Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Going to the police had been a mistake.

It’s not as if he’d expected to be whisked away into protective custody while alarms began to blare and the station erupted in chaos, but he’d thought something would be done. And it’s not like he’d burst through the door having a meltdown over one little thing – he’d calmly walked in multiple pieces of evidence in hand, explained the issue, and stated his concerns.

And had been laughed out of the building.

Exaggeration or not, it still ended up being a pointless visit. Hizashi had been told there was no evidence of intent to harm him, the photographs he presented weren’t enough to warrant opening an investigation, and whoever was sending them was probably just a fan, all in a condescending tone that made it very clear how much the officer felt his time was being wasted.

Hizashi had taken back his envelope and scuttled out of there before he could be made to feel even more like a nervous old lady in hysterics because she thought she heard a bump in the night.

He wonders if it’s conceited that he isn’t used to having someone just plain not listen to him.

He’d decided to walk home, hoping a stroll around an unfamiliar neighborhood would take his mind off his shame. It hasn’t been working, and he’s still walking around with his tail between his legs when he sees it: a cat cafe, tucked away in the middle of the block, bright and inviting.

Hizashi crosses the street and peers in through the window. It’s just as charming on the inside, one large room with some doors near the back, small tables and cushions interspersed among tall cat trees and fluffy beds, shelves holding treats and toys and brushes lining the walls.

There’s a gray tabby cat sitting on the ledge inside the window, watching him with wide eyes, and although Hizashi has very limited experience with cats, he’s pretty sure it’s a playful look. Sure enough, when he drags a finger along the glass, the cat reaches up and attempts to bat at it through the window.

He needs to pet this cat. Urgently. The fate of the world may as well depend on him petting this cat in the next five minutes.

He’s not hungry, not after his humiliating experience, but surely it won’t be an issue if he just wants to pet a cat for a few minutes, right?

There’s what looks like a childproof gate just beyond the door, and on the other side of the little entryway where people leave their shoes is another door and another gate – extra caution about kitties getting loose, he supposes. A one-eyed cat does nearly manage to slip by him, and by the time he’s closed the gate and shooed it away, another one has padded over to him, an itty-bitty black creature that mews up at him.

He decides the gray one in the window can wait a little longer.

“Hi, little one,” Hizashi coos as he crouches down and holds out his hand. The cat sniffs his fingers studiously, then rubs its face against them, and he gets a few seconds to bask in the bliss of being chosen before he hears an almost bored-sounding voice above him.

“Have a seat, I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Oh, I’m not here to-” Hizashi looks up and falters, because the man who’d stopped walking and half-turned back to him looks like a damn model. At first, at least; a longer glance lets him see past the sharp jawline and enviable biceps. The man’s stubble is just a little too long for that sexy and mysterious vibe he’d first caught, and his haphazardly tied back hair isn’t quite dramatically framing his face so much as just escaping the too loose tie in the back. One eye is covered by a patch, the other tired and severe. There’s plenty of cat hair evident on his all-black outfit, and Hizashi doesn’t want to know what his shirt looks like under the white angelic kitty riding on his shoulder.

Still, he’s a bit of a knockout.

Hizashi clears his throat to cover his pause, then smiles. “I just came in to see the cats. The cutie in the window was calling to me.”

“You can’t just pet the cats.”

Hizashi looks down at the creature still happily nuzzling his hand, then back up. “I already am?”

He gets an unimpressed stare in response. “I mean if you want to spend time with the cats, order something.”

“Why can’t I just play with them for a while? I’ll be quiet, promise.” He flashes a smile he knows to be winning, but the grumpy man isn’t swayed.

“Because this isn’t a shelter. I’m running a business.”

“You own this place?” The question slips out before he can catch it, and he’s only glad he doesn’t include the other thing he’s thinking: that it’s quite rude to lure the unsuspecting public in with adorable little kitties only to make them pay for the chance to pet them.

“Yes, I do.” There’s definitely more pride in those words than just ‘I run a business.’ The man reaches up to pet the cat draped across him with a small smile that somehow doesn’t serve to make him look any more approachable. His other hand gestures around the cafe. “So? Table or door?”

Hizashi’s already been given the brush-off once today. The ultimatum to either order or leave had most certainly been a challenge, and from the look on the owner’s face, he believes it’s one Hizashi won’t rise to.

But Hizashi’s never been one to back down from a competition. And there’s a cat that needs petting.

He holds his hand up in surrender. “Alright, I’ll sit and stay awhile. Since you seem so keen on having me here.”

The man scowls but walks off without a word.

Point for Hizashi.

He settles at a table as close to the window as possible and grabs a toy with a feather on the end, hoping to entice the gray cat closer. It works; it comes bounding closer, almost skidding as it pounces.

Hizashi’s never really considered himself a cat person (or any sort of animal person), but it’s the cutest experience he’s had in weeks. Maybe it’s time to take advantage of having an apartment that allows pets.

If he didn’t feel quite so lonely at home, maybe he wouldn’t end up on so many awful dates.

When he’d chosen, years ago, to put his career first and work on building his reputation, he’d figured it would be temporary. He’d assumed there would be a point where he was stable enough, financially secure enough, that the work would plateau, and then he could turn his attention toward finding someone he wanted to share a life with.

He’s finding out that really isn’t the case. He has no regrets about making his dream his priority, not at all, but his star had risen quickly, and now most people expect to be on a date with Present Mic, not Yamada Hizashi.

And it’s not like his professional life has been so great lately, either. The show’s doing just fine, but as for his music? He wonders how long he can get away with stalling his fans while he tries to revive his creativity.

“So what’ll it be?”

Hizashi looks up from his new friend and sees the owner standing next to him, now missing his furry shoulder adornment.

“Um…” He glances down at the little menu. “Tea.”

In reply he gets a quiet scoff. “Any particular kind?”

“Surprise me.”

The amount of sly satisfaction in the smile that stretches across the man’s face is unnerving, and Hizashi already regrets his decision.

Hizashi wonders if the guy knows who he is. He’d already clocked the couple across the room as they’d looked his way and leaned in to speak to each other in hushed voices. The man hadn’t given any indication he’d recognized Hizashi, but then, he doesn’t seem the type to make a big deal out of it even if he had. Picturing him asking for an autograph makes Hizashi stifle a giggle.

The owner comes back with his tea and sets it down in front of him, then crouches by the gray cat.

“What are you doing?” Hizashi asks, watching him fiddle with a device he pulls from his pocket.

“Taking advantage of her good mood.” He reaches over to the cat’s ear and there’s a beep from the little machine.

“To do what?” Hizashi looks between him and the cat, who has abandoned her toy and is aggressively washing her ear with that cute little paw-licking thing.

“She’s diabetic.” He holds out the device so Hizashi can see the display, as if the numbers mean anything at all to him. “She didn’t finish breakfast so I’m being extra careful.”

“You have to stick her ear like that every time?” It’s a strange amount of sympathy for ‘not an animal person’ to feel about a cat he’s known for ten minutes (and that hardly seems to care about the prick anymore), but there it is.

“It’s not often. Technically she’s in remission. Has been for a while.”

“So she’s okay, then?”

The man looks at him for the first time since coming over, his single eye sweeping up and down his face. Hizashi has the urge to preen a bit, though he isn’t sure what he’s being appraised for.

“Yes. She’s okay.”

“Well that’s good then, isn’t it?” He directs the question to the cat, but she darts away from him, apparently not in the mood to be touched anymore. “Why have a diabetic cat in a place like this? Seems like extra work.”

The owner nods behind Hizashi, who only then notices the laminated ‘menu’ hung on the wall beside him, identical ones spread periodically around the space. It lists each of the cats and gives a little information about them, and as Hizashi scans through them, he notices a theme: alongside the cat with diabetes (Mochi, it says) are cats that are missing limbs or eyes, some with epilepsy or heart problems or other issues he’s never heard of.

“So you’re giving a home to the cats nobody else wants?”

“Yes and no.” The man looks around the cafe, checking on the rest of his customers, then sits on the cushion across from Hizashi. It excites him more than it probably should after their unfortunate first meeting, like he’s been granted special consideration. “In a shelter, people only see a special needs cat and dismiss it, or else it just gets put down. They can get to know them here. They still don’t get adopted very often, but it’s better than being in a shelter.”

“Wait.” Hizashi holds up a hand. “All the cats are adoptable?”

“Yes.”

“You said my only options were table or door!”

The man scoffs. “You want one of these cats?”

“Maybe. You don’t know.”

“How many cats have you owned in your life?”

Hizashi glares but says nothing, defeated, and the dark-haired man sits back and smiles with victory.

Point for the enemy.

“That’s really neat,” Hizashi says. “Doing that. Giving them a better life.” It’s gentle on purpose, said softer than anything he has all afternoon, and the owner’s mild surprise shows clearly. He looks away at where Mochi has run off to and shrugs halfheartedly.

“It’s something.”

Hizashi grins. “So you’re a big ol’ softie inside, huh?”

That unamused scowl returns. “You haven’t tried your tea.”

Right. The tea Hizashi had almost forgotten to be suspicious about.

He picks up his cup and sniffs it. It smells fine, a little like ginger and something citrus, so he takes a sip and nearly gags.

Whatever’s in it is vile. Only years of practicing smiles and schooling his face while performing allow him to not show his reaction, though the cafe owner no doubt knows exactly what hell his tastebuds are going through anyway. That is an unmistakable smirk there at the corner of his lips.

Okay, point for the smug attractive asshole, but…

Hizashi smacks his lips and says “Delicious” and holds his gaze while he takes another, larger sip.

The other man raises a brow incrementally, and after a moment cedes and nods slowly, almost respectfully.

Point for Hizashi.

Chapter Text

Hizashi’s back at the cafe not even a week later.

He tells himself it’s because the idea of the owner thinking he’d been able to scare Hizashi off a deplorable blow to his ego he simply won’t stand. The sooner he returns, the more the smug man will see Hizashi can’t be deterred by snark, wiseassery, or condescension, especially not when done as playfully as the pair of them had. The satisfaction of knocking someone down when they think they can’t be is just plain fun when it comes with the underlying knowledge that there aren’t any hard feelings meant.

That’s what he tells himself, but there is some part of him – a part he’s willing to acknowledge because he’s a big boy now and he can be mature about such things – that just wants to get an eyeful of that ass.

Though of course the cats are another draw. He still hasn’t quite let go of the idea of owning one, which is a little unexpected because usually his spur of the moment ideas are just passing whims that will disappear permanently into the void of his mind if he doesn’t write them down.

It’s true that maybe he shouldn’t start down the road of cat ownership with one of those cats, but surely he could handle a deaf cat, who would never complain about his feeble attempts at songwriting, the way he screws around and makes noise to feel like he’s accomplishing something even though he’s never been able to put the music together before he has the lyrics, and writing lyrics lately has been nothing but a hassle.

Or maybe he could get one whose only issue is a missing leg? They can still get around just fine, he could only screw things up but so much with one like that.

The point Hizashi’s trying to make to himself is that he has no reason to stay away from the cafe.

The owner apparently sees things differently. As soon as he spots Hizashi seated on a cushion and grinning at him, his eye closes with exasperation, and he takes a visibly deep breath before walking over.

Well, Hizashi’s always liked being memorable.

“What, you liked the tea that much last time?”

“What can I say, it had such a unique flavor that I just had to come back and sample something else.”

“Such as?”

“One of those huge cookies.”

“What kind? Or should I surprise you again?”

“Bring me your favorite,” he says with a hint of victory, though his certainty of it wavers when the other man only shrugs and mildly says “Okay” before walking off and leaving Hizashi to wonder just what he could do to a cookie to make it taste terrible.

Still, he can only worry about it but so much, because there is currently a cat asleep in his lap.

He might be a little too excited by that fact. It’s not exactly a rare and mind-blowing experience for most people. But it’s never happened to him before, and now there’s this warm and purring little creature curled up on his legs, declaring him a comfortable and trustworthy friend to cats.

The ultimate acceptance.

This is absolutely his new favorite place. And while Mochi will always be remembered as his first love, she’s been dethroned. Binti, who had wobbled her way over to him, high-stepping and looking fit to fall over at any second, is the queen of his heart now.

And maybe he’ll be able to get some work done here. While the radio show is doing numbers, his personal musical life has been...dead. He hasn’t released even a teaser of a new song in so long that the thought of what his fans must think puts him in a neverending downspiral – the longer it takes him to find his inspiration, the more stressful it gets to try.

So he’s brought a notebook with him today. He’s always preferred writing longhand, jotting down thoughts as they come. If he’s lucky, the new surroundings coupled with the cats and the intrigue of the cafe owner will ignite something in his poor dehydrated wasteland of a brain.

The dark-haired dreamboat returns with Hizashi’s cookie on a plate, which he sets down on the little table then situates himself on a cushion.

Hizashi stares in mild shock. “Break time?”

He shrugs. “Sure.” He gestures to the cookie, and Hizashi gets it: he screwed up by asking for his favorite and now he’s going to pay for it, and this guy wants to watch.

He stares at the cookie. It seems harmless enough (but then, so had the tea). It’s black – not as in burnt but probably dyed – and has little green chips in it, which are probably either mint or matcha, and either of those can’t end up too disastrous.

The owner is watching, meaning it’s going to be at least as awful as that tea, but that’s fine. He’ll just suck it up, chew, swallow, and say it’s delicious.

He takes a bite.

His resolve crumbles.

He can hear the soft chuckle from the man across the table at whatever face he’s making, but he can’t help it; he can hardly be expected to be stoic when he’s obviously been poisoned. He can’t even make himself swallow, and spits the barely-chewed bit out into a napkin.

Another point for his rival.

“Okay, you win, ugh, I surrender, what is that?”

“Licorice, black pepper, and mint.”

“And those actually sell?”

“They’re not on the menu, I make them for myself.”

Hizashi watches with horror as he reaches over for the cookie and nibbles on it. “You’re actually scaring me right now, you know that?”

“You asked for my favorite.”

“Yeah, when I thought you were human.” Hizashi narrows his eyes. “Hey, you’re not gonna make me pay for that, are you?”

“Well I am the one eating it, but then, that’s hardly a way to run a business.”

“Come on, be nice to me, you already annihilated my tastebuds.”

The man sets the cookie back down and wipes crumbs off his fingers. “I’ll waive the fee if you tell me something.”

“Do you have a specific topic in mind, or should I surprise you?” Hizashi quips.

His company ignores it. “Those people over there were taking pictures of you.” He gestures across the room, where a pair of teenagers quickly look away from him and attempt to seem casual.

“Yeah, I noticed that earlier.” To their credit, they’d been subtler than many, and he appreciates not being approached when he was obviously just trying to pet his new best friend in peace.

“And that’s...something you’re used to.”

Hizashi shrugs. “You could say that.”

“Who are you?”

There’s no reason why Hizashi’s good humor should sputter and stall out.

It really shouldn’t matter to him. He’d spent years trying to make a name for himself so that at just such a moment as this, he could flash a smile and introduce himself as Present Mic and watch an impressed look steal over someone’s face.

He wants people to know who he is.

This guy doesn’t know.

Why doesn’t Hizashi want to change that?

Seeing the girls sneak pictures of him hadn’t bothered him in the least. It’s flattering. So it’s not as if he just wants to be treated like any other average person. He could have at least made some attempt at disguising himself if he’d wanted that.

“I’ll tell you my name if you tell me yours,” Hizashi says, and watches growing interest fall into distrustful disappointment. “What, you have an embarrassing name or something?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what? Afraid I’ll do a deep dive on you and discover a sordid past you’re trying to escape?”

That dark eye meets his own, serious and perhaps cautionary, and Hizashi drops the smile.

For the first time, he thinks to wonder how this man lost his eye. If his quirk has anything to do with the one he has left and that’s why Hizashi’s captivated by it. Where the scars on his hands and face came from, if they’re the only ones he has.

Maybe his past is something he needs to stay in his past.

And maybe Hizashi understands that.

It’s been freeing, talking to somebody who has no idea who he is. He doesn’t have many demons in his past, not big ones at least, but he does have regrets, things forever attached to his name that he wishes he could claim were someone else’s doing.

When they met, days ago, what if he hadn’t learned so quickly that the man now sitting across from him was also the owner of the cafe? What if he’d thought he was just an employee? Would Hizashi have been so ensnared by his mild superiority, taking it as a playful challenge, or would he have thought of him as some asshole worker looking down on him?

That knowledge had probably changed how Hizashi saw him, and who’s to say finding out who Hizashi is won’t change how this man sees him?

“Let me rephrase,” Hizashi says. He leans in a little, lowering his voice and dropping the breeziness to say that he gets it. “I promise not to look you up if you promise not to look me up.”

The owner continues to stare, and it isn’t getting any easier to read. Hizashi’s being assessed, he knows that much, but for what? How serious he is? The man gives nothing away, no biting his cheek or drumming his fingers, nothing to say whether he’s more anxious or amused by the proposition.

Hizashi hates long silences.

With a short huff of laughter and a minute shake of his head, the man says: “Aizawa Shouta.”

He’d half been hoping he’d know the name, or that it would at least seem familiar and he could search his memory for answers without breaking the deal. But no, he has no idea who Aizawa Shouta is.

“Yamada Hizashi.”

Sure enough, no sudden recognition registers on his face.

“So, Aizawa,” Hizashi begins, letting the light back in his tone and pushing his plate across the table. “You run a cat cafe.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Lifelong dream or impulse decision?”

“Closer to an impulse, actually.”

“How long have you had it?”

“A few years.”

“What’d you do before?”

Aizawa only cocks his eyebrow, as if pointing out obvious it should be that such a question is off-limits.

“Come on, not even a hint?”

“What do you do?” Aizawa asks instead and bites into that abomination he’d tried to pass off as a cookie.

Hizashi hums. He could say he’s a musician or songwriter, but Aizawa’s clever; even that much could have him adding music + fans and getting some idea of his fame. So maybe he could just say he’s ‘in radio,’ or that he talks for a living.

Or he could have some fun with it.

He says “Today I ruminated on prison.” It’s true; he’d been tinkering with some lyrics and gotten lost in a clumsy metaphor about a prison yard and fences.

It’s a vague enough answer to garner obvious surprise from Aizawa. “Have you been to prison?”

“Maybe so,” Hizashi answers, waggling his eyebrows.

Aizawa scoffs. “So that’s a no.”

“Excuse you, I am insulted.”

“That I don’t think you’ve been to prison?”

“You were implying I couldn’t handle myself in prison.”

Aizawa says nothing to that, just looks him up and down, including the precious bundle of fur still dozing in his lap, and eats the rest of his cookie.

“You don’t know me,” Hizashi says. “I could be a dangerous man.”

“The cats seem to think you’re alright.”

“Which earns me a stamp of approval in your book?”

Aizawa shrugs.

Hizashi hums and taps a finger against his lips. “You were probably around cats a lot before you owned this place, because you wouldn’t focus on special ones if you were a kitty newbie. Were you a vet?”

“Maybe.”

Hizashi sighs and slumps. “Would you even tell me if I guessed something right?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Aizawa says and stands, and Hizashi watches him make his rounds checking on the rest of the cats.

Here’s what Hizashi knows:

Aizawa Shouta likes disgusting cookies. He’s witty, somewhat sensitive about the past, he doesn’t keep up with pop culture, and there’s a lack of people who can keep up with him in his life.

Here’s what Hizashi wants to know:

Everything.

Hizashi returns home with a bounce in his gait. This game he and Aizawa have started, cautiously poking at each other, prodding with questions to see which ones will hit, may still be mostly one-sided, but he finds he’s not questioning Aizawa’s interest. He’d never rejected Hizashi’s questions, not outright, not even when he’d asked about his name – he’d only gone even quieter. Rather than telling Hizashi to fuck off, he’d deliberately taunted him there at the end.

Aizawa’s a closed book, but he’s not a locked one.

It’s definitely a game, and Hizashi can’t wait to play it out with him.

He’s still riding the buzz he’d gotten from their banter, the playful frustration Aizawa had left him with, so when he unlocks his door and sees the photograph that had been slipped underneath it, the tumble down from that high nearly gives him vertigo.

He locks the door behind him and picks up the picture. It’s a little older, a candid shot of him completely sloshed at some party he thinks was a few years ago. There’s nothing written on the back, and as far as he can tell, the photo hasn’t been altered.

It’s just a picture of him, sent to him anonymously.

It hasn’t been that long since he got the last one.

He could go back to the cops with it, but they’d probably brush him off again. Tell him he should get used to it, with his rising fame; he was bound to pick up some obsessive fans along the way. And aside from creeping him out, whoever was doing this wasn’t doing anything to him directly.

So he doesn’t even bother putting the photo in the envelope with the others. He tears it up, drops the pieces in the trash, and double-checks that the door and his windows are locked.

Chapter Text

There’s a girl in the cafe.

Not just in it, but working in the cafe.

Hizashi can’t say for sure how old she is (11 or 12? -ish? Maybe? He’s never been great at guessing ages), but she’s obviously comfortable in her role of holding down the entire fort despite her youth. He watches her take payment from a departing customer and greet three cats by name on her way over to clean the newly vacated table.

Okay. So.

Obviously there are two possible scenarios here.

Either:

The girl is merely a volunteer, maybe fulfilling a school requirement, or…

She’s a (very) juvenile delinquent working on her community service hours.

Whatever the story, leaving her to look after things while Aizawa is nowhere to be seen seems downright unprofessional, and Hizashi has far too many questions that he suspects the cafe owner isn’t going to answer.

Hizashi’s sitting by a table in a corner, next to a pile of blankets with a ginger cat asleep atop it who had only stirred and stretched when he approached, then went back to sleep. It has a face that looks...well, mangled. It’s missing an eye, most of an ear, and some fur on one side, and some of its teeth seem to be permanently on display. But it starts purring when Hizashi pets it, and so he’s losing his heart all over again.

How had he gone his whole life never knowing how much he adores cats?

“I am so sorry.” The girl has managed to sneak up next to him. “I totally didn’t even see you come in. Did you want to order something?”

