Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s a boy walking down the street by himself. Elementary-school age. Dark hair, bright eyes. He seems to be humming as he scuffs his sneakers against the cement. Sometimes, he kicks up a rock and watches it clatter away in delight. He mutters to himself as he goes, occasionally breaking into giggles that don’t quite reach his eyes.

Shouta wouldn’t find this notable at all if it wasn’t nearly two in the morning and if the boy wasn’t completely alone.

His rounds don’t usually take him by this section of Musutafu, but he found himself walking through sleepy residential streets anyways. Shouta resigns himself to a quiet patrol; he could probably count the number of people he’s passed in the past few hours on one hand. It’s refreshing, he supposes, after the past few days had him chasing petty criminals down dark alleyways between his undercover work.

Of course, that’s the moment he spots the boy.

The boy hasn’t seemed to notice him yet, engrossed in his play as he is. He’s invented a new extension of his game: now, he’s attempting to juggle a chip of concrete with his feet so that it doesn’t hit the ground. He’s able to kick the stone four times in a row before it flies out of reach and lands in some nearby grass.

Shouta hears the kid mutter, “Rats,” before furiously whispering new potential strategies to try and extend his air-time to himself.

“You okay, kid?”

The boy nearly jumps out of his skin, his already wide eyes gaping owlishly at Shouta. Belatedly, Shouta realizes what he must look like: dark, baggy clothing; the strange shimmer of his capture weapon draped across his shoulders; the lurid yellow reflecting off of the goggles perched on his head. He sighs quietly and crouches down to try and salvage the situation before the kid starts screaming and wakes up half of the neighborhood—

“No way! Eraserhead?!” 

That’s not what he expected.

“Yeah, that’s right. You’ve heard of me?”

The kid’s eyes are practically sparkling. It would be endearing if it wasn’t almost terrifying how they took up half of his face. “Of course! The Erasure Hero! Your technique is rated S+ and you have one of the highest success-to-mortality rates of all active Heroes! You’re one of the Heroes that waives being listed on the Hero Commission’s rankings, but it’s widely acknowledged that if you were on there, you’d be in the top twenty at least!” The kid’s eyebrows furrow after a second. “But this isn’t your normal route, is it?”

Shouta’s still mentally parsing through the sudden information influx thrown back at him, but he recovers enough to answer him. “Not quite. Are you alone?”

The kid hesitates. “It’s alright,” he says. “I’m from around here. I’m just on a walk.”

“It’s pretty late, kid. Can I walk you home?”

His eyes shoot back open. “Oh, no, I don’t want to be any trouble! It’s fine, no one cares, you should just go back to your patrol, I’m sorry for taking up any of your time!” he says all in one breath. He turns and starts running down the city block.

“Kid!” The boy freezes before turning back around slowly, not quite meeting Shouta’s eyes. The streetlight behind him floods the sidewalk with light, throwing his face into shadow that Shouta can’t quite make out. Something catches in Shouta’s throat, but he’s not sure what. A question? An offer? A plea?

He says none of those. “I’ll be here earlier tomorrow night. Ten-ish.”

The kid takes one step into the light, and Shouta can see how his expression has lit up brilliantly, how the smile that stretches across his face transforms him completely. “Okay,” he says before turning back around.

Shouta blinks, and the kid is gone.

Chapter Text

Shouta wants nothing more than to fast-forward to that night so he can go and check in on that kid again (he pointedly doesn’t unpack why he feels like he has to go so insistently. His gut has saved him enough times that he knows to listen to it whenever it twinges the way it does when he thinks about that strange boy). However, being a relatively well-known underground Hero means having duties, like being on-call after the ranked Heroes clocked out of work. 

At least he didn’t let Nemuri talk him into that U.A. job that she’d been so insistent about, even if his reasons at the time had been far more selfish than reasonable. She’d pouted about it for weeks until he promised her a favor in exchange for her shutting up about his decision to stick to ‘skulking around in his pajamas all night like some sort of shadow-gremlin-creature’, as she called it.

He hears his office door being kicked open and barely holds back a sigh. The favor in question stalks into the room, though thankfully he’s gotten much better at controlling the way sparks dance across his palms after two days of Shouta glaring his Quirk silent. 

Bakugou Katsuki is an ill-tempered kid who has never been told ‘no’ in a way that matters. Every other word of his is some sort of expletive, and he’s just as prone to blowing up verbally on whoever drew his ire as he is to actually blow something up. Shouta knows he was a moody brat as a teenager, but Bakugou takes it to a whole new level.

Which makes it even more baffling that he’s chosen to brand himself as the Explosive Hero: Pachi-Pachi.

Bakugou glares at him with none of the sweetness of his moniker’s namesake and slumps into a chair. “What dumb bullshit are we doing today?” he grunts unenthusiastically. 

Shouta replies with a scathing look of his own. “If I recall, before Midnight convinced me to send you a late internship offer, you were all set and ready to spend this week modeling for Best Jeanist while he talked about teamwork in cotton blend metaphors at you.”

Bakugou grimaces with genuine distaste before it melts back into the scoff Shouta recognizes as his mask. “Would have gotten a sick jacket out of it, probably. All you’ve got here are shitty scarves that aren’t even that comfortable.”

“Metal alloys typically aren’t.” Shouta stuffs some of the files on his desk into a random drawer, scowling when it didn't quite close. “What did you say your goals for this internship were supposed to be, again?”

The teenager kicks a foot out sullenly. “NSFW lady said something about working on subtlety and control over the narrative. Said that I needed to learn how to communicate to the public efficiently and maintain the persona I want to show everyone when I have my Hero costume on,” he muttered, parroting Nemuri’s tone perfectly without sounding mocking. 

Easy enough. Shouta’s gotten very good at separating Eraserhead from himself in the past few years, which was probably why Nemuri wants him to be Bakugou’s first exposure to Hero society anyways. “Alright. Grab a piece of paper and fold it in half.”

Bakugou glares at him for a defiant second before taking a pristine sheet of notepaper out and carefully aligning the edges of it.

“I want you to put your name on one side and your Hero name on the other.” He did so. “You have thirty minutes to write out facts about yourself that are true and facts about Pachi-Pachi that you want the public to believe are true. The Hero facts don’t have to be accurate or detailed, but there should be enough to build a narrative off of.”

The kid gives him one last look before settling into the busy work. Shouta takes advantage of the thirty minutes of quiet to fill out some of his own paperwork, signing off on statements he gave and glancing through updates to cases he’d helped out on. It’s always a monotonous chore, and he’s almost grateful when Bakugou leans back in his chair precisely twenty-nine minutes and forty-five seconds after he started working.

Shouta takes the paper and idly reads through Bakugou’s work. It’s mostly standard stuff: uses he/him pronouns, broke a tooth falling out of a tree at 3, developed Quirk at 5, moved across Musutafu at 7. He gives both lists a once-over before grunting and turning back to Bakugou. 

The kid sits in front of him, arms crossed, his default glare boring into Shouta. He observes him for just long enough to wonder exactly what had happened for Bakugou to have learned how to shutter his expression so effortlessly. He’s almost tempted to start needling him to find out. It would be simple: as guarded as Bakugou is, Shouta has years of interrogation experience and the bluntness to push past the inevitable bluster.

“Do you really want the public to know your sweat tastes sweet?” he asks instead. Predictably, Bakugou flares up in righteous indignation.

Chapter Text

The kid’s sitting on the sidewalk when Shouta walks up today.

“You came back!” he shouts, hurriedly getting to his feet. There are band-aids on his knees and on the palms of his hands, but they’re easy enough to wave off as consequences of childish mischief, so Shouta does.

“Of course I did,” he says gravely. “Would a Hero lie?”

The kid gasps, his hands flying up to his mouth. “N-no! I didn’t mean it like that!” He wilts, shrinking into himself. “I’m sorry,” he says, and to Shouta’s horror his voice already sounds thick with tears.

“No, no, kid, I’m not— that’s not what I meant,” Shouta says, trailing off lamely.

Somehow, that upsets the kid more. “I’m sorry!” he wails again, and his tears are actually streaming down his face now. “I didn’t— of course you didn’t mean it like that, I shouldn’t have assumed, I’m just— you’re so nice, why wouldn’t you mean to be nice, even if everyone else is mean—”

“Kid, breathe.” This is the worst day of Shouta’s life. He wants to reach out and do something (pat the kid’s shoulder? hold his head up for him? wipe his tears away?), but even if he is a Hero he’s still a stranger to this kid, and unwanted touch would be the best way to send the kid into a full panic-driven meltdown. Instead, he sits on the curb of the street and waits patiently for the kid to calm himself down. “You weren’t being mean for assuming the worst. It’s okay to be happy to see someone, and I didn’t mean for you to take my words so literally.” He pats the curb next to him, and the kid drifts over with a dazed expression. “How’re you feeling?”

“F-fine,” the kid hiccups, sitting where Shouta indicated. He tucks his knees under his chin. “I’m sorry if I worried you. The other kids say I’m a crybaby.”

“Crying is just an emotional response to outside stimuli.”

The kid stares at him with wide eyes. “What’s ‘stimuli’?”

Shouta barely holds himself back from wiping a hand down his face. “A stimulus is something that causes something else.”

The kid mouths the word ‘stimulus’ to himself. “So it’s not bad that I cry so much?” he asks quietly.

