Archive of Our Own

The first time Shōta ever speaks to him, it’s in the process of trying to prevent him from getting his ass kicked.

The older guys who live in the apartment building that faces Hizashi’s don’t like him very much.  It’s not like it’s a surprise, or anything—he’s loud, and he likes vintage radios and weird music and old movies, and he studies a lot.  Especially English.  So that he can watch more old movies, and imitate Grace Kelly until it makes his mom start to laugh.

They’re not overly impressed with his shiny new UA duds.  He hadn’t exactly let his hopes float up into any of the higher regions of the atmosphere, but… still.  It would’ve been nice.

Instead one of them shoves him back into the wrought-iron fence on the side of the road hard enough that he can feel the first intimation of the future bruise spreading hot and fast.  He hopes it isn’t shaped like the fenceposts—they’re arrowheads.  Unmistakable.  Can’t just say he slipped if somebody at school sees it when they’re changing into their equally arguably-cool gym clothes.

“You think you’re hot shit?” Kenji asks, as if he could ever possibly be stupid enough to answer in the affirmative in these circumstances.  “Some fucking hero.”

“Where did you even get those shitty glasses?” Dai chimes in, very helpfully, and Aoto snickers.

Hizashi comes perilously close, in that moment, to giving up—to simply hurling himself out into oblivion and calmly replying Your mom’s closet and letting the chips fall where they may.

But before he can decide whether this is the hill he wants to potentially-literally die on, Kenji reaches for the lapels of his jacket again.

And a shadow-colored whirlwind whips through the confrontation before his fingers touch the fabric.

Hizashi makes the mistake of blinking in surprise.

Which means that he misses the part where Shōta Aizawa punches Kenji right underneath the ribcage.

Hizashi does bear witness to the next series of moments, in which several things happen swiftly:

Kenji’s eyes go huge and bulge a little with the combination of agony and amazement.  He wheezes like a beached fish.  One of his knees gives out.

The other two stare open-mouthed.

Shōta snarls “Fuck off” three times louder than Hizashi has ever heard him say anything in class.

Dai and Aoto overcome their shock and whirl on him and Hizashi again.

Shōta grabs Hizashi’s hand—his is clammy, or Hizashi’s is, or both of them are, or maybe the whole world has gone a bit moist.

Shōta hauls on his arm and hisses “Come on, idiot!” before beginning to demonstrate.

And they run.

Shōta doesn’t stop until they’re four blocks down, around a corner, over a fence, and then up a tree.  Hizashi scrapes his knee a little trying to climb up, even though Shōta made it look effortless.  What a day, and he hasn’t even started his homework.

He’s trying to smooth some of the scratched fabric of his slacks back out without sacrificing his grasp on his support branch when Shōta says, “You need to learn how to fight.”

“My quirk damages people’s eardrums,” Hizashi says.  He rubs helplessly at a particularly damaged spot.  His mom might be able to fix it.  “I can’t exactly—”

“I know,” Shōta says, even though he doesn’t, actually, because he’s always ignoring everybody else during training.  “I don’t mean fighting with your quirk.  I mean hitting back if they hit you first, hard enough that they won’t make the mistake of hitting you again.”

Hizashi stops fussing with the pants and looks at him for a long couple of seconds.

“You either learn how to end fights,” Shōta says, scanning the horizon, “or you learn how to avoid them.”  He turns.  His eyes are dark and serious and sharp and so, so interesting.  “And if you really want to be a hero, I think you should be trying to do the first one.”

“Aizawa,” Hizashi says, because the eyes distracted him, and his mouth got ahead of his brain the way it so often does—the way that he hopes is a funky, backwards indication of some sort of heroic instinct proving that his quirk wants to kick in before he knows what’s good for him.  “Have you seen these noodle arms?  Do I look like the kind of guy who can throw one punch and deter legions of evil-doers?  Like, I know I’ve got big blond hair, but that’s as far as the comparisons go between me and All Might, man.  Unless you know somebody with a quirk that can turn me into a bodybuilder overnight—”

“Shortcuts are crap,” Shōta says, voice flat and completely calm.  “Do I look like a gym rat to you?  That’s not the point.  All Might is the only one who can be All Might.  The rest of us have to be us.  But we have to work with what we have to make it as good as we can get it.  We have to be smarter if we can’t be stronger.  There are a million ways to win.  All we need is one that works for us.”

Us.

Whoa.

“Okay,” Hizashi says slowly, more to defuse the intensity than because anything about that sounded doable.  “So… I need to find somebody who can teach me how to throw a punch?”

Shōta’s eyes narrow.  Makes Hizashi want to shiver.  “You just did.”

Hold on.  Hizashi searches Shōta’s face, which is made somewhat more challenging by the fact that Shōta has hunkered down again, intently watching the ground for any sign of pursuit.  “Uh… you don’t even… know me.”

Shōta blinks evenly down at the street below.  “I know you’re smart, but you’re trying to hide it, ’cause even though your grades are good, you act like you’re just there to have a good time, to try to get people to like you.  I know you like music more than you like people, even though you like people a lot—which is stupid, by the way.  And I know you can’t fight, but you’ve got guts.  First one’s much easier to fix.”

Hizashi tries to think that over as rationally as possible when he is trapped in a tree with a guy who knows how to hit and knows he doesn’t.  If he jumps down, he’ll break both his legs, which will make it impossible to run, and will also probably cause him to miss enough class time that they might offer his spot in the hero course to someone else.

“If you give me a black eye,” Hizashi says, “my mom is gonna freak.”

Shōta looks at him like he’s sitting on the side of the road trying to sell his last brain cell at a minimal profit.  “How bad a teacher do you think I am?”

“How should I know?” Hizashi says.  “You barely even talk.  I think this is more words just now than I’ve heard you say this entire year so far.  Are you sick?  Are you on drugs?  Are we both on drugs?  Are we jointly hallucinating?”

Shōta stares at him, lips slightly parted, for several very long seconds.

And then—quietly, huskily, like he’s a little unsure of it and a little ashamed of it and a lot unpracticed—he ducks his head and laughs.

High school is decidedly weird.

High school is decidedly the worst.

It somehow manages to be nearly as difficult in entirely different ways from the other side of the desk.

It’s easier to get around the campus now, simply by dint of the fact that Hizashi’s legs are longer than they used to be back in the day.  It’s a hell of a lot easier to beat the first bell when you can drive—the trains were pretty consistent, sure, but they didn’t know the shortcuts, and Hizashi has always hated waiting.

On the other hand, he thinks he actually dreads quizzes—and, worse, essays—even more now than he did then.  Grading several dozen of them is so, so, so much worse than grinding through and turning in just one.

He thought that one of his precious consolations would be that he didn’t have to deal with the drama anymore.

As it turns out, not being directly involved in drama is an entirely separate matter from the prospect of the dealing-with.

He is still dealing.

And he can’t even do anything.

Ayumi is one of the sweetest kids in this year’s crop of hero hopefuls.  Maybe that’s the mistake.  At what point does keeping your heart open to the whole world stop being noble and start to look self-destructive?  How many knife nicks are you meant to count?

There’s a guy she’s really into—fortunately, the little bastard goes to another school, and Hizashi’s never heard of him, let alone met him, but Ayumi is convinced he’s the love of her life.  He’s smart and funny and cute and kind and remembers things she told him about her dog two years ago before they were even dating.

The problem is that he’s dating three other girls, too.

And she thought she was going to be okay with that.

But she’s not.

Hizashi would take the vicious vagaries of the most slapdash, spit-glued, backwards, bizarre, inconsistent, head-scratching, mind-melting language on Earth—that is, English—over a one-way ticket on the interpersonal strugglebus eight days a week, but the whole point is that you never get to pick.

He’s not too old or too far away from it to remember how hard it is—how small you feel against the world at sixteen, how it feels like opportunities are already slipping through your fingers, and the shadowy scope of the future will revel in swallowing you whole.

And he remembers that the prospect of some nebulously kind tomorrow doesn’t help as much as adults think it will, because you don’t have tomorrow.  You have now.  You’re still caged by the rules your parents make and the responsibilities of school and the hero work and the circumscribed strictures of teenagerdom, but people keep demanding to know why you haven’t learned to fly, and every minute feels like it lasts forever.  Every pain feels stark and permanent and formative, itching like a new tattoo.

He can’t just say Girl, guys like that are a dime a dozen, and much better ones are going to throw themselves at your feet.

That’s not real to her.

This is real.

The hurt and the betrayal and the scalding disappointment—the conviction of her own inadequacy in the eyes of someone she wants to be important to—are real.

A promise of some theoretical future where the world gets fair won’t mean a thing, even coming from a teacher that she trusts.

So he sits with her, and hands her tissues, and asks all the questions, and tells her she did everything right—did everything she could while staying true to herself.  Tells her that everybody is a little lost, and when they’re all feeling around in the shadows trying to identify the shapes around them, they frequently put their elbows into other people’s eyes.  Tells her she doesn’t have to forgive this guy for not watching where he stuck his joints.  Tells her it’s not her fault his were so sharp when she was banking on something softer.  Tells her there’s more fish in the sea than you could hope to number, and more elbows in the void than you could ever count.  Tells her to keep walking, keep searching, keep hoping.  Tells her it’s okay to feel like shit as long as she doesn’t give up.  Tells her it won’t be this bad forever, if only because nothing ever stays the same.

He can’t tell how much the pep talk helped, versus just the presence of a human being who cared enough to listen, but it seems like some part of it provided a little bit of catharsis, at least.  She’s a red-eyed wreck by the end, but she’s holding her head a fraction higher, if he’s not mistaken.

He teaches at a damn hero school.  He’s usually not.