He can’t tell if the smile is genuine or if she’s already got that practiced customer service expression down pat, but her kind face, framed by pale hair and the off-center horn on her forehead, is such a tremendous difference from Aizawa’s neutral (though sometimes intimidating) stare that he might understand why he lets her have the run of the place.

He orders another cookie (a perfectly safe chocolate chip this time), and catches her attention when she returns with it.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Oh, about him?” the girl responds, gesturing at the malformed cutie. “That’s Edgar. He got attacked by a dog when he was just a kitten, so he’s had his whole life to get used to having one eye. Kindof a messy drinker, though. He leaks a little,” she adds with a giggle.

“Oh, I meant, uh...So you work here?”

She nods. “Yeah, if I don’t have clubs or anything after school. I even get paid, just not ‘officially,’” she says, adding air quotes around the word.

“How did that happen?”

“Oh, trust me, it took me forever to convince my dad to let me do more than just sweep up after closing.”

“So your dad knows you’re here alone?”

She tilts her head. “Yeah? It’s only for a few minutes; we ran out of milk or something.” She waves a hand toward the door that must lead to a kitchen. “And he knows that if he sends me to get groceries I’ll buy myself candy even when he specifically tells me ‘only stuff for the cafe, Eri, your sweet tooth is not a business expense.’”

“Wait...the owner of this place is your dad?”

“Yep.”

Well color him gobsmacked, that’s a revelation and a half…

“Why?” the girl asks, taking in his shock. “Do you know him or something?”

“I just never would have-” Hizashi starts, but Eri puts her hands on her hips and interrupts him.

“Is he telling people I wandered in off the street again?”

“Uh…”

Before Hizashi can explain (and seize the opportunity to wheedle information out of the girl), Eri apologizes and has to dart off to see to another customer.

So Aizawa has a daughter. A fact that would thicken the aura of mystery that drifts around him even if said daughter looked or acted anything like him.

The man in question arrives then, bustling through the doors and gates with a bag in hand. Another sleeping cat nearby rises and trots after him as he heads for the back, but most don’t even acknowledge the sound of somebody entering.

Hizashi’s content to munch his cookie and pet Edgar (who is so dead asleep now that squishing his little toes doesn’t even make him twitch) as he watches, and when he sees Aizawa follow Eri’s pointing finger to him, he waves excitedly just to see the exasperated eye roll.

Aizawa still comes over to join him after a minute though, and Hizashi nearly does a victory dance right there on the floor.

“You’re back again,” Aizawa says. A tired huff escapes him when he slumps onto a cushion.

“Oh, you’re never getting rid of me. I’m hooked on this place.”

“Joy.”

Hizashi leans forward, hands braced on his knees. “You have a daughter.”

“Do I?”

“She seems to think so.”

“She’s dead to me now.”

“She also seems to think you tell stories about her.”

“She showed up one day and imprinted on me,” Aizawa deadpans. “I tried kicking her out but she keeps coming back.”

Hizashi snickers. “Oh, then you won’t mind if I kidnap her to come work with me? Because if she can sucker you into letting her stay, she’s got people skills I can put to good use.”

Aizawa’s lip twitches, and his voice takes on a note of breezy informality. “Let me put this lightly: Touch her and lose your hand.”

Hizashi swallows. Beneath the feigned nonchalance is so much flint that he should probably be a little more intimidated rather than close to swooning over the protective streak.

(Not that he’s altogether surprised by that. He wouldn’t be poking the bear if a little excitement didn’t get him riled up in all the right ways.)

“So that’s ‘lightly’ for you, huh?” Hizashi says with a breathy chuckle.

Aizawa’s face says enough.

“Man, I feel sorry for her when she starts dating.”

“If her dates aren’t smart enough to keep the relationship secret from me, then they deserve to be threatened.”

“Wait, you want her to hide her paramours from you?”

Aizawa grimaces. “Don’t say ‘paramours.’ She’s not old enough to have paramours. I’m not old enough to have paramours.”

“Well I know there’s been at least one,” Hizashi says. He’d been referencing Eri, but Aizawa doesn’t seem to connect the two things. His face tightens with confusion, and Hizashi gasps. “Unless she’s adopted!”

The other man scowls at that, looking away, and Hizashi can practically hear him cursing internally.

“Yes!” he nearly shouts, pumping his fists in the air and startling Edgar awake (though he settles once he’s being petted again). “Point for me! So,” he says, grinning triumphantly. “Let me update the picture: Aizawa Shouta runs a cat cafe he didn’t picture himself owning until somewhat recently, has terrible taste in sweets, and has an adopted daughter. Still pretty blurry, but we’re making some progress.”

“And I’m done,” Aizawa says, beginning to stand.

“No, wait, come on!” Hizashi reaches out, though he stops short of grabbing him. “I’ll stop. It’s your turn. That’s only fair. Ask me anything.”

“Fine.” Aizawa settles back down. “Who are you?”

Hizashi pouts. “But that’s so broad.”

“You said I could ask anything.”

“You’re only asking that because you know I don’t want to answer it.”

Aizawa only gives him a smile that says he doesn’t feel remotely sorry about it.

“Well I already told you my name,” Hizashi says. “What do you wanna know about me?”

“What do you do?”

Hizashi thinks for a moment. “Today I fended off a creative debtor.”

Nothing false at all in that statement, technically. His manager had called, something that was becoming a weekly occurrence at this point, wanting updates – any progress on the lyrical front, when could she expect even a peek at something he was working on, she needed something to promote lest Hizashi fade into obscurity, etc. Hizashi had given her the usual runaround, although this time there had been at least a little truth behind his words of reassurance. His notebook has seen more use these past two weeks than it had for months before.

“My turn again,” Hizashi says. “How’d you lose your eye?”

“No.”

He doesn’t give Hizashi a warning glare to go with his refusal, so he pouts again. “Aw, but I answered your question!”

“You call that an answer?”

“It’s true, though! I described something I did today that is directly related to what I do for a living.”

“Okay, fine. I lost my eye in a high-stakes staring contest.”

He knows Aizawa’s having a laugh at him and his obvious bewilderment as he tries to work out the circumstances of such a contest, and it’s worth it to see him relax a little.

“I have some concerns about this contest,” Hizashi finally settles on saying.

“So did I.”

It’s impossible to tell just how serious Aizawa’s being, and Hizashi can only smile.

He’s never had a relationship like this with anyone, where the more he finds out, the less he feels like he actually knows.

“So you do know each other.”

Eri appears next to them, squatting down to their level and petting Edgar.

“You doubted it?” Hizashi asks.

“How’d you meet, though? Because Dad doesn’t really have friends and you don’t look like a-”

“Eri, I have friends.”

Hizashi doesn’t remotely miss how the near reveal is covered up by a seemingly innocent attempt at defending himself.

“Dad, your ‘ex-colleagues’ don’t count.”

“Why not?”

“Because you never see them! Besides Aunt K, who do you ever hang out with? And don’t say the cats, they don’t count either.”

In a show of maturity befitting his age and status as a parent, Aizawa sticks his tongue out at her. “Well since I’m just a lonely old man with no friends, I’m going to go run my business. You,” he says, pointing to Hizashi. “Don’t ask her about me. You.” He points to Eri. “Don’t tell him anything about me.”

He leaves, and Eri takes his spot. “Why can’t we talk about him?”

Hizashi flaps his hand, waving away the seriousness Aizawa left in his wake. “He’s just being stubborn. He can’t admit we’re friends yet.”

Eri looks over her shoulder to make sure her father is gone, then leans close to Hizashi. “Aren’t you Present Mic?”

“Ah, a little listener!”

Eri’s mouth opens in a grin, chest expanding like she’s about to let out a squeal high enough to rival noises Hizashi can only make with his quirk. He holds a finger to his lips and she immediately slaps her hands over her mouth.

“Your dad doesn’t know I’m famous.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not even surprised. He’s so out of the loop.”

“Let’s keep it that way, yeah?”

“Wait, wait, wait. He doesn’t know who you are, and you can’t know that much about him because you didn’t even know about me, but you guys want to keep knowing hardly anything about each other?”

“We’re competing. So far I’m in the lead.”

Eri hums, intrigued. “What do you know about him?”

Hizashi counts off on his fingers. “His given name is Shouta, he didn’t quite plan on the whole cat cafe thing, his taste in cookies is questionable at best, he has an ado-orable daughter...” He barely manages to catch himself in time, but Eri snickers at the awkward attempt at a cover-up.

“I’m know I’m adopted,” she stage-whispers.

Hizashi heaves a relieved sigh, hand on his chest. “Oh, I scared myself there. I would never have been allowed back here again.”

Eri laughs. “I wish I had something nice for you to sign. I know somebody who’s a huge Present Mic fanboy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Totally. He tries to downplay it and say you’re just ‘alright’ but I don’t know why he even tries when he knows I see right through him. He would have been so jealous if I had your autograph.”

“Oh, don’t worry. You’re definitely going to be seeing me again.”

There’s no way he’d be able to stay away now. After the day’s surprise of a whole entire child, he’s certain Aizawa’s still got plenty of other secrets for him to figure out.

Chapter Text

Hizashi’s hoping this visit will cheer him up.

He’d found another photo the evening before. Another shot from a party, this one a little more recent, but still from before he’d really cleaned up his act. In fact, it looks like he’s in the process of taking...something that is probably responsible for why he only knows when the party took place because of how long his hair is in the picture.

It’s not like his fans don’t know about his party-boy past. The notoriety of being a promising up-and-coming star had come with opportunities both good and bad, and he’d seized as many as he could hold. Things like ‘considering the consequences’ hadn’t been able to measure up to living in the moment – a moment that at any given time could be full of pounding music, a pharmacy’s worth of questionable substances, and attractive people who wanted him.

That isn’t him anymore.

He’d made a reputation for himself and he’s only just started managing to get out from under his own shadow. He acknowledges the drugs and the debauchery, and he doesn’t bar interviewers from asking about those days, but he’s different now. He’s stopped messing with his life; he barely even drinks anymore.

He’s not really keen on saying he ‘grew up,’ but it feels like he’s done exactly that.

So what does this person who’s sending him these pictures want from him? Does it mean they miss the way he was during that time? It can’t be blackmail, because there are plenty of tabloid shots to be found out there – it’s public knowledge that he didn’t always make great choices.

If he’s being stalked, why give him old pictures? If they were taking shots of him in the present, at least then he’d have something substantial to show the cops.

There’s nothing he can do about it, no more than any other time a photo has shown up. He’d tucked it away with the rest of them – just in case, right? – in the envelope he never even bothered putting away.

Coming to the cafe has helped him relax, but only a little. The white cat he’d seen on Aizawa’s shoulder that first day had been lured over with some treats and has taken up residence in his lap, and Hizashi’s been glad to discover there’s a cap on how terrible a person can feel with a sleeping kitty in their lap.

Aizawa has only been over long enough to take his order (hot chocolate, the perfect drink for a melancholy day) and drop it off. He’s busy around the cafe, taking and fetching orders, cleaning, checking in on certain cats, and that means Hizashi’s free to people-watch, so he sees Eri as soon as she arrives at the front door with a young man – tall and purple-haired, looking like he could really use a nap or six.

The man stops as he passes by Aizawa, the two chatting easily enough it’s obvious they know each other well, before heading on. He double-takes almost comically when he spots Hizashi and then stops so abruptly Eri nearly runs into him. He stays frozen as she complains, eyes fixed on Hizashi, then steps in reverse and waves a hand around until it lands on Aizawa’s arm to get his attention.

Hizashi’s too far away to be able to hear them, but it’s easy to see what the younger man is saying: “Why is Present Mic here?”

Confusion steals over Aizawa’s face, but before he can ask for clarification, Eri is reaching up and snapping in front of the other man’s face to get his attention, then holding a finger to his lips, then herding him toward the back and through a doorway off to the side, which he barely misses smashing into because he can’t stop staring at Hizashi.

Hizashi looks back to Aizawa and is met with a calculating stare.

He sighs.

It was only ever a matter of time, really. Aizawa may not recognize his face, but would he know the name? He’s bound to have at least heard it, if Eri’s a fan of his.

If that’s the case, he hopes it doesn’t mean ‘game over’ for them. He isn’t satisfied with the little he knows about Aizawa, and hopefully the other man feels the same even if he’s familiar with Hizashi’s public past already. Much of his life over the past decade and some may be available to perusal online, but he does still have a private life he’s willing to air if it means holding his interest.

When Aizawa is finally able to sit down with him, Hizashi decides to try and delay the inevitable a little while longer by being the first to speak.

“So who was that?”

“My son.”

Hizashi frowns. “I know we didn’t exactly make a blood oath to always tell the truth, but I figured it was implied.”

“He’s my son,” Aizawa repeats.

“Okay, so I’m just guesstimating some numbers here and either he was a huge accident or you just look really good for your age.”

“Or?” Aizawa prompts him to continue.

“Uh...Or he’s your nephew that you were forced to take in when you were too young to really know what to do with a kid after your older brother was in a tragic accident that took your sister-in-law’s life, and the grief and his injuries led your brother to becoming hooked on pain pills and he tried to buy some from the wrong guy and he went to prison and your nephew never forgave him and chose you as his father instead?”

Aizawa stares.

Hizashi stares back and sips his hot chocolate.

“I really want to know what you do for a living,” Aizawa finally says. “But no, the answer I thought you’d arrive at is that Hitoshi’s also adopted, and no, we’re not biologically related.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Hm...You know, I feel like there’s a story there.”

“Nope,” Aizawa says. “I flicked through a book of orphans, pointed randomly and said ‘give me that one,’ and here we are.”

“Come on,” Hizashi whines. “You gotta give me something. Why is there such an age gap between your kids?”

“Circumstances.”

“You’re impossible.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, I’ve got a good one,” Hizashi says, holding his hands out like he’s about to do a magic trick. “Scale of one to ten, how planned were the adoptions? One being ‘who are these kids and why are they in my house,’ and ten being ‘I had a premonition as a child and I always knew I’d be their dad.’”

Aizawa nods. “Two questions phrased as one. Trying to work out both whether the adoption circumstances were typical and whether I actually wanted to be a parent.”

“Guilty.” Hizashi puts on his best pleading eyes, but Aizawa pulls a displeased face.

“Stop that, I was going to tell you anyway. When I first met them, they were both at about a three.”

“Do I get to know how that changed?”

“Maybe, but not today,” Aizawa says. “My turn. You’re Present Mic?”

It’s like someone has poured a bucket of thick, sticky disappointment down the back of his shirt, the way it crawls over him. “Then you’ve heard of me?”

“I’ve heard the name before. You’re on the radio.” He waves a hand, dismissive. “Or something to do with radio. And music.”

Hizashi grins. “Something like that.”

Aizawa scoffs. “Not going to elaborate?”

“Hey, not my fault you’re out of the loop,” Hizashi says, but his ability to keep up the jovial act is fading fast. Po the cat, as if sensing the impending unhappiness, gets up and moves over to Aizawa’s lap. “But I guess you can look me up now, if you want. I mean, you basically know who I am, and you know your kids know me, so-”

“I don’t know shit about you,” Aizawa interrupts.

“...You just said you’d heard of me.”

“I have. I’d already guessed you were somebody famous, but we’ve established I’m not very familiar with pop culture. All Hitoshi did was connect you to a name. I know nothing about Present Mic. And if I looked you up, I’d be breaking the deal and you’d be free to do the same.”

“Oh, I see,” Hizashi says. “You just need to cover your own ass so you can keep being cagey.”

“The mutual ban on research was your idea.”

“Don’t act like you aren’t enjoying this whole thing here.” Hizashi gestures back and forth between them.

“What’s there to enjoy? You’re nosy as hell and more energetic than any person should be. Pain in my ass, really.” Aizawa sounds serious, but there’s a smile on his face that for once holds no notes of smugness or superiority. It looks real. Just a little upturn of the corners of his lips, but the impact is exponentially larger.

He looks away from Aizawa’s face, instead focusing on him petting Po in his lap, which is how he notices the bandage covering his lower palm.

“A cat get you?”

Aizawa lifts the hand in question. “No, for once. Turns out you should pay attention when getting things out of the oven.”

Hizashi winces and reaches across the table, gently taking his hand and pulling it closer. Now that he’s looking, he can see numerous little scratches everywhere.

“Not a career for the faint of heart, I see,” he murmurs.

Aizawa shrugs. “As long as cats have claws, they’ll use them.”

He has other scars, ones Hizashi’s noticed before but never looked at in detail, probably too deep to have been from cats. His knuckles are large and rough, and some of his fingers aren’t entirely straight.

Hizashi doesn’t comment on any of that, because Aizawa’s hand is whispering hints about his past and they both know it, and he’s pretty sure Aizawa won’t be telling him anything more today.

“Your skin is so dry,” he says instead.

“I’m a little obsessive about hand-washing, working in a place like this,” Aizawa says.

When Hizashi looks up, he can peripherally see Eri pointing in their direction while elbowing her brother far more energetically than necessary.

“Your daughter is very excited right now.”

Aizawa nods as if he knows what Hizashi sees. “She’s probably going to try and set us up.”

“Wanna play along?” Hizashi waggles his eyebrows and clasps the injured hand gently between both of his.

“Please,” Aizawa says, taking his hand back. “She doesn’t need the encouragement.”

Over the PA system in Hizashi’s head blaring the announcement that it hadn’t been a rejection, he says: “Sounds like she’s done this before.”

“Too often.”

“You know, you don’t come off sounding so great there,” Hizashi says, teasing. “Can’t hold a date?”

“She’s never tried to set me up with anyone worth my time.”

“And what makes someone worth your time?”

Aizawa goes silent, only looking at him, and for one tiny moment, just a single teeny fraction of a moment, Hizashi thinks he’s saying ‘you’re worth it’ and he swears it’s like a can of warm soda just burst inside his chest.

But no, he’s only waiting for Hizashi to realize absurdity of thinking he would actually answer a question like that.

“Well,” Hizashi says, taking the hint. “I’d say we could talk about my love life, but really we’d be talking about my lack of one.”

“I’d loan you Eri, but I doubt she’ll entertain the idea of you dating anyone but me right now.”

“I’ll think twice before grabbing your hand next time, then. Or any part of you.”

Aizawa arches an eyebrow, says “Don’t think too hard,” and walks away, leaving Hizashi’s mind sputtering as he tries to parse whether there was more insult or flirtation in those words.

Eri is sitting beside him before he’s come to any conclusions.

“So. Present Mic,” she says, hands together in front of her, fingertips tapping together in a pose she must have practiced for instances just such as this. “Is there anyone...special in your life?”

“Sorry, little listener, maybe if you were about twenty years older.”

Eri’s nose wrinkles. “That is not what I was talking about. What I was going to say is that my dad’s single.”

“You know, he told me that you’ve tried finding him a date on multiple occasions, so I would’ve thought you’d learned how to be a little more subtle about this stuff by now.”

“Subtle doesn’t really work with Dad. If you like him, you’re probably going to have to say it directly to his face.”

“Who says I like him?”

The face Eri levels at him leaves no room for speculation about the meaning: ‘Don’t even try it.’

Hizashi holds up his hands in surrender.

She’s right, anyway.

Chapter Text

Hizashi’s runaway mind is usually a good thing. It’s taken some wrangling over the years, but he’s learned how to work with it. The places it goes when it’s time to sit and focus can wind up landing him with some pretty fan-fucking-tastic material. His creative engine gets juiced up when he lets it roam, and as long as he’s ready to take dictation as fast as his poor fingers can move, he gets plenty of potential lyrics to prune down into something palatable.

Songwriting isn’t exactly a science. It’s more an interpretive art. He takes whatever’s going on in his head and makes it poetic.

Except today, all his thoughts are on vigilantism, and all he’s gotten down are a few weak cliches about justice and shadows.

He’s supposed to be moderating a debate on his show in a few days about the recent rise in ‘unsanctioned heroic activity,’ and he’s been reading up on his guests in preparation: a politician throwing support behind the recent talk of stricter laws around would-be heroes and a board member of a nonprofit organization that’s been notably outspoken against prosecuting vigilantism.

Even though it leaves him with a vague sense of guilt for holding an opinion some might call orthodox or traditionalist, Hizashi tends to lean toward the law when it comes to vigilantes. These people have no oversight, no agencies or commission to keep them in check, no license to worry about losing if they want to go to extremes. There are no rules for them to follow, and he can’t help but wonder about the implications of having an entire group of people – people with quirks capable enough to allow them to harm, subdue, and capture others – that consider themselves above the law.

But he can also understand the opposition to the laws. While he isn’t entirely on board with letting karma catch up to those who escaped punishment or got off on a technicality (he believes in justice, but not by any means necessary), he was of the opinion that the laws around vigilantes were already strict enough. Some of the measures he’d heard talk of being put into practice seemed more than a little extreme. Automatic registration as having a dangerous quirk? Prison time for a first offense? It feels like overkill. Whatever happened to fines and quirk suppressors? Couldn’t the money planned to be put toward anti-vigilante actions just be spent on trying to lower the crime rate in the first place, eliminating the need for so much off-the-books hero action?

So maybe he’s a little more in the middle camp. And maybe that makes him a good moderator, but the moral gray areas of the issue are leaving him mentally exhausted.

He slams his notebook shut.

He wants to be at the cafe. And not just because of Aizawa, though he is quite the incentive.

Hizashi hasn’t been bothering to try and deny that he has a little crush on the man, because he’d had some idea it would happen ever since he’d been given that disastrous drink he’d called tea. But he isn’t expecting it to go anywhere. There may be a little flirting going on, perhaps on both sides, but he’s not getting the vibe that Aizawa’s looking for anything from him. Or from anyone, really.

Eri’s declaration that Aizawa isn’t subtle had felt pretty on point with everything he knew so far, and if he hadn’t been remotely phased by Hizashi’s joking overture of a fake relationship, then he probably wasn’t interested.

Which is fine. They’ll keep up the harmless teasing and Hizashi will hopefully end up with a friend. He hadn’t exactly been daydreaming about sweeping him off his feet and becoming stepfather to two, even if Eri is a little sweetheart.