“No.” Shouta studies the kid curled up next to him, the way the band-aids that cling to him don’t quite cover all of the scrapes and cuts that speckle his legs. They’re unfamiliar. Maybe his observational skills have gotten worse than he thought (they haven’t, and he knows that, but there’s no logical explanation for half-healed cuts on the child he hadn’t seen the previous day otherwise).

“The other kids think it’s bad.”

“Are the other kids part of the everyone else that’s mean?” Shouta asks, raising an eyebrow.

The kid turns pink. “Um.”

“If you know they’re being mean, then what they say is meant to be mean, not right,” Shouta reasons. “You don’t have to listen to them if you don’t want to."

The kid’s eyes slip back to the pavement. “Uh huh.”

This isn’t going anywhere. Shouta tries a new strategy. “I miss crying, sometimes.”

The kid, oddly enough, looks starstruck again. “You can’t cry? Is that because of your Quirk? I know it cancels when you blink, but I didn’t think that dry-eye could be persistent. Is that why you use eye drops? Do you have something in your goggles that helps combat the dry-eye? Is that why they need to be ventilated? That never made sense to me; why wouldn’t you just use solid material to protect your eyes—”

Shouta stares at the kid. There’s drying tears on his cheeks and a fanatical gleam in his eye as he begins to ramble more and more enthusiastically about Shouta’s physical shortcomings. At least he’s cheered up a bit. “You know the word ‘persistent’ and not the word ‘stimulus’?”

The kid blinks at the interruption. “Some words come up more than others,” he says cheekily. Then he freezes and looks at the moon, of all things, with a tiny gasp. “Wait, but you’ve been here for so long already!”

“I’ve been here for ten minutes,” Shouta deadpans.

“You could have caught so many criminals in that time!” the kid says with a squeak. “Your fastest take-down was in 5.71 seconds, and your average time is around two minutes! You could have caught four people at least while I was sitting here crying.” He stumbles to his feet. “You have to get back to work— you’re a Hero!”

“I suppose I am,” Shouta mutters to himself, forcing himself to stand up. “If you want me to head out so badly, I’ll go.”

The kid nods fervently. “You have people to save!” he chirps.

“Perhaps.” Shouta stretches his legs, grimacing as they limber back up. 

“Bye, Eraserhead-sama!” the kid says. 

Shouta full-body cringes at the moniker. “Please, just Eraserhead, kid.”

The kid nods solemnly, then hesitates. “Will I see you again tomorrow?” he ventures.

“Depends if you’re here.”

Chapter Text

“Shouta-kun!”

Every three days or so (or really, whenever Nemuri calls), Shouta vaguely wonders if she’d annoy him less if he’d relented and joined U.A.’s faculty when she first invited him to years prior. Then, he remembers that she’d probably take advantage of being in the same part of the city as him and bother him every day until he submitted his resignation.

“Is there a reason your student refers to you as ‘NSFW lady’?” he asks without preamble.

Nemuri just laughs, all exhilaration and joie de vivre . “Ah, that’s my darling Bakugou-kun for you,” she says with a sigh. “Isn’t he charming?”

“That’s a word that some might use, I suppose,” he says. 

She hums. “Shouta-kun, you don’t normally call unless you need something. What’s up? Did he blow up your office or something? You’re way too calm if that’s what he did.”

“He hasn’t committed any form of arson yet, no,” Shouta deadpans. “I just wanted to ask about all of the notes I see on his file.” He’d called in a favor from Ms. Joke that morning to have his intern follow her around on whatever she’s got planned, freeing him up for the day, after seeing how long the kid's file was for someone so young.

Nemuri goes silent for a couple of seconds, which is far longer than she usually is. Then, a quiet sigh. “We shouldn’t do this over the phone. Can you meet me at that stupidly cute cafe by U.A. that we used to go to as kids? Maybe at around five tonight?”

Shouta’s first reaction is to say absolutely the fuck not. There’s no way he wants to be seen anywhere near U.A., especially by someone who definitely still stops by the very cafe that Nemuri is talking about. He’s sure she knows this, too, seeing as it had been his number two reason for declining her job offer.

Then, he thinks of the shadow in Bakugou’s eyes and wonders when he went soft.

“Fine,” he says shortly. Even if he's agreeing, he isn't going to hide his displeasure. “Five. I’ll be there.” He hangs up on her shocked excitement and immediately begins heading over.

U.A. announces itself long before Shouta gets near it, and he grimaces at the unwelcome sight of the behemoth school. Something in his chest stirs upon seeing it, but he brusquely turns away from the wistful nostalgia and heads straight for the cafe. It’s a tiny place squashed between an appliance store and a watch repair shop on the corner, its windows perpetually shaded and its wooden door worn. He steps into a dim interior that hasn’t really changed in close to ten years.

Nemuri is sitting at a familiar table, one far too large for just the two of them to claim, but Shouta just orders his coffee and slumps into the chair he'd once commandeered as a teenager. She glances up from the texts she’s reading and visibly starts when she sees him.

“Damn, Shouta, you’re actually dressed?” she says.

Shouta fixes her with a half-lidded glare, one loose strand of hair standing on end before he rolls his eyes at her. “Bite me,” he mutters, sipping his drink. “You're the one who sicced one of your brats on me for the week.”

She ignores his grumbling to make approving noises at the neatly braided bun on his head, the dark denim jacket he threw on over a black shirt, the brown pants he’d dug out of his closet. “If I’d known all I needed to do to get you to dress well was give you an intern, you’d have heard from me years ago,” she comments. 

He doesn’t grace that with an answer.

The bell on the door jingles as someone walks in. Shouta shifts to sit ramrod straight and forces himself not to check who it is.

“Calm down. I told him I was conducting a secret interview for a case here today. Said that if he showed up, he’d compromise the whole thing.” Nemuri looks at him through her eyelashes. “You’ll be fine.”

Shouta doesn’t thank her out loud, but she hears it anyway.

“So.” Nemuri sighs, putting her phone down and picking up her tea latte. “Bakugou-kun. If he manages to shake off the attitude, he’s going to be his class’s valedictorian, I can just feel it.”

Shouta’s class valedictorian was Iida Tensei, a kind-hearted man who came to U.A. knowing exactly what kind of Hero he was going to be. He tries to overlay the cheerful, idealistic boy from his past on top of the kid who glared daggers at him and is completely unsuccessful.

His failure must be visible because Nemuri chuckles at his expression. “I know, I know, but his grades are impeccable, he’s the most efficient Hero student we have this year, and he takes everything so seriously that his classmates have an entire game based on teasing him to make him crack.” She raises an eyebrow. “Sound familiar?”

“I didn’t ask to hear about his grades. I asked about his file.” Shouta’s patient, but he has to be back at his agency when Bakugou leaves or else the kid will pick up on something fishy happening. “Why does he have a rap sheet three pages long for a single semester of middle school? Since when do kids get into fights that often in middle school? ”

Nemuri taps the lid of her latte. “I don’t know too much,” she warns. “Bakugou’s parents gave me a barebones explanation and I asked Nedzu not to tell me any more details if he found out, since he hasn’t tried to fight any of my other students. I’m trying to support my class, not dig into their sordid pasts.”

Shouta leans back in his chair, gesturing for Nemuri to continue.

“Bakugou’s an angry kid,” she says softly. “Is now, definitely was when he was younger. But he’s also got one of the most unwavering moral compasses that I’ve ever seen, and a good chunk of his morals revolves around not letting others around him get hurt. According to his parents and old teachers, every fight Bakugou took part in was instigated by someone bullying another kid in front of him. Kid would throw himself in front of the victims, mouth off to get the bully to punch him instead, and then wipe the floor with them. Some of them even needed medical attention after they pried him off of them, but the school hushed it all up because Bakugou was their little shining star who was going to make them all proud. Hound Dog’s got him now, has weekly meetings with him and everything, and I think he’s helping, but—” Nemuri drains the last of her drink. “Kids don’t just come out of the womb like that, Shouta. Something happened to Bakugou, and he’s not telling anyone. I’ve got the feeling his parents don’t even know what happened to him.”

Shouta’s coffee is bitter on his tongue. “Pissed off at the world and everyone who makes it shit, huh?”

Nemuri gives him a humorless laugh and holds her empty cup up as if to ‘ cheers’ him. “Sound familiar?”

Chapter Text

The kid’s still covered in band-aids, though they’re definitely larger seeing as Shouta can see all of All Might’s face branded on his knee rather than just his smile (and he’s not sure if it’s stranger that they’ve gotten bigger or that he knows those band-aids had been discontinued more than half a decade ago).

“Eraserhead!” the kid cheers. 

“Hey kid,” he says. “You doing alright?”

The kid shrugs. 

“Other kids being nasty again?”

“It’s okay,” he says automatically. “They can’t help it. That’s just how they were taught. They’re just copying their parents.”

“Are their parents mean to you?”

The kid clams up, his entire body going stiff. He looks on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Shouta hasn’t had anywhere near enough coffee for this.

“I never got your name,” he offers instead.

The kid deflates in relief before beaming up at Shouta, previous discomfort completely forgotten. “Kacchan used to call me Izu-kun.”

“Kacchan?”

His eyes light up brighter than they had when he realized who Shouta was at their first meeting. “Kacchan’s so cool!” he gushes. “He’s my best friend, he’s going to be the greatest Hero in the WORLD one day! He's so strong, and he's not afraid of ANYTHING! His Quirk came in when we were five— it’s like candy!”