He’s been very, very careful not to get his hands any closer to her than strictly necessary to pass the tissue stream like a magician pulling hankies out of a hat, but as he walks her out to the front exit of the school—partly for the moral support, and partly to be able to use his body as a shield to hide her misery if someone she knows is also lingering late—she turns to him on the front step.

“Mr. Yamada,” she says, shakily.  Her arms lift a little, hesitantly.  “Sorry—sorry to ask for… can I…”

And that’s when they hear the scream.

Hizashi pushes Ayumi back inside behind him, feeling light, light, light as he skips down the steps, scanning the walkway, the plaza, the lawn.  The sound didn’t travel very far.  

All he has to do is—

There.

He’s not quite dumb enough to assess it as not too bad, which would ensure that the nailgun met a coffin or two in a matter of heartbeats, but it could be worse.  That has to be safe, right?  It could be worse.

The gigantic dude that has scooped a student up, the better to dangle her by her ankle as she shrieks, stands only slightly taller than a lamppost, and looks only slightly broader than a pickup truck.  There’s quite a bit of snarling and slavering and posturing, but there isn’t any blood.  The giant, quirk-engaged sweaty strong man grasps several students’ backpacks in the hand that is not currently tormenting a teenager, which implies a motive of simple avarice rather than outright destruction.

Also, the student being shaken by her ankle is Kimiko from 2B.

She’ll know what to do.

“Hey, douchebag!” Hizashi calls, which is less professional than it could be, but marginally better than any of the other greetings that came to mind.  The culprit turns, in any case, cords standing out in his thick neck, reddened eyes fixing on Hizashi, and that’s the important thing.  “Pick on somebody your own IQ!  Oh, wait, is that even possible around here?  Is that your problem?”

His signature brand of scintillating wit may, in fact, be lost on this particular specimen.

Doesn’t matter.

He has the bulk of the guy’s attention.

Kimiko slaps her hands over her ears.

Hizashi plants his feet, fills his lungs, and calls up his quirk.

The way the first vibration shivers low in his diaphragm and starts to resonate—

It feels like raw power, sure.  But more than that, it feels like the power to do something—to change something.  It feels like the stability to stand up and scream back at the whole damn world—loud enough to shatter glass.  Loud enough to shake the concrete.  Loud enough to matter.  Loud enough to shape the world that you release it to, leaning into the cyclone of soundwaves pouring out of the core of your being, stretching the supplication towards the sky.

Also, pertinently, loud enough to make even the taut skin of Muscles McGee’s scowling face ripple, and his eyes start to cross.

The vibrations whip through the trees behind him‚ branches shuddering, leaves dancing; and flatten the grass.

Kimiko, gritting her teeth, tears dripping up her face from the corners of her eyes, hands still pressed hard over her ears, has started glowing.

The villain drops the backpacks to try to smack at least one hand over his ear, which neatly checks the too little, too late box.  He staggers one step backwards, then two, his balance wavering.

Hizashi draws another, deeper breath.

Despite the stumbling, around the heel of that oversized hand, Hizashi can just make out a trickle of blood winding down from the ear underneath.

He doesn’t like hurting people.

But this asshole started it.

He concentrates.  He narrows his target window to a delicate little circle directly around the villain’s head.  He gathers the air into his chest cavity, the energy into his heart, the tension into his shoulders.

And he cuts it loose.

One of the things that the kids almost never get their heads around is that kicking ass with your quirk is only ever half of hero work.

The other half is experience.

The other half is learning the hard way, over and over—one scrape at a time until the scars write out a story, and the lesson sticks.  You can have as many fancy tools and fussy gadgets as you want, but the heart of navigation is just knowing—without a thought, without a question, beyond a shadow of a doubt—which way the wind will blow before the air ever starts to move.

Kimiko’s quirk is that she can gradually heat her body up to a degree that melts metal.  When she gets too emotional in daily life, she starts glowing with the heat until she can get it back under control.  She doesn’t have any ordinary clothes anymore, on account of the incineration factor.  

She just got too bright to look at.

Hizashi figures it was probably the panic first, but then she realized that superhuman strength does not confer a super-resilient epidermis.

Any instant now, the adrenaline will ebb just enough that their villain will realize that, too.

If they’re lucky, he’ll drop her like a strangely-shaped hot potato instead of hurling her across the entire lawn.

The good news is that Ayumi’s quirk is being able to levitate things once she’s splattered them in sparkly goo.

The bad news is that the organic glitter never, ever fucking comes out of your clothes.

Oh, well.

Hizashi turns.  Of course she’s crept out of the doorway and braced her feet, weight rocked back on one knee, ready to dive in no matter how many tear streaks are painted on her cheeks.  She’s hero course.

There isn’t time to sugar-coat, or even to explain.

“Throw me!” Hizashi says.

She stares at him for a half-second that they don’t have, her eyes gone wide.

Then her eyes narrow.

Good girl.

She smacks Hizashi so hard with the flat of her left hand that it actually stings, but the sparkle-glop floods out so fast that he forgives her.  Totally ruins her nails.  She did them with some of those funky little plastic beads and tiny pearls, presumably to make herself feel better about the asshole ex-sort-of-boyfriend thing.

Then the goo glimmers, and gravity gives out.

Hizashi braced his feet on the corner of the top step in the nick of time.

Ayumi’s fingers curl into his sleeve, and then she puts all of her weight behind a very impressive shove at the same instant that he pushes off.

Which is good.  Because if he’d used his quirk to generate the force, he would have shaken her brain halfway out of her skull from this close.  She’s going to need that brain later.  She’s got a whole gorgeous life laid out ahead of her.

He hopes, anyway.

He always hopes.

More importantly, at this particular instant in time, the combined impetus of both of them moving together sends him flying.

There are a lot of tricks to trajectory, but fortunately today’s journey is pretty literally straightforward.  Hizashi keeps close to the pavement, keeps his elbows tucked in, and slingshots himself directly towards the place that Kimiko will land when the villain lets go.

Which said villain, with a startled yelp as the heat simmers and crackles and scalds straight through his admittedly fairly stylish biker gloves—

Does.

Hizashi is pretty good at math.  Or at least at physics.  Or at least at guessing.

The gravitational acceleration rips Kimiko out of the air and drags her towards the concrete, and he tips the angle of his shoulders just slightly to correct, reaching out with both arms—

She slams down into his waiting arms so hard that when they strike the pavement, it severs half the spikes on his elbow pads.

But he gets her.

Unfortunately, the rest of his body maintains the original momentum even as she pins his elbows to the concrete, because he functionally doesn’t weigh anything just now—which sends him spinning ass over teakettle like a broken pinwheel.

He keeps his grip on Kimiko for the first few whirling rotations, trying desperately to identify which way most closely resembles up, struggling to shift the direction of their ungainly flight to carry them away from the immediate threat to life and limb.

Grass.

Nice.

Hizashi holds his breath and times out another vertiginous rotation, and then releases his grasp on Kimiko right as his knuckles graze the dirt.

That shift in momentum stabilizes him just enough to give him one good, solid look at the villain they just left behind—who sways on his feet, lifting one hand towards his bleeding ears, and then takes one step towards the staircase.

Towards Ayumi.

Of course.

Back to the plan Hizashi scrapped before.  You can make all kinds of stuff out of scraps, when push comes to shove.

Or when calling up the fullest, deepest, strongest incarnation of his quirk.

He does one brutally difficult sudden sit-up against the direction of his own momentum and then hurls a top-notch, gold-star, tree-whipping, air-splitting, gut-wrenching dose of Voice out at the empty lawn ahead of him.

Which gives him whiplash before he even has a chance to blink.

But which also serves the intended purpose superbly:

It reverses the way in which he was drifting at a substantial velocity, and propels him in the opposite direction at ramming speed.

One of the tricky things about Ayumi’s quirk and others like it is that it temporarily severs your obligation to the Earth’s gravity, but it sure as hell can’t change the fact that you have mass.  All the other relevant laws of physics still apply, just twisted around by the one that she’s broken by swiping you with sparkle-goop.

So Hizashi has mass.

And acceleration.

Which even an English teacher can multiply together.

“Eyes on me, jackass!” he shouts this time.  He puts a moderate bit of the quirk behind it, just to make the message utterly impossible to ignore—it ruffles the asshole’s hair and ripples the tattered remnants of his shirt.

He turns. 

Away from Ayumi.

Good.

Less-good is how little time Hizashi has left before the moment of impact, which is shaping up to rival that of the asteroid that summarily concluded the Cretaceous period.

He has to angle this right.  He has to aim for one ankle and grapple on—no matter how badly that hurts, no matter how violently he collides with it, no matter how hard it shakes his skeleton in his skin—to give himself the leverage to bring this guy down.  If he applies his body weight to the exact right fulcrum, or some sort words like those—

But there’s no time—not so much as half a breath for calculations, let alone second-guessing.

Just have to do it.

Just have to try.

Just have to—

Smash into the bastard, arms out, jaw clenched, nerves screaming with the deep dread at what they’ll meet in moments.

Hizashi sympathizes intimately with those crash test mannequins.

He thinks he knows what Shōta would say on the topic of dummies.

He also knows that Shōta would have done the same thing, or possibly something worse.

He just manages to hook both arms around the meaty ankle that he’d identified as his target, clinging on as tight as humanly possible as the rest of his body sweeps past him, the aborted momentum whipping his legs around sideways and coiling him around the guy’s huge ankle like…

Okay, well, like a probation ankle bracelet seems a little too pointed, but Hizashi can’t help the first thing that comes to mind.

The important thing is that he definitely has this guy’s full attention.

He also has an arm coated in anti-gravity goo.

So he twists said arm around far enough to smear as much of the goo as he can onto the big guy’s ankle.

That earns him an incredulous snort, and the guy leans down shockingly quickly to grab his ankle, which Hizashi supposes isn’t exactly unfair.

