memory of a careless young man who had deserved to sheepishly survive the incident. Who had deserved to come apologize to Shouta and promise he’d do better.
And if Sero had done that, Shouta would’ve given him an earful and shamed him and then forgiven him for it all.
But Sero is not alive, not here, and Shouta cannot forgive him for it.
-
When Shouta arrives at the hospital, he’s already been informed that there’s no cure. There’s no hope. All they have is time. Plenty of it, in fact.
“It’s a slow-acting quirk,” the doctor explains wearily, “but we can’t stop it entirely.”
“How long?” Shouta asks, standing outside the closed door.
“We think maybe another sixteen hours,” the doctor shakes her head. “I’ve never seen such a nasty quirk before—honestly, we’re not sure how he’s even conscious right now.”
Shouta places a hand on the door’s handle, his heart pounding in his chest, fearful of what will greet him when he opens it. Part of him wants to walk away. The bigger, more rational part of him forces himself to pull the handle. “He’s always been stronger than he looks.”
It’s a private room, with only one bed, and in that bed, with half his skin turned a mottled gray, Ojiro looks at him with hazy eyes.
“Sensei,” Ojiro rasps. His voice sounds like his throat has been scraped raw, like he’s been screaming too much. Maybe the pain has ebbed away enough for the screaming to stop, or maybe Ojiro’s simply not capable of screaming anymore. Either way, Shouta is glad not to hear it.
“The others said they’ll be here soon,” Shouta says. “The villain’s been arrested thanks to you.”
“That’s good,” Ojiro mumbles. His eyes are a little unfocused, dazed from pain. It hurts just to look at him.
Apparently the quirk Ojiro had been hit with was some kind of horrific biochemical monstrosity that had been breathed into his lungs. A gas that had immediately started eating away at his flesh from inside-out. Even now, the quirk was slowly spreading through Ojiro’s body, devouring his insides and muscles at a tortuous pace. It wasn’t the kind of infectious variety that could spread to other people via touch or the like, but Shouta still took care not to touch Ojiro, because even the slightest contact might feel like agony to him.
Shouta doesn’t bother with niceties. “Doctor said you might have sixteen hours left. You think you can last that long?”
Ojiro blinks up at him slowly. Once. Twice. Then he whispers, “I don’t think I can.”
You’re stronger than this, Shouta wants to say. You can withstand this. I know you can.
He wants to say, please don’t make me bury you, too.
But then Ojiro says, small and shaky, “Sensei, it hurts so much.”
Ojiro, who took a broken bone or two with a grimace and then shook it off. Ojiro, who had survived all sorts of villain attacks that left him a bloody mess and still managed a smile. Ojiro, who was stronger than anybody gave him credit for, was in so much agony that he could barely scream and his eyes were red-rimmed with pain.
Shouta couldn’t be selfish enough to ask for Ojiro to endure any more than he had to.
“I’m sorry,” Shouta says instead, the words breaking out of him like shattered glass. “I’m so sorry.”
Ojiro opens his mouth to reply, but then he winces and hisses through his teeth, his entire body curling up as invisible pain crawls through him. Shouta can’t touch him. Can’t comfort him. Can’t even say Ojiro’s goddamn name, because there’s nothing else he can say that will get Ojiro through this agony.
“Don’t let the others in,” Ojiro grits out through his teeth. “Don’t want them to see me like this.”
Shouta swallows. Nods. “Of course.” And because he needs to say this one last time, he adds, “I’m proud of you, Ojiro.”
Ojiro chokes on a hoarse scream, then musters a crooked smile. “Thank you, sensei. For everything.”
Those are the last words Shouta ever hears from him. After that, all he hears is hoarse sobbing and growls of pain. Eventually, Ojiro passes out from the pain at the nine hour mark, and then dies another six hours later.
Shouta stays the entire time, until the very moment Ojiro stops breathing.
-
Aoyama had always been, at heart, a very sensitive young man.
He’d cultivated an image as a self-absorbed and self-centered person, but he’d been empathetic to other people’s pain. It had always been his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
Shouta isn’t sure if it’s because Aoyama couldn’t stand the dwindling number of his former classmates, or if there were simply other matters that had been eating him up, but either way, Aoyama had been pushed to the edge, closer and closer til he’d toppled over it entirely.