Shouta is officially lost. “How is a Quirk like candy? Can he make candy somehow?”

Izu giggles. “No, that would be silly, Eraserhead,” he says. “His hands make something that smells sweet and he can make it pop and crackle! It’s really pretty. Mama doesn’t want me to mess around with it too much— she says I could get really hurt, but Kacchan would never hurt me like that.”

“Does Kacchan help when the other kids are mean to you?”

Izu doesn’t respond immediately, even though he enthusiastically dove into all of the reasons why Kacchan is his very best friend and how he will always be his biggest fan, and the hesitation stays with Shouta far more indelibly.

“He tries,” he says. “Sometimes, he says things that hurt me too. But that’s okay, he always says ‘sorry’ afterwards, and none of the other kids do, so he’s the nicest one of all.” 

There’s something heartbreaking about how matter-of-fact Izu sounds as he navigates his thoughts. Shouta doesn’t like the foul logic he needs to convince himself the world is just when he seems to be everyone’s favorite punching bag.

“Is there any way I can help?”

Izu smiles at him. “You are! You come here every day, and you talk to me, and you’re not mean. What else could you do?”

Save you. I’m a Hero, as you like reminding me of.

The words stick in Shouta’s throat.

Izu turns from Shouta to stare into the trees beside them. The sidewalk that the kid frequents borders a small, surprisingly dense park that Shouta hadn’t known about, the name of it obscured in shadow on a sign. Shouta follows Izu’s gaze into the depths of the trees.

“What’re you looking at?” he asks.

Silence answers. When he turns back, Izu has vanished.

Chapter Text

Shouta drags Bakugou along with him when he goes on patrol early. It’s strange, squinting in the late afternoon light rather than straining to make out individual shadows after sundown, but it’s a refreshing change.

At least, that’s what Shouta tells himself.

“Do I get to chase after the extras if they’re being shitheads?” Bakugou grumbles.

“Does that fit the message you want to deliver?” Shouta promptly answers.

Bakugou barely restrains himself from either loudly sighing or loudly scoffing. “No,” he mutters petulantly.

“Then act like how you want the public to see Pachi-Pachi starting now,” Shouta says, maintaining his disinterested glancing about. “No need for journalists to write some gossip articles ten years from now about how you grew up from being an annoying asshole of a student intern.”

Bakugou snorts before closing his eyes and standing up straighter. He arranges himself into a faux arrogance befitting the Pachi-Pachi profile that he and Shouta had developed together: prideful and confident and deservingly so, a visible figure and signal for all attention, hostile or not, to be drawn to. The kind of guy everyone wants on their side.

Shouta’s not sure where the bitter boy had found this persona, but it fits him like a glove. It’s almost too easy to slip into their predestined dynamic and roll his eyes when Bakugou smirks winningly at a properly charmed passerby.

“Good start,” Shouta mutters to him under his breath. Bakugou’s smile goes a little too sharp before fading back into its brash echo.

“Fuck off,” Bakugou mutters right back.

Shouta huffs, mostly out of humor more than anything else, before his day is immeasurably ruined.

“Pachi-Pachi! Look at you dressed up, all grown-up and professional!”

Shouta feels the hair he hadn’t managed to tie down begin to float as he reflexively activates his Quirk. He quickly closes his eyes and takes a deep breath before anyone notices, but judging by how Bakugou shifts beside him he at least picks up on the suddenly tense atmosphere. When Shouta thinks he’s regained control over his temper, he slowly reopens his eyes and turns stiffly towards the person talking to his intern.

He emotionlessly documents what he sees: blond hair tied back, glasses with black plastic rectangular frames, a mustard hoodie with his radio show’s logo printed on it. The man is holding some sort of bright pink drink filled with boba and topped with cheese foam in one hand and pulling his headphones down with the other. Shouta hates that he can still recognize the brand with just a single glance, hates that he remembers buying a pair just like them years ago as a holiday gift.

That’s not Shouta anymore, though, just like how this man isn’t his high school friend anymore.

“Loudmouth-sensei,” Bakugou says, crossing his arms. Shouta mentally thanks him for his irreverence; it’ll be easier to get through this if he doesn’t have to conflate the man in front of him with the wide-eyed friend he remembers. “The fuck’re you doing here?”

“Now, Pachi-kun, you shouldn’t be cursing like that, especially in uniform!” The man waggles a finger at Bakugou, like he’s a misbehaving stray. “Who knows who could be listening!”

“Piss off,” Bakugou snorts. He turns back to Shouta. “Are we done here?”

“Not quite,” Shouta says, managing to cling to his indifferent drawl. “We still have to check in at the local agencies to make sure we’re not needed. If we have time after that, I wanted to do a quick loop around Aldera before your parents come to pick you up.”

“Kill me now,” Bakugou grunts, but he’s nodding dismissively at his teacher and dutifully following Shouta as he walks past—

“I’m glad you’re well, Shouta.”

Fuck.

Shouta reluctantly looks over his shoulder and makes eye contact with him. A hand is nervously playing with one of the strings of his hoodie, winding it around a knuckle until his fingertip turns white-red. The other is squeezing the sides of his drink.

“It’s Eraserhead when I’m in uniform. Glad to see your memory still fails you, Yamada-san,” he says, keeping his voice as flat as he could.

The man flinches so violently that his lurid pink drink spills onto its lid and all over his fingers. Shouta's lip curls distastefully at the thought of it drying into a sticky film.

Something dances at the tip of Shouta’s tongue, but he doesn’t know if it’s more cutting commentary or the beginning of an apology. Instead, he goes back to directing Bakugou down the street, past the frozen form of the man behind him.

“ Harsh , sensei,” Bakugou doesn’t try to hide the grudging admiration in his voice.

Shouta scoffs quietly.

After walking down half of another block in silence, Bakugou speaks up again. “Why’re you interested in Aldera? It’s so quiet over there.”

“I’m surprised you’ve even heard of it,” Shouta comments.

The boy flushes. “Grew up in that neighborhood,” he grumbles. “We moved away when I was still a kid, but I sort of remember it.”

Shouta looks at him out of the corner of his eyes. “Do you still know anyone there?”

“Not really. The hag’s got a friend over there still, though, so I hear about it sometimes at dinner.”

It feels like a shot in the dark, but Shouta’s used to taking those. “Would she know anyone there with a kid whose name starts with ‘Izu’? Age somewhere between six to eight, probably. I’ve seen one running around alone after dark; just wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”

It takes Shouta a few seconds to realize that Bakugou isn’t following him anymore. He turns, confused, only to see Bakugou staring at him with a completely foreign expression on his face: wide eyes, clenched jaw, trembling hands pulled into fists. He’s gone completely pale as he stares at Shouta like he’s never seen him before.

“Pachi-Pachi?” 

“I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about,” Bakugou says far too steadily, his face still white. He forces himself to rejoin Shouta with a robotic gait. “Can we get a fucking move on? I don’t want to be in this shit neighborhood for another second.”

It’s a lie and not a very well hidden one, at that. Shouta just makes a mental note to give the kid lessons on speaking half-truths and lets him lead the way down the street.

Chapter Text

Izu is standing on tiptoe at the edge of the sidewalk, staring into the depths of the park, when Shouta finds him. He still greets him with a bright, winning smile, but his gaze is soon drawn back to the trees and whispering grass.

“What’s back there?” Shouta asks.

“Dunno.” He picks idly at the Ryukyu-themed band-aid wrapped around the heel of his hand. “Something. But Mama says not to go back there after dark.” His bottom lip is stuck out in a partial pout. “But it’s important .”

“Can’t you come back during the day?”

“Nah.” Izu peers up at him. “You look sad, Eraserhead.”

Shouta blinks. “Do I?”

“Yeah. You look like Mama does when she thinks about Dad.” The kid reaches over, as if to pat him on the arm. “Did something happen?”

Did something happen? He’d gone on an early patrol with his intern, then he’d picked up a sandwich at a konbini , then he’d come over to Aldera to see Izu—

Wait.

Shouta sighs. “Yeah, I guess something did,” he says reluctantly.

“D’you wanna talk about it?” Izu plops down on the curb. “Mama always says that talking about your sads makes them easier to hold onto.”

“Your mother’s a smart woman.” Shouta crouches down next to Izu. “When I was on patrol with my intern today, we ran into someone I used to know from school.”

“Was it another Hero? You went to U.A., right, Eraserhead?”

“You know way too much,” Shouta deadpans. “Yeah. He’s a Hero now. Works in the daytime, though, so I usually avoid him.” He stares up at the waning moon. “We used to be best friends.”

“That is sad,” Izu says. “If Kacchan stopped being my best friend, I would miss him everyday.”

Shouta swallows the lump in his throat. “I don’t think Hizashi ever wanted to stop being my best friend,” he says, and just saying his name is enough to start the familiar hurt again.

“So what happened?”

The memory always starts in fragments. An echoing shrill screech, a roof brought down over Shouta’s head. Shoving crumbling drywall off of the group he was working with (the villains he was sent to infiltrate). One of the others snarling as he desperately tore chunks of building off of the slumped body of another, cursing at how “it’s always just one more fucking job with you, isn’t it Michiko?!” The taste of dust in his mouth, punctured by the smell of copper from the villain’s blood as it pools from a wound on her head. Standing guard as they huddled around a broken form, allowing them to have a single, precious minute that they should have used to flee to instead mourn the loss of one of their own.

