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Shouta watched the class as they took a break during training. Peripherally. Keeping the room in a soft focus. Watching everything without focusing too sharply on anything.
The class sprawled across benches and the floor in quiet clusters, catching their breath.
Midoriya and Todoroki sat facing each other. Legs tangled comfortably, unselfconscious. Habitual. As if they’d been doing this for years instead of weeks.
Intimate and casual all at once.
Shouta felt the warmth of it from across the room.
Memories of the lodge intruded. Todoroki slumped in the corner chair, making fitful efforts to keep the room warm even in his sleep. A small, scarred hand that he'd cradled because he needed more connection than sight alone.
Sensei wouldn't wear that expression.
He blinked it away.
As close as they were—like two neglected houseplants straining toward the light—they leaned even closer.
It was an earnest conversation. Midoriya tilted his head, listening with his whole body. Todoroki’s brows pinched together as he considered every word. Then, Todoroki interlaced his fingers over his heart,
Shouta straightened.
He watched the intention settle into the boy's posture. The movement was slow. Deliberate. The shape of his hands chosen with care. Each finger placed precisely.
A small flicker of fire sprang to life, cradled in the boy's hands. The light danced across the stoic boy’s face.
The flare of light made Shouta hold his breath, Erasure ready.
The small orange flame became a bold blaze of white at the center before blue flames and orange cut across his chest in an X. Todoroki’s red and white hair shifted wildly in a self-made wind, eyes narrowed with intense concentration.
Midoriya reached forward. The way someone might test the temperature of a cup.
Mindful, but fearless.
Trusting.
There’s no flinch. No cry. He does it again. Reverently brushing his fingertips through the white flames at the center before he withdraws his hand.
The bi-colored crossed flame dies, and Todoroki drops his hands. Midoriya hands him a bottle of water, and the two boys continue to talk. Oblivious to the rest of the class watching with their jaws dropped.
No one moved.
Todoroki said something—cutting Midoriya off mid-thought. The green-haired boy froze. Hands dropping while he turned his attention inward. Then he lifted one hand, studying it as if the answer were written in the lines on his palm.
A head tilt. A focused stillness. The way he did when he was locked onto a problem, muttering through the details.
The smell of ozone hit as if a storm were rolling in.
Lines of color crawled across Midoriya's exposed skin. Flickering. Then vanished as green lightning crackled to life from his hair to his heels.
He glowed, and Shouta felt the wave of power ripple across the room.
Where they touched, jade arcs licked across Todoroki’s arm and leg. He watches them. Curious and pleased. Like he was watching something he'd helped make and was still surprised it was real.
The light sputtered out. The pressure dropped, and Shouta could breathe again.
Around him, the class shifted. Stunned and quietly processing.
Then Midoriya laughed— startled and delighted. Todoroki watched his face as if he were memorizing Midoriya’s expression.
The spell broke.
The class erupted. Surging forward, voices overlapping with eager questions and praise.
Shouta didn’t move.
You have to do it, the memory said. At a distance.
They weren't showing off. They weren't looking or approval. Or to impress. But simply. Undeniably. They had just demonstrated that they were each other's best teacher.
Bolstered by the other’s devotion, they readily surpassed their previous limits.
Todoroki let Midoriya field the questions. The smaller teen was animated, his hands waving, and his voice still full of laughter.
Shouta watched them.
He had been certain of his approach. That harshness was pedagogically sound. That distance was necessary. That pressure, applied correctly, would force growth. That Midoriya's quirk was dangerous enough to justify a standard held high and unyielding. Anything less, and the boy would settle, and settling with that quirk would destroy him.
The boy was improving, wasn't he? Progress was proof enough that the method worked.
He'd believed it.
Midoriya had silently hidden the cost of that belief.
Had taken what he was given—and what he wasn’t—and found a way forward with the quiet ingenuity of a brilliant child who stopped expecting the door to open and taught himself to fit through the window instead.
And now he was here. Glowing. Laughing. Learning and teaching with another child because adults had failed them both.
The other teachers would arrive soon.
Shouta left before anyone thought to look for him.
-.-
The observation room was empty. With only the screens for light and dark pools of shadow in every corner. Shouta let the memory take him.
The climb in the dark. Terror kept at bay by Jiro’s quiet assurance—there’s a heartbeat. Following Todoroki through the snow, hauling himself up frozen debris because the boy's ice held.
"He was conscious when I found him," Todoroki said. His voice was steady. His hands weren’t. "He isn't now."
Shouta had him coordinate with the rangers to get the additional help they needed and have the lodge ready to care for Midoriya. Giving the boy a task to help steady him.
The woman a few feet away hadn't moved because she couldn't. Fearing the worst, he’d knelt, cradling the pale, freckled face, hunting for the promised pulse. It was faint. Slow.
Green eyes blinked open at the touch.
Regarded him with unnatural calm.
Then closed again.
