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“Your sister and her wife are traveling?” Emi asked, scrolling through her contacts on her phone.
“Yeah,” Shouta confirmed, “and so are your parents?”
“Yup” She nodded before suggesting, “your mom?”
“Working.”
Emi huffed, chewing her lip, thinking of who else they could possibly ask to watch their three year old daughter, Keiko, while they were at work the next day. Her usual daycare was closed due to a flu outbreak and it seemed as if no one was available, especially on such short notice.
“I’ll take her to UA with me.” Shouta elected.
And to that, Emi raised a brow, “ya sure?” She knew better than anyone how much he hated his students knowing about his personal life ‘they find out one thing and suddenly they have to know everything’ he had complained before, ‘and then they start to treat me like I’m their friend or something’ and he hated that. Also UA training was intense— overly so in her opinion— she didn’t want her baby in the middle of it.
“Yes Em,” he assured, “I know you have that off campus training you’ve been looking forward to, and I was planning on having a lecture class tomorrow anyway.”
She raised a brow, “another case study?” That’s what he had been doing his past few lecture classes.
He nodded, “it's building up to a paper.”
“You love an essay” she said with a fond shake of her head: she could never assign written assignments with the frequency he did.
“You know I hate writing MCQs” —and he was too much of a control freak to use any pre-written ones.
Emi laughed at that confusing mind of his, “I’d rather write a million MCQs than grade 20 essays every few weeks!” She sighed and said, “If your principal is okay with it, she can go with you tomorrow,” a smile then spread across her face, “and good luck getting your class to focus on that lecture!”
There was a reason for that tricky smile on her face; they had a little competition of sorts in their marriage; who had the better school, the better students, the better teaching methods. Shouta’s class being full of distracted kids with unanswered questions? One point for Emi!
———————
“Kei! Today you’re going to dad’s school with him!” Emi said, crouched in front of her little girl the next morning.
“School!?” Keiko repeated, bouncing on her toes, she was very excited to start school the next year, her parents just hoped that her enthusiasm would stick with her after she had actually experienced her first year.
“Yup! Today you’ll be a student at the ever illustrious UA” Emi said, praising the school with an obvious air of critical sarcasm and ruffling her daughter’s hair.
“And you’ll probably be a better student than at least half my class.” Shouta said, scooping the girl up into his arms.
He later unlocked the door to his empty classroom and Keiko weaved her way between each desk, looking under and getting on her tip toes to look at the tops of each. “Do I have a table?” She asked as she made her way to the front most desk.
“Here” he offered, picking her up and setting her on the chair behind his desk, he pumped the pedal, adjusting the chair high enough for her to be able to see over the desk, though she was still too little for it to be a proper seat for her. “Front of the class” Shouta set down his bags and sat leaned against the wall behind his desk watching his daughter happily kick her legs from the raised chair.
The first student to walk in the classroom was Tenya Iida, his eyes went wide upon seeing a little girl at the teacher’s desk, but feeling as though he shouldn’t say anything he tightly folded his hands over each other and shut his mouth. A few more students, Todoroki, Koda, came in quietly. The first student to say something was Katsuki Bakugou who opened the door and barked out “What the hell is a child doing in here?”
It wasn’t long until Ashido entered with a squeal, “Oh my god!” Soon enough the entire class was in the room, and the entire class was talking. Shouta didn’t silence their reactions yet: hopefully they’d get it out of their system before the bell rang.
The bell rang— and it was, in fact, not out of their system.
Shouta stood up from behind his desk and before he could so much as address the class, he was pelted with questions:
“You have a kid?”
“Whats her name?”
“Whose her mom?”
“How old is she?”
He used his quirk on the class, the feeling of emptiness that tended to follow his quirk made them go quiet, “she is going to be here all of class: I don’t want to hear anything about it.” His hair fell down and the class was quiet, but of course, their curiosity was not quelled. Murmurs filled the room as each student took out their notebooks and pencils. One student extended her pink hand into the air. “Ashido, if this is about my child, put your hand down.” Shouta said without even raising his gaze to see the hand be lowered outside his periphery. The classroom was, for a little while, quiet; the quiet of kids who were not going to pay attention to a word he said.
Shouta was planning to just teach the class as normal, and if they couldn’t pay attention, it was their fault and would be reflected in their grades. He was about to start when he felt a tug on his sleeve, it was Keiko pulling him over to whisper, “I needa go to the bathroom” he’d have to wait to start.