“Every villain is a person." U.A. once organized a special assembly for its Hero Course students and invited a collection of active and retired Heroes to speak at it. Shouta doesn't remember everyone who was there, but he definitely remembers Crimson Riot.  “It might seem silly for me to say that, but it’s the most important thing you’ll ever learn. Every villain could have a parent who loves them, a child who idolizes them, or a best friend who’s never been apart from them. Villains are never born evil, no matter what it seems. If you can find the compassion within yourself to defend civilians from their deeds, then you must also find the compassion to understand that their circumstances shouldn’t completely define them.”

In the detritus of a former hideout, it's easy for Shouta to forget that he was a Hero sent to ensure that these villains would be here to be apprehended, that he’d doomed them all from the start. It was far too easy to settle into the grief that held them all softly, far too easy to murmur condolences and grip hands that needed to hold onto something lest they slip away too far. Shouta hadn't worked closely to the fallen villain himself, but he remembered her sly grins and the easy way she wrapped her too-long limbs around the others. She acted far too comfortably for them to be anything but her chosen family. Shouta could understand that just as easily as he understood the despair that surrounded the others.

He was not as close to them as she had been, but he was still human. He understood the urge to forsake survival for mourning.

When Shouta didn't immediately reemerge from the wreckage of the building with the rest of the villains arrested, the ambushing Heroes had hurried in to find him helping the others cradle their teammate’s body (their friend’s body, their sister’s body) and maneuver it out of the debris as best as they could. Hizashi had led the way, his hair starting to peel loose of the gel he’d always insisted on plastering it with, sunglasses thrown to the side and leaving his wide, panicked eyes completely visible. When he laid eyes on Shouta, his expression broke to a near-tears level of relief.

“SHOU-KUN!” he’d screamed out—

“He acted before thinking,” Shouta says softly.

Shouta’s eyes widened. He tried to spit some sneer back, find some denial to throw back in his idiot best friend’s face, but he’d hesitated for just a heartbeat too long. He felt the eyes around him turn on him, felt their overwhelming grief morph into violent betrayal.

The thing about being a wolf in sheep's clothing is that you're never quite sure how many others there are in the herd.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Shouta tried to say.

“You sure about that, Shou-kun ?” one of the villains growled. Michiko’s mask had shattered when she’d died, and he’d been carefully removing the largest shards of it from her slack face. “Seems pretty cozy with you, huh?”

“Did you know about this?” another said, taking a step away from Shouta. “Did you know they were going to bring the building down? Is that why you wanted to meet up here for the job?!”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Shouta snapped back.

“He’s fucking lying,” a third hissed, slit eyes darting between Shouta and the approaching Heroes. “I can hear his heart racing. Fucker was probably ecstatic when we agreed to be here, was probably salivating at the thought of handing all of our asses in! He's the reason why Michiko is dead!”

The first villain carefully handed Michiko’s body to another before lunging forward and grabbing Shouta by the throat, lifting him into the air with a single motion. He heard Hizashi’s horrified gasp magnified at the sight, heard footsteps begin to pick up as the Heroes approached. 

“NOT ANOTHER FUCKING STEP!” the villain roared at them, shaking Shouta like a rag doll. When they froze (when Shouta heard them freeze), he turned back to Shouta with a baleful glare. “You got one of us killed,” he growled, nostrils flaring. “Why shouldn’t we return the favor?”

Shouta didn’t respond. He was too busy choking, fighting back against his grip. In lieu of panic and primal fear, he sank into analytical dissociation.

The human body can survive without oxygen for longer than expected, minutes rather than seconds.

The man holding him had a mutation-based transformation Quirk; he could turn his hands into lobster claws with an equivalent amount of grip strength. That didn't mean that he had less time, just that it's harder to break the grip he has on his throat.

It also meant that all the villain actually had to do to kill Shouta was flick his wrist to the side and cut his head off.

The villains were right. He did lead them there. He did work with the Heroes to corner them. He did get their teammate killed. By all accounts, he should snap his neck and be done with it (Shouta's brain started to go foggy when he came to that logical conclusion). Something is staying his hand, perhaps a combination of some lingering morality and the niggling thought that Shouta had, in fact, saved him from raids before (raids that were planned to allow Shouta to gain their trust, but they had no reason to know that).

Illogical emotions were the only thing protecting Shouta from being killed on the spot for being unmasked so openly. He had to play on them, had to say something, do something that appealed to the villain, but he's being choked out he's losing his breath his head is pounding how could he speak —

Their stand-off didn’t last that long, even if it felt like he'd been held at the border between life and death for an eternity and some change. Nemuri finally shoved her way forward, arms wide and spewing hypnotic gas that swept through most of the villains and knocked out enough that the other Heroes managed to wake themselves from their mute horror and help her. 

“He nearly got me killed.” Sometimes, when he stares at the mirror, he can still see the angry dark red marks around his neck that Recovery Girl had kissed away as soon as she could.

Izu’s eyes are wide. “Oh,” he says softly. The kid is quiet for a bit. “Did he mean to?”

Shouta stares at a pebble in the road. “No,” he says softly. “But it still happened, and it was still his fault. I don’t think it matters if he himself meant to or not.”

Izu taps a toe absentmindedly as he thinks. “I think it matters a tiny bit,” he replies. “I think if he didn’t mean to and he’s very sorry, it’s okay to forgive him while still being sad that you nearly died.”

It’s not the first time that someone’s told him to forgive Hizashi. Nemuri used to call him weekly to beg him to at least talk to the guy, and Tensei would demand that they at least be civil in public. His parents had even sat him down with Hizashi’s parents and asked him to tell him what happened, not as a Hero revealing details about a case but as their son talking to his parents about something that happened to him. All of them had repeated the same mantra of “You know Hizashi, he didn’t mean for you to get hurt, that villain was the one who tried to strangle you—”

Sometimes, the air tastes like dust and blood and grief, still.

For some reason, the same sentiment sounds different, echoed by Izu. Perhaps that’s because the kid isn’t telling him to forgive Hizashi for the other man’s sake, but as a way to acknowledge what happened; that it’s okay to be upset at the person who nearly killed him, even if it wasn’t Hizashi’s hands on his throat. It feels awkward to be validated by a literal child, but some previously overlooked ache that had settled somewhere in Shouta’s spine after the botched mission begins to slowly slink away.

“I never thought of it that way,” Shouta says. “You’re a very smart kid.”

He feels a small smile come to his face as Izu sputters and denies his words.

Chapter Text

Bakugou’s parents are usually able to pick him up from Shouta’s office when it’s time for him to go on his evening patrol. They pull up and wait patiently for their son to drag himself into the backseat of their car, fuss over him while idling, and then drive off, presumably to have a cute, quaint family dinner where they discuss their days.

This time, his mother gets out of the passenger seat, pats Bakugou on the shoulder, sends him to the car, and asks to talk to Shouta.

“The brat said you were asking about our old neighborhood,” she said with a feigned casualness, leaning an elbow on the chair her son had been sitting in not ten minutes prior.

Shouta observes her for a moment. Bakugou Mitsuki isn’t an unknown factor to Shouta; he’d researched the kid foisted upon him, and that includes background checks on his close friends and family. She works in the fashion industry, specifically in cosmetics, and has built a reputation as a star make-up artist whose carefully managed exclusivity gives her more than enough time to raise her child. She balances high-strung clients with a son whose school record must have required hours of meeting with teachers over his behavior, and behind her harsh monikers there’s a concern that Shouta recognizes in whispers of faint childhood memories ( “Oh, Shouta, it’s okay, don’t listen to what the other kids say, you’re worth more than that—” )

Really, Mitsuki was far stronger than Shouta could ever be.

“I’ve been looking into Aldera recently, yes,” he says.

“Why? I’m sure you’ve heard how sleepy that place is. Nothing happens there. Low crime rate, decent enough schools, I suppose. Same Quirkism problem that most places seem to have these days, but we did our best to stomp that out of Katsuki when he came home spouting it one day. Half the reason we moved out of there, really.”

“Bakugou-kun mentioned that you still have friends in the area,” Shouta says. “I ran into a kid out there. Fairly young, definitely under ten. He calls himself Izu-kun and hangs out by a park by himself. Ring any bells?”

Mitsuki’s eyes shutter, much like how her son’s do, and she curses to herself quietly. “You’re sure that he called himself Izu-kun?” she says. 

Shouta’s taken aback by how strained she sounds. “Yes.”

She clearly fights with herself for a moment before coming to a decision and sagging. “You have connections to the police, right?” she asks, rubbing a tired hand down her face. “Call a precinct. Ask about the incident in Aldera ten years ago. And never mention it to my kid again.”

Shouta’s lost for words. Mitsuki stands, nods to him, and lets herself out.

A deep sigh chokes its way out from his lungs, releasing none of the tension in his body. As he goes to stand up, his knee catches on an over-full drawer that he remembers dumping files into a few days prior while speaking with Bakugou. 

He resigns himself to reorganizing his desk before leaving, opening the drawer with a quiet grumble and taking the files out. At the top is a manila folder stamped with the gray ink that denotes it a cold case. Shouta can’t remember why he took it out of police archives, seeing as he’s got his hands full enough with fresh acts of villainy and crime. The flap of the folder dates it to just under ten years prior, though it gives no other information on the case itself. 