But it has also earned him a sudden increase in the gravitational acceleration that applies to him, because he transferred enough for Ayumi to redirect her quirk.

Which means—

The big guy doesn’t waste time dangling him—just hurls him directly down onto the pavement, which makes everything hurt so much that Hizashi barely registers the fun flickering stars dancing across his vision like an abstract chorus line gone horrifically wrong.

This idiot clearly doesn’t hang out with physics teachers anywhere near enough.

Hizashi manages to seize onto the threads of his fading awareness just long enough to confirm that the force required to throw him to the ground just propelled the asshole upward, about as gracefully as you’d expect.

If the bastard is unwillingly airborne, he’s going to have a time and a half trying to get back down, especially given that he clearly doesn’t have anywhere near as firm a grasp on aerodynamics as he did on Kimiko a couple minutes back.  He’s probably going to flail around, and shout a lot, and make no progress whatsoever.  Kimiko and Ayumi will have plenty of time to book it to safety.  Hizashi can already hear some distant shouting.  Sounds like the homestretch—sounds like salvation.  They’ll be okay.

Things go very swimmy after that.  Hizashi sinks into a deeper darkness where everything is very quiet, and then periodically drifts slowly upward, almost to the surface.  The surface has bright lights and muffled noises.  Feels like being in the dentist’s chair.  In a bad way. 

Not that there’s a good way.

But this is worse.

This is blotchy and bewildering, and everything feels disorientingly distant.  He can’t reach the world, or the diffuse little patches of light.  He can’t even lift his hands to try.  He can’t even lift his eyelids more than a sliver, here and there, when he strains to.

He gleans flashes, when he succeeds—searing sunlight and emerald grass, and voices that manage to be way too damn loud and utterly indistinct at the same time.  Hizashi has been told that his threshold for what constitutes way too damn loud ‘could fell an otherwise healthy caribou’, so this may, in fact, really be saying something.

It’s all a deafening muddle.

Except one voice, which he picks out like a connoisseur identifying a single wisp of cologne.

He is aided, in his aficionading, by the fact that the voice in question is approaching him rapidly and yelling a lot.

“Don’t move!” Shōta says.  “I see you twitching—don’t even think about—”

“Kimiko,” Hizashi rasps out.

“Is fine.  Rest, you record-breaking fucking moron, before I knock you back out mys—”

Sounds nice, honestly—more the resting part in general than specifically Shōta whacking him upside the head hard enough to banish his hard-won shreds of consciousness to another dimension, although at this point he might take either or both.

But first:

“Ayumi?”

“Also fine, obviously, since she’s in my homeroom—”

That is a fairly compelling argument, all things considered.

Hizashi tries to shift, more as a matter of scientific experimentation than anything else.

Fairly predictably, an extremely strong hand splays itself on his chest and pins him back down in the well of ambient dimness.

“Don’t you dare move,” Shōta says.

“You’re not the boss of me,” Hizashi mumbles.

“Yamada!” Nezu’s voice calls, squeaky and slightly faint.  “Do not move!”

“Aw, crap,” Hizashi says.  Triangulated.  Snared and hoodwinked and bamboozled.  Pwned, in fact.  Unequivocally.

But it’s getting increasingly difficult to care, because the weight of Shōta’s warm hand and the nearness of his voice trick Hizashi’s body into believing that everything is all right.  They’re soothing on a level so fundamental to his being that he can’t even quantify it.  It just is.

So the dark swallows him up again, and he doesn’t fight it.

A ceiling comes into focus.  Damn.  He hasn’t seen it for years, but it still feels familiar.  He’s not quite sure what that says about him, but it’s probably not anything good.

Winching his eyes open wider hurts like the Dickens.  Turning his head hurts like hell.

Worth it, though.

Shōta is already looking up from the papers he was grading.

Their eyes meet.

And hold.

And… keep holding.

“I hope you’re happy,” Shōta says.

“I am firmly planted on cloud nine, drifting over the moon,” Hizashi says.  “I have never been happier even once in my entire, extremely enthusiastic life.”  It’s okay to lie to people when they’re being needlessly sarcastic.  That’s just the rules.  “Pray, Shōta, my kind and loving friend, why do you ask?”

Shōta does not so much as bat a beautiful eyelash.  “You’re going to have to wear a neck brace for three weeks.”

Hizashi is happy, thank you very much.  That’s a whole hell of a lot better than many of his alternatives.

“Can I get people to sign it?” he asks.  “Like a cast?  Or maybe I should decorate it so nobody can tell that it’s not a normal part of my costume unless they get really close.  Like, it’s pretty much the same if I just put a speaker in it, right?”

Shōta rolls up the papers.

He leans forward.

He uses them to smack Hizashi on the nose like a misbehaving dog.

“All right, all right,” Hizashi says.  “Point taken, be less reckless or something, let the students get cuffed around sometimes to build character.”

Shōta gives him the dead eyes for a second, and then settles back in his chair and ostensibly returns his full attention to the grading.

Hizashi lets him pretend.  He’s here, after all.  He could have gotten up and left, but he didn’t.

In front of other people, Shōta calls it ‘humoring him’, which is a special kind of nightmare in its own right—but that’s not what it is.

It’s simpler.

It’s just caring.

He just cares.

So Hizashi settles down and tries at an admittedly rather achy-necked nap, because Shōta will be here when he wakes up.  And might even have gotten some of his grading done.

Everybody wins.

It sucks every year, but it sucks a little extra on a major anniversary.

Today marks ten years of sucking.  A whole damn decade of vacuum and void.

Hizashi put an aviator jacket, the third year.  Shōta eyed it the whole time, in what Hizashi presumed was annoyance that he was trivializing the occasion or… something.  He never quite put his finger on what he thought it was.

The fourth year, Shōta wore one, too.

All of which has led to them sitting in an izakaya tonight—wearing their matching jackets, staring at their food, tipping their drinks back and forth and back and forth again.

“The thing I hate the most,” Hizashi says.

He stops.

He shakes his head.

“The thing I hate the second-most,” he says, “is that the more time passes, the less… real it feels.  He’s so far away now—we were so young, and we’re so different now, it’s like…”

“Another lifetime,” Shōta says, barely loud enough to carry over the ambient conversation and the clinking of bottles and the clattering of chopsticks around the food.  “Practically a dream.”

“It’s like we wouldn’t even relate to him if he was here,” Hizashi says before he can stop it.  “He’s—he’s frozen in time at the age our students are.  And—I mean—yeah, obviously we were kids back then, too, and we grew up, but—”

“Speak for yourself,” Shōta mutters, more into the mouth of his beer bottle than into the air.

Hizashi grimaces at him.  “Any time you’d like to explain what the hell that’s supposed to mean would be cool with me.  Take your time.”

Shōta hides a dry half-smile.  “All right.”

And then he says nothing.

Because of course he does.

Hizashi gives in first, because the point he wanted to make is burning a hole in his voicebox.  “What I mean is—it’s—harder, in a way.  The further we get from it.”  Typical, possibly, that he’s had too much to drink and not nearly enough.  “It’s like losing him all over again, in a completely different way.”

Shōta looks at the wall for a long time, brow slightly creased, fingers stilled against the glass of his bottle for the first time in a while.

“I think,” he says, slowly, strangely haltingly—Shōta rarely hesitates.  “I think… we’re also… grieving the people that we were.  And could have been.  If he was still alive.”

“We could’ve had that agency,” Hizashi says.

“We would have been a fucking disaster at running an agency,” Shōta says, but there’s a glimmer of a smile in his eyes.

“For the first year or five, sure,” Hizashi says, keeping his voice light, “but we would’ve figured it out eventually.  We’re smart.  And… motivated.  Mostly.”

Shōta raises an eyebrow.

“Well, look at me,” Hizashi says.  “This radio thing—I honestly didn’t think that was going to work!”

Shōta already knows that.

Shōta talked him into trying anyway—talked him down from discouragement and despair and maybe a bit of melodrama, more times than he can remember even if he wanted to start counting.

Shōta believed in it far more fiercely than he ever did.

Shōta believed in him.

And that’s the only reason that it ever made it off the ground.

“And I’m still way underwater on some of the administrative stuff,” Hizashi says, because that was what he was supposed to be saying at some point before his brain peaced out, “but it’s just… once you push the boulder, it’s heading down the hill.  I’m figuring other stuff out as I go, and it’s limping along, and it’s fine like that, so far.  We could’ve done that.  Agency-wise.”

Shōta’s expression looks more vaguely wistful than convinced, but since it’s mostly directed at the wall anyway, Hizashi will take whatever he can get.

“More importantly,” Hizashi says, “we would’ve kicked so much ass as a pro trio.”

“The way I remember it,” Shōta says, warming up a little, “you were mostly on the receiving end of the ass-kickings.”

“Reconnaissance,” Hizashi says.  “All part of the plan.”

Shōta arches an eyebrow.  “With that talent for retroactive redescription, you should have gone into politics.”

Hizashi, appropriately aghast, claps a hand over his chest.  “Shōta.  I thought we were friends.”

Shōta eyes him hard across the table.  “Friends don’t bullshit each other.”

Hizashi eyes him right back.  “You’re bullshitting me right now about that, ’cause you bullshit me all the time.”

Shōta scowls.  Hizashi scowls back.

Someone positively guffaws over in the far corner of the room.  It’s the loudest, wildest, funniest laugh that Hizashi has ever heard in his entire life, and he’s chalked up some bangers.

Shōta’s mouth twitches, and Hizashi’s chest jumps, and then they both start snickering at the same time.

“I don’t bullshit you,” Shōta says.  “I lie outlandishly to your face to see how long it takes you to realize that I’m full of it.”

Hizashi bats his eyelashes.  “Full of what?”