“Iida, Yayorouzu,” he said, calling the class reps; who were thankfully the students with the most respect for his privacy; to the front to of the room, “pass out these court cases,”
As soon as he stepped foot outside the classroom door, the class exploded into conversation.
“she’s so cute!” Ashido cooed.
“And she looks just like him,” Asui said from the little girl’s wispy black curls and dark eyes.
“Okay, but who had a kid with him?” Kaminari questioned as if the concept of anyone getting with their teacher was impossible.
“Mr. Aizawa requested us to not talk about it” Iida said stiffly, though he was hiding that internally, he was just as curious as the rest of his class.
Kirishima waved him off, “He said he didn’t want to hear anything about it, he’s gone he can’t hear us.”
As he waited for his daughter to finish in the bathroom, Shouta decided that attempting to teach his class was a futile effort. He knew his class would not leave him alone about Keiko. But he didn’t want to waste a class period. And as he held the girl up to the sink to wash her hand he thought of what to do.
“Keiko,” he started as they walked into the hallway.
“Yea”
He crouched down to look her in the eye, to make sure she took in what he said, “When my students ask you about mom, don’t tell them anything, okay?” Keiko nodded, “don’t tell them her name, or her quirk, or what she looks like” she nodded again, “so today, if one of those kids asks you: ‘who's your mom?’ What do you say?”
“I’m not telling you!” She said, very proud to be withholding information and participating in whatever her father was planning.
“Yes, perfect” he said with a scheming smile that spread across his face in a manner that might have been off-putting to his students, but not at all to his daughter. He ruffled her hair and stood up.
“Remember, don’t tell them anything.” Shouta reiterated as they stood outside his classroom door.
She nodded before asking, “but why?”
“Because today Keiko; you’re helping me teach”
Shouta entered his classroom and the class’s loud talking quieted to whispers, “put away the papers, there’s been a change of plans.” His voice commanded attention, and nearly everyone went skittish and quiet putting their papers away.
Nearly everyone meant everyone except the 2 students who, try as he might, were not afraid of him. The pink hand of one of said students shot into the air again, “are you gonna answer our questions now?” She asked without waiting to be called on.
“No.” He returned, “You’re going to answer your own questions” he said before dipping to pick up his daughter, “today, you all will use deductive reasoning to figure out: who is her mother?” Keiko giggled as her dad held her up by her armpits like a cat and set her down to stand on his desk. It was an achievable challenge: there were plenty of clues pointing towards Emi Fukukado, namely her face, which she just about shared with her daughter. If it wasn’t for Keiko’s black hair and eyes, her pictures could be easily mistaken for a baby Emi. There were also the relics of Miss Joke to be found across his belongings, and the timeline of her work lined right up with the arrival of their baby: it was obvious. But then again, maybe he had been with his wife for so long that he just saw her in everything.
The class filled with energized chatter, “you have 10 questions for us” Shouta said gesturing between himself and the toddler, “choose them wisely,” he warned, “I’m not telling you her mom’s quirk” that would make it too easy, “ you may not ask your other teachers, and yes, this is for a grade” he said before they could ask, though he wasn’t planning to put it in for anything more than a low point pass/fail assignment.
He took Keiko down from the desk and set her on the floor with her toys and books to keep her occupied, but she seemed pretty content just watching the teenagers as they gathered together to guess who her mom was.
“Should we just out and ask them who the mom is?” Sato suggested.
“No, don’t waste our questions” Jirou scolded, their teacher obviously wouldn’t just tell them.
“We can at least ask the kid,” he insisted gesturing towards her, “I don’t know if she knows how to lie yet!”
“I do!” Keiko proclaimed from her spot at the corner of her dad’s desk, proudly making the teens laugh, that was another thing that made her similar to her mother: she loved to make people laugh.
“Well” Yayorozu started, “him asking us to find the mother is predicated on the idea that she is findable. So she can’t be a private citizen.” She observed.
“Good assessment,” Aizawa said from his desk, not looking up from the paperwork he was using the class time to fill out.
“Before we start coming up with questions, is there anything we can figure out without asking anything?” Ojiro asked the class. Their teacher nodded in approval.
“He’s married” Hagakure threw out, her classmates looked at her in surprise at how she knew that so quickly, “I scoped that our first week of school,” she shrugged, “he wears a ring.”
“So we’re looking for his wife?” Sato said.
“Not necessarily" Shoji observed, “we could ask that though.”
