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There’s a moment, when you fall a long way and hit the ground, where the impact drives the breath out of you entirely. It’s a purely physical response: the force of the collision causes your diaphragm to spasm, locking it tense and preventing you from taking a breath. Once your body recovers from the shock, your ability to breathe returns as well—air is free to flow, so long as you have lungs to fill.
Shinsou has not yet hit the ground, and yet he finds that he cannot breathe.
It was a half-second moment that did him in. A split instance of inattention, of using his capture cloth to swing from the exposed support beam of a well-structured building. There was no chance of it giving out on him and sending him plummeting—the building isn’t very old. The only reason people don’t live in it now is because the landlords in this part of the city have become greedy over time, and refuse to rent below a certain cost. There are dozens just like it around here, standing empty and cold while the less fortunate spend their nights crowding around small campfires on the beach.
Shinsou, living month-to-month in his cramped studio apartment on an unknown underground hero’s salary, is a little bitter about it. Not in the least because the empty houses make excellent hiding places for a plethora of villains.
For example: Scissorhands, a wannabe-villain who names and styles herself after a macabre American romance film from a previous century. She’s not the worst he’s met, and to be perfectly honest her main crimes consist of squatting and theft, but she’s his main lead and occasional cooperator in hunting down a child trafficking ring precisely because she squats in the same kinds of places that people get taken from.
She has someone she’s looking for herself. When Shinsou had tried to find out more about the victim, all Scissors did was read a series of bullet points from a crumpled-up list that she kept in her pocket: “Blue, 17 years old, forget-me-nots, important!!!!”
“She has a quirk,” Scissors had said, “that makes you forget about her. Makes her real hard to pin down. So I don’t know why she’s not out yet.”
They had found the answer out the hard way. They found Blue, with smatterings of tiny periwinkle flowers sprouting from her temples, standing over a silver-haired ringleader: blood on her arms, blood on a caved-in skull, blood on the crowbar in her hands.
There are lots of things that Shinsou can turn a blind eye to in the underground, but a death isn’t one of them. The worst part is, he sees it from Scissors and Blue’s perspective, too. He got what he wanted from them—the name and operations of the kind of notorious trafficking lord that will put the heroes in the news for weeks—and now that he’s done with them, he’s turning them in.
So, he runs. Blue is impossible to fight against when he can hardly remember she exists at all, and it’s hard to work with someone like Scissors for weeks without her finding out what his quirk is, so neither of them will speak to him. He runs and runs and runs, through the same pristinely dusty, perfectly painted, echoingly empty houses, until he’s swinging out over a three-floor balcony and about to make it home free. He’s so focused on making sure Scissors’ blade doesn’t find flesh that he completely forgets what else she could cut until he’s looking up, three stories over hard asphalt, to see her cutting arms around the taut fabric of his capture cloth, and—
Snip!
It’s the fall itself that leaves him breathless, in the end. The only thing he knows of the impact is a loud crack, before everything goes black.
When Shinsou comes to, he hears beeping. It’s very cliche, and not unfamiliar. While this is the first time he’s landed himself in a hospital, he’s also visited enough teachers and classmates—Midoriya—in their wards to have long gotten bored of pondering whether the sound of a heart monitor would make a decent background beat to a music track.
“Mindjack!” comes a voice and he groans, peeling his eyes open.
“Mizumi,” he mumbles at his handler. She sounds awfully chipper for someone whose teammate has injured themselves severely. At least, he’s pretty sure he’s severely injured. He feels awful, and when he looks down at himself, he can see that his right leg is in a cast.
“Congratulations,” Mizumi chirps, tapping together some papers in the lap of her freshly-pressed suit. She’s diminutive in it, the kind of tiny person that it’s terrifying to see in formalwear because you know you can’t fuck around with them. He has no idea how old she is, and she smiles so much that sometimes he thinks she does it to make up for the way that his own resting face looks utterly dead. Either that, or he’s just cursed to be surrounded by people like Aizawa and Mizumi, those with creepy grins, for the rest of his life.
“You’ve solved the case!” she says. “And you’re going to be fine, by the way. I’m sure the doctors will tell you soon, but you only broke a leg and some ribs. Those hero instincts of yours—apparently you managed to curl in your head just right and came away with barely a concussion! Most people who fall onto their backs from that height hit their heads badly enough to die from intracranial bleeds.”