Shōta blinks calmly back.  “Shit.  But no bulls were harmed in the production.  It’s how I show affection.”

Hizashi grimaces.  “Trolling me on purpose because I trust you?”

Shōta sits back, almost-smiling again.  “Who else could I do it with?”

Hizashi thinks a lot about that, too.  He doesn’t, and can’t, know who they might have become—or what they might not have—if Oboro was still here.  If it was the three of them against the world, instead of the two of them against it and the grief together.

If maybe it brought him and Shōta closer than anything else ever would have done.

If maybe he owes the best thing in his life to the worst thing.

Damn.  He’s had way too much to drink this year.

“The other thing,” Hizashi says, “which mega sucks—which super totally plus-ultra extra completely blows—is that he would’ve killed it on the radio with me.  He would’ve loved that.”

Shōta full-on smiles this time.

“Maybe with two of us,” Hizashi says, “it could be more nights every week.  Like, split up the work, patrol some nights, jockey the discs on the others.  Except then we couldn’t put the fear of our supreme overlord Nezu into the hearts of men quite as efficiently, I guess.  Having all three of us out there together would be wicked good.”

He’s mixing up his tenses a little bit—making the conditional sound probable.  Letting the wishful thinking win.

It’s not going to help.  It’s not going to change anything.

Maybe that’s why it matters, though.  Maybe it’s good that it’s powerless.  Maybe the thought exercise is an exorcism.

Maybe if he talks about enough of this, it’ll stop cycling endlessly in the back of his mind.  Maybe if he cuts it loose, he can set it free.

“Me and Oboro could do combo moves,” he says, “and call every single one of them ‘SoundCloud’.”

“Perfect,” Shōta says flatly.  “It would be great for our three-man agency to get immediately embroiled in a lawsuit for copyright infringement.”

“Who do you think you’re kidding?” Hizashi says.  “Oboro would have hit those skeevy corporate lawyers with the puppy eyes and annihilated them in one fell swoop.  They’d be paying us royalties.”

“I don’t think that’s how the law works,” Shōta says.

“I don’t think the law should be butting its way into my weird coping fantasies,” Hizashi says.

Shōta looks at him for another second.

And then smiles.

And then pushes the beer bottle aside, and stretches like a cat—hands splayed out on the tabletop, back arching, extending his legs under the table until his toes poke Hizashi’s knees.

“Okay,” Shōta says, when he’s done, and fortunately hasn’t licked the back of his hand and rubbed it over his hair—not this time, anyway.  Maybe that’s how he gets it to look like that.  “We should go.”

“For another round,” Hizashi says, just to be like that.  Just because Shōta will let him.  Just because here, he’s not too much.

“Home,” Shōta says.  “Someone’s home.  Yours is closer.”

“And your couch sucks,” Hizashi says.  Not as much as a tribute to someone who loved life like no one else he’s ever met, and hardly even got to taste it.  But—kind of a lot.  It’s lumpy.  “Mine it is.”

They pay—or Shōta pays?  Hizashi pushes money at him; everything’s a bit blurry.  Shōta has developed a skill for pickpocketing and also for reverse-pickpocketing, so Hizashi isn’t confident that the bills he offers stay anywhere near Shōta’s wallet.

The cooler night air outside clears his head a little.  He kind of wishes it wouldn’t.

Maybe they could do something with this sad thing, right?  Instead of just wallowing once a year and sometimes on intermittent weekends, when there’s time to breathe.  Maybe they could start a charity or something.

For… what?

They teach at the place that taught Oboro how to die in the name of public safety.

They’re part of the machine that ripped him to shreds.

It’s possible that that was always part of Shōta’s long game—he does take the whole hero education gig much more seriously than pretty much anybody else, and he puts his kids through the paces in a way that could, arguably, prepare them better for the unspeakable horror that could always be waiting around the next corner, biding its time in the dark.

The next corner they pass greets them with a “Hey—hey, Present Mic?”

Crap.

Tipsy fan interactions—and, honestly, tipsy might be a touch more generous than he deserves right now—are a recipe for disaster.  They’re also a recipe for Hizashi’s publicist howling in his ear about how he has a reputation with the children now and all that jazz.

Maybe not jazz.  Maybe ska.  Something a little chaotic.  Jazz improv is meant to sound like it’s not improv—like it’s cohesive even in its suddenness and creativity, as it remixes familiar—

“Who’s asking?” Shōta says, flatly.

Hizashi stares in maybe-slightly-drunken wonder as a knife comes out.

Part of the wonder is—

That’s it?  One knife?  It’s not even, like, a weapon-knife—it’s a short switchblade that doesn’t even look particularly sharp.  It would take you twenty minutes of sawing to slit somebody’s throat with that thing.  Unless you had veritable wrists of steel, you’d have to do it in shifts.

It’s possible that that’s the plan, since the rather big, broad-shouldered kid who just caught Hizashi’s attention and pulled the blade is flanked on either side by two even bigger, broader-shouldered kids.  One of them has curled horns like a ram.  The horns are, as it happens, pretty cute—kind of cartoony.  By his pointedly sour expression, though, Hizashi doesn’t think their owner would respond particularly well to being told as much.

“I am,” the kid in front says, still brandishing the tiny knife.  Hizashi looks at it for a few seconds, trying to decide how badly a comment about the way you use the knife being the important part would be received.  It’s already a shitty night.  He should pick his battles here.

It’s possible this kid just picked one for him anyway.

“Your show,” the kid says.  “Your stupid radio show.  You’re going to stop it.  Just take it off the air.  Or you’ll regret it.”

Hizashi opens his mouth to ask if he peeled that dialogue directly off of the pages of a discount convenience store manga, and then remembers what he just told himself about picking battles.

But also—

Like.

Wait a second.

“Why?” he asks.  “Like… what’s in it for you?  If you don’t like it, you can just… turn the radio off.  That really does the trick.  I’ve tried it before.  Or you can twist the dial a little bit in either direction, and you’ll wind up on a different frequency and find another show.  That’s how radio works.  It’s actually pretty cool.”

The kid steps towards him, fingers curling tighter around the handle of the knife, and Shōta’s fist grasps the back of Hizashi’s jacket and hauls him a half-step back.

Which is kind of funny, honestly, because Hizashi is pretty sure that kid couldn’t find a vital organ with that thing if he had an hour of silence and a detailed diagram, but he supposes that anybody could get lucky once, and the universe spitting in his face on a day like this would check right out.

“Your shitty show is clogging up the airwaves,” the kid says, making a sincere attempt to sound menacing.  He’s lucky he’s tall and big, because Hizashi is tall and stringy, and a deep voice only goes so far.

As the kid steps into the purview of the streetlamp behind them, it also becomes evident that he has stone spikes on the backs of his hands, and matching scales extending up his forearms.  Presumably you can bash bone to splinters with those.  He really should have led with that instead of the hilariously puny knife.  It’s so hard to take somebody seriously when they don’t even know how to intimidate correctly, and sometimes you turn them into a loose cannon just by laughing in their face.

Cannons don’t have to be very precise to turn you into pulp.

“You’re going to kill it and free up space for better shit,” the kid is saying, as Hizashi admires the cool aesthetic of the overlapping scales.  “Or we’re going to—”

“Hold on,” Hizashi says, waving his hands to erase the mental slate.  “Let me get this straight.  You’re here trying to assault me because my radio show, which isn’t even very popular—” Shōta clears his throat, but Hizashi ignores him.  “—and which is centered around positivity and having fun and giving people good news every now and again—just, you know, exists.  And you’re jealous.”

There’s a silence.

“By all means,” Hizashi says, “please make that make sense.”

There is a long silence.

No one fills it with ringing revelations or a sparkling bridge of logic.

The kid looks at him, and the knife gleams in the streetlamp’s light.

“Seriously?” Hizashi says.  “All this—” Waving both hand vigorously makes the kid tighten his grip, which is perhaps, possibly, potentially not a W.  “—over a couple hours of airtime a week?  The only people who even listen to it are students who want extra credit in English.”

Shōta sighs.

“You don’t count,” Hizashi says.  “You’ve been my friend for eleven years.  You feel obligated.”

“Or I want extra credit in English,” Shōta says. 

The kid’s fingers clench even tighter around the knife.  His knuckles are going white.  “Shut up.  Your whole fucking problem is that you don’t shut up.”

Hizashi stares.  Shōta’s head tips slightly to the side like a cat spotting an inexplicable new animal out the window.

“Buddy,” Hizashi says.  “I hate to break it to you, but if that’s what you wanted to get out of tonight, you’re gonna go home disappointed.  I am the least shut-uppable person in the entire world.  It’s, like, my whole brand.”

There’s another weighty silence.

Hizashi takes the opportunity to assess their would-be-but-hopefully-won’t-be adversaries.  Presumably the ram-horn kid just headbutts people with great efficacy.  That’s a gamble they’re going to have to make, since Hizashi can’t see any other signs of a quirk.  He considers the third kid.

Faint glow of purple light from underneath the zipped-up black hoodie.  That could be a whole host of different things.

Neato.

Hizashi can flatten them with a proper holler.  Rams have ears.  So does the glowy kid, probably.  He’s wearing his hood up, but everything else looks pretty standard in the anatomy department, other than the bioluminescence.

Hizashi sidles a half-step in front of Shōta.

Who stares at him like he’s a world-class idiot.

He’s barely even a nation-class idiot, when you factor in people like the guy trying to kill him over a radio show that wouldn’t even be very hard to beat.

“Shōta,” Hizashi mutters.  “They’re mostly heteromorphs.  And you’re wearing a normal scarf.”

Shōta steps shamelessly right back in front of him.

“I don’t own any normal scarves,” he says.

