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Shouta passed through the doors that led to the urgent care center to stare down his five students (well…four students plus one protégé) sitting in the hard plastic chairs in the waiting room. All bore bumps, bruises, and scrapes to varying degrees, all looking at him with expressions ranging from anger to terror.
He let out a sigh and massaged the bridge of his nose. “What happened?”
They all, predictably, started talking at once. He nearly flinched back from the wave of sound but raised a hand to silence them. “Not all of you!”
He blinked his tired eyes, surveying the five teenagers with a growing sense of discomfort. Kirishima, who was the one he usually called on to explain their antics, was the only one with the urgent care doctors, so he zeroed in on his next best choice. “Sero?”
Sero grinned and shrugged one shoulder. “Kiri got stung by a bee.”
Shouta waited. He knew about Kirishima’s allergy; the kid was responsible enough to keep his medical information up to date. But that didn’t explain why the other five looked worse for the wear. “And that’s all?” he said, when Sero didn’t elaborate.
“That’s why we’re here,” Sero replied.
Shouta heaved out another sigh and turned to his next choice. His protégé hadn’t spent a lot of time with 1-A, so hopefully he wasn’t going to cover up whatever disaster had happened. “Shinsou?”
Shinsou, arms folded across his chest and legs crossed at the ankles, lounged laconically back in his hard plastic chair to give Shouta an insolent smirk. “Then we decided to walk here to wait for him to be cleared, so we could walk back together.”
An ache was starting to build behind his eyes. He swore and tried to rub it away while glowering at the kids, but only wound up glaring into his own hand. “And that’s all?”
“We met some friends along the way, but yeah. That’s all.”
This was going nowhere. “Ashido?” Shouta directed his next question at the girl sitting beside Shinsou, practically vibrating out of her seat with suppressed emotion. “You want to tell me what happened?”
“It’s not his fault!” she burst out. “There were these jerks from one of the other classes, and we tried to des…de-es…calm the situation down, but they wouldn’t listen! They picked the fight, Mr. Aizawa, we didn’t!”
“Yeah!” Kaminari cut in. He was sporting a bruise across one cheek and some scratches on his chin. Shouta was pretty sure he could still see gravel in there. “We really tried, Mr. Aizawa, honest! It was self-defense.”
“Totally self-defense.”
“We didn’t even use our Quirks!”
“Not even once!”
“Then one of them pushed Shinsou—”
“—and when Kaminari tried to break it up, she sucker punched him—”
“—and Sero jumped in to keep the big guy off me—”
“—Bakugou tried to scare them off, but that little guy started calling grasshoppers out of nowhere—”
“Enough!” Shouta put his hands up to silence Ashido and Kaminari. Shinsou, sitting between them, just smirked up at his mentor. Shouta gritted his teeth and turned to the final person in the row. “Bakugou?”
The teen stared up at him mulishly. He was leaning forward, forearms resting on his knees, fingers pressed together. “Pretty much what they said.”
Shouta facepalmed. “You do understand that’s not the story the other students have told, don’t you?”
“All lies!” Ashido cried. She leaned across Shinsou to catch Kaminari’s chin, holding him up for Shouta’s inspection. “Just look at Kami’s poor little face! We were lucky to make it out of there alive.”
“Lucky to…” Shouta let his voice trail off and shook his head. Five hero course students…well, four hero course students and one stand-by…versus four gen ed students with no combat training. “Wait. Did you say grasshoppers?”
Ashido shuddered. “They were everywhere.”
“And none of you used your Quirks?”
“Bakugou let off some explosions in his hands, but he didn’t touch them,” Sero said. “Besides, he does that all the time.”
Well, it wasn’t like the gen ed students had looked much the worse for wear. And now that he’d seen his students, he could tell that it wasn’t the one-sided beatdown the others had claimed it was. Not unless they’d gotten really creative in their alibi building and beaten each other up.
“All right,” he finally said, trying to futilely massage away the headache between his eyes. “How about we just say I gave you all a stern lecture on fighting between classes and never speak of this again?”
“Absolutely!” Kaminari cheered. “You’re the best, Mr. Aizawa.”
He grunted. “I’ll go check on Kirishima…think the five of you can wait here without causing any more problems?”
“No promises,” Shinsou called after him as he turned to go. When Shouta glared over his shoulder, his protégé just gave him a shrug and a shit-eating grin. “You told me to make friends, remember?”
He was regretting it already…even if he couldn’t quite wipe the grin off his face.