Shinsou stares at her, suddenly finding it harder to breathe. Did breaking his ribs hurt his lungs, or something? But no, it’s the same as when he was falling—not painful, just difficult.
“Or extracranial bleeds, I suppose,” she says cheerfully, leaning over to put a newspaper onto his knee. “Their skulls are usually open at that point. Look, you’re on the front page!”
He looks.
Speaking of creepy grins: The Phantom Thief’s smarmy mug beams back at him, standing proudly under the headline ‘PHANTOM THIEF BUSTS TRAFFICKING RING: SAVES DOZENS.’
“Monoma was rather insulting over the phone when we asked him to take credit,” Mizumi informs Shinsou. “Did you know he hates your graduating class? He only did it when I told him it was for your sake. After all, we don’t want someone like you actually making the front page.”
“What the hell?” he blurts, something clenching in his chest. The way she could just say that—and he’d been enjoying working with her so far, too, hadn’t caught a whiff of the kind of garbage his middle school classmates used to spew about his quirk and his background. Frankly, he’s almost certain at this point that she’s quirkless, so how could she—?
She blinks at him, smile softening. “I meant an underground hero, Shinsou. I want to be very clear: I am here to congratulate you for saving dozens of young girls from death and even worse. But your identity and your quirk are both important secrets for you to keep in this line of work. Giving you the credit you deserve would make you a liability.”
Shinsou swallows. “Right. I know that.”
She pats him on the leg, leaving the newspaper there. “Read some of the cards people sent you. You’re really popular with your classmates. Even Monoma sent one. Don’t worry about your report until you’re feeling better.”
Then she leaves. She’s right, of course. He’s surrounded by over a dozen cards, Monoma’s a clear contender for the most over-the-top and glittery bid for attention, and even some gifts. Midoriya left flowers, and Kaminari—er, Denki, he keeps telling Shinsou to call him—left a whole stuffed toy. An electric mouse. Pressing his fingertip to the soft red circle of its cheek is almost enough to make Shinsou smile.
He flops back onto the hospital bed.
The thing is, nothing Mizumi said was incorrect. Scissorhands knowing what his quirk was, revealing it to Blue first-thing when the two of them went after him, screwed him over majorly and landed him in this hospital. He was hard-pressed to even send the relevant information to bust the case open to Mizumi before he had to flee. People finding out who he is would just lead to more incidents like this.
So then why does ‘people like you’ echo so awfully in his head?
Several days later, he’s discharged from the hospital and recommended to, if possible, stay with someone who can help him get around his day-to-day with a broken leg. Shinsou immediately calls Aizawa, begging visitation to Recovery Girl and the healing powers that he and the rest of the hero course absolutely took for granted during their high school days.
Aizawa, a man who is not quite hypocritical enough to preach patience in healing, acquiesces. And then promptly proves how much hypocrisy he is willing to exhibit when he invites Shinsou over for dinner, citing that he knows Shinsou’s eating habits and refuses to send him to Recovery Girl if it’s just going to land him back in the hospital for exhaustion.
Shinsou still has the key to Aizawa’s place. He’d been booted from the home he was staying at when he turned of age, stayed in the UA dorms for the few months between that date and graduation, and swiftly learned that a high school diploma isn’t really enough to secure you a job that pays well enough for rent right out the gate, even from a place like UA. At least, not when you’re going the underground route and don’t have a bigshot hero agency lined up like the likes of rich boys Todoroki and Iida, or big names like Midoriya.
If that thought comes out bitter, he doesn’t intend for it to. He thinks people should take advantage of the resources available to them fully, which is why he only hemmed and hawed in humiliated hesitance for a little bit when Aizawa cuffed him upside the head and dragged him to the apartment that he apparently shares with Present Mic.
Yeah, Shinsou isn’t sure how he hadn’t figured that one out prior to graduating, either.
Anyways, the point is, he’s polite enough to knock when he arrives, but he still lets himself in.