Aoyama’s suicide note simply reads I’m sorry, I just can’t take it anymore.
Shouta doesn’t know what exactly Aoyama couldn’t bear to live with, but he wishes Aoyama had told him. He wishes Aoyama had begged for help, because Shouta would have helped him in any way he could. He would have done anything to give Aoyama the strength to keep living.
But Shouta will never know what was haunting Aoyama, and that fact will haunt Shouta, too.
-
It takes nearly another year before Shouta gets another phone call.
He hadn’t been expecting it, to be honest. Because there were so few left and he’d thought that it was statistically improbable that he could lose any more of his problem children at this point, but apparently Shouta was wrong.
The bigger surprise is that it’s Tokoyami.
Tokoyami had one of the most ludicrous quirks Shouta has ever seen even until this day, and he was powerful even in the daylight now. Pro hero Tsukuyomi barely ever received any injuries. To think that he could die, that Dark Shadow would even let Tokoyami die, was such an unthinkable concept that Shouta didn’t know what to do with the news.
What does not surprise him: Tokoyami died defending a bus full of children. The children had all escaped unscathed, thanks to his sacrifice. Tokoyami must have been proud of himself, for dying what might be the most honorable way for a hero to die.
But Shouta isn’t proud; Shouta is miserable. He’s lost yet another problem child, and the fact that he died valiantly does not comfort him in the slightest. All it does is make him want to grab a knife and his capture weapon and go find the bastards who killed his former student to make them pay.
Funny thing is, Shouta doesn’t need to.
Hawks goes and hunts down the culprits, one by one, all three of them. He hunts them down like a predator sinking its claws into its prey, and he brings each one back with his red wings drenched even redder and the villains barely alive.
It’s bad heroism and bad publicity, but for once, Hawks doesn’t seem to care. He throws down the gauntlet: if people don’t like what he did, he’ll retire.
And for all that what Hawks did sets the public on edge, they still need him. So he gets off with a slap on the wrist and keeps going, bringing criminals to justice and saving citizens one quick feather at a time.
But, Shouta notices, Hawks doesn’t smile anymore.
-
Months later, Shouta gets a phone call from the police, and he sinks into his armchair and bites back a scream.
Iida had been a productive and prolific hero, with a whole family legacy on his shoulders and an unstoppable drive to be the best hero he could be. So of course, he’d been a great hero.
And a great hero had many enemies.
Villains that held grudges were dangerous. Villains with grudges banding together to exact their revenge were even more dangerous.
They almost failed, too. Nine moderately powerful villains all cornering Ingenium strategically where he could not get backup in time, and even then Ingenium had nearly defeated them all on his own.
But one last villain had been able to put a bullet in Ingenium’s back, and that had finally brought down the former class president of Shouta’s problem children.
-
There’s a villain attack in downtown Tokyo that demands the attention of every hero in the vicinity, and Shouta is no exception. He throws on his hero costume and arrives in the middle of a messy battle, and he contributes the best as he can.
It’s a long and grueling affair, but the heroes steadily push the villains into a corner, arresting them one by one. Shouta’s exhausted at this point—he’s far past his prime, he hates to admit—but there are still two more villains to subdue, and he’s working in tandem with the others when one of the villains launches a surprisingly powerful attack, an explosive projectile that sends out jagged shards of glass, much like a grenade full of nails. A nasty kind of attack that pierces through everything in its surroundings.
Shouta is lucky enough to avoid getting hit on the first attack.
He isn’t as lucky in the second.
“Fuck,” he hisses as a long shard of glass stabs through his thigh. Nowhere near any parts of him that might bleed him out, but it’s painful and a hindrance nonetheless.
Which is why he’s not fast enough to run when the villain launches a third attack.
Shouta feels the moment whirr by him in slow motion at first. The villain launching one more projectile before finally being taken down by Lemillion. Shouta’s feet, unsteady on the ground as he tries to leap backwards. The sudden tug of his capture weapon, pulling him back faster, then the realization that it’s not his capture weapon—
Then it’s all over in a blink, and Shouta finds that he’s been pulled back, switched positions with his reckless, final problem child.
