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Shouta grunted as he raced across the rooftops, jumping from one building to the next. It was all he could do to keep his eyes on the shock of green hair currently sprinting away from him — even with all Shouta’s parkour training, the kid was matching him jump for jump.
But that’s exactly what he was: just a kid. A kid who was definitely more than just in the wrong place at the wrong time; yes, Shouta had carefully verified that night after night as he observed the very intentional things the kid was doing. But still, he was just a kid.
“Stop- please!” he called out, but the kid only cast a panicked look behind him and ran even faster.
Frustrated, Shouta reached for a grappling hook, using it to swing by the railings and try to get a hold of the kid. “I’m just here to help!” he yelled.
The chase went on for what seemed like forever, until finally, the kid slipped.
Of course. He may have been trained, but his experience and stamina couldn’t compare to Shouta’s twenty-plus years of eight-hours-a-day underground hero work.
As he unfurled his scarf to its fullest extent, wrapping up the kid and catching him right before he hit the rocky earth below, Shouta felt a pang in his heart. The kid was so young. He shouldn’t be here.
And at the same time, there was something more.
That could have been me, he thought. Had Nedzu not seen my application and taken an interest in me, I could have ended up out here, trying to play a role that I could never really achieve.
The moment they were safely on the ground, the kid began wriggling, trying to kick his way out of the capture scarf, but to no avail — after all, the scarf was created to prevent that very thing.
“There’s no use struggling,” Shouta said, he immediately wanted to kick himself for his choice of words. How many people had told him ‘there’s no use’ in his life already? He hated to be one more.
The kid seemed to get the message, though, and his motions slowed to a stop. “What is it you want with me?” he spat, but there was less vitriol and more hopelessness in his voice.
“I just want to talk,” Shouta answered. Why was he so bad at this whole sensitivity thing?
“Talk about what?” the kid questioned. “I think you’ve already made your point fairly clear. You want to capture me, bring me in, punish me for doing literally nothing wrong, just like everybody else in my life.”
And oh, there was quite a lot of something to unpack there.
“That’s not my intention,” Shouta told him placatingly. “I’m a lot like you- or at least, I was, before someone saw me and gave me a chance.”
“Fat lot of good hoping for a chance does for me,” the kid muttered.
“What if I gave you that chance?” Shouta asked.
The kid was silent for a moment.
Shouta tried to redirect the conversation to something more normal to start with. “What’s your name?”
The kid hesitated. “You can call me Mi- Midori,” he finally answered.
“Midori,” Shouta said, turning the name over in his head. It felt pretty spot-on, given the kid’s appearance, but something also felt just-not-right. “That’s not your real name, is it?”
Midori shook his head.
“I thought so,” Shouta praised him. “That’s smart of you, not giving away identifying information to a stranger, even if I’m a hero. Because I could be pretending to be a hero. But in this case, I promise you, I really am one.”
Midori let out a half-laugh at that but said nothing.
“And I really think, from what I’ve seen of you — and this isn’t to encourage your reckless behavior, of course — but I think you have what it takes to be a hero,” Shouta went on. “You’re better than me when I was your age, confused, angry, scared, desperate.” It was a risk, telling a child that, but Midori needed to hear it from at least one adult in his life. “You can be a hero, no matter what everyone else tells you. Look at me; I beat the odds, too.”
Midori blinked up at him, and Shouta could almost see hope and disbelief shining in his eyes.
“What if I held out my hand to you and said you could take it, no strings attached?” Shouta tried again. “Would you?”
After a long time, Midori sighed. “I held out a hand to someone I cared about, someone I thought cared about me, once. At that time, and for months after, I wished nothing more than for him to have taken my hand instead of rejecting me. But I’m afraid I’ll have to do the same to you.”
With that, he leapt into the air, having loosened the hold of Shouta’s capture scarf at some point, and tossed a handful of grainy pepper behind him. In the second it took Shouta to regain his wits, Midori had already disappeared into the night. Most likely, he would never cross Shouta’s path again.
~
On the first day of UA, Aizawa Shouta strode into homeroom, expecting that his class would need a lesson in situational awareness just like every other year. What he wasn’t expecting was for a boy to immediately point him out to the people around him and proceed to plop into his seat with a confident familiarity, as if he’d been doing it for weeks already.
“Hi, Eraserhead! Or should I call you Aizawa-sensei?”
As Shouta took in the shock of green hair atop the boy’s head, he allowed himself a genuine smile.
He listened and heard what I said.
He is here.