He can enjoy a nice verbal spar with Aizawa’s wit regardless of what the future holds, and the cafe owner is bound to have an opinion on vigilantism given his home is right smack in the middle of a hotspot, so maybe he’ll inspire Hizashi’s lyrical endeavors, or at least give him something to think about.

And even if he has nothing to say, there’s always the cats and baked goods.

The cops in the back are what he first notices when he enters. They’re talking to Aizawa, and everyone looks genial enough, but the police obviously aren’t there for the company of cats.

Hizashi takes a seat and almost misses when a dark mass of fur with eyes and a tail pads over to him because he’s too busy trying to parse out whatever he can of the conversation from lipreading. He’s not getting much, but he thinks Aizawa might have just said something about ‘home last night.’

Is he being accused of something? Hizashi’s mind, eager for the stimulation he thought he might satiate by coming here, immediately runs off in search of what kind of crime Aizawa might commit: petty theft? Graffiti? Maybe he knew of someone mistreating an animal and paid them a visit last night. That seems most likely.

Or maybe he’s the one who called the police. Although judging from Aizawa’s crossed arms and growing scowl, probably not.

The cops eventually leave, Aizawa’s steely gaze on their backs. He doesn’t relax until they’re clear of the building, shoulders slumping into a more relaxed posture as he begins making his rounds, checking up on customers and cats.

Hizashi’s all prepped to ask what the hell that had been about, but Aizawa hardly even pauses as he walks by his table, only glances down at the cat Hizashi’s petting and says “If she falls over, just let her be” before hurrying away again.

Hizashi looks down at the cat and sees she’s drooling quite a bit. He stops petting her and peers closer, keeping his hand outstretched as he looks for a visible cause or for whatever had set her owner off. Aizawa returns with a towel, which he stuffs under the strangely compliant cat, then whips out his phone and starts recording, of all things.

“What’s-”

Hizashi pauses when the cat goes stiff and lurches sideways, then collapses to the floor and begins convulsing violently.

“What do I do?” Hizashi asks, his voice going shrill.

“Just hold still.” Aizawa sounds calm as ever, though he’s watching the episode intently, finger tapping on his leg.

Holding still is easy; he’s too afraid of hurting her to move at all. He can only watch as she twitches, back arching and legs stuck stiff, claws extended. Her eyes blink rapidly and her jaw clicks as she bites down on nothing. Her body skitters along the floor with the force of her movements, rolling to one side and then the other.

“She’s okay,” Aizawa says. Hizashi hadn’t realized how terrified he must have looked to elicit such a gentle tone from him, but when he glances up, Aizawa looks away from the cat long enough to meet his eye and nod slightly. “She’s been through it before.”

Hizashi forces a deep breath through his lungs, unclenching the hand that had been clutching at his shirt.

The twitching begins to subside, and the cat ends up pressed against Hizashi’s leg, chest and belly visibly heaving even through her thick fur as she settles down.

“Almost a minute,” Aizawa mutters, tucking his phone away.

“Is that bad?”

“No, it’s good. Fairly short, comparatively.” He tugs the towel out from under the kitty and uses it to wipe her face and the floor of spittle. “She’ll probably be a little out of it for a while. She might not want to be touched. Just keep an eye on her.”

“’Keep an eye on her?’ What about you? Shouldn’t you watch her? I don’t know anything about cats; what if it happens again?”

“Then time it, but it won’t happen.”

Hizashi begins to protest again, but he’s shushed by Aizawa placing a hand on his shoulder.

“You won’t hurt her. She’s okay.”

He’s wondered before if Aizawa’s quirk is in his eye, and he’s becoming certain it must be. What else could explain the immediate calm that comes over him when he meets that steady gaze, when other times just a glance can give him a rush of competition or desire?

“Just don’t overwhelm her,” Aizawa continues. “I have to go give the same miniature lecture on feline epilepsy three times in a row.”

He stands, leaving a slight chill on the shoulder where his hand had been, and Hizashi watches him walk away. The other patrons are looking his way with varying degrees of concern, and he imagines Aizawa is used to putting worries down. He probably has his lecture memorized.

Hizashi looks down at the cat to check she’s still alright. She looks asleep, so he checks the kitty menu and sees her name is Kyo. Next to her picture is a small note about her condition, informing visitors not to restrain her if she has an episode, only to try and keep her from bashing her head against anything.

He wants to pet her, or even pick her up and hold her close, but it would be more to comfort him than her. Kyo seems perfectly content next to him, if a little shaky.

“Dad said this is on the house.”

Hizashi jumps a little at the voice on his other side. A pastry is set in front of him, and Aizawa’s son crouches next to him and carefully strokes Kyo’s head.

“I haven’t moved or touched her or anything,” Hizashi says, defensive even though he thought he’d calmed down. He takes another deep breath. “I know Aizawa said she’s okay but was he just trying to get me not to freak out? Because she just had a seizure and isn’t that-”

“She’s fine,” Hitoshi says behind a laugh. “It happens sometimes.”

Kyo is purring beside him, which puts him a little more at ease.

“Still think cats are adorable?” Hitoshi asks with a cheeky smile that has absolutely been inherited even if Aizawa claims they aren’t related by blood.

Hizashi’s about to retort but stops as he realizes Hitoshi’s referencing a social media post he’d made a week before.

“You know,” he says, thinking about the secret fanboy Eri had mentioned, “you recognized me pretty instantly the other day.”

“Yeah, sorry. Eri told me all about your thing with our dad. Didn’t mean to ruin that.”

“It’s fine. Turns out he doesn’t know who I am anyway.”

He gives Hizashi the same eye roll Eri had. “Figures.”

“So do you work here too?”

“Nah. I just help out sometimes.”

“I bet your dad appreciates it.”

Hitoshi only smiles, and Hizashi has mere seconds to register and begin to pick apart how that smile doesn’t reach his eyes before the younger man nods toward Hizashi’s notebook on the table. “Are you writing?”

“Yeah. Been trying to get some lyrics down.”

“Really?” There’s a sudden verve in his voice, and Hizashi has to wonder just how much ardor he’s tucking away an aura of nonchalance. He seems awfully calm for talking to somebody he supposedly idolizes, but then again, he’d apparently been told Hizashi just about had a panic attack over a cat that’s perfectly fine now. It had probably helped humanize him a bit.

“I thought I was getting back in the groove again, but I’ve hit a snag. Too distracted, I guess.”

“By what?”

Hizashi sighs and finally takes a bite of his free pastry, which turns out to have a strawberry filling. “What’s your take on vigilantes?” he asks as his answer to Hitoshi’s question.

Hitoshi’s eyebrows fly up. “Why?”

“I’m having some people come on the show this week to talk about everything that’s been going on recently and I’m just trying to see what people think, random survey style.”

“What’s your take on them?” Hitoshi asks.

Hizashi chuckles. “Hate to be boring, but I see pros and cons on both sides.”

“But what about them, specifically?”

“As in the people running around deciding they know the criminal justice system best?”

“Guess that answers that question,” Hitoshi quips.

“I mean, sometimes I get it. You see somebody getting mugged and you can do something about it, then you do it. It’s the right thing to do. But going looking for that? If you’re going to make this whole life for yourself about bringing down bad guys, why not take the legal route to do it?”

“It’s not that easy,” Hitoshi says. “You have to get into the right school, know the right people, have the right kind of quirk. The Commission doesn’t just let anyone who wants a license have one.”

“And we should be glad for it.”

Hitoshi stiffens, his fingers stilling in Kyo’s fur, and Hizashi decides to rein it in a little.

“I just mean that there’s a process for a reason. There has to be some way of deciding who gets a license, because we can’t just allow everyone who’s ever thought they’d be a good hero to just go and do whatever they want. But,” he adds, “I know there’s a lot about it I’ll never understand. I know people can fall through the cracks.”

“Didn’t you want to be a hero?” Hitoshi asks.

Hizashi gracefully withholds a teasing remark. He’s spoken so little about that childhood dream; Hitoshi is almost certainly a huge fan, if he knows of it.

“What kid doesn’t?” he says. “Actually, I got in to U.A.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I just...decided it wasn’t the path for me.”

“Huh.” Hitoshi snickers then, and Hizashi tilts his head in a silent question. “I was just thinking that if you’d gone, you would have been in the same...uh, you might have known my aunt. You’re about the same age.”

“Your aunt’s a pro?”

“That won’t help you in your little competition,” Hitoshi says. “She’s not my dad’s real sister.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about that!” Hizashi claims, despite his mind having immediately begun perusing his memory for any hero near his age who’d ever mentioned a brother or nephew (a hell of a long shot, he knows, but he so badly wants to complete the puzzle that is Aizawa Shouta).

“Yeah, sure,” Hitoshi teases, standing up.

“Wait, you’re leaving already? You didn’t actually answer my question about vigilantes.”

“Sorry, busy,” Hitoshi says, gesturing around at the cafe as if he has a line of customers waiting on him.

“Okay, one other thing, though: Do you know why the cops were here talking to your dad?”

Hitoshi pulls a disgusted face, then sighs. “Nothing serious, but he’s not gonna thank you for bringing it up, so maybe don’t do that.” He walks away, leaving Hizashi with the impression that he’s just as cagey as his father.

Hizashi has a worn out cat snuggled up against him, a free pastry, and a notebook in front of him just waiting to be further defiled by his ideas, but his desire to write anything has dissipated entirely. So much for being inspired by the things already on his mind; he just feels drained.

He takes another bite and picks up his pen anyway. He should really try to make something out of what Hitoshi said, that sometimes capability is shut out by circumstance. If nothing else, he can just make a list of words that rhyme. Better than nothing.

He’s hardly put nib to paper when Eri settles herself beside him.

“Let me guess: he tried to play it cool?” she asks.

Hizashi shoots her a thumbs up.

“Called it. I give it three days before he’s asking for an autograph.”

“I’ll give him that as an apology.”

“What’d you do?”

“I’m not sure,” Hizashi says. “I was trying to ask him about vigilantes and I got the feeling it’s a touchy subject.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“Ah, it’s not important.” Hizashi waves her off, figuring if it is a sore spot, maybe Hitoshi wouldn’t want his younger sister butting in on it. “What about you? How do you feel about them?”

Eri suddenly looks uncomfortable as well, fiddling with the hem of her shirt and watching Kyo’s tail flick idly. “Well...I guess it comes down to them wanting to help people, and I don’t think that’s wrong.”

“I agree with that. But why not look for safer ways to do it and leave the heroics to the heroes?”

“But a lot of them probably wanted to be heroes but couldn’t for some reason. Why do you need a license to make your dreams come true?”

Hizashi nearly stops the conversation to quote the girl because holy gadzooks, what a question. “What if your dad tried opening this place without whatever kind of license or permit he had to get? All he wants to do is help cats like Kyo and give people a place to chill out and eat cookies. If people could just do this kind of thing without anybody watching to make sure they’re doing it a certain way, the right way, then nobody with any authority would be checking in to see how the cats are being treated or doing health inspections or anything like that.”

“...I guess you’re right,” she says, though she doesn’t look convinced.

“And vigilantes sometimes try tackling some pretty bad guys. They’re not exactly reprimanding school bullies.”

Eri scoffs and mutters “I wish they would.”

“Uh-oh.” Hizashi breaks off a chunk of pastry from the unbitten end and hands it to her. “Tell me everything, little listener.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she says, but the glower on her face and the way she rips off a bite with her teeth imply otherwise. “There’s these three girls in my class who are just...ugh, they’re so annoying. They make fun of this place and the fact that I’m adopted and say I’m just another ugly stray my dad took in because nobody wanted me.”

Hizashi’s speechless, stricken by the cruelty of schoolgirls, but Eri continues like it doesn’t even warrant a pause for effect.

“And I don’t really care, because it’s not like they know anything about my life, but they’re always calling me ‘litterbox girl’ and saying I smell like one and they laugh anytime there’s cat hair on my uniform, which is always, and they...they piss me off!”

“Does your teacher know this is happening?”

“I am not taking this to my teacher. They don’t need any more ammunition.”

“What’s your dad say about it?”

Eri deflates. “I haven’t told him.”

“Why not?”

“He’d probably go right to the principal. Or he’d tell me to just be the bigger person and ignore them and they’ll get tired of it eventually, which is basically what I’m doing anyway. Either way, he’d make a super huge deal out of it and get really worried and overprotective.”

“Ah, of course,” Hizashi says. “And you’re certainly not arriving at that age where it’s totally uncool to be close with your parents.”

Eri glares, probably at being reduced to a preteen stereotype. “Dad doesn’t need to stress himself out about this. I can handle it. Don’t tell him, okay?” She points a cautionary finger at him, and Hizashi hurries to nod and hold a hand to his heart.

(He’ll use the fact that he never actually promised out loud as his defense if it becomes a big enough problem Aizawa needs to know.)

“So what are you going to do?” Hizashi asks her.

“I don’t know. Probably keep ignoring them.”

“Think that’ll work?”

“No, but it’s all I’ve got until I can think up some kind of revenge.”

“Who are you getting revenge on?”

Aizawa has appeared beside them in that sudden way of his, and upon hearing his voice Kyo finally gets up, stretching and making her way into his lap once he sits.

“Hitoshi,” Eri answers, sneaking a glance at Hizashi, who decides he can keep his mouth shut for now.

“What’s he done now?”

“What has he ever done to me?”

“So you’re getting revenge for the general fact of him being your brother?”

“Always.”

“Then shouldn’t the object of your revenge be me?” Aizawa points out.

“But then how would I express my love? Hitoshi and I have a system, Dad.”

“As long as your system stays out of the cafe, have at it.”

Hizashi shakes his head. “Fatherhood sounds like a riot.”

“Did they annoy you terribly?”

“I’m not annoying!” Eri pipes up.

“Nah,” Hizashi says. “If anything, I was annoying them. Nobody likes to talk about vigilantes these days, I guess.”

Aizawa frowns. “Why were you talking about vigilantes?” he asks, practically hostile, and Hizashi reels mentally. Of course he knows it’s something of a charged subject, but this family seems particularly uncomfortable with it.

He shrugs, purposefully casual. “It’s been on the news lately.”

Aizawa hums, then rolls his eye when Hizashi leans forward expectantly. “Idiots.”

“Really?” Hizashi’s eyes go wide, and he sees Eri’s do the same.

“Wannabe heroes risking life and limb to keep safe a society that only looks down on them. I could almost admire the idealism, but it’s a stupid way to live.”

“Wow, Dad. Tell us how you really feel.”

“I feel you should take care of the couple that just came in because I’m taking a break,” Aizawa returns, and Eri leaves with an exasperated groan.

“Gotta be honest,” Hizashi says, “that’s not the opinion I was expecting to hear.”

Aizawa shrugs. “Most of them are young and untrained. They think it’s exciting until they get in over their heads, at which point they either get killed or they bail after getting the attention of the wrong sort of people. They can’t tell actual law enforcement if they find something too big for them to handle. Too many thrill-seekers end up with life-altering injuries because they thought they had what it takes and nobody told them otherwise. Or they were told and they were too stubborn to listen.”

“Okay, so you’re critical of young folks trying on the label for shits and giggles, that’s understandable. But what about people who understand what they’re getting into? People with real conviction about it who for whatever reason can’t be a hero legally?”

Aizawa hesitates, discerning eye boring into Hizashi, looking for whatever deeper reason is hiding behind ‘it’s been on the news,’ but eventually he answers. “It’s still dangerous. It’s dangerous enough when it’s legal. What happens if you’re injured? What if you need backup and the only people you can call on are more vigilantes, who can’t have any set schedule or patrol route because that’s a quick way to get arrested? Can’t count on an agency to cover the cost of any equipment you’ve got if it breaks, so do you fix it yourself and hope it doesn’t kill you? Or replace it with money you don’t have because steady work is difficult to keep when you’re constantly exhausted and sore? How many injuries can you explain away to a hospital before they get suspicious? Do you just stop going? And you can’t have any sort of close connection to someone else, because you’ll either be keeping a huge secret from them or putting them in a dilemma of not wanting to report you.”

Hizashi’s jaw has steadily been dropping during his little monologue, and Aizawa scowls when he looks over and sees what connection he thinks he’s making.

“No, I didn’t lose my eye as a vigilante.”

“You didn’t say you’ve never been one…”

“Yamada.”

“I’m just saying, that’s awfully insightful of you.”

“Common sense,” Aizawa says. “Also, I listen.”

“Who would you be listening- Ah, right, your pro hero sister.”

“She has some strong opinions.”

“Mmhm.” Hizashi mimes jotting something down, and Aizawa chuckles.

“You think that’s going to help you learn anything about me?”

“Just give me a second, I’m trying to focus. Female hero, close to my age – thank your son for that piece of intel – with a brother or close male friend, has strong opinions on vigilantism.”

“Never said her opinions were about vigilantism.”

“You implied it!”

“Did I? How sure are you that’s what I meant?”

Hizashi glares. “You enjoy taunting me way too much.”

Chapter Text

Hizashi’s become a regular.

He’s not certain he’s ever been a regular anywhere he wasn’t forced to go, but the cafe now ranks in his top favorite places to be, maybe even right there at the pinnacle of the list.

He knows most of the cats by name now. He’s learning how to read contentment in the swish of a tail, playfulness in the set of a pair of ears. He knows that Aizawa does in fact have a ‘customer service’ persona, just a slightly more open expression, just a little less gravel in his voice. He knows Eri waits on every customer with a smile. He knows Hitoshi doesn’t really interact with the customers aside from delivering an order now and then; mostly he cleans, checks on the cats, and occasionally bakes.

Hizashi’s realized by now that neither of the kids being around those first two times he’d met Aizawa was more coincidence than the norm, at least in the later parts of the day. Mornings and afternoons, Eri has school, and Hitoshi the university student is either in class or asleep (or sometimes both, according to Aizawa). But most days one or both will drop by in the late afternoon, usually staying to help their father close shop.

With his visit having run long today (some of the cats have become so accustomed to him that they actually seek him out, and he’s obligated to give them all an equal amount of attention), Hizashi’s still giving Mochi a chin scratch minutes before closing time, and a glance around reveals neither of Aizawa’s wards around.

“No kids today?” Hizashi asks after everyone else has maneuvered through the doors and Aizawa is frowning at his phone for probably the hundredth time in the past few minutes.

“Eri’s with friends and Hitoshi’s somewhere.”

Hizashi laughs, but Aizawa’s troubled expression doesn’t change. “Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

“You seem kinda worried.”

Aizawa sighs and kneels to pet Mochi, who’s rubbing against his legs. “We argued.”

Hizashi grimaces with sympathy. “So badly that you have no idea where he is?”

“I don’t always know where he is. He lives with me but he’s an adult, he has his own life.”

“Yeah, but you seem a little off about it.”

“I worry, sue me,” he snaps, then drops his gaze and eases his tone. “I’d only asked him if he was coming by to help tonight. I didn’t think he’d leave that unanswered, even if he only texted back ‘no.’”

“Shit, so you’re actually worried, not just ‘dad’ worried?”

Aizawa huffs out a laugh. “No. I’m just...paranoid, I guess. And a little pissed, because he knows what a pain feeding everyone alone is.”

Hizashi had never considered that part before – the logistics of feeding so many cats. He wonders if it’s as impossible a task as it sounds. “Can I help?”

Aizawa stares. “You want to?”

“Why not?” Hizashi shrugs. “You’re used to having help, and with all the money I’m sinking into this place, shouldn’t I get the full experience?”

“Ah.” His smile is the one Hizashi had learned to beware of that very first day, sly and almost sadistic. “If that’s what you want, we can start with the litterboxes. I usually do them in the morning, but since you want ‘the full experience,’ why not?”

“You know, on second thought-”

“I was joking. I actually wouldn’t mind help.”

“Then put me to work!”

The cats obviously know what time it is. They pad after him and Aizawa as they head for the back of the cafe, down a short hallway. There’s a room that’s blocked off with another door and gate combo, and he sees why once Aizawa enters: it houses all the cat food.

“Stand there,” Aizawa says once Hizashi has stepped over the gate. “They usually won’t try to jump it if somebody’s in the way.”

Hizashi stands at his post and does his best to ignore the desire to meow back at the cats imploring him with their sweet little faces (he shouldn’t have looked; how anything ever gets done in the presence of such pleading eyes is beyond him). Aizawa fill three bowls and set them on the floor, then gestures to the horde of meowing mouths behind the gate.

“Any three except Mochi, Isabel, and Jun; they have special diets.”

“So you do actually have a system for this,” Hizashi says as he bends over (fully aware of the view he’s giving Aizawa) and lifts Binti, then Edgar, then a tripod named Pocket over the gate.

“To a degree.” Aizawa leans against the wall next to the gate and checks off the three cats from a list on his phone.

“How long did it take you to work this out?”

“Few weeks after I started this place. Dinner used to be more of a free-for-all, but then we got a cat with food allergies and I also realized I couldn’t keep track of how many treats customers were giving any of them. So now it’s methodical and everyone gets weighed weekly.”

“Weekly? Isn’t that overkill?”

“Cats don’t weigh much, so even a slight fluctuation can mean a lot.”

“So doing things this way means you can be sure of how much they all eat,” Hizashi says.

“That, and nobody gets food aggressive.”

“Is that a common thing? Actually, how is it that they all get along so great anyway? I always thought cats were super territorial.”

“Most are, but most will also warm up to other cats if they have to share a space. I haven’t taken in any new ones in a while, but I have to be picky about personality, and not just with how well they do with other cats. People come here because they can’t have a pet, so a cat that isn’t okay with being approached by strangers every day is just an expense, and I can’t afford many of those.”

Hizashi smiles. “That explains why some of them actually like me: they’re hand-picked for friendliness.”

“That, or they know a sucker when they smell one.”

Point for Aizawa – Hizashi has no basis for denying that. He’d fallen in love the first time he’d stepped in the cafe. “So did you decide on special needs cats because of your eye?” He knows better than to ask about the eye directly, but Aizawa’s in a good mood; maybe asking indirectly about the past will open some doors.

“My eye, and other things.”