“Seriously?” Hizashi says.  “Shōta, what in—that is a fashion-based cry for help.”

Shōta winds the end of his very ordinary-looking—albeit not especially stylish, Hizashi has to confess—scarf around his hand.  “Have you considered shutting up?”

“Once again, no,” Hizashi says, which is the truth, and also apparently the ludicrous linchpin of this little misadventure.  “But for you, I will.”

“Ten seconds,” Shōta says.  “Promise.”

The kids stare at him—at this scruffy, tired-looking twenty-something guy in a worn aviator jacket, cheeks flushed from drinking, fingers tightening around the tail of his mismatched scarf.

And they laugh.

Because they haven’t noticed how sharp his eyes are, or how easily he sunk his weight onto his back foot, or how smoothly his shoulders shifted, or how expertly his fingertips dance along the fabric like they’re playing an instrument.

Hizashi imagines rapping a conductor’s baton on the side of a music stand.  Attention, please.  The symphony is about to start.

It’s a short piece.

The typical intro is more fun anyway.

“Hey, sports fans!” Hizashi says, putting just enough of his quirk behind his voice to startle them—at first.  “Check out this move!”

The last word rises to a decibel level that makes all three of them instinctively clap their hands over their ears—knife and all, in the case of their infelicitous frontman.

Shōta doesn’t waste it.

He moves like the shadow of a demon.

Hizashi barely even gets a chance to blink before the pale scarf streaks through the air like targeted lightning—like a whip of pure intention guided by the night.  Shōta’s body blends into the air, the dark, the breath of the wind, fluffy-collared jacket notwithstanding.  He’s one with the motion of the universe, and with the dim alley swallowing the light.

The scarf hooks around the lead kid’s wrist, pulls taut, and jerks his arm so hard that the knife pops out of his grasp and pinwheels through the air, the blade sparking.  Shōta dodges effortlessly around it, the scarf wrapping tighter and further around the kid’s forearm like a dull ribbon, and the kid stumbles, spun helplessly on his heel by Shōta’s momentum as Shōta darts past, flicking his free hand, the motion only even visible as a faint glimpse of pallor in the enveloping dark.

The other end of the scarf winds around one of the ram kid’s horns just as he starts to lower his head, breath steaming out of his nose.

Shōta twines his hands almost lovingly into the fabric, then yanks his elbows together.

The two kids slam into each other.

This is art.

But there is one more player, of course.

Hizashi turns to the third kid—who has started glowing much more avidly, violet light pouring up from underneath his shirt, shadowing his features starkly like a child with a flashlight.  His shoulders tilt as he begins to raise his equally illuminated hands.

One of the things the kids don’t know is how much of a fight you can avoid if you end it fast—before anybody revs their engine or stokes the fire or gathers up the guts.

“Hint,” Hizashi says to UV Boy, in a normal voice.

The kid blinks at him, pausing on instinct.

Rookie mistake.

Hizashi adds, in the not-so-normal Voice: “Run!”

The force and abruptness already send him staggering, and then—because an adult gave him a command, and his brain is more alight with panic than any part of his body is with the quirk—he does what he’s told.

He whirls on his heel and tries to bolt.

And hurls himself directly into the loop of the scarf that Shōta just tossed out to catch him like a rabbit in a snare.

Winch, cinch, tighten an inch, and they’ve got a triple-bad-boy sandwich trussed up nice and neat against the alley wall.

Shōta steps back.

“Seven seconds,” he says.

Shota is, of course, insanely hot like this, but there’s nothing for it.  Hizashi knows.  He’s tried.

“I helped,” Hizashi says.

Shōta eyes him.

He grins back.

Shōta reaches for his phone.

“Hang on,” Hizashi says.  “Are you calling the cops?  They didn’t actually do anything.”

Shōta stares at him in open disbelief this time.  “Hizashi, he threatened you with a knife.”

Okay.  That’s a good point.

“Let me rephrase that,” Hizashi says.  “They definitely did some stuff.  But they didn’t accomplish anything.”  He extends an arm out to them for emphasis.  “They didn’t actually commit any crimes, because they didn’t get far enough.”

One of the sorely routed kids makes a deeply pathetic little whimper noise.  Whether that’s a poetic coincidence or an intentional bit of guilt-tripping isn’t particularly important, because it makes Shōta grimace either way.

If he wastes energy on a facial expression, that means that he’s thinking too fast to remember to hide the fact that he’s thinking.

Hizashi nudges one of the kids with his foot—carefully—and then picks up the extremely ill-suited knife.  He retracts the blade and tucks it into the pocket of his jacket.  “They’re just kids, Shōta.  Dumbass kids, but—kids.”

Shōta looks down at them for a few more seconds, eyes narrowed, jaw set.  The streetlamp does him so many favors that you’d think it was trying to get some from him, too.

Hisashi totally has dibs.

He knows that Shōta’s thinking something not too different from what he is.

Oboro would want them to leave it.

Oboro would want them to give these imbeciles a second chance—if not in the name of munificence and magnanimity, in the name of all the stupid shit that the three of them never got to do.

Oboro would want them to take the high road, heads in the clouds.

Shōta weighs it for a few more seconds, looking down at his scarf bound up around them, tangling the three of them together, immobilizing them from harming anybody else for a while.

Hizashi knows Shōta Aizawa.  He’s a hard-ass except when he’s not.  He’s cold except when he’s not.  He does whatever it takes, except when there’s another way.

Plus he hates the cops. 

“Their punishment,” Shōta says, “is that they have to find their way out of it.”  He busies himself brushing his hands off on his jeans.  “And they have to live with knowing that they came very close to having the single stupidest motive for attempted murder that I’ve heard in eleven years of stupid reasons.”

Hizashi has definitely heard worse, but he has retained just enough wherewithal to realize that saying so would undermine Shōta’s parting shot, and the intended lesson.

Besides, Shōta is starting to walk away.

“What about your scarf?” Hizashi asks, as he follows—of course.  Shōta didn’t even hesitate, let alone wait for him, because there was never any doubt.

“Told you,” Shōta says.  “I have a ton more at home.”

“That is truly a shame,” Hizashi says, “because that one—I mean, I hate to say it, I really do—”

“You do not,” Shōta says.

He’s right.  “Well, it’s ugly.”

A lesser man would defend his dubious fashion choices with a selection from the obvious ripostes:

Your whole wardrobe is ugly.  Your face is ugly.  It should make you feel right at home.

Shōta just shrugs.  “Gets the job done.”

He always does.

Hizashi shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket and curls his fingers around the knife, sauntering after Shōta, a little drunker than he meant to be, a little happier than he ever dared to hope for.  He watches the wisps of cloud drift across the moon like reaching fingers that can’t quite grasp it.

Maybe next year will be better.  Maybe tomorrow will.  Maybe he’ll bury Shōta in fashion scarves for his birthday.  Maybe he’ll do it for both of their birthdays.  Maybe he’ll do it just for fun.

The night isn’t young.  He’s not sure he is, either.  But the world’s still big, if you look at it from all the way down here.

Hizashi bats his eyelashes.  Shōta loves to pretend he hates it.  “Admit it.  Isn’t this nice?”

“It’s fine,” Shōta says, just to be a pill.  Sour cherry flavored or something.  Sometimes the coating melts off, and you get the bitter bite too strong right out of the gate, but you still know it’ll make you feel better if you give it time.  “We could have just had lunch in the staff room.”

“You are,” Hizashi says, “cataclysmically unromantic.”

Shōta shrugs.

It’s not really a surprise, though.  They’ve been so close for so long that all the boundaries have blurred into oblivion.  Hizashi has been trying to redraw some of the lines—trying to define where codependent friendship stuff ends and distinctly boyfriendy activities begin—but it’s actually trickier than he thought.

And Shōta kind of has a point.  They would have had a nice time just eating leftovers in the staff room, too, because they have a nice time anywhere that they’re together.

That said, Hizashi did not come this far—and cough up all those goddamn flowers—just to settle for what they had before, albeit with a new name and a lot of couch cuddles that are deliberate, instead of being fake-accidental on the pretense that one or both of them just slid that way and is too tired to move.

The fact that so little has materially changed is kind of cute in its own way, but it makes the shift in status weirdly harder to get used to.  When Hizashi wakes up in the morning, if Shōta isn’t there on the other side of the bed, he kind of… forgets.  Everything just feels normal.  Maybe a little warmer, a little brighter, a little sweeter—but he can get all the way to, like, his third class before it hits him like a freight train full of slabs of granite.

The funniest part—maybe, anyway; he intentionally hasn’t shared it with anyone else in case somebody tells him that it’s stupid—is that he still catches himself pining.  It’s such a deeply-ingrained habit at this point that he doesn’t even realize he’s doing it.  He’ll just sit there at his desk, kicked back in the chair with some quizzes resting on his knee or something, and watch Shōta lean over a lesson plan or a quirk analysis essay or whatever, with his hair falling around his face to frame it and his eyes all intense and his brow slightly furrowed, with his fingers so graceful but strong around the stark red pen that they look like something out of a painting, with the focused set of his mouth so indescribably perfect that it’s mesmerizing, and think If only.

And then he’ll remember, sometimes several minutes later, that it’s not an If.

It’s a Holy shit goddamn yes yes yes!, more or less.

The world is vast and inexplicable.

“This is better,” Hizashi says.  “We got a nice walk.  We’re away from the computer screens.  No nosy coworkers asking us invasive questions.”  Nemuri has marginally improved with the unnecessary prying in the past few weeks, but Hizashi suspects that it’s primarily because she’s gotten bored, because Shōta always just stares at her like she’s speaking a language he doesn’t understand and wouldn’t care to learn, and inevitably waits her out.  “Plus the food here is supposed to be great.”