“Guys, what if it’s a trick question?” Sero said conspiratorially, they could never be too sure with their teacher, “Like he’s married to a man and she’s adopted or something and doesn't have a mother?”
“What if it’s not even his kid: like what if the mom is his sister” Kirishima suggested, trying to find the trick in their task.
“So we should ask: if he’s the dad, if we’re looking for the bio mom, and if he’s married to the mother,” Ururaka said, writing the questions down.
“Ask if we’re looking for a woman,” Kirishima said.
“Well he said mother, so I’d assume so” Asui thought out loud with her finger poised on her chin.
“Like I said: what if he’s tricking us!” Sero insisted.
“Okay…” she agreed.
The students looked around the classroom to see what else they could find out without asking. There weren't many personal relics to be found though because at UA teachers switched classrooms instead of students. Finally, Todoroki dared to stand up and peer over their teacher’s desk. There he saw two bags, one was the nondescript black messenger bag that he bought daily, and the other was an unfamiliar bag: the bag for the kid. Could they look at it for clues? Todoroki was about to raise his hand and ask, but he was stopped with the thought: would asking take up one of their 10 questions? So, instead of asking, he pointed a finger to the bag and stared right at Mr. Aizawa until he noticed.
“Yes you can look at it, but you can’t open it without a warrant,”
With that Todoroki took the bag over to the rest of his class and he was welcomed like a soldier returning with spoils of war. The class poured over the bag carefully inspecting the outside. It was a dark forest green book bag, the front pocket was decorated with enamel pins: two yellow smiley faces, a blue star, and a calico cat. Attached to a loop on the bag was a tag for identification, it read: Keiko Aizawa, and under her name there was a phone number. Koda took notes on it all.
“Okay we have her name, so what questions should we ask Miss… Keiko?” Ururaka asked, reading her name off of Koda’s notes.
“Her quirk,” Ojiro provided.
“That only matters if we’re looking for her biological mother, so we should ask our questions for Mr. Aizawa first,” Tokoyami said.
Ururaka nodded and marched up to her teacher’s desk, “Okay! First question: are we looking for a woman?”
“Yes, you’re looking for a cis woman” Shouta answered, providing more information than they asked for in their veigue, kind of useless, first question “you could have gained the same and more information in a single, better question”
He heard something to the effect of ‘I told you it was a stupid thing to ask!’ and ‘I stand by that question’ from somewhere in the class before Ururaka asked “Are we looking for the biological mother of Keiko?”
“Yes”
“And are you the biological father?”
“Yes”
“Are you married to her mom?”
“Yes—good observation on my ring, Hagakure”
“That’s all we have for now!” Ururaka said, looking down at her paper.
He nodded, “6 questions left.”
“Okay, since we know they’re her bio parents, we can ask about her quirk,” Ojiro said.
“And ask her to use it,” Midoriya added, “if she has one yet.”
“Why if we already know what it is?” Todoroki asked, trying to preserve their limited number of questions.
“She could have a unique activation from her mother’s side,” he explained.
“Shut it nerd, you just want to geek out over the kid’s quirk,” Bakugou scoffed, “and we don’t even know if she has one– how old’s the ankle biter anyway?” Ururaka jotted the question down, though she amended the wording.
“I'll ask” she said, unphased by his attitude, “Do we have any more questions for her?” She asked, the students exchanged looks, no one had anything. Ururaka gave a thumbs up before turning on her heel towards the desk with Midoriya tailing close behind her.
“I’ve got some questions for Keiko this time.” She said, so Shouta picked up Keiko from her spot on the floor and sat her on his lap. “So first,” Ururaka started, and the little girl nodded, very happy to be answering their questions. “What’s your quirk?”
“I know your quirk.” Keiko said very simply. Midoiya’s eyes went wide at that statement, and Ururaka gave a confused look to the girl— that didn’t answer the question.
“That’s her quirk,” her father clarified, “she can tell someone’s quirk by looking at them.” She had gotten it pretty early like her mother, and unlike him, but the quirk itself was entirely from his side.
“Can she use it?” Ururaka asked. And Midoriya, who just a little while earlier was right behind Ururaka eager to observe as much as he could, side stepped out of the way as to not have his quirk read.
“Mm-hm” Keiko answered, she had manifested her quirk around four months ago and with her parent’s help had gotten very good at controlling it for her age. She shut her eyes tight and when she opened them back up her hair wandered upwards and her eyes glowed a soft green. “you make things float!” She said as her hair fell back down, and she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Yes I do!” Ururaka confirmed, clapping lightly at her demonstration, “Okay, one more question, when were you born? Month day year,” she asked, trying to pack as much information into one question as possible.