“Like?”

Aizawa scoffs then and gives him that look he’s getting used to, the one with ‘are you serious?’ emblazoned across it. “Really?”

The cats have finished eating, and Hizashi helps swap in another three. “You know, you could just say ‘pass’ or something,” he says as he scratches between Po’s ears and sets him down. “If you don’t want to answer, I mean. Or just tell me to back off about something. You know I’m not trying to legit annoy you, right?”

“If I thought that, you wouldn’t be back here with me.”

“True.”

“I don’t mind questions about anything,” Aizawa says, “as long as you don’t mind that you won’t always get an answer. The parts of my life you find interesting are the parts I don’t just up and talk to people about, not even people I’ve known a long time.”

“Why not?”

Aizawa doesn’t reply, but he looks surprised, confused why he even needs to ask.

“I mean, I understand some of it,” Hizashi says. “You know, bad memories or something like that, but...Why is it that you like that I don’t know about whatever came before this?”

“You’re some kind of celebrity; why did it bother you when I found that out?” Aizawa shoots back.

Hizashi winces. It’s not that he doesn’t want to answer, he just hasn’t found a way to put words to it that doesn’t make it sound like he regrets his entire life.

“I guess it was nice knowing that somebody was getting to know me as me. You didn’t have any opinion of me, good or bad. At least,” he adds, teasing, “not for a few seconds, until I wanted to use your cafe as a petting zoo.”

Aizawa’s mouth twitches, as good as a smile from him.

“I know it might sound a little hypocritical,” Hizashi continues, “or like I’m not grateful for what I have, which I am, but sometimes I just want to step out of that life for a while. Talk to somebody who really just doesn’t care who I am out there to everybody else. Somebody who doesn’t expect anything from me because they don’t know me.”

“A clean slate.”

“Yeah. With one person, at least.”

Aizawa nods, but doesn’t speak again until they’ve rotated another set of cats in. “At first, I thought you were running from something. Because you got it immediately; you understood me not wanting you to know anything about me. But when I found out you’re famous, I thought I was wrong and you only wanted to hide from paparazzi or something.”

“I guess it was some of that, too.”

“It’s the same for me. Wanting a clean slate with somebody. People don’t recognize me, hardly anybody knows my name, and ten years ago you could barely find anything about me online. And I’m still not exactly newsworthy, but...if you went looking, it wouldn’t be that difficult to find everything you want to know.”

“I won’t,” Hizashi says.

Aizawa nods again. “And I trust that. Which is different.”

“Trusting somebody?”

“Yes. Or no, more like…” He huffs and crosses his arms. “I’m not sure how to say it, but...you noticed me. Somehow I caught your attention and you thought I was somebody worth getting to know, as I am. Not because of anything connected to the past. And I wasn’t expecting that. It’s different.”

“I did a little more than just notice you,” Hizashi says. The words have the weight of a confession, and he ducks his head a little.

“You found somebody who didn’t know anything about you but thought you were interesting anyway, and you like that,” Aizawa says.

“What I found was somebody who knows what it is to feel like people think they know you because of what they know about you.”

Aizawa stares, that one dark eye holding Hizashi hostage, but he decides he doesn’t mind it. “And what do you know about me?” Aizawa asks.

“I know you love your kids and you’re softhearted toward other people’s. I know you’re calm under stress. You make a point of greeting your regulars by name. You’re very funny, but you don’t let it out much. You should. I know you’re very organized and you’re the kind of guy who likes a long day of work. I don’t know why, maybe it makes you feel like you accomplished something that day. I know you fundamentally care about people.”

“Mm?”

“Everything you said about vigilantes, none of it was about legality or morality or societal effects. It was all about the risk. If I had to guess, you don’t actually find fault with vigilantes at all, not with what they’re doing or why, you just hate that it has to be so dangerous and that they do it despite the dangers.”

Aizawa looks stricken, distraught, like Hizashi’s just given him terrible news rather than making an inference that, up until a few seconds ago, he hadn’t even been 100% sure was correct.

And he has to wonder what it is about pointing out that he doesn’t like people putting themselves in danger has him so shaken.

“Or,” Hizashi says, attempting levity to escape the stranglehold Aizawa’s gaze has on him and to wipe that lost, pained look off his face, “you only called them idiots because Eri was there and you didn’t want her getting any ideas.”

He gets no reaction at first, and he’s not sure Aizawa’s even looking at him anymore, too stranded by whatever Hizashi had inadvertently flung at him. He’s so close to asking where he went wrong, what happened, what did he say, because he truly hadn’t wanted to push any real buttons, but then Aizawa relaxes and sighs.

“You’re sharper than you usually let on.”

“I kinda wonder if I should be offended right now, but I’ll let it slide if it means it’s your turn now.”

“What?”

“I just told you what I know about you, so now it’s your turn to do me.” He thinks he should be applauded on his maturity for not giggling at ‘do me.’

“I know you’re a people person,” Aizawa begins, hardly even taking a moment to gather his thoughts. “Charming, outgoing. Not experienced with animals but surprisingly good with cats. I know you’re also softhearted toward children. I know you’re grateful that people don’t approach you in the cafe even when they obviously know who you are. I know you’re writing in your notebook much more than you were a few weeks ago. I know your quirk is voice-related.”

Hizashi lets his surprise show, eyes widening at Aizawa’s certainty. “How’d you figure that out?”

“It just made sense,” Aizawa says as he starts moving cats out of the room. “With your career and your personality.”

“So that was an educated guess. We’re discussing things you know.”

It happens fast enough he almost doesn’t even react.

Hizashi grabs one of the cats still waiting to eat and sets it down inside the room. He feels a hand on his shoulder as he stands, and when he looks over, suddenly he’s being turned and pushed, back hitting the wall maybe a little too solidly to be comfortable, but he hardly notices because he’s being kissed.

Hizashi’s hands fly right to Aizawa’s waist and freeze there, unable to move because he’s trapped by the tingle of adrenaline and the disbelief that this is happening in a room that smells so overwhelmingly of cat food.

The lips pressed to his fall back, just a little; he can feel the other man inhale, they’re that close, and he feels the shift under his palms, too – Aizawa’s about to speak and pull away from him, and he can’t take that. He hasn’t had time to catalog the way he kisses, whether he tastes like anything, how his stubble feels against his own smooth skin, whether he likes to take charge or wants a give and take.

Hizashi kisses him back, and learns.

He tastes faintly of those terrible cookies that don’t seem half so horrific anymore. The slight scratch of his skin against Hizashi’s bottom lip is the most right thing he thinks he’s ever felt. And Aizawa lets himself be kissed even though he’s the one with one hand cupping Hizashi’s jaw and the other sliding back to tangle in golden hair.

And then it’s over, Aizawa breaking it, breathing against his mouth (heavily enough Hizashi pulses with satisfaction, primal desire to make him pant even harder), turning away just enough to discourage a continuation.

“I don’t know how long you wanted to do that,” Aizawa says, “but I know you wanted to.”

Hizashi chases his mouth. “What else?”

He allows another kiss. “I know I can’t trust myself around you.”

“Then don’t.”

His laugh is a mere puff of breath against Hizashi’s jaw, but the encouragement wasn’t enough. Aizawa’s stepping back, his hands dropping down to rest on Hizashi’s chest just briefly, holding him back or holding him there, before he takes another step back.

“Go home, Yamada.”

Not a rejection, just a dismissal. He’s gotten good enough at reading Aizawa’s smile by now.

“If that’s what you want,” Hizashi says, smiling back a bit more obviously.

The once-over he gets, up and down, is all that needs to be said about what he wants, but Aizawa shakes his head. He turns back to his cats, but Hizashi feels him watching as he leaves.

Point for both of them.

Chapter Text

“You know, he’d probably let you stay after and help him clean up. If you asked.”

Hitoshi’s smirking at Hizashi like he knows something, and it’s a strange situation to be in given Hizashi has to hold himself back from telling him ‘You can wipe that smug look right off your face because I was smooching your pops just the other night.’

Of course, he’s only assuming Aizawa hadn’t told him anything about the kiss. Maybe Hitoshi’s just messing with him and actually has the whole scoop on the lip-lock. The way he’s being read, it’s almost like Hitoshi knows not just about the kiss, but about how he hummed the whole way home, almost had his evening ruined by yet another anonymous photograph of himself (this one from just a few months ago), but had managed to shake off his disgust in favor of flopping onto his bed and nearly taking out a window with the squeal he’d let loose into his pillow.

He might be falling stupidly hard for Aizawa.

One kiss and the cafe owner had unlocked a never-before-seen level on Hizashi’s crush meter, surpassing even that period as a kid when he’d idolized All Might so hard he’d nearly fainted from excitement when he saw him in person.

One kiss. Two, if Hizashi’s reciprocation counted separately, and he can’t stop analyzing that part. When Aizawa had first pulled away, had that been regret? Or resignation, thinking he’d frozen because he wasn’t interested? It had only been shock, really. Wanting it was one thing, expecting it another. He can’t even say for sure if he’d thought anything would ever really happen between them.

Had it been an impulse? Or had Aizawa planned it? Had he intended on kissing Hizashi since the moment he offered to stay and help? Or longer, and he’d just been waiting for the right moment?

“Haven’t the faintest clue what you’re referencing,” Hizashi says in response to Hitoshi.

“Yeah, okay. It’s not like you come in here basically every day and stare at my dad’s ass the whole time.”

Hizashi sputters, and just the thought of ‘Oh shit, do I seriously!?’ makes his eyes seek out that exact object, meaning he’s given away that Hitoshi’s assessment isn’t entirely false. “I...that’s...”

“Wow. You know, you could have denied it and there was actually a chance I would have believed you, but you have no chill.”

“I have plenty of chill.”

“On your show, maybe.”

“Here I am giving you access to a highly exclusive club of people who get to see behind the Present Mic mask, and you choose to make fun of me?”

“You make it too easy.”

“Okay listen, Hitoshi...Is it okay to call you Hitoshi? Because calling you Aizawa would just feel strange.”

“Well that tracks, since it’s not my name.”

Hizashi pauses and reaches into his memory for anything Aizawa has ever said about his son, and Hitoshi snickers.

“Holy shit, I can practically see the math symbols around your head right now.”

“Your name really isn’t Aizawa?”

“It’s Shinsou. I never bothered changing it after I got adopted. It’s whatever, though,” he says with a shrug. “Hitoshi is fine.”

“You sure? If you kept your name for a reason, then I-”

“You are literally Present Mic. You can call me whatever you want. I’ll respond to ‘hey, assface.’

“Okay, assface, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“How’d you get the busted lip?”

Hitoshi doesn’t have the most expressive face (a learned habit from Aizawa?), but Hizashi can still tell his mood sours a bit at the question.

“Tripped over Binti.”

Hizashi lets the sounds of the cafe pour in between them – the chatting and cooing of other customers, exclamations from and about the cats, the jingle of a toy – as they stare at each other.

“You tripped...over a cat? And got that?” He gestures to Hitoshi’s mouth.

“Well it was more like I was trying to not trip over her. You know how she is.” He mimes the wobbly cat’s distinctive walk with his arms. “She got underfoot anyway and I bashed my face on the counter.”

Hizashi stares some more.

“What? I apologized to her.”

“That’s not what-…” He truly cannot tell if Hitoshi’s screwing with him or not. Hizashi’s watched him maneuver around the cafe before, easily stepping around nosy cats while holding drinks or a sweet treat on a plate – he isn’t lacking in grace.

Then again, it’s bound to happen sometimes with so many cats around, and if it’s a lie then Hitoshi’s an excellent liar.

“Huh,” Hizashi says. “I thought maybe you’d been in a fight with someone and that’s what you and Aizawa argued about."

“No, he just didn’t-...Shit, that was smooth,” Hitoshi says, somewhat awed.

“I know.” Hizashi grins. “Please, continue. He just didn’t…?”

“If he didn’t tell you then I’m definitely not,” Hitoshi says. “Anyways, you changed the subject. Let’s get back to you and my father.”

“Strange, I thought Eri was the one intent on getting us together.”

“It was her idea. She has a decent one every now and then.”

“I’m flattered, but I don’t need any help.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Hitoshi says, then points over his shoulder at Aizawa. “But he does. Don’t expect him to even notice you’re interested, much less make a move.”

Hizashi’s imagining a little ‘On Air’ sign flashing and picturing a dozen cameras pointed at him to help him keep his composure and stop from saying ‘Oh, if you only knew,’ but he manages it. His mouth doesn’t so much as twitch. He’s never been prouder of himself, not even way back whenone of his first videos hit a thousand views and he’d teared up a little.

He only asks: “It’s really that obvious?”

“What?”

“That I’m interested?” Not that it isn’t correct, and Aizawa certainly already knows that, but Hizashi hadn’t realized he’d been coming on so strongly that other people were noticing.

“Are you being serious?” Hitoshi asks. “Like, genuinely serious?”

“...Yes?”

The younger man’s eyes widen a fraction. “Oh.”

“What?”

“Uh...I was being hyperbolic about the whole thing for a laugh because the idea of my dad dating Present Mic is…” He mimes a miniature explosion at his temple. “Actually, the idea of Dad dating at all is kinda like that anyway. But I figured it was…I don’t know, like a casual flirting thing? I didn’t know you were actually into him.”

“Ah. Well. Now you do.”

“Shit, man.”

“So he’s not a ‘make the first move’ kind of guy, huh?” Hizashi asks it because he’s curious to see more of what Hitoshi thinks of his father, even though he already knows this very thing to be untrue.

“He might as well be a ‘don’t make any move at all’ kind of guy.”

Now there’s a piece of relevant information. “Wait, does he even date at all?” Because if he’s been imagining a future with an aromantic guy this whole time, that’s nothing he can’t work with, but he’s going to have to fill in a few plot holes in that fantasy.

“Maybe? Eri asked him once when she was little why he wasn’t married and he said he hadn’t found the right person yet. And I once overheard him telling my aunt that ‘honorary aromantic’ wasn’t the compliment she thought it was. Which I guess means he’s looking? Or at least open to it.”

“But I’ll have to make the first move, huh? Since he won’t even notice I’m interested.” In his head, ‘I don’t know how long you wanted to do that, but I know you wanted to’ is playing on repeat.

“Probably. You guys already have that whole ‘guess my past’ thing going on, which means he likes you at least a little, but he probably thinks you’re just being friendly.”

“So you think I should offer to stay and help clean up?” An idea that is absolutely, completely Hitoshi’s. “Get him alone, no distractions.”

“Yeah, that’s a good start, at least. Don’t expect him to go rushing into anything, he’s…” Hitoshi shakes his head. “Eh, whatever. I can tell him I have shit to do and clear out and he’ll be happy for the help. His leg’s doing its thing today.”

“His leg?” Hizashi looks over to Aizawa, but doesn’t see any sort of limp or stiffness that isn’t usually there. “What’s wrong with it?” When he turns back to Hitoshi, the younger man is dragging a palm down his face, a picture of exasperation.

“I need to just keep my damn mouth shut,” Hitoshi murmurs. “Oh well, I gave him your name, now I give you his leg. So it’s even.”

“Huh?”

“Nope. I’m leaving now.”

He walks off and flags down his father, and Hizashi watches him put on an act, looking apologetic. Hizashi sees Aizawa ask “Now?” as he checks the time. Hitoshi says something else, after which Aizawa shakes his head and waves him off, saying “It’s fine.”

Hitoshi shoots him a surreptitious thumbs-up as he walks out, and Hizashi is left to bide his time.

He’d purposefully come by a little late, already planning to stay, knowing they needed to talk. The kiss had been great, spectacular, a triumphant chorus vocalizing while fireworks exploded in the background. And ‘I can’t trust myself around you, go home’ was one hell of a clincher – he’s giddy just recalling it – but it isn’t the sort of thing one ignores and just leaves in the dark with the cat food.

Hizashi’s been fine with their somewhat nebulous relationship thus far, the verbal sparring and underlying desire, but this will change things. He won’t be able to stop wondering what Aizawa wanted to come of it.

Already, he’d spent most of the day trying to imagine how that conversation would go. Aizawa almost always came to sit with him for a few minutes in between work duties; were they going to try and fit a meaningful conversation in there or would they spend those few minutes pretending it hadn’t happened?

But since it doesn’t look like they’ll get to talk until after closing, will it be while they’re distracted by feeding the cats and washing dishes and everything else involved in shutting the place down for the night, or will they wait until it’s all done and then sit down and make it a deep conversation that Hizashi really isn’t sure if he’s ready to have?

Yet Hizashi finds that imagining Aizawa kissing him again lets him ignore the massive potential for awkwardness and emotional vulnerability.

So that’s what he does, since Aizawa hasn’t been able to come over and sit with him. The cafe has gotten busier over the past weeks, and while Hizashi has never actually mentioned the place by name on any social media accounts, he’s noticed enough people snapping pics of him that he doesn’t think it’s conceited to believe himself responsible for the uptick in business. It still isn’t exactly a bustling place, and Aizawa isn’t exactly rushing around, but he’s kept on his feet enough Hizashi doesn’t feel purposefully avoided.

Which only makes him think about Hitoshi’s comment on his leg.

Potential awkwardness be damned, he’s sticking around.

Aizawa seems to understand that, because he locks the door after the last customer leaves, then sighs and leans against it. Hizashi stands and finds the spray bottle he’s seen used to clean the tables.

“You don’t have to do that,” Aizawa says.

“I don’t mind. I saw Hitoshi take off earlier.”

“Right after talking to you.”

“I don’t know what you could possibly mean by that.”

“I’m sure,” Aizawa says, but there’s no spark in it, no underlying challenge. After a moment he asks, “Did you even order anything?”

Hizashi shrugs. “No, but it’s fine.”

He hears a tsk and then: “Sorry. I saw Hitoshi with you and figured...You can just take something, if you want.”

“Might help myself to a cookie later.” Hizashi shoos a cat away from a freshly cleaned table and moves on to another. Aizawa hasn’t moved from the door yet. “But if you’re feeling obliging, I have a question.”

“You always have questions.”

“I forgot to ask last time, but why were those cops in here the other day?”

Aizawa groans, and when Hizashi looks up and finally gets a proper look at him, he sees exhaustion more clearly than he’s ever worn it before. Maybe the busy day had gotten to him, after all. “To give me a headache.”

Hizashi chuckles, but Aizawa doesn’t continue on with a real reason. “You really don’t have to do that,” he reiterates instead, nodding toward the tables. “Eri should be here soon, I’ll put her to work.”

Hizashi wants to press a little more, but they’ve got other things to talk about, and if he can joke about it, it can’t be too serious. “You trying to get rid of me?”

“Trying not to take advantage of you.”

Hizashi could point out how that sentence could be misconstrued if he wants, but he doesn’t need to – Aizawa’s mustered the energy for an expression that can’t be called anything but suggestive, and Hizashi’s going to pretend his shudder was purely internal whether it’s true or not, and that he didn’t want to say ‘Take every advantage you want.’

“No way,” he says instead. “Eri’s just a kid, and you’ve got your...You know what, Hitoshi mentioned something but I’m gonna be a good boy and not even bring it up.” He’s already asked one question Aizawa obviously wasn’t keen on answering; he can ask about his leg some other time. “I’m here to work. So use me.”

He can’t help but say it like a dare, hands on his hips, and Aizawa’s face may be utterly impassive but Hizashi sees the little sliver of tongue dart out to wet his bottom lip. “Awfully bold.”

Hizashi shrugs. “I happen to know you don’t have any problems taking charge.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Well when a guy pins you to a wall and plants a wet one on you with no warning, you kinda start to make some inferences.”

Aizawa hums. “That’s fair.” He pushes off from the door finally and starts picking up cushions to stack them against a wall. Hizashi follows and helps. “Hitoshi left so you’d have a reason to stay, right?”

Hizashi winces. “If it matters, it was his idea. He seems to think you need help judging when someone’s interested. And I didn’t tell him I think you’ve actually got that part down.”

“No?”

“Not my kid, not my place. Wasn’t sure if you’d want him to know.”

“Know what?”

Hizashi hesitates. If Aizawa’s playing dumb about it, there must be a reason he wants Hizashi to say it. “That you already know I’m interested.”

The pair of them pause in their work, cushions piled in a corner. Several cats mill around them, complaining that things are being done out of order and they need their dinner.

“Do I know that?” Aizawa asks.

“Doubting yourself now?” Hizashi returns playfully. “You said you knew what I wanted. It’s not like you to lose your confidence.”

Aizawa scoffs and says “Right, because you know me so well,” but it’s gentle in that teasing way of his, not affronted.

Hizashi plays along. “Yep. Gonna know you better than you know yourself soon.”

“Ah,” Aizawa says, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms, and Hizashi senses he’s about to regret something. “So you’d be able to tell me what I would do right now if Eri weren’t about to come home?”

“You’d pin me to the wall again?” He shoots for coy, provocative, but he’s pretty sure he only lands on hopeful.

“Maybe. I don’t know. I might tell you it was a mistake, it won’t happen again, and you should go.”

Hizashi’s mouth goes dry. Deep behind his lungs, it’s like a dropped bag of ice has burst open, the shards flying and embedding themselves. He stands frozen, empty, searching Aizawa’s face, replaying the kiss, his words, the way his waist felt against Hizashi’s palms.

Then Aizawa’s face softens and a half-smile slides across his lips, and Hizashi’s never been so elated and so enraged simultaneously.

“But really,” Aizawa says, shrugging one shoulder like he hasn’t just made Hizashi realize exactly how much power he’s given over to this man already. “Who knows?”

There’s thumping coming from the stairs in the back, a voice calling out “Dad, I’m home! Be down in a sec!”

Hizashi has to take a moment to wet his mouth before he can speak, and even then he still has to search for the right words. “You just strapped me and my emotions into the front seat of a roller coaster, started it before I was fully strapped in, randomly sped it up and slowed it down throughout the whole ride, stopped me at the top of a loop a few times, and when I thought I’d reached the end you took me through the whole thing backwards, and when I finally ask if it’s over, all you can say is ‘Who knows?’”