Shōta does not look impressed, which is not especially surprising given his perspective on those energy-drink juice-pouch abomination-things he consumes in place of recognizable sustenance with distressing regularity.

Hizashi ordered for him, since he claimed he didn’t care.  Hizashi is going to win this war.  Knowing Shōta’s ramen order puts him at a huge advantage—simple and savory, with occasional pops of unexpected flavor combinations.  It’s a formula he can put to use in a lot of situations, and Shōta won’t even realize he’s being manipulated into associating the flavor profile that he already likes with newer things until he starts asking to try more—

“Damn,” Shōta says.

Hizashi emerges from a pleasant reverie about taking a vacation to Bali and tricking Shōta into liking Indonesian food.  He blinks down at Shōta’s hands first, assuming from the neutral delivery that that was a reaction to an unfortunate email from a student, or a text from Nezu, or news that one of his secretly-favorite troublemakers had gotten into a spot of their namesake.

Shōta’s hands are empty.

His head is turned.

His shoulders have dropped, but his spine has straightened.

“Noooooooo,” Hizashi says, even though it’s obviously already too late.  “In front of my salad?”

“You don’t have a salad,” Shōta says, like a normal person.  That’s a funnier joke in its own right anyway—the mere abstract concept of either of them being normal.  “I’ll make it up to you later.”

Hizashi makes a point of collapsing all over his seat as Shōta gets up.  “It’s not about the mon—”

And Shōta is… out the door.

Hizashi gets up and jogs along after him.  Maybe if they save enough wide-eyed innocents and vulnerable schoolchildren and sweet old grannies, the chef will be inspired enough by their indomitable courage to keep their food warm until they come back.

He has to spin around a couple times in the street before he can pinpoint the direction whence the ruckus originates.  When he sees the smoke rising, he takes up jogging again, and pulls out his phone to tap the contact he labeled AAAAA1 in order to keep it perpetually at the top of the list.

“Mic?” Nezu says after less than half a ring.

“We might be late for class,” Hizashi says, raising his voice about as much as is safely possible without damaging those adorable mousy… beary… aardvarky… whatevery ears.  “We have a little situation on our hands.”

He doesn’t actually know if it’s little, but he does know that Shōta will make it smaller.

Nezu doesn’t waste time on a sigh.  “Send me—”

“You got it, boss,” Hizashi says, lowering the phone long enough to drop a pin into a text.

He can barely hear the squeaky voice over the ambient rumbling, even with the speaker pressed up to his ear.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

Hizashi laughs.

He crams his phone successfully back into his pocket on the second try just as he comes up to a scene he hadn’t expected—which is really saying something, given the sheer breadth of his potential expectations.  He considers himself difficult to surprise.

A T-Rex will do it.

The fucking thing stomps around so hard that the ground shakes violently, and only a hasty repositioning of his feet keeps Hizashi’s face off of the concrete.  It has already annihilated a car—Shōta will have made sure that the civilian who chose the wrong damn day to drive to lunch got scarf-whipped out and deposited somewhere safer, but the car, unsurprisingly, did not fare well beneath the gigantic birdlike feet.

Speaking of birds—it doesn’t have feathers.  Aren’t they supposed to?  Isn’t that a thing?

Before Hizashi can decide whether Googling that is a panic reaction or a rational stage of information-gathering, it roars.

Jeez.  And people tell him he’s loud.

The concrete shakes again, and the air shakes with it.  It sounds like shredding metal and tortured lions and smashing a guitar amp with an electrified sledgehammer, and like an avalanche and a demolition.  Hizashi can feel his eardrums thrumming with it.

Shōta flickers around its ankles like a persistent moth, darting out of range and out of reach, keeping it stomping around mostly-harmlessly.  The scarf undulates back and forth, but even Shōta can’t manipulate momentum into letting him drag down something that big from a single point of leverage.

Shōta backflips clear of one of its giant claw-toes and then dances over to join Hizashi at the perimeter, moving in swift, graceful leaps and bounds like an unkempt gazelle.

“Stay out of the way,” Shōta says.

There’s love in that, if you know how to listen.

Hizashi keeps his eyes on it.  “That’s a fucking dinosaur.”

He can hear the grimace.  “Arguably.”

“It’s a pretty significant footnote in the historical record,” Hizashi says, watching the very sharp and shiny arm-claws pawing through the air, “that those are extinct.”

“Odd shapeshift,” Shota says.  “Erasure isn’t even regressing it.”

Awesome.  Paleontastic.

“Okay,” Hizashi says.  “Plan B.”

He can feel Shōta glaring at him.  “Plan Stay Clear.”

“What?” Hizashi says, cupping a hand around his ear as a few more civilians pour out of one of the nearby office buildings and start screaming up a storm.  “Can’t hear you over the sound of the arguable Jurassic predator.”

Shōta hisses through his teeth, but he’s already shifted his weight.  “Watch your ass, or I’ll kill you myself.”

“Watch your ass!” Hizashi calls back, vaulting over a stray chunk of rubble.  “It’s mine now!”

Whatever way Shōta chooses to swear at him this time gets lost under another ear-splitting roar.

That sounds way too much like it’s ripped right from the foley track from ‘Jurassic Park’—like, actually copied.  Put that together with the lack of feathers, even though the scientific record has kinda confirmed the fluffy reptile thing—

“Move!” Hizashi calls over at the new cluster of quivering civs.  “Shake it on over to—” The T-Rex swings its giant head around towards them, massive teeth gleaming in the midday sun, and the chorus of screams devolves into clutching at each other.  “Oh, for heaven’s sake—”

He tilts the speaker towards them.

“Evacuate in an orderly fashion, please!  Everything’s—”

—coming up rexes, rather than roses.

Hard yikes.

The mouth alone is the size of a fucking truck, and it is currently turning towards him.

Hizashi has to dive and then roll for his damn life, and the force of the fetid breath huffing out right behind him makes it petrifyingly evident how close he cut that one.

But the thing, about the big ones—

Is that they have to catch you first.

Hizashi scrambles up onto his feet and takes off at the break the sound barrier or die, maybe sprint he’s perfected over the years.

Towards the rex.

But specifically towards its feet.

They, too, boast vehicular proportions, as well as the bonus of those claws that look like they evolved specifically to shred a smaller being moments before the stomp splatters the shreds.  Shōta hadn’t been able to budge one of those ankles even with the many tricks he has up his sleeve, which include such sick moves as spiraling himself around the pinioned target to gather angular momentum like a living bolas.

But Hizashi doesn’t want to budge them.

He wants to use them as a shield, and use that as a distraction.

“Why, Mr. Rex,” he calls, amplifying it for good measure.  “Or Madam Rex, or… anything else is cool, too.  Rex as in monarch.  Anyway—what big teeth you have!”

He darts around behind one of the enormous fucking feet so that the giant creature’s own ankle shields him from the brunt of the roar.

Nobody appreciates poetry anymore.

The rex tries to stomp its way around in a tight circle to track him, since swiveling doesn’t exactly fall into its skill set.  It is hell staying one step ahead when its steps are about twelve times bigger than his, but so far—

Famous last words: the next slamming footstep shatters the concrete, cracking open a crater of sufficient size that the web of fissures spreads too fast to track.

Hizashi scrambles backwards, trying to guess where the next greedy split will yawn open and bite for his feet—and one lucky jump becomes two, becomes three—he ekes out a fourth—

And then he misses his footing, and his boot slips, and he goes down like a sexy sack of bricks.

And twists his right ankle in a way that registers as painful even over the dizzying ambrosia of the adrenaline.

More importantly, though, he finds himself on the ground at a time when there is a huge, highly extinct creature actively attempting to obliterate the ground in question and anything on top of it.

It—or whatever fraction of a tormented human mind is trapped inside it at the moment—has evidently recognized that superior size can give it control of the environment, which is frequently the way you win.

Hizashi gets his elbows underneath him.  His right foot is caught between two chunks of concrete, of course; and hauling on it makes fragments of his soul depart from his body, of course; but given the options of an unfashionable ankle brace or death, the choice is, of course, pretty clear.

The T-Rex swivels around with uncanny ease, the enormous tail whipping through the air fast enough to sing.  Fascinating acoustic observation.  If only it wasn’t for the death thing, Hizashi would love to investigate.

Its giant, unsettlingly intelligent eyes fix on him where he fell victim, humiliatingly quickly, to the extremely basic broken-pavement trap.

Well.

Okay.

This is kind of his moment.

He tips the speaker up, digs as deep as he can bear, and drags in a long, long breath.

Dinosaur feet aren’t the only thing in this neck of the woods that can destroy infrastructure, after all.

He lets it lumber towards him, leering.  It is impossibly big.  It is impossibly big.

He lets it lean down.  He lets it part the jaws that could close around a subway train, lets it bare the teeth as tall as he is.

And he calls up the Voice.

“Hey, lizard breath!” he roars right back, directly into its face.  “Why don’t you pick on somebody from your own geochronologic era?”

The force of it makes the rex’s rubbery-looking skin undulate, and it squints its giant eyes, the—comparatively—tiny arms flailing a little.  Hizashi doesn’t know much about T-Rex hearing, but based on its attentiveness, it must have pretty high auditory sensitivity, which means he just blasted the absolute shit out of its eardrums.  Its massive head ought to be ringing right about now.

It stumbles one gigantic step backwards, which makes a few more civilians wail in dismay.

It starts to turn towards them, still looking disoriented.

And it gets hit by a small, swift, black and gray bullet—right in the back of the neck.

Shōta has a bad habit of ignoring gravity, more than really defying it: today he hooks the scarf onto a scale or a horn or a protrusion of some kind between the neck and the shoulder, then just flings himself back off of the top of the rex’s head and scarf-swings under and around, whipping back up to close the circle.

Shōta would.