Probably for the best as they unpinned him and slid back to the lodge. The storm cut the power, but they had Todoroki and Kaminari. The boys settled into their roles, running machines, lights, and heat until the generator was running and the fireplace was blazing.
Then Todoroki had settled into the infirmary with quiet, immovable resolve. The temperature rose until the medic said stop. Then he held it there with the same gritty focus he’d use in a fight.
Shouta had taken the chair beside the bed, heeding all the warnings about how not to handle his fragile student.
-.-
The first time Midoriya surfaced, it was just a slit of green. Unfocused. No recognition. A pinch of confusion. Then he was gone again.
Shouta noted the time and waited.
The second time, his breathing changed—shallower, quicker. Eyes slit open, gaze tracking across the ceiling with the unfocused quality of someone navigating between two places at once.
Then his eyes found Shouta.
The shift was subtle. Recognition–of a kind. Uncertain, but not afraid.
"It's nice," Midoriya said.
His voice was thin. A brittle whisper carried only by a breath.
Shouta leaned in to catch it. "What's nice, Midoriya?"
The boy's eyes stayed on him. Kind and patient. Like he had all the time in the world.
"That you wear his face."
Shouta went very still. He wasn’t sure what Midoriya meant. He didn’t want to assume. He swallowed his uncertainty and kept his voice level.
"Whose face?"
But Midoriya had already moved on, following some interior conversation. His brow furrowed faintly.
"But Sensei wouldn't wear that expression."
Shouta didn't know what expression he was wearing. It seemed trivial in their situation.
“What expression?”
He wasn’t even sure what the boy could see in the dim light. When Midoriya didn’t answer, he tried again.
"Why wouldn't I wear this expression?"
Midoriya considered that with the gravity of someone working through a genuinely difficult problem. His gaze drifted, then came back.
"I learned," he said.
The jump in conversation didn’t make sense, but when the silence dragged, Shouta changed track with him.
"What did you learn?"
“You have to do it," a pause to breathe. The slow, careful swallow of someone for whom small things cost dearly. "At a distance."
"What do you have to do at a distance?"
He asked to prove that he was listening. To keep Midoriya here. Shouta didn’t expect anything coherent as he gently slid his hand under smaller, crooked fingers. Mindful not to grip or jostle. Resisting the urge to hold the cold fingers between his hands to warm them.
"Care," the boy whispered, certain in the way only a thing long ago accepted could be certain. "For the people who don't like you."
The corner of his mouth pulled — the ghost of a smile, like his face remembered the shape of it and was trying. Then his eyes closed. His breathing slowed. And he drifted back under with the uncomplicated ease of someone who had said what they needed to say.
Shouta sat in the warm, dim room with the boy's cold hand resting against his own. He looked back at Midoriya's face.
Sensei wouldn't wear that expression.
Said without anger or accusation. A fact verified so many times it was no longer questioned.
You have to care for the people who don’t like you at a distance.
He had taught the boy that.
Not with a single act. Not with cruelty. With consistency — with the slow, accumulated weight of a hundred small distances —that care, where Aizawa Shouta was concerned, didn’t exist for Midoriya Izuku.
He scrubbed a hand across his face. He still didn’t know who Midoriya had thought he was. Still didn’t know what expression the boy was talking about. But he was certain he wasn’t going to like it.
That knowledge —that he wouldn’t like it—almost certainly meant he needed to know. There was something there. Imbedded. Festering. He dug at the memory, replayed it, trying to dig out what he had missed in the moment.
He remembered his horror at the boy’s frosted skin. The almost imperceptible heartbeat. His terror that he was going to lose a student. He couldn’t Erase the cold. His capture scarf was useless.
Without Jiro and Todoroki, they’d have lost him.
So what expression did Midoriya think he wouldn’t make? Who else did the boy think was coming for him?
-.-
Hizashi found him twenty minutes later.
Which meant Hizashi had given him twenty minutes on purpose. Which meant Shouta was going to have to have a conversation he wasn't ready for.
Shouta didn’t look over as the door opened. He listened as the familiar footsteps approached. Gaze steady on the screens where the training ground feeds were still running. The class had moved on without him. Still clustered, collectively processing the extraordinary thing that had just happened.
Midoriya lit up again. Gingerly testing his range of movement, lightning sizzling around him. Kaminari reached for it. No one reacted; the kids almost seemed disappointed, suggesting that the light show was just that.
The lightning died out, and everyone turned to Todoroki, who demonstrated his new technique again. Kaminari reached for the flames as well. Judging by the way he snatched his hand back, the outer flames were hotter than the white center.
Hizashi dragged a chair over and sat. For a long moment, neither spoke.
People assumed present Mic couldn't do silence. Shouta had known him long enough to understand that the noise was a choice, which meant the quiet was also a choice. And when Hizashi chose silence, it meant he'd decided the room needed it.
On screen, Midoriya was talking to Cementos, gesturing up and out enthusiastically. Shouta assumed asking for walls or platforms.