“Shinsou? You’re early.” Aizawa is sitting at the living room table, hunched over in a way that is surely terrible for his back, grading papers. That’s another thing Shinsou learned while living here: teaching is even more thankless than he’d realized, and involves a lot of after hours work. Between that and the underground job, sometimes he wonders if his mentor is a masochist. Neither of his jobs get him any recognition, Shinsou thinks.
“Sorry,” Shinsou said. “Figured getting my stuff from my house would take longer, but Mizumi wouldn’t let me take public transit with a broken leg, so she called me a car.”
“Mm. That was good of her.”
“I guess,” Shinsou says, dumping his things in the doorway and hobbling over to the couch that Aizawa isn’t occupying. “Where’s Mic?”
Aizawa puts his pen—a ruthless red that’s already slashed through half the hero ethics essay in front of him, leaving it bleeding out the poor student’s grade point average—down, and leans back to look over Shinsou. His gaze isn’t exactly critical, but he’s definitely categorizing Shinsou’s various injuries.
“At the studio,” he answers finally. “He won’t be home for another hour or so, which means both of us can starve until then. If we’re treating you to dinner, it should be good.”
Shinsou muffles a snort into the back of the couch, leaning sideways against it.
“Hey, I like jelly packets.”
“Stockholm Syndrome,” Aizawa says, with the wisdom of a man who has experienced the same himself. “Now, how was your mission? I read the debrief. You did well.”
Shinsou raises his eyebrows. “Really? I messed up and took a three-story nosedive. I’m lucky I’m alive.”
Aizawa squints up at him. “And the four years of fall-training had nothing to do with it, I’m sure. I thought you’d be happier—you saved a lot of people. The segment Hizashi is doing is on your case, actually. What’s wrong?”
Shinsou squirms, uncomfortable. He’s almost nineteen now, technically a pro hero even if he’s new at it. It shouldn’t make him feel so young anymore to have his teacher levy that kind of glare at him.
But he’s said ‘it’s nothing’ to Aizawa enough times about the things that really mattered to know that the man’s years of teaching experience left him very skilled at prying open students’ soft and squishy bits to get at the meat of their problems. He’s not going to pretend that a graduation certificate has somehow rendered him immune to that.
It’s just…
“You’re going to call me ungrateful,” he murmurs, half-muffled when he turns away from Aizawa and into the back of the couch.
Aizawa hums. “Only if you leave without eating. You’re one of the most grateful students I’ve ever had, Shinsou. Maybe too grateful, sometimes.”
Shinsou winces.
“That segment that Mic is doing,” he starts slowly. “It’s not really on my case, is it?”
Aizawa frowns.
“It’s on the Phantom Thief’s,” Shinsou says quietly, staring down at where his fingers twist together in his lap. “And I know that’s how things have to be, but I’m still jealous. I’ve gotten this far, and worked this hard, and in the end I’m still just—it still just comes down to my quirk, doesn’t it? People like me don’t get to be heroes.
“So, there. All these opportunities, and I’m still ungrateful.”
Aizawa is silent for a long, long moment. Shinsou doesn’t look up at him, even though after enough time passes, he’s not even sure that Aizawa is still thinking about this conversation, but Aizawa doesn’t pick the red pen back up.
Eventually, he says this: “There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to sit down and take the realities of being an underground hero.”
Shinsou startles, not expecting his mentor’s voice to finally break the silence, and looks up. “Wh-what?”
Aizawa shrugs, finally turning back to the ethics paper he’s grading and sighing as his back untwists with a click. “It sounds like you would do better as a regular pro. You could probably keep Mizumi on as your agent even if you join with a bigger agency. She’s a freelancer, right? I recommended her because she’s well-known, so any agency would be happy to take her.”
“What, just like that?” Shinsou can’t help but ask, heart in his throat. “What about… my quirk?”
Aizawa tips his head back to look at him. “You’ve fought hard to be where you are, Shinsou. Working around your quirk might take some brainstorming if you go public, but it’s hardly a handicap. Your voice modulator already does a lot of the work for you in hiding it.”
Shinsou’s next breath shudders out of him, a tension he hadn’t realized was there leaking out of his shoulders. He always ends up holding himself like that, like somebody’s about to hit him, when—when he expects something to hurt.
But Aizawa’s never really hurt him.
“Okay,” Shinsou whispers, swallowing. “Okay, let’s do that, then.”
Aizawa grins.