Shōta would try to choke out a dinosaur.

Unfortunately, Hizashi’s memories of fascination with prehistoric predators have faded substantially over the past twenty years, and he’s not sure if the colorfully illustrated books dedicated much time to the structure and relative durability of T-Rex’s windpipe anyway.  Tracheas are poorly preserved by fossilization in the first place, and also make mediocre two-page spreads.  Hizashi knows the second bit firsthand, because a medical-minded journalist tried to do an article about his once, which didn’t even make it to the editor’s desk before it got the ax.

The article, that is.  The article got axed.  Not Hizashi’s trachea.  At least there’s that.

Point is—

Shōta probably needs a little bit of help.

Hizashi wrenches his foot loose, with no help whatsoever from Kevin Bacon.  Fancy-freed at last, he puts several unskipped arm days to work levering himself backwards, then lowering himself down—off the edge of the tectonic-plate-like gap that the T-Rex smashed into the innocent street, to land on the section below.

It’s a pretty substantial drop—a rent in the asphalt, jagged at the edge, leaving a gap some three feet tall between the lowered section Hizashi ended up on, and the higher plane where Shōta and the rex continue to tango without a beat.  The rex looks very irritated about the strangulation thing, but not especially oxygen-deprived.

Right, then.

Hizashi plants his palms on the cracked concrete, nudges the speaker up with his elbow, ignores the ominous throbbing that his ankle has taken up, and focuses on the exposed asphalt guts of the street right in front of him.

Soundwaves move faster through solids than through the air, because the molecules have less give.

He doubts that whoever woke up this morning and decided to turn into a dinosaur at midday studied the physics of earthquakes extensively enough to know about that.

Hizashi concentrates, and concentrates the sound.

And he screams.

The vibrations ram through the cement, radiating with their own potential, which can only redouble itself so many times as he keeps howling into the solid wall before—

The road crumples underneath the T-Rex’s giant feet.

And because it isn’t expecting the whole street to erupt into a near-instantaneous chaos of broken pieces this time, it can’t counterbalance its weight.

It staggers, teeters, staggers again, tips further—

Shōta slaps it sharply in the eye with one end of the scarf.

That must smart like crazy.

The latest roar to rattle the air carries a detectably plaintive tone.

But it’s too late.

The dinosaur goes down like… well.  More like a gigantic reptile than a lead balloon, although Hizashi would have expected the brand-new crater and dust-blast radius if it had been the balloon.  He probably should have expected it from the rex, too, but it’s been a hell of a day.

He ducks, as much as it’s possible to duck when you’re already on the ground, surrounded by mean little chunks of concrete that keep digging into your back and arms and elbows every time you move.

Yet another roar washes over him, but this time it’s all dust and air and street detritus, and then everything goes suddenly, eerily still.

Other than the car alarms.  And the wailing civs.  And the distant sirens.  But you barely even hear any of those after a while.

Hizashi nudges his glasses up until they just tumble off, and then he attempts to swipe his forearm across his face without rubbing more dirt into his eyes.  The glasses had started to function more like stained glass than corrective lenses a couple minutes back, so wearing them wasn’t helping much anyway.

He drags himself up the side of the concrete earthquake-fault wall one scraping handhold at a time so that he can peer over the top.

All he can see is dinosaur ass.

Picturesque.

At least the ass isn’t moving.

He tries to wrench himself up over the edge of the tiny concrete cliff, putting his much less-miserable left ankle to work by bracing that foot in a promising crevice and attempting to—

—not jump out of his skin and immediately tumble back down when Shōta appears out of thin air and lands in front of him.

Shōta grabs his shoulder pads and hauls him up like he weighs about as much as a bag of dandelions.

Shōta glowers something awful, but he’s unerringly gentle in supporting Hizashi’s arm until he’s balanced on his better foot.

“What did I tell you about watching your ass?” Shōta says, with more than a hint of the angry kitty growl.

“My ass is fine,” Hizashi says, as cheerfully as possible.  “You didn’t say anything about my ankle.”

Shōta’s glare could probably melt glass, so maybe it’s a good thing that Hizashi’s glasses got so wrecked.

“So, uh,” Hizashi says, gesturing at the prehistoric derrière that obstructs his view of practically everything else.  “What’s the protocol here?”

Shōta considers the rex for a few seconds like it’s a distant curiosity rather than an extremely unconventional villain that he just rodeo-rode.  “Given the loss of consciousness—”

Obviously Shōta doesn’t lead a charmed life.

But damn if the thing doesn’t start emanating weird, scintillating smoke right on cue.

Shōta shifts a half-step forward—almost moving in between Hizashi and the theoretical threat yet again—without releasing his arm.  Hizashi puts as little weight on his ankle as possible, keeping his breathing as deep and even as he can amidst all the ambient particulates of various characters.  There are lots of final bosses with a phase two that’s much worse than the first.

This one—

Nearly disappears beneath the thickening, billowing mist, which then dwindles rapidly, the stream narrowing, the cloud condensing—

And then the obstruction drifts away.

Lying on the shattered pavement, curled up into the fetal position, unmoving except for the hitching breaths moving his scrawny shoulder, is a little boy who looks about four or five.

Like the age you might be if you were walking home from school, and your quirk manifested out of nowhere, and you turned into what you thought a cool dinosaur should look like from the movies that you’d watched.

He’s butt-naked, obviously, since they don’t construct most kids’ uniform clothes to withstand a thirty-five-thousand percent increase in mass.

And he’s still passed out.

Shōta gently releases Hizashi’s arm and stomps right over.  Hizashi shucks his jacket off and tries to shake out the worst of the dust.  He takes one step towards the kid, sorely regrets it in every sense of the phrase, and whistles through his teeth instead.  Shōta looks back.  He balls up the jacket and tosses it.  Shōta catches it, face settling into the subtly appreciative expression, and then crouches down and bundles the kid up into it.

Hizashi holds a hand above his eyes and makes an effort to squint at the approximate perimeter of the destruction for anything that looks like an abandoned school bag or something, but—to put it in delicate terms—he can’t see shit.

Oh, well.  That’s a problem for future Hizashi, or hopefully the cops.

Present Hizashi sits down.

Past Hizashi haunts present Hizashi in the form of a long, low, loud tummy rumble.

“Hey,” Hizashi says as Shōta picks his way back over with the kid cradled in both arms, two fingers pressed against his carotid to monitor his pulse.  “Do you think if we called now and asked nicely, the cops would bring us some food?”

Shōta sits down next to him.  The kid’s cute, as far as Hizashi can tell through the blur of his not-so-blessed vision.  He looks tired as hell, though.

Big mood, etcetera.

“Doubt it,” Shōta says.

“Damn,” Hizashi says.

That night, he gets a text from his publicist.

It’s a picture very similar to the last one she sent of him and Shōta—an image that would be quite cinematic if it wasn’t clearly taken at nine-times zoom on a phone camera from behind the caution tape.  He and Shōta stand together in the midst of the field of rubble again, dust swirling up past them in wide, artistic coils, with Shōta’s arm wrapped around Hizashi’s shoulders.  This time, Hizashi’s arm is very firmly settled around Shōta’s waist, secured by the way he’s fisted a firm handful of Shōta’s shirt.

Mic, is all his lovely PR angel even wrote.

She was, of course, on the need-to-know docket from day one—a rather exclusive list that made for a series of spectacularly surreal conversations, in some of which he had to clarify multiple times that no, this was a new thing, because they actually hadn’t been dating before.

The press, of course, is not on the need-to-know list.

Cute! Hizashi writes back.  Historians think they were good friends.

She sends him an unimpressed emoji, but he knows she’ll make it work.

In the meantime—the much, much more important meantime—he shoves his phone onto the nightstand, rolls onto his side, and slings his arm across Shōta’s waist all over again.

Recovery Girl made short work of his ankle, bless her.  By some minor miracle of muscle and motion, he didn’t break anything—just sprained it something awful, and she was able to coax his body into speed-running enough of the healing that he shouldn’t even be limping for too long.  He’s got a bag of ice cubes strapped to it right now—secured with one of the other not-normal scarves, in fact—which feels rather heavenly.

Not as heavenly as holding on to Shōta, though.

Shōta shifts the textbook he was annotating so that he can resettle his arm over Hizashi’s shoulders.  “How is it?”

“Perfect,” Hizashi says, nudging his cheek more vigorously against Shōta’s ribcage.  “Warm.  Comfy.  Twelve out of ten.  Highly recommend.  Would snuggle again.”

“Your ankle,” Shōta says, but Hizashi knows how to detect the hint of the invisible smile that flickers under his voice.

“That old thing?” Hizashi says.  “Don’t fret your pretty little head about it.”

“You know you only have two of those right?” Shōta says.  “Be careful with them.”

“Sure, sure,” Hizashi says.  “But I only have one of you.”

Shōta favors him with the indulgent sigh and rests the textbook on the back of his head, but he knows what it means.

Hizashi loves Shōta Aizawa so, so much.  Hizashi loves his sharp edges and his crap sense of humor and his scary eyes and his bad posture and his immovable devotion to his students and his love-hate relationship with the entire world.  Hizashi loves his funky little steel foot and the scars around his right eye and the way he always kind of snorts when he first wakes up, and then does an extremely specific little scoot-wriggle thing to move over to the edge of the bed to reach his alarm.

Hizashi does not love his alarm.

Hizashi wants to drop-kick his alarm into an active volcano and then blow up the volcano and then sink the blown-up volcano into the sea.

Shōta slaps the phone twice before he hits the right button to silence the noise.  He mutters something unintelligible but extremely vituperative.  Hizashi yearns for magma.

Shōta’s hand gropes its way across the mattress, finds Hizashi’s ear, finger-walks up into his tangled hair, and pats twice.  “Go back to sleep.”