It’s the kind of cold case that absolutely frustrates Shouta due to both the lack of evidence that had been compiled (negligently little, as if no one at the precinct had cared enough to really try) and the subject matter of the case itself. It can be summed up in one sentence: a little boy vanished after going out to play with his friends. Shouta glances through the details as though he doesn’t remember them with shocking clarity: a single mother household, the father having long since abandoned it, a Quirkless child (a pit forms in Shouta’s stomach as he sees the correlation that someone hadn’t seen or, more likely, had chosen to ignore), and a shattered family. 

The file includes a change-of-address form for one of the witnesses interviewed with all personal information blacked out, as is policy for case files taken out of a station’s archives, but it seems as though the mother of the missing child had stayed in Aldera. Shouta lingers on that interesting detail. He wonders why she hasn’t left, whether it’s a foolish hope that her boy will return home or a frozen grief that will not let her leave until she knows what happened to him. He thinks in her place, he would be stuck in a strange time loop, desperately trying to relive the handful of hours in which he thought his child was simply playing outside, the house peaceful before they brought their loud chaos back inside.

Another paper on Shouta’s desk catches his eye. It’s the makeshift worksheet he’d had Bakugou put together while coming up with his Hero persona, with a crooked line drawn through the middle and a list of personal facts. Uses he/him pronouns. Broke a tooth at 3. Developed a Quirk at 5. Moved across Musutafu at 7.

He tries not to overanalyze why Bakugou Mitsuki wanted him to read this file.

Chapter Text

Izu is clumsily dancing under a streetlight when Shouta finds him, humming something too off-key and mistimed for Shouta to easily recognize. He thinks it might be the theme song for an All Might-themed cartoon that was discontinued a couple years ago.

He twirls just a hair too close to the road for Shouta’s comfort.

“Be careful,” he calls out. The boy stops dancing and turns to him with the wide grin Shouta’s become accustomed to seeing.

“Hi, Eraserhead!” he chirps. 

“You’re out late a lot, kid,” Shouta says, settling in his usual spot on the curb (Izu joins him after only a second of hesitation). “I’m sure your parents are worried.”

“Mama always worries, even if I was home,” Izu says, plopping down next to him.

“And your dad?”

Izu just shrugs. He examines the band-aid on his knee, carefully flattening an air bubble that somehow formed in between Best Jeanist's eyes.

Something bitter lingers in Shouta’s mouth at the kid’s reticence. “Do I need to talk to him?”

“Nah,” Izu says, kicking his feet out in front of him. He grins at his shoes, a shockingly bright red pair of chunky sneakers from a brand Shouta doesn’t recognize, and visibly wiggles his toes. “Mama doesn’t talk to him much after he moved to Knees.”

Shouta stares at him. “Knees?” he repeats.

“Yeah. Mama says it’s in France.” He carefully pronounces the unfamiliar country name.

“Fran— do you mean Nice ?” Shouta asks, somewhat disbelieving.

“Mhm! That’s what I said!” 

Every day, Shouta is grateful that he doesn’t work with kids.

“When did he leave?” he asks.

Izu shrugs again. It seems to be his go-to response when he’s nervous or uncomfortable. “I dunno. When I was five?”

Pity tastes bitter on Shouta’s tongue, a pill that refused to be swallowed. “He moved to a different continent right when you got your Quirk?”

“Hmm? Oh, I haven’t gotten my Quirk yet, Eraserhead,” Izu says far too nonchalantly. “Mitsu- baa says that I’m just a bright bloomer, whatever that means. Mama and Masa- jii say not to worry about it.” He looks up at Shouta with those impossibly wide eyes. “Did you know that five years old is just the average age that Quirks come in? A lot of them manifest at birth, mostly mutation-type ones, and an equal amount come in when the child is closer to six- or seven-years-old, sometimes even eight. It’s just that most cases develop at around five and the outliers cancel each other out.”

“ Late bloomer.”

Izu blinks. “Huh?”

“Your—” Shouta sighs. “She called you a late bloomer. It means that you develop later than others in your age bracket.”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

Shouta swears, then and there, never to talk to someone younger than twelve ever again.

“I’m sorry your dad left,” he says instead. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

“Yeah,” Izu says, glancing over his shoulder. “It’s okay, though. I have Mama and Mitsu- baa and Masa- jii and Kacchan. That’s more than some kids can say.”

He’s looking toward the treeline again.

“Did you lose something back there?” Shouta asks. “Is that why you keep looking?”

“I think so,” Izu says thoughtfully. “I’m not sure, though. I just know there’s something very very important in there, somewhere.” 

“I can look for you, if you want.”

Izu gives him a wide-eyed look. “I can’t ask you to do that!” he squeaks. “It’s my re-sofa-bility, I can take care of it.”

Shouta barely holds back from rubbing his eyes with a hand. “ Responsibility , kid.”

“Yeah, that!”

Chapter Text

Shouta somehow nearly forgets about the worrying length of Bakugou’s file until they come across a child jeering at another cowering against a building.

“C’mon, useless scum,” he sneers, holding his hands up and gesturing eagerly. “I need to practice taking people like you down so that when I’m a Hero, no one can stop me.” He scowls when the other child doesn’t move and reaches over to grab her wrist. “ Hey, ” he growls, “I’m talking to you —”

“You’re hurting me, Suzushin,” the other child whimpers. “ Please let me go.”

The first child ( the bully , some sour voice whispers in the back of his head) scoffs and grips harder, something like lightning bursting from between his fingers and making the girl quietly whine in pain. “Stop screaming , you’re so loud,” he hisses. “God, why did I even put up with you, Kaoru—”

Something loud POP! s next to Shouta, and Bakugou storms up to the kids. He’s been diligent about upholding the profile they’d developed together, but all of that’s clearly been forgotten as he slams a fist into the wall beside them.

“The fuck’s happening over here, eh?” he growls. The boy freezes with the girl’s arm still in his grip, but a second later she’s able to struggle free. Bakugou pays no mind as she runs off. “Think you’re so big and tough, do you, brat?”

The boy gapes like a stranded fish, which makes sense seeing as someone in a Hero uniform just stalked up and started loudly scolding him.

“Heh? Cat got your tongue?” There’s a strange, bitter echo in Bakugou’s words that Shouta doesn’t recognize. “C’mon, shitty extra, defend yourself. What’d she do that got your pants in a twist?”

“Pachi-Pachi.” Shouta keeps his voice neutral. “No hurting children.”

Bakugou visibly grits his teeth and takes a step back, but he holds the glower until the boy manages to stutter something out.

“W-what does it matter? No one cares. Her Quirk’s not worth nothin’, who cares that she can change a flower’s colors—”

“Wrong answer,” Bakugou grits out. A spark skitters across his shoulder. “Wanna give it another go?”

“Pachi-Pachi.” Shouta is loath to drop his Hero persona, but Bakugou’s already thrown his away and this is slowly escalating into a crisis before his eyes.

“Um, excuse me, Hero-nii,” a soft voice says. Shouta and Bakugou both glance over to see the little girl standing by the building, having drawn up just enough courage to timidly creep back to them. She freezes like a deer in headlights after catching their attention and trembles like a leaf in the wind, but that doesn’t stop her from taking another step forward. “I— it’s okay, Suzushin just has a really strong Quirk and sometimes he can’t control it. H-he’s g-going to use it to be a Hero one d-day too! S-so, p-please don’t hurt him.” Her voice cracks with tears as she traces a red mark on her palm with a finger. “I don’t want him to get hurt.”

“Is that so?” Bakugou speaks in a way that Shouta’s never heard before: soft, gentle, as if the child still absentmindedly playing with her injured hand is a skittish animal he’s trying to coax over.

“Shut up, Kaoru, I don’t need your help—”

Bakugou glares at the boy again. “Shut up, idiot,” he snarls, his typical aggression snapping back into place. “Is that what you say to someone trying to help you? Haah? Why don't you give it another try?”

The kid flinches. He visibly swallows. He glances at the girl, who’s staring at him with tear-filled eyes. 

A moment passes, everyone frozen in their strange stand-off.

Right when Shouta’s about to tell Bakugou to stand down more firmly, the kid scoffs with unconvincing derision. “Fine. Sorry, Kao. I shouldn’t have done that.”

The words are flat and the kid clearly doesn’t mean them. That doesn’t stop the other child’s eyes from getting even wider, tears finally leaking from them. “I-it’s okay!” she hurries to say, and Shouta can tell from the clench of his jaw that Bakugou disagrees. “I-I’m not that hurt, I can move my arm, so—”

“Unlicensed Quirk usage is illegal,” Shouta says, and the younger children both jump, as if they’d forgotten that he’s also there. “If either of us hears about it happening again, we’ll have to talk to your parents. You’re lucky Pachi-Pachi was here to stop the situation from getting more out of control, even if he was being unorthodox about it.” Shouta ignores his intern’s glare. “Let them go. They’ve learned their lesson, right?”

“Y-yes!” The girl reaches over and cautiously tugs the boy’s sleeve. “Th-thank you, Hero-nii, Hero-san.” She awkwardly bows, still holding the sleeve, and drags the other kid down the street and around the corner.