Aizawa smiles then, really smiles, burdens and shadows lifting off his face, a flash of teeth showing before he glances down and recomposes himself. He steps forward and kisses Hizashi’s cheek while he’s still stunned.

“Go home, Yamada. See you Saturday,” he has the nerve to murmur in Hizashi’s ear, then walks away.

“Wh-...Sa-...When did we-?”

Aizawa doesn’t turn around, doesn’t even look over his shoulder. “Saturday. Late.”

Hizashi thinks he should probably get comfortable in that front seat.

Chapter Text

It’s Saturday.

Hizashi’s dressed nicely, probably too nicely for the circumstances – his most ass-flattering jeans and a button-down undone slightly more than usual. He’s only going to be sitting in a cat cafe and then helping clean it with a man he already knows is attracted to him, so it isn’t like he needs to grab Aizawa’s attention, but the point is that he feels snazzy. And he’s not exactly going to complain if Aizawa does eye him a little.

(He doubts Aizawa will complain about his outfit, either.)

It’s the principle of the thing – he put in a little extra effort and it paid off; he looks good.

And Aizawa hasn’t said a thing.

He caught Hizashi’s eye and nodded, but he’s been busy again today. That’s not surprising; Saturday is his busiest day (even more so when Eri and Hitoshi are nowhere to be found) and he stays open late to take advantage of that. Hizashi isn’t sure when he gets up in the morning, or how long it takes to get the cafe ready to open, but he’d bet good money on Aizawa having been on his feet for more than twelve hours by this point.

He really isn’t sure whether to admire his work ethic or give him a stern talking-to about taking a break now and then.

It’s full dark out by the time Aizawa locks the doors, and Hizashi expects to hear a sigh or maybe see him slump with relief that the day is done, but the overworked owner barely even looks his way.

“About time. Ready to use me yet?” Hizashi asks, grinning, but Aizawa doesn’t rise to the bait, only motions for Hizashi to follow him to the food room.

Knowing what to do is a nice feeling, like he’s actually being helpful, but if he was hoping to impress by remembering the routine, he’s let down. Aizawa’s focus is entirely on the cats tonight. He kneels to pet them as they eat, and it’s as if Hizashi isn’t even in the room.

“Long day?” Hizashi asks.

“I’ve had worse.”

“No seizures or catfights or anything?”

“No.”

Hizashi waits. Aizawa doesn’t sound upset with him, and he wouldn’t do the passive-aggressive thing on purpose, would he? And he doesn’t look especially concerned about anything, either. He’s just...quiet. More so than usual.

It’s not reassuring, given he’s the one who’d said ‘Saturday’ in that voice that brooked no doubt about Hizashi being here tonight.

“So what did I do between the other day and now?” Hizashi asks once they’re down to the final batch of cats and nothing more has been said, and he’s only partially joking.

Aizawa looks up then, expression laced with confusion at first before he shakes his head. “Sorry. It isn’t you. I’m...not really myself tonight.”

“Oh yeah?” Relieved to not be the cause of melancholy, Hizashi crouches next to him. “What’s got you stuck in your head?”

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

Hizashi hums, nodding. “See, one of the things I know about you is that if it’s something you don’t want to talk about, you just shut up. You don’t say things like ‘it’s nothing,’ so I’m going to tag that as breaking our truth rule.”

“Didn’t you say that rule was only implied?”

Hizashi scowls playfully.

“Okay,” Aizawa says, shortening ‘well, you wanted to know, be careful what you wish for’ to a mere two syllables. “I don’t really know if I’m nervous or excited.”

Hizashi chuckles. “It’s hard to picture you being nervous about anything. Or excited, actually.” He’s not really acting like he’s either of them.

“We don’t all project our emotions into the stratosphere.”

“Obviously. Things would be a lot easier if people did that.”

Aizawa tilts his head, amused. “I have to disagree.”

“No, it’s true. If I’d known what you were feeling, I wouldn’t have been wondering what was wrong.”

“But you knowing how I feel hasn’t made anything easier for me, so your conclusion is flawed.”

“Well maybe if I knew why you’re nervous and/or excited, I could help.” He ignores the tinny little voice coming from his heart that’s trying to say there’s a chance it’s him.

“Yeah, you probably could,” Aizawa says, and doesn’t follow up with anything.

Hizashi can only sigh. “You know, for as often as I find myself wanting to tell you things like ‘you’re infuriating,’ I sure hang around you an awful lot.”

“I have wondered why you keep coming back.” With all the cats sated, Aizawa leads them back out into the hallway.

“What can I say? Something about your charming demeanor has ensnared me.”

“Ah. I’ll be sure to work on that, then.” Aizawa stops at the bottom of the stairs leading up to his home.

“Sure, sure, I see how it is. Invite me around, get me all curious and flustered, and leave me unsatisfied. You can get away with it this time,” Hizashi says, poking Aizawa’s chest, “because I’m nice and I know you’ve had a long day, but next time you’re gonna owe me something.”

“Next time, because you’re certain I’m going to leave you unsatisfied this time?” Aizawa says as he starts up the steps.

“I am. Didn’t I say I’m getting to know you? I know how this will go. I’ll say something like ‘hey, why’d you ask me to come?’ and you’ll say ‘Good night, Yamada’ and continue on your merry way upstairs.”

“Will I?”

“Absolutely.” Hizashi nods. “Here, we’ll try it: Hey, am I the thing you’re nervous or excited about?” He holds out his hand, palm up, indicating Aizawa’s cue.

“Want to come up?”

Hizashi stares. “What?”

“The kids are out for the night.” Aizawa breaks eye contact for one near-imperceptible moment and his thumb slides slowly along where’s he gripping the railing – a hairline crack in the mask, uncertainty he’s not used to. “Do you want to come up?”

Soft, a vulnerability he both does and doesn’t want to be showing.

Hizashi’s hand slowly sinks.

The question is far too heavy to be an invitation for a cup of coffee. It might mean he wants to show Hizashi something – something from his past, some explanation, a little moonbeam to shine on the dark places Hizashi’s willing to wait to explore – or it might mean there’s some other kind of intimacy on his mind.

Either way, yes. He does.

But there’s weight to Hizashi’s answer now, like how he says one simple word matters as much as the word itself, like a joke or breezy ‘Do I ever!’ will get the invitation revoked. Like asking for clarification, just to be sure, will only get him disappointment for failing a test.

Either way: “Yes.”

Aizawa’s face softens where he hadn’t even noticed a tenseness, and he motions for Hizashi to follow him up the stairs.

Any other time, he’d be saying something cheesy about the view as he follows, but the line never comes, because he gets it now: excitement is there, but it’s wavery, tempered by the pull of something a little less certain of itself.

He wonders what Aizawa’s home will be like. As clean as the cafe? Maybe the fastidiousness is in his nature, not a learned necessity. Or will it be a bit of a mess because he likes to leave his clean energy downstairs, so his apartment looks cozier? Does he have any other cats, ones that don’t do well with strangers? Is Hizashi about to be bombarded by a barrage of feline design?

He doesn’t get the chance to find out.

The little entryway is dim, and from where he’s crouched down to remove his shoes, he can only see down a short hallway into what looks like a dining room, from the large table there, but the only light is ambient, probably a nightlight. Hizashi stands and is about to ask for a tour, and Aizawa is on him again.

It isn’t like the first time, quick and unsure. Hizashi’s against a wall once more, but there’s no hesitation in kissing him back. Hands are at his hips, holding him still, and he thinks about them roaming his body, teasing him, clutching at him, but he can only groan into Aizawa’s mouth, unwilling to part from him.

He can’t keep his hands still. They wander over Aizawa’s chest, his shoulders, his waist, one finally finding rest in dark hair as lips leave a heated trail down to Hizashi’s neck.

The back of his head hits the wall softly as he gives free rein to those lips, and he’s only tangentially aware of the little “ah, ah” noises slipping from his mouth whenever stubble scrapes over sensitive skin. He wants more, wants to pull Aizawa’s shirt off and urge him to keep going, to suck harder on his neck or wherever else he wants, but he holds back from saying it.

Should he push for it? This is Aizawa’s show, his apartment, his invitation. Maybe he never meant for it to go beyond this, a taste as brief and explosive as a snap popper, meant to get them riled, to up the ante on the bets they’ve made on each other.

But Aizawa could have made out with him in any of the rooms downstairs.

Hizashi kisses him again, deep and thorough, and he’d completely forgotten that a tongue rubbing against his could make him weak in the knees. He has to stop, breathe, has to ask what comes next or make a move, but Aizawa chooses that moment to slot his leg between Hizashi’s and rock and the noise that escapes him is nothing but want. The pressure right where he needs it, the feeling of Aizawa’s desire for him pressing into his hip – it’s too much, it’s been too long. He wonders, briefly, if he’s going to have any incidents with his quirk tonight.

That’s something Aizawa should probably know about, if he hasn’t guessed already, but the words won’t come. They aren’t even kissing anymore, just panting against each other’s lips, breathy little moans turning into white noise under the feeling of the fireworks show going off every time Aizawa rocks into him. The fingers at his hips crawl up under his shirt, and he could get off just from this, easy, just grinding on Aizawa’s leg. He shifts, pressing his own thigh up a little harder, and those fingers dig in, nails dragging down. Teeth scrape along his bottom lip before pulling away.

“You sure?” Aizawa asks, his voice a wet dream that Hizashi’s lost in.

“Fuck, please, yes,” he answers, and then he’s being pulled down the hall, chasing Aizawa’s lips, his touch.

He’s pushed through a door and they tumble onto a bed, Hizashi landing on his back. He feels his shirt being unbuttoned and sits up to pull it over his head instead – much faster – and immediately helps Aizawa do the same. He’s grinning around their kisses, heart racing from the feeling of a bare chest pressed against his, and he starts to fumble with Aizawa’s pants but is stopped by a sharp “Wait.”

“What?” Hizashi asks, and sits up as his almost lover stands and takes a small step back.

“I should…” Aizawa’s eye rakes over Hizashi’s body and pauses on the tent between his legs. He’s so hard it aches, but being able to noticeably distract Aizawa makes it worth it. “You should know, my leg…”

“Yeah?”

“It’s a prosthetic.”

“Oh.” Hizashi’s breath leaves him in a relieved sigh. “I mean, thank you for sparing me the awkward moment of discovering that for myself, but if that’s all…?” He reaches out, hooking a finger in Aizawa’s pants and tugging him closer.

“I figured you’d have questions,” he says, but he straddles Hizashi’s lap anyway.

“Oh, I have plenty of questions, but right now, none of them are about your leg.”

Hizashi lies back down, and Aizawa follows.

After, when they’re side by side, their slow panting the only sounds in the dim room, sweat cooling, hearts still racing, Hizashi’s still smiling.

“Shit,” he says. His voice cracks, and he can’t begrudge Aizawa his huff of laughter.

“Not what you expected?”

“I didn’t know what to expect.” Hizashi sidles closer to him, the air starting to feel chilly. “We’re lucky I like surprises.”

“Bet you’re glad I didn’t say ‘good night, Yamada.’”

“No, you definitely didn’t.” Hizashi rolls onto his front and looks down at him. “You called me Hizashi.”

“Hm?”

“Like maybe two minutes ago.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He could have guessed it hadn’t been intentional, but that he doesn’t even remember it, that it’s what he calls out when he’s so far gone with bliss it’ll be a blur afterward, has Hizashi’s head spinning.

“No, it’s okay. I like it.” He flops back down and snuggles closer. It’s true, he does like it, and he’s content to leave things at that, not needing reciprocation. But maybe he’s also a little worried that Aizawa doesn’t want to give him the privilege in return, and resting his head on his shoulder so they can’t look at each other might be a way of trying to run from that.

But.

“If it’s just us, you can call me Shouta.”

Inside, he’s squealing, mentally returned to that first kiss, going home and nearly destroying his pillow, but squashes the feeling down, molds it to resemble an acceptable level of falling for someone.

“Hmm.” He pretends to deliberate. “I don’t know.”

“Seriously?”

“Well I thought I knew you pretty well but you caught me so off guard tonight that it feels like I hardly know you at all.”

“After that, you’re going to say you hardly know me?”

“Mm, okay, I guess knowing what you look like when you come counts for a lot.”

“Just how much do you-”

THUD

Hizashi flinches and instinctively looks toward the just barely ajar door, but his attention is caught by Aizawa’s reaction to the noise. He’d gone from totally relaxed, lounging next to him, to upright, half-crouched, within a moment. One foot on the floor, the other braced and tense on the bed. He’s utterly still – Hizashi can’t even see him breathing – but when he shifts to sit up, Aizawa makes a sharp motion in his direction without turning his head, stilling and quieting him.

Hizashi doesn’t know much about trauma.

He hasn’t ever been in a situation he can truly say scarred him that way, not really. He has the unfortunate habit of replaying his most embarrassing moments on repeat when he’s trying to sleep, but he doesn’t have the kind of memories that leave him wanting to crawl under his bed to hide. He’s never been that sort of scared.

He doesn’t know about trauma, but he’s realizing he knows it when he sees it.

This is ingrained behavior; nobody is so ready for a fight, so alert and tense and affected from a single noise in the night if they don’t have something in their past they wish would stay there.

He thinks he might know the answers to some of his questions.

There’s another clunking noise, and Aizawa says “Stay here” so quietly Hizashi can’t be sure he hadn’t thought it, then leans down to reach under the bed and pulls out an alarmingly large knife, which he just happens to keep easily accessible where he sleeps, and then he’s gone, silently slipping out of the room.

Hizashi has more questions.

He finally sits up and wonders if he should really stay put. What if Aizawa’s being robbed or something? What if it’s worse – he’d seemed so prepared for something like this; what if he has enemies and this is some kind of targeted attack?

If it comes to a fight, he might not be of much help, given Aizawa seems to know what he’s doing and there isn’t much Hizashi can do with his quirk that isn’t a last resort, but he’s held his own in a few bar brawls. He should at least be ready to do something other than sit there.

While Aizawa may have no such reservations, whatever’s going on, Hizashi isn’t about to meet it in the nude. He rolls over and stands slowly, quietly, searching for his underwear, freezing when the floor creaks because the rest of the house is dead silent and oh fuck what if they heard him and they're going to-

“What the fuck, Dad, put some clothes on!”

Well.

It would seem Hitoshi’s come home.

Hizashi lets himself have a silent fit of laughter imagining the scene, and when he calms down, a light has come on down the hall and he can just barely hear the whispered sibilants of a hushed conversation. He finds his shirt and underwear but takes his time getting dressed. He wonders, for a moment, if Aizawa would want to keep this a secret from his son, but Hitoshi was probably going to guess he had someone over anyway.

He wanders into the room in time to see Aizawa, now with a blanket wrapped around him like a large towel, knife set down somewhere, kicking a pile of something mostly out of sight behind a chair while Hitoshi says “Could you at least be careful with my-”

The younger man freezes, mouth open, eyes flicking over Hizashi. Apparently, naked Dad wielding a huge-ass knife in the middle of the night is a sight easily recovered from, but pantsless Present Mic simply does not compute.

Then it clicks, and Hitoshi looks to his father with a sly grin. “Nice.”

“Hitoshi.”

“No, really, I didn’t know you had it in y-actually, I’m gonna pretend like I didn’t just say that.”

Hizashi snickers, and Aizawa glares at him as he walks past back to the bedroom.

“So,” Hitoshi says when it’s just them, that taunting grin now focusing on another target. “That was fast.”

Hizashi smirks. “The second time wasn’t.”

Hitoshi’s face scrunches into a grimace. “Can you not?”

Hizashi only then registers the state Hitoshi’s in: he’d thought Hitoshi had his arms crossed, but he’s holding one up with the other like he’s injured his shoulder, and he has a nasty scrape along his hand on that side.

“What happened?”

“Fell off my bike.”

He offers no further explanation, not why he was riding his bike in the middle of the night or why he was dressed all in black while he did it, or why Aizawa, when he returns dressed and bearing a first aid kit, looks a little angrier than he ought to be over his son interrupting them because he’d done something stupid.

“Nice night for a ride,” Hizashi quips.

“I couldn’t sleep, thought I’d wear myself out a little. Learned my lesson.”

Hizashi has only more questions, like why he was home when Aizawa had thought he’d be out all night and how someone can sound so casual and so forced at the same time. And why he won’t look at Hizashi. And what Aizawa had tried to hide from him behind the chair.

Hizashi glances over at that mysterious bundle. He’s not sure what he’s looking at – black fabric and something metal and some kind of belt that makes the word ‘utility’ jump into his mind.

“Hey.”

Aizawa’s coming over to him and speaking softly. “I’m sorry to kick you out, but…” He doesn’t go on. Hizashi could fight him on it – he’s worried about Hitoshi – but he isn’t oblivious to the strained atmosphere. He’s out of the loop on something here, and he isn’t going to be brought into it tonight.

“No, I get it. Father-son thing.” He manages a smile before he walks back to the bedroom to finish getting dressed. The other two men are silent when he returns, and Hizashi hesitates.

What’s the etiquette here? Is he supposed to kiss Aizawa goodbye? Now? With Hitoshi there and the vibe between father and son nearly as uncomfortable as microphone feedback?

“See you soon?” He could cringe at how stilted it sounds.

Aizawa nods. “Yeah.”

Hizashi calls out “Be more careful on your bike” as he heads to get his shoes.

He hears a bit of commotion and more whispering as he’s slipping them on, then “Go!” and when he looks up, Aizawa is coming down the hallway after him.

“Listen, I do get it,” Hizashi says, holding his hands up. “I mean, I don’t, actually, but it’s fine, I can tell there’s something going on there and it’s totally valid you’d want me not to be here right now if you two are going to get into it.”

“I’m sorry,” Aizawa says, not denying a thing. “This isn’t how I thought tonight would go.”

“Oh? So you’ve been thinking about this, then?” Hizashi teases, a last ditch effort to lighten things.

Aizawa smiles, a brief beam of sunshine before the clouds obscure it again. He starts to say something, but doesn’t. His eye flickers down to Hizashi’s lips and back up.

Hizashi gets it. He’s not sure where this is supposed to go, either.

“I…” Aizawa starts, but Hizashi lets him off the hook.

“Hey, go deal with your kid. I’ll see you soon, okay?”

The weight off Aizawa’s shoulders is nearly palpable. “Okay.”

Hizashi starts to go, steps back in and kisses him, a little peck, then turns and leaves.

Chapter Text

“So I’m guessing Eri doesn’t know anything?”

“I didn’t see why she’d need to know I slept with someone. If that’s all it’s going to be.”

Hizashi starts. “Woah, hang on, when did we...Oh, I see, we’re having that talk now. Gotcha. Really could have phrased that as more of a question, you know.”

Shouta does his amused little huff of a laugh a s he fills the bowls of the impatient felines meowing beyond the gate . “Well if you were upset by the thought of it being a one-time thing, then I assume…” He trails off and glances over his shoulder without saying a thing about what he assumes, and Hizashi has to wonder if he’s afraid of being wrong.

Because if he doesn’t give away any hints of what he wants, he can pretend to be okay with whatever Hizashi says. It’s either the logical way to approach the situation or self-preservation borne out of fear of vulnerability.

Letting on to someone that you have feelings for them that they don’t return? Humiliating.

If Shouta’s trying to avoid that, it means Hizashi can afford to risk baring himself.

“I think I’d like if it were more than that.”

Shouta smiles, gentle and almost out of place on his grizzled face for how sweet it is. Hizashi slots their fingers together while he mulls over one of the most important choices of his life: whether to kiss him or say something so ridiculously gushy that Shouta will have no choice but to laugh out loud.

So Hizashi’s got a boyfriend.

He’s been at the cafe every day in the week that’s passed, because he hardly needs to worry about seeming overeager, not when it’s all out in the open. And it’s not as if spending so much time there is a hindrance.

He’s filled a notebook over the past few weeks with possibilities – hastily scribbled lyrics with possible rhymes crossed out or circled, chord progressions, esoteric ramblings such as ‘bridge up this one two slower’ and ‘need (illegible) DOWN if echo let go.’ Not all of it’s amazing, but he’s cobbled together a few songs he thinks are pretty solid, though one of them is sickeningly lovey-dovey enough to be a departure from his usual sound and makes it obvious exactly how things are going in his personal life. So maybe he won’t be recording it anytime soon.

Regardless, poetry has never slid onto the page so fluidly for him before. Maybe it’s the cats and the atmosphere of the cafe, maybe it’s Shouta and the things that have happened in it, but it works, whatever it is. Things are coming together.

Everything’s looking up. His musical career is getting ready to take off again, now that he’s back in his groove and writing things that even Shouta, with his peculiar tastes and limited knowledge of popular music, finds palatable. Which is another thing that’s going right – being able to play for Shouta since they finally did the normal thing and exchanged phone numbers.

He’s happy.

The only detracting factor is the lingering tension between Shouta and Hitoshi.

They’ve both been avoiding questions about that night. Hizashi doesn’t want to push too hard; he’s only just started this thing with Shouta, so while he and Hitoshi get along great, it really isn’t his place to make a fuss over something they obviously want to deal with themselves.

But they’re just so cagey about it. He asks about Hitoshi’s injured arm and he gets only ‘it’s fine’ and a subject change, no matter which one of them he’s talking to. So he hasn’t even attempted to broach the topic of what the hell else had been going or how Hitoshi actually injured himself.

(He has his suspicions, of course, but he’s not sure he’s ready to have them confirmed. Another reason he hasn’t pushed that hard.)

He just needs to have patience, he supposes. It’s never been something he’s had in backstock, only barely enough to fill the shelves up front, but it feels like maybe he’s been going through his supply a little slower lately. Maybe the game he and Shouta are still playing has been teaching him something about letting the plot unfold itself instead of skimming pages to get to the twist.

A week isn’t a long time; he knows he can’t expect to suddenly have a few more chapters of Shouta’s life filled in just because they’d both acknowledged what they wanted.

Sure would be nice if it worked that way, though.

As it is, he’ll have to content himself with carefully worded questions and reminding himself that Shouta doesn’t know Hizashi’s whole life story yet, either.