Keiko twisted back to look confusedly at her dad, he gave the answer: April 24th, 3 years ago. “If you were questioning a child on the field I'd say break that up into smaller easier questions for them, but for this, good job packing more information into a single question,” he said, “you have 3 more”
The class reconrogated in a tight clump at the center of the room, discussing how to use their last 3 questions. They seemed frustrated at their minimal progress. “You guys aren’t using your most valuable asset," Shouta said, cutting through their talking, the whole class looked up to him, confused at what he could mean, “the internet: your phones and computers, come on” he provided with slight exasperation, he never thought that he’d be telling teens to get onto their phones.
He heard a wave of ‘ooohhhh’s through the class as they took out their devices. Eraserhead was obviously not the type of hero they could just look up and find their answer, so they still had to use their brains.
“That phone number on the bag: let’s call it,” Kirishima said, typing the number into his phone. The students gathered around as he pressed the call button. Their teacher’s phone rang from his desk— damnit.
Ashido looked at her phone and frowned, “I tried stalking him the first day of school: he doesn’t have any social media! So that’s off the table.”
“Okay I looked Mr. Aizawa online, and this website says it has his marriage certificate” Jirou said, turning her laptop screen towards everyone else, clicking onto the website, “damn, its behind a paywall”
“What background check website is that?” Ashido asked, leaning closer into Jirou’s laptop, “oh! I have an account!” She said, pulling the computer over to type in her login and leaving her surrounding classmates to internally ask the question: ‘girl, why do you have an account?’ Maybe it had something to do with her social media stalking. “What!?” Ashido exclaimed, scrolling and clicking through the website, “It’s blank! Everything’s been scrubbed!—hello??”
“Most heroes have their personal records taken down.” Shouta explained.
Iida, who, up until this point, had been conflicted on all of this snooping, finally spoke up: he potentially had a lead, “my brother went to high school with Mr. Aizawa, perhaps he knows his wife,” he revealed, pulling out his cell phone (which felt so wrong to do in a class setting) and texting his brother.
Iida got a response sooner than he expected, Aoyama leaned all the way over his shoulder and dramatically read the text aloud “I didn’t go to his wedding, but I heard they had a baby recently. Sorry, that’s all I got.” Aoyama cursed out something in French and the whole class groaned at the lack of information. They’d have to use another question to get anywhere.
The class went back into their tight huddle discussing their next question, a hand raised from the middle of the clump: “what does she do for work?” Tokoyami asked on everyone’s behalf.
Shouta kept his answer true but vague: “we have the same job.”
“Does he mean teacher, or hero? Or teacher-hero-double-job?” Kaminari inquired to his classmates.
“Maybe it’s a hint, and she works at UA!” Sero suggested, like he had solved a puzzle, “and that’s why we can’t ask the other teachers.” In reality they couldn’t ask the other teachers because Hizashi and Nemuri would be all too happy to give them more answers than they asked for.
Ururaka pulled up the UA website and clicked over to the ‘staff’ page and began scrolling through, “13 is nonbianary, and Recovery Girl is too old— Miss Midnight?”
The students looked between each other and collectively without words, they all could just feel that the answer was, “No.”
“She’s probably a hero,” Asui said, thinking of Yayorozu’s explanation of the mystery woman being findable. The class nodded in agreement.
“This hero database is the most extensive and has the best filtering,” it didn't look like Midoriya should have had access to the website he pulled up, it had the minimal interface of a bureaucratic site with sliders and check boxes to filter the list of heroes. “Alive, female, Japan—“ the class briefly huddled and whispered before he asked, “how old is she?”
“Late twenties” Shouta answered as he spun his daughter around on his swiveling chair, “one question left”
Midoriya adjusted the age slide bar: 25-29. Even with the filtering, there were hundreds of heroes listed on screen.
Tokoyami Huffed scrolling up and down through the names, “how do we narrow this down more?”
“One question left.” Todoroki echoed.
Faint mumbles from Midoriya could be heard as he rifled through his bookbag and pulled out a ratty notebook, practically bursting at the seams with notes, “when I found out he was our teacher, I did a bunch of extra research on Eraserhead” he explained flipping through the book, it held notes and sketches of just about any hero anyone in the class could think of, “some of my notes are at home, but I think I have his documented working relationships with other heroes in here.”