Bakugou scoffs as they rush off, turning to keep patrolling.

“Stop.” He freezes. “Explain.”

“What’s there to fucking explain?” Bakugou’s voice is an emotionless monotone. “I went too far, right? Whoop-de-fucking-doo.”

“You did, but you know you would and still made the decision to do so. Why?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does if I have to put it in my report for Kayama and you get a mark on your record.” 

Bakugou grits his teeth so hard that Shouta can hear them grinding against each other. “Nothing new there,” he says, but there’s a reluctance that hadn’t been there before.

“A note on your record now will stay there for the rest of your career.” Shouta let that hang in the air. “Last chance. Why?”

A spark of light and smoke crackles on Bakugou’s neck, but he says nothing, glaring at his feet instead. Shouta waits patiently, arms crossed.

“That was me, y’know?” Bakugou finally says.

“What was you?”

He rakes a frustrated hand through his hair, clenching it into a fist at the back of his head and pulling on a handful of blond spikes. A grounding gesture, Shouta realizes. “The fucking kid who thought he could rule the world because everyone told him how fucking special he was. What else?”

The conversation stops and starts as they walk down the street. It’s the worst patrol Shouta’s ever conducted; there could be a bank robbery happening a block away and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an absolute piece of shit,” Bakugou says, “but my Quirk— it kinda ruined my childhood in ways that you wouldn’t really expect.”

“Your Quirk seems like a desirable one,” Shouta says. “Easy to control, flashy, hard-hitting when you want it to be. Its downside is easy to bypass if you need to. What was the problem?”

“ That was the problem,” Bakugou scoffs. “It’s so fucking perfect, isn’t it? Ma’s Quirk makes her look youthful, Dad’s gotta be careful clapping at the end of a concert, but me? It’s like being a Hero was written in the goddamn stars for me.” He flicks a drop of his sweat and lets it pop with a shower of sparks. “It’s all I heard from the moment I turned four. I couldn’t have been treated better if I started shitting gold.

“Ma tries her best, y’know?” Bakugou hesitates after his non sequitur. “I know that. I can see that, even without her and Dad jamming it down my fucking throat every day of my goddamn life. Ma does her best, but she was still starting out or whatever when I was a kid, so she didn’t have as much time to keep an eye on me as she does now. Both of them weren’t really around to tell me off when I started really being a little shit. Found out that I could grab someone and still make my explosions go off, and that was the tightest shit in the world, because imagine if I could grab a villain by the throat? They’d be dead, and I’d have stopped them, and that meant that I would be the best fucking Hero this country’s ever seen.” Disgust creeps into his voice. “'Tightest shit in the world'. I was a fucking idiot kid.”

“You were a bully.”

“Bully doesn’t cover it,” Bakugou snorts, even as he shrinks in on himself slightly. “Near fucking sociopath, and no one wanted to point it out. They were all too busy fawning over ‘the next Number One’ or whatever they were feeding themselves to make them feel better. It took my parents like three fucking weeks to find out. Ma was fucking pissed the first time I said some Quirkist bullshit around her. I’d never seen her so angry. Stormed into the headmaster’s office, said she’d sue the preschool for ruining her kid, told them this was why society was going downhill, told them that if they saw me on the news as a villain ten years from then they’d have to live with the goddamned knowledge that they made me who I was. A lot of really scary shit to hear your mom say about you when you’re barely potty-trained. I remember having a full fucking breakdown when we got home and screaming that I didn’t want to be a villain because villains go to jail.” 

A dog curiously sniffs their shoes as it walks by with its owner. Bakugou nods to the civilian and waits until they're out of earshot before he barks out a humorless laugh. “Y’know what Ma said to me? ‘Katsuki, you shouldn’t want to be a villain because you shouldn’t want to hurt people.’

“So my parents found a new preschool and put me in it and hoped it’d all gone away. Washed their hands of it all. Said to themselves that it was a fluke, that surely that was just that preschool being full of crazy Quirkists and that surely I’d be fine if I wasn’t with them. And like, I guess I was. I didn’t come home saying shit that made them think I would be in juvie by the time I was eighteen, at least, but—” he cuts himself off with a shrug. “Society isn’t like that. Fucking unfortunately.”

“It happened again?”

“Yeah, sorta. It was subtler, less ‘you’re going to be so amazing whenever you blow someone’s head off’ and more ‘you shouldn’t worry about people weaker than you, you should focus on being the strongest Hero’. Gave me a superiority complex instead of making me an antisocial narcissist, which I guess is better. Like how a house fire is better than a fucking volcanic eruption."

They're at a crosswalk. They wait for the light to change.

“There was another kid there. He’s the reason I went to that preschool, actually; Ma’d heard about it from an old friend of hers who sent her kid there.” Another shower of sparks dances across Bakugou’s palm as he absentmindedly snaps. “Everyone looked down on him because his Quirk hadn’t come in and we were almost six, which meant to us that he was the Quirkless freak in the room. I let him follow me around and talked to him from time to time. I think that’s what I thought friendship was at the time. And he told me the same thing that everyone else did: that I was amazing, that I deserved to be the best, that I would be the Number One Hero one day. Said he’d do everything he could to keep up with me, to make sure I ‘earned’ his friendship.”

It turns green. They cross the street.

“Everything I got him to do became some sort of fucking test that he tried desperately to pass. Give me your snacks, tell me what the answers to the homework are, take care of your own shit. And he did. Until he didn’t.” That expression he’d seen on Bakugou’s face when asking him about Izu reappears, and Shouta’s still at a loss as to what it holds. Shock, maybe, and a nauseating grief that Shouta didn’t think he’d ever see on a child Bakugou’s age, one that reminds him of fallen rubble and the smell of dust and blood. “I’ve always been a coward, though. Always running away from my fuck-ups.”

Shouta waits, but it doesn’t sound like Bakugou is going to elaborate. “Then?”

“Then we moved, then I got into U.A., and now I’m apparently gonna be a fucking Hero,” Bakugou bites out. “Or so they say. Doesn’t fucking feel like I am.”

“Technically, you aren’t one until you get your provisional license,” Shouta points out.

Bakugou snorts. “Might not deserve one. Maybe you should put that shit on my record, anyways. Maybe I’m wasting my time and stealing a spot in the Hero Course from someone who actually fucking deserves it.”

Chapter Text

Izu is huddled on the sidewalk in a small ball when Shouta finds him that night. His shoulders shudder, his head is lowered, and he looks like he’s trying to make himself as small as he possibly can. He wears more wounds than band-aids today.

“Kid?!” Shouta rushes over, worry biting at his throat. “Are you alright?”

Izu’s head shoots up, his eyes widening. “E-Eraserhead?” His greeting isn’t the ebullient cheer that it usually is, and the glassy-eyed stare that accompanies it only has Shouta hurrying faster to crouch by him.

“Are you alright?” He frantically looks over Izu, hands hovering over his form. “I can get you to a hospital, do you think you can stand?”

“N-no!” Izu carefully unfolds himself, stretching out one limb at a time until he’s standing in front of Shouta, arms open as if to try and pretend that he’s not covered in bruises and scrapes and the faces of Heroes that retired years ago. “I’m perfect! Right as rain!” He winces as the smile he attempts stretches his cheeks enough to highlight a scratch that runs down his entire face.

Shouta stares at him. “Kid, you look the exact opposite of perfect.”

Izu’s lip trembles, but the determination doesn’t leave his shoulders. “Nuh uh! I’m fine! I was just—”

“Just what?”

He swallows. “Nothing.” The energy leaves his small form. Izu sinks back down into a crouch and stares at a crack in the sidewalk. 

Shouta watches him for a heartbeat before lowering himself next to the boy. “Have you gotten it back yet? That thing you lost?”

Izu doesn’t look up as he shakes his head. A hand absently traces a particularly rough looking scrape on the side of his arm. “I’m not good enough, I guess. Kacchan wouldn’t have fallen. He’d have gotten down and up and none of this would have happened.”

What?

“What?” Shouta echoes himself. “What are you talking about, Izu?”

“I’m sorry,” the kid says instead, his voice going scratchy as tears first well in his eyes and then begin a steady stream down his face. He wipes them away before they can drip onto the sidewalk, but that doesn’t stop the quiet shaking sobs that wrack his small form. “I was never good enough, huh? Just a stupid little deku , just like Kacchan said.”

“Hey, don’t say that about yourself.” Shouta fishes in his pockets for some sort of napkin or tissue to offer him. “Just because you’re better at some things than others doesn’t mean that you’re useless. And you’re very good at the things you’re good at.”

Izu directs his weepy gaze at Shouta. “Like what?” he sniffles.

“Well, you recognized me as soon as you saw me,” Shouta says. “Not many adults can do that, let alone kids your age. You clearly have a great memory, since you’re able to recall the details of my statistics and take-down numbers so quickly. You’ve got good reflexes for your age; I saw you playing kemari by yourself with rocks the first night we met.”

“None ‘f that matters.” Izu rubs furiously at his eyes. It’s a futile gesture that wipes his overflowing tears across his face instead of cleaning himself up at all. “‘S not like you can be a Hero without a Quirk, and Kacchan says I’m never gonna get mine, and if I can’t even take care of my things, how can I take care of other people—”

“Quirks aren’t the end-all, be-all, in heroics,” Shouta says. “Mine helps me when I have to apprehend a criminal or a villain, of course, but it doesn’t help me infiltrate villain bases or clear rubble away from a rescue situation. Even besides that, there are plenty of Heroes whose Quirks hold no overlap with the work we have to do, and they still excel. It takes dedication and a serious work ethic to be a good Hero, not some twist of fate at birth.”