He spots Eri coming down from the apartment – another thing he wants to know about, the story of how she and her brother became siblings – and he can tell something’s bothering her even before she scoops up Pocket and sits down next to Hizashi.

He doesn’t bother asking if she wants to talk. He grabs his empty tea cup and holds it up, turning it upside down as he looks at Eri with one eyebrow arched – spill, girl.

She rolls her eyes but obliges him. “Do you remember those girls I told you about?”

“Those three bi-uh, not very nice girls?”

Eri smiles knowingly but doesn’t call him out. “I found out that they’re making fun of one of my friends, too, just for being friends with me.”

Hizashi makes a disgusted noise. “Why? They couldn’t destroy you so they’re going after your friends?”

“I don’t know! It’s not like I ever did anything to them! I’m just different.”

“How are you so different? Because you’re adopted?”

“Yeah. And because they think this place is a joke.” She flings one arm out to indicate the cafe. “And because my dad wears an eyepatch, and because I’m not rich, and because my quirk isn’t exciting, and a million other things.”

‘What is it with these girls?’ Hizashi shakes his head, giving thanks to any deity listening that whatever bullying he’d had to deal with, at least he’d never been a middle school girl at the mercy of her own kind. “Okay, when they take a shot at the adopted part, you say that at least your dad picked you, their parents got stuck with them.”

Eri snickers.

“And about living here, just say you’re not surprised that they can’t understand why good people do the things they do. And about his eye, just imply that they’re jealous, they’ll hate that and no matter what they say it’ll come across sounding straight-up immature. And for the money, if they’re so rich then why can’t they afford better personalities? And...well I don’t even know what your quirk is, so I can’t help you there.”

Eri smiles and touches her horn. He’d assumed it was related – or else that having a weapon attached to her forehead was her quirk. “It’s okay,” she says. “I can tell them my quirk has already helped save a lot of people, which is more than they can say.”

“There you go! The most important thing is that you never let them think they’ve won.”

“But I’ve been doing that this whole time and it hasn’t changed a thing. I never let them see me get angry.”

“Which is why you’ve gotta start firing back.”

Eri only shrugs, and Hizashi decides it’s time for a subject change; he hates seeing her dwell on such a thing. “So tell me what you actually like about school.”

So she tells him about her classes and her teachers, her friends, calligraphy club. More and more she becomes the happy young girl he’d met weeks ago – the girl she should be, not one down and out due to some snooty girls being tyrannical for no other reason than that they can.

The pair of them swap stories about school for stories about Hizashi’s work – what guests on his show are like off-air, how it isn’t just his fans asking for a new release soon but also quite a few people that might be considered in charge of his reputation and his money. They keep each other company until the doors are locked for the evening and the cats are starting to pad around Shouta’s feet.

“Eri, can you handle the kitchen tonight?”

“Sure.”

The girl, far more amenable to washing dishes than Hizashi will ever be, disappears through a door at the back of the room, and Hizashi follows Shouta down the hall to the food room.

As soon as they clear the gate, before the first three cats are fed, Shouta pulls him in and kisses him. Hizashi grins into it, laughing a little like he’s done every time their lips have touched in the past week.

Shouta exhales deeply, exasperation almost becoming its own flavor with how thick it is, but there’s fondness underneath it as he murmurs: “How long are you going to keep doing that?”

“Until I stop being happy about it, so probably never.”

“Ridiculous,” Shouta says, but kisses him again.

While they’re wrapped up in each other, a door down the hall opens, one that Hizashi’s never seen used but knows must lead to the side of the building. Hitoshi passes by the doorway a moment later, muttering “Forgot my key” without even looking up as he steps past the furballs waiting for food.

Amusing as it is that he and Shouta are still pressed against each other and Hitoshi hadn’t even noticed, his hunched walk and the petulant note in his voice have Hizashi frowning at the reminder that things are still strained between father and son.

“How’s he doing?” Hizashi asks, squeezing Shouta’s fingers before the other man pulls away to finally tend to the cats.

“He says his shoulder’s all healed up.”

“He gets a lot of minor injuries, huh?” Hizashi asks, recalling the split lip from apparently tripping over a cat.

“He’s always been like that,” Shouta says, and Hizashi has to try and decipher if that’s a practiced response or not.

“But is everything okay? Really?”

Shouta looks at him, silently requesting clarification.

“That night, I know it’s not really any of my business, but it kinda felt like you were...I don’t wanna say angry, but...kinda angry, yeah. And I don’t mean ‘embarrassed that your kid interrupted our fun-time’ kind of angry. And it really seems like neither of you have wanted to talk about it at all and I just hope I didn’t cause any problems by being there.”

“It had nothing to do with you, don’t worry.”

“Are you sure? Because I really don’t want to be the reason for any-”

“I’m sure. It’s not the first time we’ve disagreed lately.”

“About what?” Hizashi asks.

“Lately he’s been lost. Moody. He’ll be graduating soon and he’s still not sure where his life is headed.”

Hizashi has an opportunity here.

It’s the perfect opening. He could ask if Hitoshi’s hypothetical future includes continuing his vigilante work. Whether or not his suspicion is correct, it’ll be out there in the open.

But he bites his tongue. Shouta obviously doesn’t want him to know about it, and Hizashi gets that – to Shouta, he’s still on probation, at least with as big a secret as that. He remembers what Shouta had said about vigilantes, and the choice of whether to tell those closest to you. If the roles were reversed, would Hizashi want to weigh Shouta down with that secret?

They’ve only just had their little confession, their mutual ‘I want more with you.’ He really doesn’t want to go putting a bad taste in Shouta’s mouth so soon.

Shouta’s staring at him, probably because it isn’t like Hizashi to not have anything to say; he doesn’t exist in silence often. And Shouta can see so much sometimes, it’s probably obvious Hizashi’s holding something back.

He could lie, or he could say it’s nothing, or he could pull a Shouta and not say anything to the silent question.

But he probably shouldn’t.

“What?” Shouta asks.

Hizashi shrugs. “Just thinking about...where his life is going.”

Shouta watches, waiting for him to go on.

“And all those little injuries. And how he rides his bike in the middle of the night. And how he didn’t want me to ask you about the cops who were here.”

Shouta isn’t even trying to act confused or oblivious, standing there with his hands in his pockets, heavy expression leveled at the floor.

“And how uncomfortable you both got when I was asking about vigilantes.”

Shouta turns away, ushering the cats out and replacing them with three more, then leans against the wall, arms crossed, and looks at Hizashi. There’s no anger, no apology there, just resignation, and Hizashi knows.

He exhales harshly. “You know and you’re just letting him go out there?”

“He’d be out there whether I let him or not.”

“You can’t be okay with this. What happened to ‘idiots?’”

“He is one.”

“But you won’t stop him.”

“I can’t.”

“You could, but you aren’t.”

“What should I do, forbid him from leaving the house at night?” Shouta glowers. “I can’t keep him from it. I could kick him out, tell him I never want to see him again unless he stops, but I know what he’d choose. And what would that accomplish?”

“You’re basically telling him that you support what he’s doing.”

“I do.”

Hizashi hesitates, smacked in the face by Shouta’s ferocious honesty. “And if he dies? Because you know it could happen, I know you do.”

“I do know. So should he die thinking his father disapproves of his life and wants nothing to do with him?”

“That isn’t a good enough reason to let him keep risking his life every night, it-”

“You wouldn’t know.”

Hizashi stops. “What?”

“You wouldn’t know anything about reasons for risking your life, or letting somebody else risk theirs. You wouldn’t understand anything about this.”

“I’m trying to understand, but-”

“I think you should go.”

“Go?”

“You won’t be able to change my mind on this. Will I be able to change yours?”

Hizashi’s jaw clenches at having their argument reduced to such a black and white ordeal. “No.” He can’t think of a single piece of evidence that would push him to support Hitoshi.

So much for his neutrality, his middle ground.

“Then it’s pointless to talk about it,” Shouta says, “and I think you should go.”

Shouta turns his back, signaling his exit from the conversation by kneeling to pet his cats.

Hizashi leaves.

He goes home and finds a picture of himself waiting for him, this one showing him at the cafe only weeks ago. He wonders if he should try talking to the police again, decides it isn’t worth it, and goes to bed.

Chapter Text

Nine days.

It’s the longest he’s gone without seeing Aizawa in...months.

Hizashi had texted him, two days after being punted out of the cafe. A simple ‘hey’ that hadn’t gotten a response. He’d sat and watched the looming dots of a reply being typed start and stop over and over for long minutes before they went away entirely.

He hasn’t tried again since then, but he wonders if he should, if he needs to do so for the sake of clarity. Or closure. He certainly isn’t going to go back to the cafe, not uninvited. And what would he say, anyway?

Aizawa had been right about that at least; they would only end up going in circles, neither of them budging.

Nine days…

Maybe he doesn’t need closure, at least not in the form of Aizawa telling him that whatever they had is over. That part seems...pretty inescapable. That shiny new relationship he’d been so excited about is more than likely entirely gone. Dissolved. Unsalvageable.

It’s not the worst break-up (assuming it can be called that; they’d been official for all of a week) he’s ever been through. He’d had to say goodbye to boyfriends he’d known for far longer and far better. Not knowing enough about each other was what had drawn them together in the first place. It shouldn’t be possible for Aizawa to affect him this strongly.

But if that’s true, then why can’t he sleep?

(He could tell himself the answer, if he wanted to be honest with himself – he saw a future together. He’d been able to imagine spending his life with that bewildering man and the kids he’d come to care about so ferociously.

It hurts to have to leave that possibility behind.)

Hizashi gets up, figuring there’s no point in lying there any longer. If sleep hasn’t claimed him by now, then he’s just wasting time. He’ll fix himself a midnight snack, maybe mess around with the lyrics he’s not feeling remotely in tune with anymore just to see if he could make anything of them, and then reward himself with trashy early morning tv for facing down that notebook and everything the words inside it meant to him.

He’s on his way to the kitchen when he sees a shadow move behind the window curtain.

It’s not something he’d notice anywhere else, but the way light hits that window in particular, only a portion of it is ever lit up – it faces another building, which is why he usually leaves the curtain closed. For him to see movement in that little portion of light meant something would have to practically be on the windowsill.

Hizashi freezes, trying to decipher what he’s looking at and what he’s supposed to do. Call the police? What if it’s nothing? They’d never take him seriously again, not with it being the second time he’d…

What if it’s his stalker?

The window – which he’s almost certain was locked – opens just a crack and Hizashi gasps and hopes the noise was lost in the sounds of the night outside.

He needs a plan.

Slam the window closed and lock it? Does he really want to go any closer to whoever it is?

Should he dash for his phone?

There’s always his quirk, but he’s only ever had to protect himself against schoolyard bullies. He’s never had to use it against real danger. What if he can’t control it and brings down the whole building?

He’s never regretted his decision not to go to U.A. more than now, while somebody tries to sneak through his window in the middle of the night and he can only stand there frozen because he’d been stupid enough to think this would never happen to him. Had he really thought he had some sort of immunity to being robbed or murdered just because he had a little bit of fame?

The window starts creeping further open and, his choice decided for him before he can think about it, Hizashi clumsily grabs the nearest movable object, sending a few other things tumbling to the floor, and holds it aloft. “If I scream it’ll bust the window and send you flying,” he calls out.

“Wait, it’s me.”

Hizashi falters, because he knows that voice.

“Uh, sorry. I put my hands up and everything but I guess you can’t see that. Can I come in? I can explain, I swear.”

Hizashi tears aside the curtain and finds Hitoshi staring at him, suspended from the roof by some sort of fabric, dry smile on his face.

“Were you planning to mace me with that?”

He gestures to Hizashi’s hand, which is still brandishing what he only now sees is an aerosol can of air freshener. He drops it and yanks the window open.

“What the hell?” he asks as Hitoshi climbs into his apartment. His eyes are drawn to the makeshift bandage he’s rigged up, a folded wad of gauze, turning red, held tightly against his back by more fabric tied in strips around his waist.

“Hey, so, can you sew?” Hitoshi asks.

“Can I..” Hizashi fumbles. “You had better be asking because you want me to fix your shirt.”

“Follow-up question: how do you feel about blood?”

“You...That’s…” Hizashi tugs at his hair. “Are you seriously asking me to stitch you up right now?”

Hitoshi winces, either in acknowledgment of how unordinary his request was or because Hizashi’s quirk had seeped out a little.

“Yes? It’s in an awkward spot and my shoulder is pretty much fine by now but I’m not a contortionist even on my best days.”

“Why not-” Hizashi cuts himself off. Going to a hospital is risky. Aizawa had mentioned it before – it take only one suspicious nurse taking their duty to report possible illegal activity seriously. “Your dad?” he finishes instead.

“He...has a lot going on right now,” Hitoshi says.

Hizashi crosses his arms.

Hitoshi scowls, but continues. “Listen, it’ll take a while to explain and I’ll talk about it but right now I’d rather get this,” he gestures to his back, “taken care of before it starts clotting too much because it’s gonna be a bitch to get this thing off after that.”

“One more question first. How the hell do you know where I live?”

“I thought I saw somebody following you this one time, so I followed both of you but it turned out to be nothing, he walked right by your place.”

“Why were you even watching me?”

“...Listen, it wasn’t a crazy stalker fan thing, it was a ‘vet the guy who wants in my dad’s pants’ thing and I would have done it to anyone. Not my fault you just happen to be famous.”

“That’s...actually a little sweet,” Hizashi says, softening.

“That’s me, sweet as can be.” Hitoshi gives him a sarcastic thumbs up. “So will you help me?”

“I can try, I guess? But you should know I’ve definitely never given someone stitches before.”

“It’s not so hard, really. I’ll talk you through it.”

They end up with Hitoshi perched on the edge of the bathtub, Hizashi sitting behind him. He grimaces when he sees the wound, a diagonal gash that any other person would have chosen not to scale a building with, and goes a little pale when it’s time to actually do the job, all gloved up and needle in hand as he takes a few deep breaths.

(He’d decided he didn’t want to get into why Hitoshi carries around a tiny container that holds a curved needle, fishing line, and alcohol swabs.)

But with a final assurance from Hitoshi, he pinches the skin together and begins. The first stitch goes through with only the sounds of Hizashi’s little noise of disgust and Hitoshi’s long, slow exhale.

“So talk to me,” Hizashi says. “Why couldn’t you go to Aizawa for this? Because I bet he’s done it for you before.”

“He has.” Hitoshi takes a second to gather his thoughts. “He told me what happened. That you figured it out and you guys fought about it.”

Except it hadn’t really been a fight; it hadn’t had time to progress far enough for that.

“He and I don’t really talk about it much, but when we do, it’s usually because we’re arguing about it. He doesn’t want me out there.”

Hizashi thinks back to the argument, to Aizawa saying he supports his son. He’d been defensive, on edge from the start, but he’d also referenced his own helplessness to stop Hitoshi.

“So why do you do it?”

“I never wanted anything else. And I almost had it. I was almost a hero, and he helped me get there, but…” Hitoshi grunts, frustrated. “There’s a lot I need to tell you and most of it Dad probably wouldn’t want you to know. At least not from me.”

Hizashi’s quiet for a moment, thinking that the ‘getting to know you’ game doesn’t really matter anymore, then ventures his conclusion. “He used to be a pro hero. Right?”

“...Yeah.”

“He stopped after he got injured?”

“Sort of.”

“What happened?”

“He was a teacher at U.A. That’s where I met him, he helped me transfer into the hero course. Or, I mean, I was supposed to but...this was when the war happened. Everything got so fucked. He lost his eye and his leg and barely took any time to recover.”

“So he didn’t quit once the war was over?”

“Basically.” Hitoshi sighs, deep and tired, and starts to slouch before the twinge of the needle has him tense again. He makes a few false starts, and Hizashi gets it – there’s a lot to the story and Hitoshi doesn’t know how much to tell him or where to start.

“I was in that war, too.”

Hizashi’s hand falters. Of course he’d known students had been fighting, everyone had known, but he’s never personally known a kid who’d been tossed into that shitstorm.

“And once everything was over,” Hitoshi continues, “the system was totally messed up and nobody know what to do with us. The students, I mean. And there was all this...Just so much bullshit. A lot of political bullshit went on and what happened in the end was that everyone in the hero classes got a license.”

Hizashi slumps as he understands. “You hadn’t gotten to transfer in.”

“Dad fought for me. I had a provisional license back then, but apparently that didn’t matter. They said the ‘special circumstances’ only applied to the hero classes and I would have to earn my license the normal way.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Hitoshi hesitates, and Hizashi sees his fingertips dig deeply into the fabric of his pants. “There’s always been...a lot of drama around my quirk. Melodrama, really. And it’s not important why, but the chances that I was denied a license just for the reasons they said and not because I’m me were...Dad and I both knew that if they weren’t going to give me one after what I did in the war, they were never going to give me one just for finishing school.

“So he quit. He just stopped being a hero. Turned in his license and said he was done with that life. He quit teaching, too, and...he didn’t have a great time for a while after that. I mean, he wasn’t…he was okay, just…he was dealing with a lot at once. Even Eri noticed. Eventually my aunt and I pushed him a little and told him to try something totally different from that life, something he hadn’t ever considered for himself before. And then one day he comes home and says ‘hey pack up, we’re moving’ because he bought a shop with an apartment above it and he’s starting a cat cafe.”

Hizashi imagines the scene and chuckles. “I’m all done back here,” he says as he puts down the needle. Hitoshi sits next to him. “Is that when you started doing this?”

“Not quite. It took a while for things to settle down after the war, and once school was starting again, they gave students the option to take time off. I took it, partly because I was pissed about the license shit but also because by then I could tell Dad was already struggling with everything. I kinda helped take care of Eri for a while there. And then when it was time for me to go back to school, I didn’t want to because I didn’t see much point in it. But Dad was pretty damn adamant about it, so I compromised and convinced the principal to let me basically test out and graduate early.”

Hitoshi sighs and bites his cheek. “Looking back, I guess I kinda see I wasn’t doing so great either. I’d pretty much...just given up after realizing they were never going to let me be a hero, so after Dad started the cafe, I was just going to work there with him. And that would just be my life, same as him. But he wouldn’t even let me help out unless I was also getting a degree in something. I accused him of trying to live vicariously through me even though I knew he just wanted to make sure I was keeping my future open. Or I know that now, at least.

“But I was angry at him and at basically everything. So I started sneaking out at night and doing what I’d wanted to since I was a kid.”

“He didn’t know?” Hizashi asks.

Hitoshi shrugs. “I’m not sure when he figured it out. Maybe he knew since the first night. I learned everything from him, so...Anyway, one time when he was saying goodnight he also said ‘be careful’ and then looked surprised he’d said it. So I didn’t bother hiding it so much after that.”

“And you’ve never talked about it?”

“Well. In a way, yeah. He’s never sat me down and asked me why, and I’ve never asked what he thinks. I mean, I know what he thinks. Anytime I come home a little banged up, which he used to do all the time, he has a whole meltdown and starts lecturing me, but then every time I tell him I’m not gonna stop, he just says ‘I know.’”

“But why do you do it?” Hizashi asks. “I know you said it was your dream, but is it really that important to you?”

Hitoshi smiles, but it’s strained, and not just from the pain in his back. “I guess it’s hard to understand if it was never really your dream.”

But it had almost been. It had been so close to being his dream that he’d applied to U.A. He’d just decided to chase after a different dream.

And he’d achieved it. He had what he wanted.

Hitoshi was told he could never have what he wanted.

“It is that important to me,” Hitoshi continues. “And it isn’t just something I feel like I have to do because I put in all the work to make it happen. It’s more than that.

“Dad gave it up because of me. I know I wasn’t the whole reason, and I know I don’t owe him anything, but he was making a statement because of what they did to me. That’s how much he believed in me. And that matters to me. It’s important to me. I won’t stop.”

Hitoshi’s looking at him with more steel in his eyes than Aizawa’s ever shown him, the spark of passion undercut by the kind of determination only found in those who’d had no choice but to call upon it.

Hizashi looks away. “I guess I see where you’re coming from, even if I don’t really get it.”

“I’ll take it.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you’re here instead of at home.”

“Right.” Hitoshi winces. “So. I’ve kinda been avoiding him.”

“The whole time? Ever since he and I…?”

“Yeah. I figured being around me and thinking about how it’s really my fault that you broke up would only remind him of how much he disapproves of all this. Especially when I come home hurt.”

“You thought if you went to him tonight it would lead to another argument and he’d blame you for what happened between us.”

“And why shouldn’t he? But I also thought maybe I could convince you to talk to him again.”

Hizashi’s mouth goes tight.

“Things were okay before, right?” Hitoshi pleads. “You would have been fine if he hadn’t had to defend me.”

“So basically,” Hizashi says, “you want us to get back together so you don’t have to face the guilt of your dangerous and illegal occupation being the reason we went down in flames?”

Hitoshi’s eyes go wide and he struggles for words, but gives up and looks down at the floor, biting his lip. He looks so much younger like that, dejected, that Hizashi almost apologizes for being too harsh.

“It wasn’t actually your fault,” Hizashi says.

“I’m really not seeing how you came to that conclusion.”

“You didn’t break us up. You can’t hold yourself responsible for our emotions. You didn’t make me feel the way I do.”

Hitoshi picks at his thumbnail until Hizashi nudges his knee to get him to talk. “I was hoping I could change your mind about it, if you knew more about how it started. Or at least give you something to think about.”

Hizashi sighs. “I do have a different perspective on it now, on both you and Aizawa, but it still comes down to the same thing: I just don’t think I could ever support what you’re doing. The most I could is just not talk about it, ever, with either of you, and with something like that being bottled up, a relationship isn’t going to last.”

Hitoshi won’t look up at him, still focused on his nail.

“And I think the same goes for you and your dad. I think the longer this goes on, the more strife it’s going to cause between you. He won’t stop you, but you need to talk to him.”

Hitoshi nods, defeat and resignation flowing off him. He stands abruptly. “I should get going.”

“Home?” Hizashi follows him out of the bathroom.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m done tonight.”