“Shinsou,” Shouta says in numb horror.
“Sensei,” his former student says, then he coughs, and Shouta sees the jagged shard of glass that’s protruding from Shinsou’s midsection. “Oh, this is bad.”
“What were you thinking,” Shouta hisses, placing a cautious hand around the stab wound to staunch any extra bleeding, scooting closer so that he’s leaning over Shinsou. He yells for a medic, then looks back down at Shinsou. “I didn’t need you to save me.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Shinsou mumbles. “But I needed to.”
Shouta watches Shinsou’s eyes go a little unfocused, and he thinks no, please, not him, too.
“Shinsou,” Shouta says, and he doesn’t care if he’s begging outright. If begging could save this boy, he’d stay on his knees forever. “Stay with me.”
“Sorry, sensei,” Shinsou says, coughing after each word. “I should’ve been better.”
“Hitoshi.” Shouta’s whole world is crumbling down. It’s been cracking at the edges for ten years now, and now the final ground of it is giving away under his feet. “Please.”
Shinsou looks up at him with a faint, apologetic smile. “Sorry for leaving you behind. All of us.”
“Stay with me,” Shouta repeats, like a mantra, like a prayer.
But no higher power answers him, and Shinsou Hitoshi—on the cusp of twenty-nine—dies in his arms before any of the medics can reach them.
-
Shouta knew what is was like to lose heroes.
His problem children were heroes, and Shouta thought he was prepared to lose some of them.
He just hadn’t thought he’d lose all of them.
-
None of Shouta’s problem children made it to even thirty years old. That fact alone slices him up from the inside and cleaves his heart cleanly in half. It’s unfair and awful and so fucking devastating that Shouta doesn’t know if he can ever recover from this. If he can find meaning in living on like this.
A whole generation of young heroes, so full of potential with full lives ahead of them, and instead Shouta has buried them one by one until none of them were left.
And because the world is a cruel place, Shouta is still alive. Still breathing. He doesn’t know what to do, now. He has nothing to protect, nothing to teach, nothing to save. He can’t go back to UA and he can’t go back to the field.
Then what does he do now? What does a man do after he buries all of his children?
“They’re gone,” Eri says, her eyes wide and wet, a young hero herself, and Shouta will die of despair if he outlives her, too. “But you can keep them alive. Don’t let the world forget them.”
“I don’t know if I’m the right person for this,” Shouta says.
“You’re the only one who can do it.” Eri hugs him, tight and strong, a far cry from the small girl that had been rescued a long time ago. “You were their hero.”
Shouta has failed every single one of his students, but despite that, he’s still here. If he has outlived them, it is only fair that he makes sure their names go down in history, to become the legends they didn’t live to be.
“Alright,” Shouta mumbles, and hugs Eri back. “They deserve to be remembered.”
-
“A memorial foundation?” Yagi asks, setting down his spoon. Likewise, Hizashi stops mid-bite of their lunch to stare at Shouta.
“For all of them,” Shouta says. “So that the public remembers them. Different aspects for each one. I was thinking of a scholarship in Uraraka’s name. For students from financially struggling families. And a charity fund in Shouji’s name for mutant support.”
“Something special for each of them,” Hizashi ponders. “That would be great, actually. It’s hardly the first time we’ve set up a memorial foundation in a hero’s name.”
Yagi nods. “I think it’s a wonderful idea.”
“It wouldn’t be that hard,” Shouta says. He knows his problem children well, even after all this time. He’s already decided what he wants for most of the class, to be honest. “They all had something unique about them.”
Hizashi’s smile is soft and understanding. “They’ll be remembered forever.”
Yagi smiles, small but unwavering. “We’d be honored to help.”
“Thank you,” Shouta says. He knows he can’t do this alone. He needs all the help he can get, to make sure his problem children are never forgotten. He will do everything in his power to keep their memories alive, even generations down the line.
Shouta might have outlived them all, but he’ll make sure their names outlive his own.