Izu openly gapes at Shouta. “D’you really believe that, Eraserhead?”

“Yeah.” Shouta crosses his arms and tucks his knees under them. “What is it you lost?”

“M-my notebook,” Izu whispers, numbly copying Shouta's posture. “My favorite notebook. Everyone’s in it. I can’t lose it, I have to get it back—”

“Kid, calm down,” Shouta cuts in as gently as he can. “I can get it for you. You said you dropped it?”

“N-no, I should do it, I dropped it down the ditch so it’s my responsibility, Kacchan said so, said I should take care of it—”

“Kacchan is a kid, too. Seriously, Izu, let me handle it for you.”

Izu’s shoulders shake with silent sobs as he gives Shouta an unblinking stare. “You’re very kind, Eraserhead,” he chokes out, and there’s a deep weariness in his voice that feels years too old for the small body that speaks with it.

“Aizawa,” Shouta blurts out.

“What?”

“My name.” Shouta shifts. “Aizawa Shouta. If you— I mean, I’m not always on patrol, and my civilian information isn’t that well-known so—” he shrugs uncomfortably. “You can look me up. Reach out if you need it. When you’re older, you could be my apprentice, maybe. Doesn’t matter if a Quirk comes in or not; that's something we can work with further down the line.”

Izu doesn’t move, still crouched frozen with his arms wrapped around himself as though he's physically holding himself together. He studies Shouta, eyes darting across his face as if documenting every blemish and scar he’s acquired over the decades. He still hasn’t blinked. Finally, Izu stands, and this time he doesn’t try to hide the pain that bows his head and makes his arm twitch uncontrollably. 

For the first time, Izu steps off of the sidewalk. He drifts towards the treeline that haunted him for the past few days and looks over his shoulder back at Shouta, still sitting on the curb. Shouta wants to stand, wants to join him, but there’s something stopping his knees from unlocking and his legs from standing.

“Thank you, Aizawa-san,” he says softly. His words carry with a horrible clarity, as though he's standing beside Shouta rather than meters away. “I think, in another life, I would have loved to be your student.”

Chapter Text

The sun is high in the sky when Shouta enters the park that Izu spent the past few nights staring into. There’s a haphazardly set-up chain-link fence that he easily hops over, and he’s more than grateful for the long pants he wears when he has to wade through overgrown grass that goes past his waist. He can easily (painfully) imagine two boys who were far more adventurous than they should have been pushing through the brush, pretending that they were spies or pirates or Heroes or whatever it is that delights small children.

He hopes to whatever higher power is listening that kids don’t come back here anymore.

Shouta picks through the bushes and is soon met with a steep drop into a drainage ditch. It’s overgrown, long grasses lining the upper border of it, softening the edge between what Shouta knows is solid ground and the steep drop down below. The sides look jagged despite how much they’ve been worn down, and there’s barely a trickle of water running through the bottom of it. On a typical day, he would have glanced down and deemed it too risky to climb unless in an absolute emergency.

“Kacchan wouldn’t have fallen. He’d have gotten down and up and none of this would have happened.”

He takes a shaky breath before he half-slides, half-stumbles down the sides of the ditch, the rocks and dirt slick with moisture beneath his feet. When he hits the bottom, he checks himself for any injuries (superficial at best: scrapes on the heels of his hands, scuffed shoes, an aching knee from falling slightly too hard on it) before picking himself up and looking around.

His heart drops.

Shouta doesn’t linger too long on the weather-worn red sneakers that he can see peeking from under overgrown brush (he thinks if he does he’s going to start screaming, and this hurt is not his to mourn). He reaches instead for a withered notebook lying a few feet away, its black cover bleached a strange orange from exposure. There’s nothing too special about the book, apart from a tiny handprint burned into the spine in a strange speckling pattern (as if tiny explosions traced the child’s hand onto the cloth). The paper is warped from years of rain and snow and feels like it’s two seconds from turning into dust, but Shouta is still able to carefully open the book.

MIDORIYA IZUKU is emblazoned across the first page in proud green crayon that’s only now beginning to flake away. A child’s drawing of five smiling people adorn the following page, along with another of the two smallest figures in the group. Red crayon arrows point to each child, labeling them IZU-KUN and KACCHAN .

Shouta shuts the book and blindly reaches for his phone and calls a number. He feels like two different people, like the Shouta who’s staring at a child’s prized possession is standing next to the Eraserhead who’s calling Midnight for back-up on a cold case. 

When Nemuri arrives half an hour later after securing her class a substitute, she finds Shouta standing vigil over a crumpled form and holding a sun-bleached book in his hands like it’s spun from gold. Something in his eyes must tell her what he can’t say out loud because she just nods, squeezes his arm comfortingly, tells him that she’ll take over the logistics, and sends him out of the ditch. Midnight tells him to let her handle wrapping the case because he’s too close to it, and Eraserhead agrees.

There’s an address written on the back page of the notebook that will never be filled, and Shouta’s able to walk to it within ten minutes (“I’m from around here. I’m just on a walk—”) . It’s a small house, quaint and quiet and forgettable along a stretch of equally innocuous looking houses, and Shouta knocks on the door before he has any second thoughts.

When the door opens, a woman with long hair (familiar dark hair that reflects green in the light of her home) and a curious expression (bright eyes that observe him on her doorstep) greets him. He fumbles through showing her his Hero ID card and says that he’s working on a case and has some things to ask her, and she graciously allows him in.

“Midoriya Inko,” the woman introduces herself. “Would you like something to drink? Tea, coffee, water?”

“Tea sounds nice.” Tea never sounds nice to Shouta, but a warm drink sounds incredible and if he had any more caffeine he might jitter out of his skin.

As Inko busies herself at the kitchen counter, Shouta looks around the home. The kitchen-dining area opens into the living area, which has a comfortable looking sofa that faces a relatively small television. Over the TV hangs a framed photo about the same size as the screen. Shouta wanders over to look at it.

A familiar boy, beaming at the camera, embraced by the woman pouring Shouta’s tea behind him, who smiles and looks at him as though he’s her personal sun, as though she wants to bottle his laughter and happiness and tuck it away so that no one can steal it from them. They appear to be in a park, and there’s a picnic spread behind them for more than two people.

“My Izuku,” Inko says fondly behind him. She hands him a mug of steaming liquid. “My little boy.” Melancholy clings to her, even as maternal pride underlines every one of her words.

Shouta takes one sip of the tea (it’s good, in all honesty; it’s a shame that he can only taste dust and blood and grief right now) before setting it down gently. “Midoriya-san,” he says, “I’m afraid that I’m about to be your least favorite person.”

Inko lets out a deep breath that only trembles at its tail end. “You’ve got quite a bit of competition for that title,” she jokes weakly. 

Shouta silently, slowly takes the notebook out of his pocket, weighing it in his hands, and holds it out to her. Inko’s breath stutters as she reaches out and takes it with the same reverence. She doesn’t start crying until she opens it to the child’s drawing he saw on its second page. She sobs far more quietly than Shouta anticipates, but he wonders if that's because her grief is familiar enough that this is not a shock.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“N-no,” she manages to say, her voice strangled. “I—”

“Midnight is currently working with a few others to—” He can’t say it. Shouta clears his throat in an effort to regain himself. “I can pass on your information, if you’d like. Or serve as an intermediary if that’s what you prefer.”

“Y-y-yes, I can do that,” she says through uneven breaths. She doesn’t try to stifle her sobs any further, and they punctuate her gestures, her words, her everything. Her hands begin waving wildly through the air, and things fly towards her from around the room (a hair-tie she neatly plucks from the air and ties her hair back with, a pair of earrings she quickly puts on with surprisingly steady hands, a spare pencil she tucks into her bun). “I-I need to— oh god, I need to call Mitsu-chan— wait, I should call off work for the week first—” In the middle of her sudden rush, Inko turns to Shouta and grabs one of his hands like a lifeline. He stares, startled.

“Thank you,” she breathes, staring at him with wide eyes. “You found my boy. Thank you. ”

Shouta looks at the woman crushed by the weight of a decade-old grief in front of him, then looks up. Izuku looks down at them, that wide smile taking up half of his face, frozen in time in a perfect moment on a beautiful day.

Chapter Text

There’s no one to meet Shouta that night on the sidewalk, no small body carving a strange indistinct shadow into the streetlight. 

He sits on the curb, telling himself that he’ll wait for Izuku, that he’ll see the kid and tell him what happened, tell him that he’s home now or whatever platitude adults tell children when things are too scary for them to comprehend. He sits there for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. If Izuku was here, he’d be spouting the statistics about how many people Shouta could have saved if he wasn’t wasting them waiting for him. He tucks his hands against his neck to keep them warm and waits.

Izuku never comes.

Out of nowhere, Shouta is aware of how tired he is. He’s used to feeling tired and ignoring it, but all at once exhaustion floods him and leaves him unable to do much besides sit on a random sidewalk curb and feel his knees stiffen from ache. He wants to stay here and wait for something that he’s quietly sure will never happen, he wants to go home and collapse in his bed, he wants to lie on the grass and remember a small form patched together with Hero-branded band-aids.