“You know, you can use the door,” Hizashi says when he sees Hitoshi heading for the window he’d come in through.

The young man slows and snickers, however, eyes on something on the floor. “Paparazzi can find you anywhere, huh?”

Hizashi steps closer and sees what he’s referencing – the photo of himself at the cafe, the most recent one he’d received. Apparently when he grabbed his ‘spring breeze’ scented weapon earlier, he’d knocked his folder of photos to the floor.

“I wish it were just that. At least then I’d know where they were coming from.”

He slips the picture back in the folder with the others, then relinquishes it when Hitoshi reaches for it. “What do you mean?”

“Those have all been anonymously slipped under my door while I was out,” he explains. He watches Hitoshi poke through the old pictures and wants so much to snatch the folder back. But he won’t – no matter how little he wanted to have reminders of those few drug- and adrenaline-fueled years in his 20s staring back at both of them, Hitoshi had shared something of himself tonight, so Hizashi could deal with a few cringe-worthy memories. “It’s been going on for a few months.”

Hitoshi looks up long enough for Hizashi to see concern on his face. “And it’s not some prank or something? Somebody you know?”

“It could be, I guess, but I don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish. I told the police about it a while ago but they brushed me off. Which is kinda valid; it’s not like I’m being threatened.”

“No, just stalked.”

Hizashi looks at the cafe photo, which Hitoshi is now holding. “Not really. There’s only the one picture that’s really recent. I’m pretty sure the rest can be found online.”

“Were they sent chronologically?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Did your neighbors see anything?”

“The ones I asked said they hadn’t noticed anything.” Hizashi crosses his arms. Gone is the sullen young man who’d poured out a compact version of his life story; Hitoshi sounds more like a detective now.

“Security cameras?”

“Only at the front, which is why I didn’t bother asking management about them. If whoever it is can only come here when I’m gone, I’m not exactly in danger.”

“You weren’t, but maybe they were building up to something. They’ve completed their timeline,” he says, waving the cafe picture at him.

Hizashi scowls. “What do you want me to do, hire a bodyguard?”

Hitoshi hums, eyeing the photo one last time before closing the folder and handing it back. “When did the most recent one show up?”

“Nine days ago. I found it when I got home that night.” He doesn’t need to specify which night he means, but he can’t help but wonder what kind of message it sends to the person wanting them to get back together that he didn’t have to think about how many days it had been since.

“How long were you out of the apartment?”

Hizashi narrows his eyes. “What are you planning?”

“We just finished discussing how you don’t want to know.”

“Hitoshi, d-”

“Let me do this. You don’t have to ever be involved with me and what I do, you never have to see me again, but let me look into this.”

Hizashi doesn’t have it in him to say no. “I left around four but I’m not sure when I got back.”

“Okay.” Hitoshi nods and strides to the window, with the quick, light steps of a completely different person from the one who’d entered through it.

“Hitoshi,” Hizashi says, then hesitates. He almost backtracks and says ‘nevermind’ because he’s worried he’ll regret what he really wants to say, but he makes himself do it anyway. “If you ever need to, you can come back here.”

Hitoshi gives him a small smile and a two-fingered salute, and then he’s gone.

It’s a lot to digest.

He’d guessed Shouta’s past as a pro. He just hadn’t known the extent of it.

He still doesn’t, really. Hitoshi had confirmed his suspicion and explained the end of Shouta’s career, but not the beginning. Not what had shaped him into a hero, the years before he became a father. Barely anything about the dark period between leaving that life and buying the cafe.

Would it make a difference? Would adding those colors to the painting in his head change how Hizashi feels?

He can’t imagine having any kind of revelation that will suddenly make him say ‘oh, I didn’t know that, I was wrong, you’re entirely justified in supporting your son’s proclivity to risk his life every night and it won’t ever be an issue between us again, now let’s kiss and make up.’

But there is something that’s tugging at him, a nail of a detail a corner of his mind had gotten snagged on.

Shouta had said he wouldn’t be able to stop Hitoshi.

Hasn’t Hizashi already accepted the same? That he can’t get through to Hitoshi and he’ll be doing it no matter what?

Hizashi hadn’t tried to stop him. He’d let him in and stitched him up and asked him why and hadn’t tried to say ‘look what happens, it isn’t worth it.’ It hadn’t even occurred to him to try dissuading him, because he’d known it wouldn’t make a difference.

If he can see that from one conversation, what does Shouta see every day?

The following evening, Hizashi leaves his apartment and heads for the cafe.

He doesn’t make it there.

Chapter Text

Hizashi’s head is pounding.

It takes him a few seconds of blinking to realize he has no idea where he is, and even then, awareness comes in stages – his mouth is unbearably dry, his arms are stuck uncomfortably behind him, he’s upright and leaning against a cold, hard wall. His memory doesn’t immediately let him know how he got where he is, but he smells alcohol and that’s enough.

He hadn’t been blackout drunk in...probably close to a decade.

If he’d never actually been an alcoholic, can he still call it a relapse?

And where the hell is he? It looks like a warehouse, huge with a high ceiling, with pallets and boxes stacked up on either side of him so that he has a pretty limited view. His first thought is a rave, because he’d been to more than one in a place just like it.

But trying to stand up makes him realize he hadn’t just passed out with his arms strangely positioned; his hands are tied behind him, bound to some kind of pipe running along the bottom of the wall. His eyes widen despite the flickering lights way overhead wreaking havoc on his headache.

It probably says a lot about his inner nature that his first assumption is that there’s been some sort of quirk accident and he’s been tied here for safety, either his or others’.

He hears a voice say “Oh, you’re awake!” and looks up to see a woman walking over to him. She looks friendly enough – she’s smiling gently, and she obviously knows what happened to him, so that’s good, right?

It’s not until she says “How’s your memory? I tried not to slip you too much, but the dose runs a little differently in everyone” that Hizashi realizes he’s been fucking kidnapped.

He stares, but the woman stares back, apparently waiting for an answer. Hizashi has no answers, only questions, ones that don’t seem inclined to make the journey from his mind to his mouth. He turns his head to look around again, hoping something will give him a clue, trigger a memory, but the only new knowledge to be gained from reading the boxes around him is that he’s surrounded by crates upon crates of beer.

The woman snaps in front of his face, rudely refocusing his attention. “What do you remember?”

“Uhh,” Hizashi says cleverly, the sound vibrating his chest and startling him a little closer to coherence. “Clothes?” He looks down at himself. “Clothes.”

And that’s about it – a vague memory of getting dressed, then he was waking up.

His questioner doesn’t look pleased by his deeply intelligent reply. “I guess it affects you pretty strongly. You must have an awful headache, then,” she coos, reaching out to cup Hizashi’s cheek, and despite having officially dragged the situation over the line into ‘creepy’ territory, her tender touch doesn’t feel so bad, actually.

Well. He’d always wondered if he’d end up having one of those stalkery fans.

“Um.” Hizashi blinks. “Where am I?”

“Oh, don’t worry!” she says, and she really does sound like she’s trying to be reassuring. “This is just a stopover. We’ll leave soon, I just wanted to make sure you weren’t going to make a scene or anything.”

“Where are we going?” Hizashi asks. The fog in his head is starting to dissipate, but that only means he can see more clearly how bad his situation is and how he has plenty of reason to start panicking.

“Somewhere safe. We won’t be bothered. Once you feel-”

“Who are you? What did you do?”

“My name is Kaname. We’re going away.”

“Why?”

“So you won’t have to spend time with anyone else. You can sing for me.” Something moves on his cheek, and Hizashi starts before realizing she’d never moved her hand away and is now rubbing his face like a lover. “Just me.”

“Sing?”

“You have such a beautiful voice. But it’s so underappreciated. It isn’t fair to you.”

“It’s not fair?”

“I’ve seen them,” Kaname says. She stands up and paces a few steps away. “All those nasty comments and stupid trolls. Disgusting.”

Hizashi’s head may still be throbbing, but he has a feeling it’s not whatever he’d been drugged with that’s making his captor so difficult to follow. “You don’t like that I’ve got haters?”

“You shouldn’t have any! They don’t get it, they don’t understand. Your work is amazing.”

“Um. Thank you.”

Hizashi looks at his surroundings again while Kaname is pacing. He’s pretty sure struggling and fighting back only works during the actual act of kidnapping, but what about now? If she doesn’t want to hurt him, he doesn’t need to be compliant, right? And it doesn’t feel like she’s done anything to his quirk. Probably not, if she’s so hung up on his voice. So he at least has that, though even if he incapacitates her, he’ll still be tied to the pipe.

Maybe going along with her would make her let her guard down entirely. If he acts grateful that she’s ‘rescuing’ him from his cruel life, she’ll let his hands free and he can catch her unaware.

Or he could just run. He should probably just run.

“You shouldn’t have to subject yourself to that,” Kaname says, more to herself than him, shaking her head as she stalks back and forth. Hizashi decides not to point out that he’s used to finding a few vicious and hateful comments on various social media posts; he’s never been so egotistical as to believe he’d be universally loved. “You don’t deserve it.”

“Thank you,” Hizashi says, loudly enough to get her attention. She stops and looks at him, eyes wide. “For saying that. I’m, uh, I’m touched. That you’re so...enthusiastic.”

Kaname puts her hands over her heart. “I would do anything for you.”

“So you…” Hizashi casts around for a better way to phrase ‘kidnapped,’ “took me away? From all of that stuff?”

“Yes!” She smiles like she’s finally gotten through to him. “You don’t have to worry about people like that anymore.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I did.”

“That’s...super. I super appreciate that. But you know, I have an idea: what if you came and worked for me? Like PR or something. I bet you’d be great at-”

“No.” Kaname’s perkiness drops away, her voice hard. “This is the only way.”

“Oh.” Hizashi swallows hard. “Well. Um. If you think that’s best. So what are we doing here, then?”

“It was just in case you didn’t want to come with me. If you woke up and panicked because you didn’t understand, I thought maybe you wouldn’t like me. That’s what happened before, but I learned. I know what I’m-”

“So you’ve done this before?” His voice squeaks. That thought he’d had about her not actually hurting him has been thoroughly squashed beneath the boulder of Kaname’s instability.

“It was before I found you!” she exclaims, wringing her hands. “I was stupid back then, I thought I was in love, but you’re the only one now, I swear!”

“Okay! I believe you!”

“So you’re not mad?”

“Mad?” Hizashi tries to fake a laugh and it comes out as more of a wheeze. “No, you found me eventually, right? The past is the past.”

“So you’ll come with me, then?”

“Of course I will! Just untie me and let’s go!”

Kaname’s smile fades, her brow creasing.

Hizashi’s grin is so fake it’s like he’s cut out a magazine page and plastered it onto his face. “So, uh...where are we going?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she says. “I have to put you under again.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I do.”

“Why? Don’t you trust me?”

“Of course I do!” Kaname’s expression crumples with anguish. “But if you know where we are then you could...I have to.”

“No, don’t!” Hizashi shouts. He feels his quirk rumble up his throat a bit, but more importantly, when he tries to jerk his hands in front of him in an instinctive motion to ward her off, he feels the pipe shift just a little.

“Don’t you want to come with me?” Kaname asks.

“I do. So much. But I want to spend time with you. I don’t want to be asleep. Don’t you want that?”

She watches him, wary but paused for now. “None of the others trusted me like this.”

“Well, they were idiots. I trust you. That’s why you sent me all those pictures of me, right?” he asks, praying he’s on the right track. “You were trying to, uh, prove to me that you...know everything about me? And that you’re not just some random stranger? Which means I can trust you. Because you’ve been a fan for so long.”

Kaname looks away, giving off shame instead of the grateful understanding Hizashi had been aiming for. “But I haven’t been. I wanted to prove to you that I’m dedicated and that I love your past as much as I love you now, but I haven’t been there since the beginning. I didn’t know who you were back then. Only the last few pictures were ones I took. The rest were lies. I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay!” Hizashi ejects. “I understand! I still trust you.”

She studies him, sucking her lower lip into her mouth as she debates, but eventually her shoulders sag. “But I can’t trust you.”

She pulls a needle from her sleeve and comes toward him. Hizashi yanks at the pipe again but it doesn’t give, so he takes a deep breath in. He may not know the limits of his quirk, but he knows it’ll affect her a lot more than it will him.

He waits until she’s right in front of him, bending down, and braces himself against the wall, but suddenly Kaname is being jerked out of the way by an off-white cloth he recognizes but can hardly believe.

Hitoshi?

Kaname is whirled behind a pallet of wood, out of sight. He hears a scream of rage and a lot of glass shattering, and the potent smell of alcohol multiplies, strong enough to make his stomach churn.

Hizashi pulls on his hands again, frantic. He can feel the pipe shifting; something is loose somewhere, but not enough to yank free, not since he can’t turn his hands enough to grip it solidly. Instead he contorts himself until he can kick backwards, ramming the ball of his foot against the pipe. It’s hell on the rest of his body, his wrists and shoulders throbbing from how hard he’s pulling, everything rattling each time his foot connects, his knee knocking against the floor. He’ll be feeling it all tomorrow, but it’s the thought that he can’t be sure how close he’d come to not even having a tomorrow that makes him keep kicking.

Something snaps, and Hizashi falls forward, nearly bashing his head on the floor before he’s abruptly stopped again. He winces at the pain, quickly leaning back to take the pressure off his shoulders. He looks behind him. A section of pipe has come free on one side, but he’s tied securely enough that he can’t just slide the rope off the end. But he has a little more room to move now, and breaking the rusted metal a second time is easier.

He scrambles to get his hands in front of him, not an easy feat with them still stuck to a length of metal, and studies the rope binding him. The knots are small and intricate, and there’s no way he’ll be able to tear through it with his teeth, but he brings his hands to his mouth anyway, biting and tugging. There’s a mess of drool over his wrists by the time he realizes the warehouse is silent and he has no idea how long it’s been that way.

There’d been sounds of a fight still going on while he was jerking the pipe free, he’s sure of that...Almost.

He stands up, gripping the pipe as best he can and holding it high, and flattens himself against the nearest stack of boxes, slowly creeping toward the corner so he can peek around it.

He reacts when he sees movement, bringing his hands down hard, but within a moment he’s being whirled around in a move that’s probably meant to pin one of his arms behind him again, if his hands could separate. As it is, he just yelps with pain and the reverb from his quirk has his attacker flinching away. Hizashi sucks in a quick breath to shout again and only then registers that it’s Hitoshi, apologizing with one hand held over his ear.

“Sorry,” Hizashi wheezes out.

“No, my bad, I reacted when I saw you coming at me.” Hitoshi pulls out a knife and slices through Hizashi’s bindings.

“Where is she?”

“She’s out,” Hitoshi says as he looks around, distracted. “Got her with her own needle.”

“What’s going on? Who is she? How are you here? Where is here?”

“I’ll explain later. I have to go.” He tries to push past Hizashi but stumbles against him.

“Shit, are you hurt? What happened? Where are you going?”

“She got me, too, but I didn’t think she had time to…” He shakes his head, trying to clear it. “Shit…” Hitoshi whips out his phone and types something, a text that’s almost undoubtedly garbled given the way his fingers slow and stumble before he tucks the phone away again. “You need to…” He reaches out and clutches Hizashi’s arm to steady himself.

“Don’t you dare pass out on me!”

“Cops coming. Present Mm-” he slurs, then slips out of consciousness, and Hizashi totters with the sudden weight he’s holding.

Okay.

Present Mic is in some random beer warehouse, propping up an unconscious vigilante, with his would-be kidnapper also passed out nearby. He doesn’t know where the warehouse is located, what time it is, what day it is, how he got here, how Hitoshi got here, or what the hell he’s supposed to do.

Okay. Okay.

Hitoshi was probably the one to alert the cops. Had he been trying to say they know Hizashi’s here? He couldn’t exactly go anywhere; without him, nobody would be there to say what Kaname had been trying to do.

But Hitoshi can’t be here, not when the police arrive.

Shit.

He doesn’t even know how long he has to come up with a plan.

He looks around, tendrils of panic making themselves right at home in his chest, and sees a door. Hopefully it leads outside, which has got to be better than inside, right?

He tries to hoist Hitoshi over his shoulder but ends up mostly dragging him (he’s as tall as Hizashi and definitely broader, and he’s lucky Hizashi’s just vain enough to actually bother to work out). He pushes open the door, glances cautiously around – it’s nighttime, quiet, deserted – and sees his answer.

Hizashi makes it home in the early hours of the morning, more exhausted than he expected to be given he’d been soundly asleep for half the night, but he blames it on the adrenaline. Nothing quite like being kidnapped to get that heart rate up.

(He’s counting the ordeal as his cardio for the entire month.)

He doesn’t dare go to bed though, or even relax when he sits down, perched on the edge of a chair with his hands braced on his knees, because he doesn’t want to pass out before Hitoshi shows up. He hadn’t had a moment to go back and check on him after the police were through with questioning Hizashi, because he’d practically been dragged to the hospital. He left as quickly as possible with a police escort he wasn’t exactly thrilled with having but was too shaken to try and convince them he could find his way home alone.

Playing the part of confused and distressed kidnapping victim hadn’t been difficult – both of those descriptors still feel accurate. His memories had mostly returned before he’d gotten back home, but with a lack of clarity that left the previous day feeling awfully dream-like. Which wouldn’t be a problem except he’s pretty certain he’d made up his mind to talk to Shouta, and he has no recollection of it happening. If he’s lucky, it means that he was drugged before he ever made it to the cafe, and not that there’s a hole in his memory the exact shape and size of a very pivotal conversation.

The nurses at the hospital had asked him all kinds of questions about what Kaname had used on him (since she was still too busy snoozing off her own quirk). Apparently – and this little factoid had just been the sprinkles on top of Hizashi’s trauma sundae – there’s such a range of drug- and poison-producing quirks out there that they’re damn hard to treat without either the user or a sample.

The whole hospital visit had essentially been medical professionals shrugging at him and saying ‘you seem fine, come back if your head suddenly catches fire.’

Kaname had been missing a screw or seven, thinking that drugging and kidnapping counted as rescuing someone from anything. Although whether saving him was her genuine intention or it was her way of justifying wanting him all to herself was up for debate.

He wonders if it matters which one is true, and whether her punishment will be any different.

There’s a thunk at his window, and Hizashi shoots up and rushes over to brush the curtain aside and help Hitoshi in.

“Wow.” Hizashi’s nose wrinkles. “That is rank.”

Hitoshi glares. “Whose fault is that?”

“Well I had to do something with you. You said the cops were coming!”

“So that’s what you went with!? And then you just left me there!?”

“To go to the hospital! And the police drove me home after that and I couldn’t exactly go ‘oh whoops, I forgot something, can I stuff this passed-out vigilante in the back with me?”

“But there? Seriously?”

“I did the best I could with a limited amount of time.”

Hitoshi groans. “Fine. Help me check my stitches, pretty sure I’m bleeding again.”

Once they’re back in the bathroom and he’s cleaning up Hitoshi’s wound again, Hizashi asks: “Now will you explain to me what happened?”

“After you told me about those photographs you’d been getting, I went and found...I guess you could call him an informant. He’s a really skeevy guy but he comes in handy sometimes so I leave him alone unless he really steps out of line. He has a quirk that lets him make anyone he touches practically invisible for a while. They just sorta blend in with what’s around them. Says it doesn’t work on himself. I know for a fact he’s been indirectly involved in a few minor thefts and shoplifting incidents, but without anything solid on him he’s worth more to me on the street.

“Anyway, somebody being able to repeatedly make it to your apartment and slip things under the door without anybody seeing anything strange made me think of his quirk. Even if he wasn’t involved, he might know something. So I paid him a visit and-”

“Wait,” Hizashi interrupts. “You’d better be about to say something along the lines of ‘he was very understanding and told me what I needed to know and I never touched him’ because otherwise I will rip your stitches on purpose just for an excuse to keep stabbing you with a needle.”

Hitoshi hesitates. “I...chatted amicably with him over brunch...and he felt very talkative when I asked him about repeat customers. I told him to tell me if a certain someone came back, which he of course agreed to do without anything that would resemble threats or blackmail.”

Hizashi scowls, but Hitoshi only smiles impishly before continuing. “I got lucky when she came back a few hours later. My guy let me know and I followed you until-”

“Followed me where? And did I know you were following me this time?”

“If you did then I screwed up. And I’m pretty sure you were heading for the cafe when she took you, but things are still a little fuzzy-”

“Woah, hold up, you watched me get kidnapped!?”

“I couldn’t stop her beforehand, I had to get actual evidence that she was doing something to you other than sending you pictures of yourself. So I followed her and recorded your conversation after you woke up, then-”

“Wait just a second, I’m still processing the part where you stood by and witnessed my abduction.”

“You stashed my unconscious body in a dumpster. You don’t get to be mad at me right now.”

Hizashi grumbles but shuts his mouth.

“Anyway,” Hitoshi continues, “you were never really in danger. I was right there the whole time. But I needed enough to convict her of something, so I recorded what she said to you, sent it to a contact with the police, then took her down.”

“Does this contact know he’s a contact?”

Hitoshi shrugs. “He sometimes gets tips from what always turns out to be a burner phone. He knows not to question it since it always turns into a win for him. Why, did somebody say something when they got there?”

“They just told me they’d gotten a message saying ‘Present Mic’ with an address and a recording. They asked if I knew anything about it and I assumed it was you so I said I didn’t.”

“How’d you explain what happened?”

“I just said everything was still blurry and I didn’t actually see what went down, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I only lied when I said I had no idea who was fighting Kaname. But you’re damn lucky I was actually halfway coherent, because I had to tell them I cut my hands free with a piece of broken glass, which I doubt I would have actually been able to without cutting myself.” He holds out his dirty and scuffed but cut-free palms.

Hitoshi tsks. “I probably shouldn’t have cut you free. But did they say anything about looking for me?” he asks over Hizashi’s indignant noise.

“Not that I heard, but who even knows; I was busy being shoved into an ambulance and having a panic attack because apparently quirks that need to be injected to work are rare.”

“Huh?”