“But what if he’s never worked with her?” Tokoyami reasoned.
“Should we ask?”
“One question,” Todoroki repeated again, “let’s just hope we’re headed in the right direction.”
Sero leaned over Midoriya’s shoulder and wolf whistled at the sight as he flipped to the pages of the notebook dedicated to Eraserhead, “I’m kinda surprised you didn't already know about the kid”
“He’s really hard to find information on” Midoriya admitted, as the class has found out first hand, which made it all the more impressive what information he did have, “as for female heroes: Mandalay, Pixie-bob, Ragdoll, Midnight, who we already ruled out, Saber, Miss Joke, Ryukyu, and Mirko.”
The class had basically found her, Shouta thought, all they had to do was pull up a picture, maybe look up, and they'd have their answer, but the teens were so engrossed in their research that they didn't think to check what was physically in front of them.
“Were any of them pregnant?” Sato asked the class.
“Nothing definitive but allot of them have had pregnancy rumors.” Midoriya said, assessing their list of potential mothers.
“That doesn't count for anything,” Jirou huffed.
Kaminari asked, “Why not?”
She rolled her eyes, “because every woman who dares to have a body bigger than a stick has pregnancy rumours."
“Also she might not have been pregnant.” Hagakure provided.
Asui read back over what Ururaka had written for the answers to their questions, “What do you mean?” ,she croaked, “We know she’s the biological mom.”
“Surrogacy is pretty popular with heroes because hero maternity leave is brutal” Hagakure explained. Often the HPSC had heroes very suddenly taken off the field and put onto chair work, but pushed them back onto the field too early and it negatively affected them both physical health and ratings wise, “so with like an egg implant or whatever she could be the genetic mom without being pregnant”
“How do you know that?” Kaminari wondered aloud.
“I wanna have kids some day and I was looking at my options” she explained. Then, without consulting her classmates, her sleeve was waving in the air, and she was walking towards the desk, “Mr. Aizawa, was she pregnant?” she asked.
“Yes, and you’re out of questions.”
At that the class griped,
“Come on Hagakure!”
“Why did you waste our last question!”
“We could’ve saved that for something more useful!”
“It wasn’t a bad question.” Aizawa said, stopping the beratement.
“See!” Hagakure yelled to her class, vindicated.
“But you should have consulted with your team before asking it.” He added to her quieter.
“Okay,” Kirishima sighed, gathering the class back together, “now we just have to see which hero was gone for however many months around April three years ago,” he said, pulling one of the open laptops, that had become communal at this point, towards himself.
“About November to July-August-ish” Hagakure provided.
“We can rule out The Wild Wild Pussycats, they had one of their bigger fights on the 12th of April that year,” Midoriya said, reading off his old notes on the cat group.
“Mirko’s a lesbian, so she’s out” Jirou caught before they searched her activity from years ago.
“Ok so, Miss Joke, Saber, and Ryuku,” was their narrowed list, Midoriya switched between flipping through his notes and scrolling on his computer, where he had digital notes too, “None of them are really in the spotlight, so it’s not uncommon for any of them to disappear for months at a time.”
The whole class seemed to wait for Midoriya to rake through every possible documentation of those heroes in the timeframe Hagakure set. Shouta was about to tell the class that all 19 of them shouldn’t be just waiting around for Midoriya, but thankfully, Sero got antsy waiting and said, “Guys, let’s compare their faces to the kid” he picked up a computer and searched up images of each hero, “she’s gotta look at least a little like her mom, right?”
“That wouldn’t be the most concrete evidence,” Yayourzu worried, students like her who found comfort in math and statistics tended to be weary about qualitative evidence whereas more artistic students like Sero usually preferred it.
“Which is why you corroborate it,” Shouta told them.
Sero went up to the desk, computer open and in hand, before setting it down on the wooden desk. First, Ryukyu: whose narrow eyes and long face didn’t at all match the little girl in front of him. Sero tried to keep in mind that 1: baby faces didn’t look like adult faces, and that Keiko’s face was bound to change somewhat as she got older, and 2: she probably didn’t look exactly like her mom, she might’ve looked like a grandparent or more like a mix of her parents or something, so he was trying to pick up on small things as far as resemblance. He next pulled up photos of Miss Joke, and things were really starting to match up: their shared big almond eyes, the freckles spattered across their faces. Sero’s eyes narrowed as he looked between the two, his intensely scrutinizing stare made Keiko giggle— and that smile— it was a smaller baby-toothed version of the one he had pulled up on the laptop: there was no question, “Guys it’s Miss Joke.”