By the time he snaps back to reality, he has his phone out and he’s staring at a contact he hasn’t touched in years.

“I think if he didn’t mean to and he’s very sorry, it’s okay to forgive him while still being sad that you nearly died.”

“Damn kid,” Shouta mutters to himself. 

He calls the number. He clings to the part of him that hopes the near-thirty seconds of ringing will send him to voicemail and he can forget his uncharacteristic bout of sentimentality.

A click.

“Shou— Aizawa-san?” 

His voice punches the breath out of Shouta’s chest.

“Hey,” he says. He sounds hoarse, exhausted.

“Aren’t you on patrol right now? Did you need something?” The tone of the voice is an attempt at sounding professional, but he can still hear the waver in it.

“I—” Shouta stares at the streetlight across the street. “Did I wake you?”

A pause. “It’s not even eleven yet, so no.”

“Ah.” Shouta rubs a hand along an arm.

“Are you alright? You sound a bit off.”

“I’m—” Shouta cuts himself off from giving a rote response. “No. I’m not alright, actually.”

“Do you… want to talk about it?” He sounds uncertain. Shouta doesn’t blame him; he spent the better part of a decade ignoring him and snipping at him whenever they had to interact.

Shouta wants nothing less than to talk about it. “I think I have to,” he says instead. “Do you— there’s an izakaya open ‘til midnight over by Nabu. Do you mind…?”

“I can be there in twenty.” Pause. “Are you sure—”

“See you,” Shouta cuts him off, hanging up. He stares at the phone, forces himself up, and heads over.

It’s easy to see Hizashi in the crowd of the izakaya ; where most booths are filled with people loudly carousing together, he’s alone nursing a beer and poking at a platter of gyoza. He’s dressed simply, a leather jacket thrown on over a faded shirt Shouta recognizes from a concert they’d attended together as students paired with crumpled jeans and well-worn red boots that Shouta has to look away from quickly. He doesn’t look up until Shouta slides into the seat across from him, but when he finally does notice him, he startles before quickly turning his hearing aids back up. 

“Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t trying to ignore you,” he says hurriedly.

Shouta raises an eyebrow. “I thought that’s what I was doing.”

By the way Hizashi winces, his comment isn’t funny. Fair enough.

“So, why—” Hizashi clears his throat. “Why did you call me? Is Nemuri’s advice not enough anymore?”

Shouta takes a moment to really look at Hizashi. It’s not like Shouta hasn’t seen him at all in the years since the mission. They’d run into each other every now and then, thanks to their shared career path, but those had always been spontaneous and awkward, much like their run-in earlier that week (it felt strange to acknowledge that everything had happened in just one week). A server hurries over, and Shouta sends him away after asking for a glass of water.

“I closed a cold case,” he says, watching the condensation gather on the glass. He can see Hizashi perk up out of the corner of his eye, sees Present Mic begin to peek from behind his uncertainty. “Missing child from around ten years ago.”

Hizashi grimaces. “That sounds rough.”

“I-it wasn’t. For a little bit.” A drop of water races down Shouta’s glass. “Then it was. You know how it goes.”

“Yeah.” 

They sit in silence for a bit, the gyoza going cold between them.

“It was an accident,” Shouta whispers. “The kid fell. I think another one saw the whole thing.”

Hizashi shudders at that, almost doubling-over where he sits. “Ack.”

Shouta looks over the rim of his glass at his old friend. He wears a grimace, but there’s more empathy than sympathy in the corners of his mouth. Shouta wonders if Hizashi is haunted by the day he nearly died as much as he is.

“I’m sorry,” Hizashi says. “I think that kind of case’d hit pretty close to home for me, too.”

Something chokes Shouta, and he ends up coughing out a laugh around the lump in the back of his throat. “I feel so stupid. It’s not like anything’s changed over the course of one fucking week, it’s not like anything new developed, it’s just that no one gave enough of a shit to look into it until now—”

“Things did change, though,” Hizashi says, nervously tapping a finger on the plate in front of him. “Maybe not for the poor kid or their family or their loved ones, but for you, definitely. You didn’t know about the kid before this week and you had to get to know their life to find out what happened, and now you have to acknowledge that kid isn’t in this world anymore. It’s just the nature of those cases.” 

He hesitates before continuing, his voice somehow softening to something even more gentle. “I think that’s why those cases are left cold. It’s hard to devote part of your life to someone who’ll never know of your efforts and appreciate them. But—” Hizashi clears his throat. “But now there’s a family that knows what happened, who can mourn them properly and finally know that kid in their entirety. I bet their parents were at least somewhat glad to finally have that case closed.”

“Parent,” Shouta corrects dully. “Just the mom.”

Hizashi’s face screws up even further. “Parent, then,” he repeats hoarsely.

Shouta’s vision blurs, and when he blinks a foreign warmth streaks down his face. He winces at the sting in his eyes. “Fuck. Sorry.” He holds his eyes, willing the tears to calm. 

A timid finger taps his arm, and when Shouta doesn’t shrug it off it’s replaced by Hizashi’s hand, gripping his forearm in some show of support. “No need to apologize. I get it.”

“It’s just—” Shouta exhales sharply, waving Hizashi’s arm off now that he’s composed himself. “It felt like I knew the kid, y’know? And the kid that I met, he was clever and bright and friendly, and he wanted to be a Hero and I fully believe that he would have been among the best of us. And now I’ll have to go home, go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and act like nothing’s changed because nothing has changed.” Because Izuku was dead when I picked up his case, and no amount of midnight sidewalk conversations could change that.

“Well, I can think of at least one thing that’s changed.” Hizashi grins crookedly. “When’s the last time you called me for advice on this sort of thing?”

Shouta snorts. “I guess that’s true.”

“Why did you call me?” Hizashi looks unbothered, but Shouta can tell how nervous he is from the way he tears at his napkin. “Again, I didn’t really expect you to go to me over Nem-pai. I thought you clicked my contact by accident when I got your call, nearly didn’t pick up on time. Not that I’m upset you did or anything,” he adds in a rush.

“I just—” Shouta stares at the plate of gyoza for a second before finally picking one up and inspecting it more closely. “I don’t know. I couldn’t think of who else to call.”

Silence falls again.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you did,” Hizashi offers. An olive branch, the kind that he offers every time he and Shouta run into each other, the kind Shouta usually turns away from without prejudice. 

Tonight, he considers it. 

“I think I’m glad, too.”

The two of them sit silently as they work their way through the plate of gyoza. The waiter comes back to check on them and leaves with an order of karaage and a Sapporo for Shouta. They don’t have much to talk about; cases have to be treated with care, what with the secrecy clauses the HPSC requires all Heroes to sign, and close to ten years is a long time to drift away from someone. It’s not like they completely lost track of each other either, as Nemuri had been adamant about maintaining her friendships with both of them and had no qualms with gossiping about one to the other. Shouta learns that Hizashi is in his third year with his very first homeroom class and how he dreads every day closer to graduation (closer to saying goodbye). Hizashi learns that Shouta has a kitchen cabinet filled with cans of cat food for the strays that he sees on his patrols. Hizashi orders them both another beer, and then another, and then they realize just how close to midnight it actually is.

“Can we do this again?” Hizashi blurts out as they head towards the exit five minutes shy of the izakaya closing. He flushes from both the alcohol and the loose tongue it’s given him. “I— just— tonight was nice. I missed you, Shouta.”

Shouta wants to immediately say yes. The part of him from high school that had been ensnared and dragged into friendship no matter how much he dug his heels in screams at him for hesitating. But he’s not that boy anymore, and it would be unfair to Hizashi to pretend that he hadn’t changed, either. They don’t know where they slot in each other’s lives now, and Shouta values his memories of his old friend more than the uncertain promise of friendship with someone who’s more a stranger to him now.

“Maybe.” Shouta readjusts the capture weapon draped on his shoulders. “I need to wrap up my patrol and write a final internship report for Nemuri tonight. I’m sure you have work for all of your jobs as well. Might be easier to just wait until we come across each other again.”

Hizashi cracks a small grin. “Just like you to be logical about these things,” he says. He hides a yawn in the collar of his jacket and coughs out a dry laugh. “Would it hurt at all to be sentimental and nostalgic, for once?”

“It might,” Shouta says, but he can hear how pedantic he’s being so there’s no chance Hizashi misses it.

“Shouta.” Hizashi rolls his eyes but doesn’t complain any further. They get to a street corner they’ll separate at. Hizashi looks down his street before turning to face Shouta, taking a few steps backward to his apartment (and isn’t it strange, knowing that he’s still in that shitty tiny box that they’d found for him right after graduation?). The small grin he’s been wearing widens into something crooked and wry. “Well, in that case, I hope we ‘come across each other’ again soon.”

Shouta nods and watches Hizashi walk down the sidewalk. He stops at every streetlight to hum something and dance to himself, just a step or two that leads him into the darkness between the puddles of light. After a few minutes, all Shouta can see of Hizashi is his shadow leaping joyously along with the body that casts it.

As he twists to launch himself into the air and flicks his capture weapon out to take him back to his typical patrol route, Shouta realizes that, just for a couple of hours, he’s forgotten what dust and blood and grief taste like. An echo of something like Izuku’s laughter follows him through the night air.