“Kaname’s quirk? The sleep juice?”

“It wasn’t her quirk,” Hitoshi says.

“...Excuse me?”

“Kaname’s quirk was her strength. How do you think she actually got you to the warehouse?”

Hizashi’s jaw drops. “Then what did she drug me with?”

Hitoshi bites his cheek. “Not really sure.”

“What was that about me never being in danger?”

“They wouldn’t have let you come home if you weren’t okay, right? And Kaname was obsessed with you, she wasn’t about to kill you or anything.”

“You don’t know that!” Hizashi shouts, then sends a silent apology to any neighbors trying to sleep.

“I’m looking into it, okay? Whatever she gave you, I got it too. So promise you’ll go see a doctor if you feel anything weird and I’ll do the same.”

“I’m feeling a lot of weird things right now, but yeah, okay.”

“Then it’s a deal. Now I’m going home so I can figure out an excuse for taking a few days off without telling Dad I’ve already pulled a few stitches.”

Hizashi winces. “Do you want a shower? I can wash all that for you.”

“Nah, Dad’s used to it. Not that I get tossed in dumpsters often,” he says with a glare, “but coming home smelling awful is unfortunately not as rare as you’d think.”

“So you’re not going to tell him about all this?” Hizashi asks.

“Do you want him to know? Because there’s always a chance some journalist got a whiff of it and if Eri sees it in a news rag you know she’s going to tell him.”

Is that what he wants? There’s a flickering fantasy of Shouta being so worried about him as to show up at his door all flustered, hugging him close with relief. But he tosses the thought away. Shouta wouldn’t do that. If they’re going to speak again, it’ll have to be Hizashi going to him.

“Don’t tell him,” he says eventually. “Or at least don’t tell him it was me.”

Hitoshi shrugs. “Okay.” He makes his way back to the window, but Hizashi stops him before he leaves again.

“Thank you. For taking the photos seriously when I didn’t think they were a big deal. And for saving my life, probably.”

Hitoshi shrugs. “Saving people is what I do.”

And then he’s gone. Hizashi closes the window, locks it, and flops onto his bed.

Saving people is what I do.

He has to admit some things have changed. Before, the image he’d had of a vigilante had been something close to what Shouta had described: someone too young and too cocky to be out on the streets looking for a fight. Now, that image has a new filter over it, changing the focus, blurring some things and sharpening others.

What would have happened without Hitoshi? What if he hadn’t skirted the law and gotten his intel through less-than-legal means from a less-than-law-abiding citizen?

It doesn’t change the facts. It’s dangerous. Hitoshi had come after him a day after getting sliced open to rescue him from someone with superhuman strength just because it needed to be done.

But Hizashi himself had once posed the question of whether if made a difference when a vigilante was somebody who knew exactly what it meant when they made their choice.

When the cops had dropped him off at his apartment, one had lingered for a moment before asking: “Hey, I know you said you didn’t really see the guy who showed up, but did he maybe have an eyepatch?” And when Hizashi said he really couldn’t be sure, the other had shaken his head as they left, saying to his partner: “How many times are you gonna do this? I’m telling you, he hung it up for good.”

“And I’m telling you, I know what I saw.”

“The man runs a cafe now, dolt.”

“By day, yeah.”

“Right, and by night he’s obviously a vigilante.”

“Shut the hell up, man, I saw the scarf.”

“Just give it up, that was months ago.”

The interaction might have made Hizashi laugh, because they had to be talking about Hitoshi – he’d said he’d learned everything from Shouta; whatever that scarf was, it must have been passed down to him.

He might have laughed, but earlier that night, walking out of the hospital, Hizashi had thought he’d seen it as well – that strange off-white cloth draped around someone’s neck, someone with long, dark hair. A flicker of a moment, a double-take, and there’d been nobody there.

He’d chalked it up to exhaustion and the aftereffects of the drug at the time, and he’d been preoccupied with worrying about Hitoshi. He can’t be certain he’d actually seen anything at all.

He isn’t sure what to feel about it.

But he knows he needs to talk to Shouta even more than he had the day before.

Before that, he needs sleep. And when he wakes up, there’s something he needs to take care of before they have that talk.

Chapter Text

Ah, middle school.

Hallways full of memories. Classrooms full of dreams. A cafeteria full of inside jokes.

Hizashi had had some big dreams back then, dreams most of his classmates hadn’t thought he’d achieve. He knew this because they’d all decided to tell him. Repeatedly. In several different ways.

But that was then.

This is now: fully decked out as Present Mic from his eyeliner to his chunky boots, standing in a middle school hallway waiting to pull a heroic stunt.

(And maybe live out some vicarious revenge.)

He starts to pull out his phone but stops, reminding himself why he’d risked being late to this little endeavor: so he wouldn’t have time to stand around and stare at a certain text, pondering the meaning of receiving a ‘Hey’ from a certain man, because there were certain facts that turned that simple ‘Hey’ from innocuous to incomprehensible.

The facts: they were no longer a couple (or an item, or boyfriends, or whatever they had been), they hadn’t spoken in over a week, Hizashi’s life had been saved by this man’s son not twelve hours prior to receiving the text, and Hizashi had seen or possibly hallucinated someone who might have been Shouta at the hospital, where he had no business being.

To receive a text after that couldn’t possibly signify anything casual.

But he can’t think about that right now.

A bell rings, and Hizashi pulls out his coolest smirk, slipping his hands in his pockets and leaning back, one foot braced against the wall.

Kids start coming out of classrooms, some stopping entirely to stare, many bumping into classmates as they watch him instead of where they’re going. He hears excited whispers of his name, but his attention is focused on the door in front of him and on watching a certain girl’s face light up when she sees him.

“Mic!”

“Hey, little listener!” He lifts Eri into a hug and swings her around, purposefully drawing as many eyes as possible their way.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s been ages since we’ve seen each other and the lovely lady up front said I could hang out with you for lunch.” It had taken a bit of persuading, since the woman had been a little older than his typical fan base, but he’d gotten lucky that the principal’s kids were big fans.

Eri leads him into the cafeteria and over to a corner, which might be her attempt at a little privacy. He can tell she desperately wants to ask him about where he’s been and what happened between him and her father, but they’re packed too closely to other students, and kids keep approaching him every few minutes.

So they pass the time like they would at the cafe – chatting about Eri’s classes, the cats, Hizashi’s show – until he sees the look on Eri’s face turn stony as she turns her attention down to her food.

“Excuse me, Present Mic?”

He turns, plastering on his public smile, and finds a trio of girls standing side by side.

Showtime.

“I just wanted to say that we are such huge fans of yours,” the middle girl says. “We know all your songs and we listen to your show on the radio all the time.”

“Aw, I’m flattered! I always love meeting fans.”

“Would you sign this for me?”

The girl holds out a notebook and Hizashi scrawls an autograph. “Say, do you three know Eri?” he asks. Eri scoffs, apparently louder than she’d meant to, because she cringes minutely and her eyes flicker up to the girls.

“Of, of course!” the ringleader says. “We’re friends! Right, Eri?”

“Friends?” Her incredulity is obvious, and Hizashi can guess that under the table her fists are clenched, but once she catches the little smirk he sends her way, she takes a breath and folds her hands demurely on the table. “Right. These are my three best friends I told you all about.”

“Well that’s great!” Hizashi crows. “You three seem really sweet. I’m glad I won’t have to step in again,” he adds as he looks at Eri again. “Last time was not pretty, huh?”

Eri hesitates, no doubt questioning where he’s going, but one of the trio asks him “What last time?”

“Oh, she didn’t tell you? There was this girl who was harassing her and after I found out about it, hoo boy, let’s just say I took care of it.”

“What’d you do?” the same girls asks, and gets a slight nudge from Middle for it, who looks like she might already be catching on.

“Oh, I won’t go into detail, but c’mon, when you’ve got as much influence and money as me? You can make things happen. A few bribes to the right people and that kid’s life was ruined. Humiliated in front of her entire school. Everyone found out exactly how insecure she was and why she felt the need to be a bully and man, her reputation got trashed. It got so bad her parents sent her to a different school. I’d even threatened to put her name on my show, just to make sure as many people as possible knew what an awful little brat she was.”

So he couldn’t actually, do that, legally, but a little white lie about having threatened to? He could get away with that.

“I actually almost felt sorry for her, but I mean,” he says, lowering his glasses and looking over top of them just for dramatic effect, “nobody fucks with Eri and gets away with it.”

He pauses, enjoying the girls’ nervous fidgeting, then snaps back into a bright grin. “Eri, why haven’t I ever seen these three at the cafe? Girls, you have to come, those babies are so precious. And I’m there all the time because her dad is a total fox,” he finishes in a stage whisper, hand by his mouth as if sharing a secret.

The girls mutter their assent and trip over themselves in their rush to leave. When Hizashi turns back to Eri, she has both hands over her mouth, trying to stifle her laughter.

He’s late.

He’d taken too long trying to decide on an outfit and cursing his ever-expanding wardrobe, so that despite rushing to the cafe, he arrivesso closely after the doors are locked that Shouta’s still walking away from the storefront.

In the back, Hizashi meets Hitoshi’s eyes and the younger man smiles gently. Eri spots him then as well, but before she can say anything, Hitoshi’s hand claps down on her shoulder and he says something to his father before leading her away.

Shouta stops for a moment, then turns around.

He does nothing at first, only stares.

So Hizashi does nothing in return except stare back and curse himself for not texting him back and just showing up instead, as if being dramatic would solve anything.

He’s maybe half a second away from just sending Shouta a pathetic smile and walking away, ready to spend the next week wallowing again for being so hopeless, when Shouta finally moves. He unlocks the doors, and that he locks them again behind Hizashi does a little to calm him down. That Shouta is the first to mutter “Hey” does more.

“I want to-” Hizashi starts, but Shouta holds up a hand.

“Let’s go up.”

Hizashi follows him up to the apartment, taking a better look around this time as they head for the kitchen. It’s about what he expected, between meticulous and chaotic. There’s been an attempt at making the space inviting – a blanket carefully folded and draped over the back of the sofa, a tablecloth with only a single stain he can see – but there’s also a few coffee mugs sitting out, dishes in the sink, and Eri’s schoolbag on the table (and a quick peek into what must be Hitoshi’s room as they pass reveals plenty of clothes on the floor).

“Eri told me what you did for her,” Shouta abruptly says as he starts a pot of coffee. “Thank you for that.”

Hizashi shrugs. “No big deal.”

“It is. My advice would have been to ignore them, but she never even told me in the first place.”

“Well, you’re her dad. It’s your job to tell her to take the high road.”

“You’re a celebrity,” Shouta shoots back. “Shouldn’t you be telling everyone to take the high road?”

“I got inspired. There can be times when the high road isn’t the right way to go.”

Shouta studies him, but lets the comment go. “From how Eri explained things, I gathered you’re more well known than I’d thought.”

“Oh?”

He sighs, shakes his head. “That’s a lie, I looked you up.”

Hizashi smiles and leans an arm on the counter. “So you were thinking about me, eh?” He waggles his eyebrows, and Shouta shoots him that scowl he’d been missing.

“I don’t usually fuck and forget.”

“Me neither,” Hizashi says. “But I didn’t look you up.”

“Which is why, if you want to know something, I’ll tell you.”

Hizashi’s silent while Shouta pours them each a mug. “I do and I don’t,” he finally says. “Hitoshi told me you were a hero. Well, he confirmed it. He told me a little about the war and after it.”

Shouta takes a long sip. “A lot was going on. It messed me up more than I-”

“Wait.” Hizashi sets his mug down. “I don’t need to know. Anything about you, about what happened to you, just...I do want to know, but not as some kind of remuneration for anything. If it’s important to you, then I’ll find out eventually. Same way I found out everything else I know about you. All that can come later, if we have one of those.”

Shouta’s fingers drum against his mug. “I’d like to,” he says, quiet, and Hizashi’s pretty sure coffee has never made him feel this warm.

“Me too. So right now, we only need to talk about Hitoshi. You said I wouldn’t understand, but I can try to, at least.”

Shouta takes another long sip. “Did you stitch his back?”

“...So you saw.”

“I did, and I confronted him. I’m guessing he told you about my past in exchange, and now you’re here.”

“Now I’m here.”

“I figured your mind was made up about wanting nothing to do with the situation.”

Hizashi sighs. “So did I.” Except it turns out that falling in love and being kidnapped can both easily fit under the umbrella of life-changing events. “Hitoshi said the whole thing with his license was just a catalyst for you quitting.”

Shouta nods. “With just my leg, I can’t say what I might have chosen, but that life was never going to be the same for me with one eye and my quirk not even half as powerful anymore. And I had both him and Eri in my life by then.”

“So you understand firsthand how dangerous it is but you still support him.”

“I made the choice to give it up. I picked something different, and it worked out for me, in the end. Hitoshi never had that choice. It was made for him. I might have ended up going the same way if it had happened to me. There’s a…” He shakes his head, distant. “Everyone becomes a hero for a different reason, but it always comes from the same thing: because it’s what you need to do. There’s this drive that pushes you and…”

Shouta sighs, giving up. “I’ve never tried explaining this. It’s a feeling, and I don’t know how to explain what a feeling feels like. Some people have it and some just don’t, and Hitoshi has so much of it. I could see that the first time I met him.

“I guess that isn’t really fair to you,” Shouta continues before Hizashi can speak. “Saying it’s impossible to understand unless you’ve felt it is just another way of telling you you’ll never get it. Sorry.”

Saving people is what I do.

“But you understand it,” Hizashi murmurs. “And that’s why you’re so sure you wouldn’t be able to stop him.”

“The truth is I’ve never been able to bring myself to ask him to. I tell him to be careful, I yell at him for being stupidly reckless, I’ve told him that it scares me sometimes, but I’ve never told him to stop. I don’t think I can.”

“So you help him instead?” Hizashi asks. The shape of the puzzle pieces says they should go together, but the picture looks all wrong. He can’t make it work.

“I can’t ask him to stop,” Shouta says, “but I can be there for him. Believe in him, support him and always let him have somewhere to come home to where people care about him, so that maybe he’ll remember to be careful for his family’s sake. If this is what he needs to do, then I’m going to do everything I can to make sure he does it as best he can.

“Maybe what I should be doing is trying to stop him, but I’m not going to. When I was his teacher, I helped him chase his dream. As his father, I can’t push him away for choosing to live out that dream. I won’t.”

Hizashi contemplates his coffee. “When I kinda blew up at you about this, I had an inkling you’d worked in the hero business somehow, but I was really only thinking of you as his dad. And I couldn’t get how someone could let their kid live his life like that. Or how I could ever see something in someone like that.”

Shouta ducks his head a little, his curtain of hair hiding his profile just a bit more.

“It changes things,” Hizashi continues, “knowing what happened and knowing you had this whole other viewpoint of him as your student before he was your son. And I get that it isn’t straightforward for you. It’s still hard to accept, speaking as someone on the outside.”

Shouta says nothing.

“You said you get scared,” Hizashi murmurs.

“I do. Every time I see so much as a bruise I want to lock him up just to keep him safe. But if I could change things so that he decided on his own that the risks weren’t worth it, I wouldn’t. He wouldn’t be the same kid.”

Hizashi has to smile at Hitoshi being called a kid. “That feeling you said drives heroes. Do you still feel it?”

Shouta glances his way, a little surprised, but says “All the time” with complete certainty.

“Ever think about getting back out there?”

At first Shouta seems confused, almost suspicious, narrowed eyes leveled at Hizashi before he drops his gaze and smiles, though his is a bit more sardonic than Hizashi’s, nostalgia plucking at memories. “Sometimes. If only to watch his back. But I won’t. All I have to do is think about Eri and I have no desire to go back to that life. This is who I am now.”

‘And I like who you are now,’ Hizashi almost says, but Shouta speaks again.

“Although I’ll admit sometimes I’ve wondered if some part of me isn’t trying to live out my old dream through him, but ultimately I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does.”

“How?”

“He thinks you do want him to stop. Actively, not in the ‘in another lifetime’ sort of way. He hasn’t tried to talk to you about it because he already knows you disapprove.”

“He said that?” Shouta asks.

“He told me he isn’t doing it because he feels like he owes it to you or anything like that, and I believe him, but it’s easy to see he’s trying to live up to your legacy and everything you used to want for him, whether he realizes it or not. If you said something, if you told him everything you told me, it would have a bigger impact than you think. You matter a lot to him.”

He watches Shouta take that in, conflict plain to see.

“I’m not saying you should do that, I know you just spent all this time explaining to me why you don’t want to do that. I’m just saying that if nothing else, at least everything will be out in the open between you.”

“I guess I assumed I understood him more than I do. We’ve never discussed it beyond when I get upset with him because I’m worried. And that usually ends with him getting angry in return.” Shouta winces and rubs the bridge of his nose. “He always tells me that he’s not stopping even when I haven’t even brought up the idea,” he mutters, only realizing now where that sentiment had been coming from the whole time.

“So does that mean you’ve also never told him that whatever he wants is okay and you’ll still support him? Because the way the both of you talk about it, it’s like neither of you thinks the other will allow you to just...be okay with it.”

‘How the hell am I the one saying that?’ Hizashi thinks but holds it inside.

“Neither of us are good at talking,” Aizawa grumbles into his mug like it’s an excuse.

Hizashi chuckles but waits until Shouta looks at him again before speaking. “You did good enough just now.”

“Good enough?” he asks, the question dangling.

That sobers Hizashi up, and he turns his attention back to his coffee. “Right. I was helping you solve your Hitoshi issue and forgot this was supposed to be a ‘you and me’ issue.”

“I don’t have anything else to say,” Shouta tells him. “If you can’t get past it, then…” The end goes unspoken, but it’s heard nonetheless.

And Hizashi isn’t sure he really can get past it. He can’t deny Hitoshi saved his life, and that doesn’t mean nothing to him, but no miracle has happened; his mind isn’t really changed. He doesn’t suddenly think it’s fine.

He just understands more, so the question becomes whether he can live with it or not. If he needs the certainty of a black or white choice, or if he can put himself in a gray area.

Live with the secret or live without Shouta. Which will let him live with himself?

“When I imagine giving you an ultimatum,” Hizashi says, “as in, either you ask Hitoshi to give it up or I walk away, I don’t like how that feels.” He shakes his head. “Because I think I like you more than I dislike all of this anymore. I wish it wasn’t happening, but...I don’t want to leave.”

Shouta is beaming, for him at least, and Hizashi smiles even though he has more to say. “I’m never going to think it’s a great idea, I’m never going to be the ‘good luck, don’t die tonight’ type, but...I do also know a little of how much good he stands to do. So I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future with all this, and we’ll probably fight about it, a lot, but...I do want us to have a future.” He reaches over and puts his hand over Shouta’s, who laces their fingers together.

“Hitoshi and I have had plenty of fights about him, and it hasn’t changed anything. So I think we stand a chance.”

Hizashi laughs, kisses their joined hands, then laughs again.

“What?” Shouta asks.

“We kinda rushed the ‘getting to know each other’ stage, went straight to sleeping together, broke up and got back together, and there still haven’t been any confessions.”

“I doubt we need confessions by this point.”

Hizashi grins. “Hey. I like-like you.”

Shouta grimaces. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Hizashi only pulls him in for a kiss and feels him melt into it, arms draping over his shoulders, his mouth as warm and inviting as the little strip of skin on his lower back where Hizashi’s fingers press.

“I like you, too,” Shouta murmurs, almost a whisper, their lips brushing, and Hizashi snickers.

“But do you like-like me?”

Shouta groans and pushes him away. “You can explain to Eri why I’ve banned you from the building.”

“Okay, okay, I apologize.” Hizashi tries to pull him closer again to get back to kissing him senseless, but is stopped by a hand on his chest.

“No, wait, I still have a question,” Shouta says. “What happened with you and Hitoshi?”

“Like you said, I stitched him up and we talked.”

“No, it was more than that.”

Hizashi blinks and spends a handful of seconds watching Kaname come toward him with a needle in hand, hearing cops tell him not to leave out any details in his account, smelling Hitoshi crawling into his apartment. “What?”

Shouta frowns. “Don’t try and bullshit me. Something happened.”

Hizashi almost asks ‘How would you know?’ but stops and asks himself the same thing: How would Shouta know anything?

Hizashi had thought he’d seen him, seen that scarf at the hospital, but...even if ithad actually been him, how would Shouta have even known to be there? He only could have found out about the incident from Hitoshi, who’d supposedly been watching Hizashi all day.

Except…

Hitoshi had said he’d alerted the police before he scuffled with Kaname, so who had he been texting once he realized he was about to pass out afterward?

Had he told the man who taught him everything to look after Hizashi?

Shouta’s staring at him, the crease between his eyes not entirely out of concern, and Hizashi has to wonder how much he knows.

“You know that for a fact?” Hizashi asks, and does he imagine that Shouta’s mouth twitches?

“Call it a hunch.”

Hizashi bites his lip. He’d had plenty of time before now to decide just how much he wants Shouta to know about his little foray into the realm of creepy fans, he just hadn’t done so.

He could explain it, and they could have a serious conversation about whether he’s okay and about what sort of security measures he’ll take going forward (he isn’t about to think Shouta, a former pro hero, would wave the whole thing off and forget about it just because Hizashi is standing alive and well in front of him, waiting to be kissed), and the feeling that his heart is sending actual confetti through his veins will dim into something much less celebratory. And if Hitoshi finishes up downstairs and joins them before they’re finished, Shouta will probably have words for him as well, and it’ll be just a continuation of the conversation they’ve just (for now, at least) put to rest.

Or.

The incident could be a funny little anecdote he tells in a few years.

“That’s between me and Hitoshi.”

Shouta watches him a moment longer, giving nothing away even though Hizashi knows there’s plenty going on in his head. Eventually, he gives in and huffs with laughter. “I thought I was the cagey and infuriating one.”

“You are,” Hizashi says.”Where do you think I’m learning it from? You are cagey and infuriating and devastatingly handsome and I think I probably started falling for you on the day we met.”

Shouta smiles, says “I know,” and kisses him.

Point for Hizashi.