“Really? They don’t seem compatible…” Kirishima said, looking at a since deleted video on the internet archive.
Bakugo watched the video again over his shoulder: it was a very old video of Miss Joke and Eraserhead on the job, they had to be around 19 and 20, “Yeah, It looks like he hates her.”
That look with the furrowed eyebrows, arms tightly crossed, and his chin buried into his scarf was not one of hate; it was the look of a guy who didn't know how to deal with how much he liked the girl who was laughing next to him. Years later when Emi found out about ‘that big fat crush you had on me!’ As she called it, she thought it was hilarious how much his face and body language contrasted his feelings which is how she came up with the whole joke of Eraserhead hating Miss Joke.
“But like, hero personas and real life can be two different things,” Mina reasoned, though her classmates didn’t sound convinced.
“All signs are pointing to her actually” Midoriya confirmed, “Saber was documented in a battle March 27th that year” so that cut her from the list, “and from November to August Miss Joke was off the field and then she took extra time off to transition into teaching.”
Kaminari gasped, “Teacher-hero double job!”
“Also, when she uses her quirk she emits this green that’s the same color as Keiko’s eyes when she uses her quirk” Midoriya added.
“The pins on the bag; they’re not just any smiley face: it’s the same ones from her costume!” Ururaka realized.
“And that kid definitely didn’t get those smiles and laughs from him!” Kirishima declared, pointing to the little girl who was smiling wide behind her hands.
“So” Ashido started, rising from her seat and going right up to the desk in what seemed like a state of some mix between giddiness and shock, “Your mom,” she pointed one hand to Keiko, “and your wife—” her other arm pointed to Aizawa, with eyes that were dinner plate wide, “is Miss Joke??” Emi would laugh if she was there to see her face.
Keiko looked like she was about to explode keeping in the answer, “Go ahead, tell them,” her father told her with a nod.
“Yess!” Keiko exclaimed, clapping her hands.
The class broke out into whoops and applause, and thankfully the period was only about a minute from ending, "Congratulations, you figured it out.” Shouta cut in flatly, “you all will never bring up my personal life in this class ever again,” he said sternly, “ and read that court case from earlier for homework.” He added, which was met with groans and complaints all around.
————————
“I’m hooome!” Emi announced as she bursted through the front door, back from home from school and the patrol she had taken directly after. Her daughter careened around the corner to greet her, hugging her around the knees, “How was your day as a UA student Kei?” She asked, ruffling the girl’s hair.
“I teached!” Keiko told her.
“Taught” Shouta corrected, walking from around the same corner to greet Emi as well.
“Off-loading work to a three year old, Shou? That’s low,” Emi teased, leaning back to kiss him as he took off her bag and coat, “was he asleep all class?” She asked her daughter.
“No,” he answered instead, “she helped me conduct class today.” He explained hanging her things on the coathooks next to the door.
Emi gasped, “Really?” She said, picking up Keiko and propping her up on her hip, “I know my daughter runs a tight ship! You kept those kids in line, right!?”
“Right!” Keiko parroted.
“Better than your dad, right!?”
“Right!”
Emi laughed, setting her daughter down, before turning to Shouta and saying, “I’m guessing class was not the most productive” in an apologetic tone.
“It was plenty productive” he assuaged.
She gave a hum of skepticism, “must’ve picked a riveting court case…”
Shouta shrugged, “they were focused.” He had to have been lying, Emi thought. His students being so in line as to focus on their work instead of Keiko all of class would’ve given him a major leg up in their little competition.
She was about to figure out what exactly ‘focused’ meant when Keiko told her, “We found you mama!”
She turned to the girl, “Found me? What do you mean?”
“At school” she started, rocking back and forth from her toes to heels, “daddy said I can’t tell the big kids ‘bout you—but they found you!”
Emi turned back to her husband with a huge grin, “Riveting case indeed!”
Shouta sighed in defeat, “I knew they weren’t going to focus on an actual lesson so I had them practice some detective work.”
Emi laughed and stepped closer to him, “You could turn anything into a lesson, huh?” she chaffed, grabbing his chin, “Smart man,” she pulled his face down to kiss: he won this round, "Y'know, they’re not gonna leave you alone now!” she then pointed out with a smile.
“Yeah,” Shouta sighed. He had told them not to bring his life up again, but when did teens ever listen? “I figured.”