Hizashi should.

But instead he pries his body up out of the cushy sanctity of the beautiful bed as Shōta furniture-surfs his way over to the doorway because he doesn’t like putting his foot on until he’s at least eighty percent awake.

Hizashi gives himself a few minutes to rue his fate and curse the day he was born and regret every single individual life choice that led to him being up early on a Saturday when he got in at two after the show ended.  His mortal coil has surpassed the point of weariness and is functionally a corpse with an uncannily resilient circulatory system.  He feels like death, and probably smells like it, too.

He scrubs the sleeve of the shirt he stole from Shōta’s dresser over his face, shoves his hair back, feels around on the nightstand until he finds his glasses, shoves his feet in his slippers, and shuffles his miserable way out into the kitchenette.

Eri has ballet class in two and a half hours.  Shōta sucks at breakfast.  Hizashi is great at breakfast.  Pretty simple math.

He doesn’t do anything too over the top, since he doesn’t want her to eat too much and then get a tummyache from all the activity, but it feels like a special sort of contained domestic haven, here—in Shōta’s new-ish kitchen in the dorm-flat, which is less battered than the old one, but contains all the same stuff in more or less the same places.  He can hear Shōta talking softly to Eri in her room but can’t quite make out what they’re saying.  The clock ticks.  The refrigerator hums.  The pans sizzle, and the soles of Hizashi’s slippers scrape on the tiles, and he can hum to himself without even trying for a tune.  He’s still a little hoarse from last night, but nobody will care.  And he’s doing something good.  He’s doing something that makes everybody here a little happier.

One of these days, Eri’s probably going to realize that having your de facto dad’s best friend happen to be in your home every Saturday morning is not just a guys-being-dudes thing, but she’ll probably be chill about it.  Hizashi hopes she gets to live in this world for a while, anyway—one where people just do that sort of thing for each other because they can, and they want to.  One where people are just nice.

It’s all coming together when Eri trots in, wearing the most adorable kitty pajamas the world has ever seen, and the way her face lights up when she sees him—

Well.  Arguably she should have figured out that he was here from the fact that the breakfast-in-progress smelled edible, rather than like acrid smoke, but it’s early, and she’s seven.  Hizashi can give her a pass.

“Hizashi!” she says, and he’d give her a pass for murder for another one of those, actually.  “Good morning!”

“Good morning, sunshine,” he says, like he always says, and she beams, like she always does, and Shōta sneaks into the doorway and smiles like Hizashi won’t notice, which always fails.

Breakfast is great, even though Hizashi has to be extremely careful how much of it he dumps into the churning maelstrom of his queasy guts after the late night and the lousy sleep, but they’ve got a good schedule that revolves around it.  Hizashi hops in the shower, Shōta puts on a mostly clean shirt, and Eri suits up in her ballet gear and then a big, puffy jacket for the walk over, with her tiny dance shoes and an apple for a snack and a unicorn-themed water bottle tucked into the bright red bag she slings over her shoulder.

She’s cuter than a whole bucket of kittens in her pink ballet gear.  Shōta very carefully ties her hair up into a high ponytail, meticulously braids it, and then wraps the braid around the base until he’s made a fancy bun.  He bobby-pins it into place with even more caution, then concentrates very seriously on tying a pink ribbon bow around the whole thing.

Hizashi sneaks a picture of him when he’s making the loops of the bow.  He glares over Eri’s head, but his hands don’t even stop moving.

And then they’re off.

Walking across the UA grounds on a Saturday morning was always a little strange, but it’s even stranger these days, with the voluntary dorm thing.  Sometimes the occasional student will straggle by, bleary-eyed and desperate to cram in some training; and more often than not said student will spot Shōta and bolt for cover just in case he finds something wrong with their presence on their own school campus early in the morning.

But usually it’s just them, and the quiet, and sometimes the mist.

Which makes Hizashi think of Oboro, but of Nemuri, too.

It’s probably confirmation bias, but he could swear there’s more mist on campus in the mornings than there used to be—that it’s thicker and warmer, at the very least.

Hizashi always makes a point of lifting his hand and spreading his fingers and dragging them through, letting the little droplets bead on his palm, letting the wisps embrace him for as long as they last.

Nothing lasts very long, when you think about it.  A lot of what seems substantial is just mist.

It’s not far to the little dance studio with their tiny, lowered bar and their cutesy genkan full of child-sized sneakers and photos of the kids that dropped theirs here in the years before.  The way that the sound of conspiratorial giggling fills the space no matter what time you arrive always makes Hizashi’s heart stick in the back of his throat.  The world keeps turning.  The sun keeps rising.  Kids keep laughing.  All you can do is try to find a way to keep up.

Most of the parents drop off their would-be ballerinas and ballerinos and ballerineithers and then bounce, but there’s one grandma who’s always here before they turn up.  She sits in the chair at the end of the hallway, from which vantage you can only just see through the window to the practice room, and knits the whole time.  She’s fast.  She’s made, like, eight sweaters.  Maybe she’s doing one for every kid in the class.

Shōta plunks down in one of the chairs in the middle, like he always does, and Hizashi drops next to him and dozes against his shoulder, like he always does.

Shōta brought some grading, which isn’t unusual either.  They’re all still avoiding the teachers’ lounge.  Nezu keeps saying in staff meetings that he’s going to remodel it, but they all know new paint and reconfigured desks won’t dispel the echo of Nemuri’s voice.  Every time he passes through, Hizashi swears he smells a whiff of that over-the-top, too-sweet, vanilla-forward perfume she loved for the irony of its innocence.  He never could have dreamed how much he would miss hating it.

He always turns around as fast as he can, but obviously she’s never there.

One of the side effects is that they’ve all sought out weird new places to grade instead.  Hizashi found Snipe on the roof once, and he can’t even throw stones, because that’s why he was on the roof.  He knows the only reason he hasn’t seen Shōta up there is because Shōta doesn’t want to be seen.

At the moment, though, Hizashi is way too groggy to grade papers.  Friends don’t let friends mark essays sleep-deprivation-drunk.  It’s a good thing none of Shōta’s kitchen appliances qualify as heavy equipment, or they would have been up shit creek and woefully paddle-less.

He drifts idly, and relatively gently, back and forth between dreams about wandering around alternate versions of the little studio—sometimes at night; sometimes in a weird, frozen-golden hour of the afternoon; sometimes silvered by torrential rain on the window and the skylight—and snatches of wakefulness.  He’s pretty sure he’s never been here when he wasn’t high out of his mind on sleeplessness, which somehow seems to hit him just a fraction harder every single time.  It makes this place seem utterly unreal—all these little sprites in their rose-pink and cream-colored tutus, twirling and leaping, high-pitched laughter ricocheting oddly off the walls.  Strains of the same half-dozen classical pieces, muffled by the glass, stopping abruptly in the middle of a movement and starting over.  And over.  And over.

Would’ve been a pretty liminal space even if he’d ever had his head on straight, probably.

Shōta’s pen whispers across the page.  The faithful granny’s faithful needles clack quietly, rhythmically, ceaseless like clock hands—subtle enough, and so familiar, that you forget until you focus.

Hizashi sinks into another dream where all of his students are stuck in a gulch, and he keeps reaching down from the cliff above, grabbing for their hands—and missing, and missing, and missing.

One kid climbs on top of another’s shoulders and seizes his wrist until his fingers go numb.

He wakes up to find that he has somehow shifted enough to be lying on his own hand, crushing it in between Shōta’s shoulder and his head.

He sits up.  He watches the kids through the window as he massages some life back into his hand.  This all still feels incredibly surreal.  He won’t be surprised in the slightest if he someday asks Eri what her favorite thing about ballet class was, and she stares at him and says “What ballet class?”

In whatever version of reality or plane of existence he’s ended up on, though, her favorite part seems to be imitating the teacher pretty darn well, little cheeks all puffed up with concentration, the clean pink bow Shōta labored over looking like it’s floating right above her head.

She looks focused.

She looks determined.

She looks happy.

She looks like a normal kid, living a normal life, doing her best and hoping hard that it’ll see her through.

“Shōta,” Hizashi says.  “Would you still love me if I was a worm?”

Shōta makes a faint noise of… something.  “Like Edgeshot?  Or a real worm?”

“A real worm,” Hizashi says.  “All… segmented.  And squiggly.”

Shōta sighs.  “How would I even know which worm was you?”

Hizashi sits up straight immediately, on account of the dagger that the love of his life just drove directly through his heart.  “How could you not know which worm was me?”

Shōta grimaces.  “All worms look the same.  It’s not like you would have hair.  Or be able to talk.  Unless you had some sort of extremely distinctive feature—I guess some have bands in a different color, or if you were really long—”

“I’m filing for worm divorce,” Hizashi says.

Shōta rolls his eyes.  “Would you still, somehow, miraculously retain your personality despite having such a massively reduced nervous system?”

Hizashi sniffs.  “Of course I would.”

Shōta eyes him.  “And I would, somehow, miraculously be able to perceive it?”

“In this impossible hypothetical wormiverse,” Hizashi says, “you would have no doubt.”

Shōta settles again, shrugging, and folds his arms.  “Then yes.  Obviously.”

There’s a pause while Hizashi rewinds to the original question.

Oh.  Right.

He slouches down and leans on Shōta’s shoulder again.  “Okay, then.”

“‘Okay’?” Shōta says.  “That’s it?  What about the ethical questions about inter-species romance and nematode social structures?  I don’t even know how worms reproduce.”

“Ask Edgeshot,” Hizashi says.  “But only if you want to die, like, real fast.”

Shōta laughs—softly, by volume, but hard enough that it shakes his shoulder, too.

Hizashi smiles, in a not especially wormlike way, and lets himself drift back to sleep.