"Training’s going well," Hizashi noted casually.
"It is."
"Midoriya and Todoroki got fancy. That new?"
“Within the hour.”
He heard Hizashi exhale. Not a sigh, more the sound of someone who’s taken the measurement of a room and come to a decision.
"You want to tell me what's going on?"
Shouta stared blindly at the screen as the memory looped once more.
Hizashi waited a moment, watching the kids. Then nudged Shouta’s shoulder.
"I'm asking about you."
Onscreen, Cementos had built a series of walls. Midoriya was at the edge of the group, bouncing in place with a smile. Todoroki at his shoulder. The rest of the class pressed close. Excited.
Only Bakugou hung back. Arms crossed. Scowling.
You have to do it at a distance.
Those words had haunted him since they were spoken.
He needed to say it out loud so he could look at it clearly and figure out what to do with it. Because he'd sat here watching Midoriya laugh and felt nothing but the memory pressing in from every side. The guilt had metastasized, and it was getting in the way of what he was supposed to be doing.
He could not allow this.
"He was delirious when he was coming back," Shouta spoke slowly.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Hizashi tip forward, listening.
"He thought I was someone else. That someone else was wearing my face." He kept his voice flat. He frowned, trying to tease apart the faint expression of a barely conscious child who was habitually open with his emotions.
"But he wasn't afraid. He sounded… relieved. Maybe."
“Huh.” Hizashi huffed, thoughtful. Gaze on the screen, tracking the boy in question. "Did he think you were Death or something? Coming to collect him?"
Tossed casually into the air, the words were light.
The idea wasn’t.
Shouta broke out in goosebumps. Quirk quivering as if he could cancel the idea. But it was already spoken. Fresh horror sealed his breath in his lungs, and if he hadn’t already been in a chair, he’d have been forced to sit.
It was illogical. Absurd. But was it an unreasonable hallucination for a creative, dying mind to fabricate?
Hizashi saw his expression and went very still. Paling at the implication.
Shouta swallowed the lump in his throat. He stared into the middle distance. He couldn’t look at the kids on the screen. Didn’t dare turn to look at Hizashi.
"Who would I have been," Shouta said quietly, "if not?"
They sat with that in silence.
Shouta wrestled with the idea. Midoriya’s addled mind had been grateful that Death wore his face.
The only way through was forward.
"He also said," he continued, "that I wouldn't wear the expression he was seeing. He wasn’t upset or angry. He didn’t doubt what he was saying." He looked down at his hands. "You have to care at a distance for the people who don’t like you.”
He saw Hizashi shift at the corner of his eye, but he still didn't turn to look.
The words sat there. No better spoken than remembered.
The screens ran on in the quiet. Midoriya bounced off the walls to the whoops and hollers of his classmates. He stumbled a bit on the landing. His smile was blindingly bright as he skidded into Todoroki, who caught him easily.
"I told myself the distance was necessary," Shouta said. "That it was in his best interest. That pressure would force him to grow." He exhaled once, controlled. "I believed that.”
He clenched his hands into loose fists to hide the tremble he felt.
“I was wrong,” he confessed in a whisper. And he was just now seeing what that error cost.
“I can’t think through it like this,” Shouta said. “Every time I look at him, it’s all I see. It's all I hear.”
Hizashi met his eyes steadily, unflinching, but kind. "What are you going to do about it?"
A practical question.
Shouta sighed.
"I don't know yet," Shouta replied, still watching the kids on the screens.
"The guilt isn't — it isn't helping me think. Every time I watch him, I hear it again. I see what he's becoming, but all I can do is stand at the edge and think about what I didn't give him." He paused. "That's not useful. Not for him. Not to me, and I can't teach him anything from inside it."
Hizashi was quiet for a moment. "So you needed to say it out loud."
"I needed to say it to someone who would tell me the truth about it."
Hizashi looked at him for a long time. Then he looked at the screens.
"The truth," he said carefully, "is that you're probably right on all counts. You were harsh. It cost him something. And you didn't know — but not knowing isn't the same as innocent, and you understand that, so I'm not going to argue with you about it." He paused. "The other truth is that guilt is a thief. It will take everything if you let it. Including the part of you that's actually capable of doing better."
Shouta said nothing. Listening.
"He doesn't need your guilt," Hizashi went on. "He needs you to figure out what doing better looks like. And then do it."
Hizashi pumped their shoulders together. "One thing. Something small is fine, just don’t stand still punishing yourself."
Onscreen, the class moved through their afternoon, excited, diligent, and ordinary. Completely unaware of the conversation happening on the other side of the cameras.
Shouta watched Midoriya. The animated hands. The laughter. The way Todoroki turned toward him like a plant toward light, and Midoriya turned back without thinking, and neither of them noticed they were doing it.
Look what they built without you.
Yes. But they were here. And so was he.
"I don't know how to close the distance," he said. Quietly. Not a confession of defeat — just the next problem, stated plainly. "Not without it being obvious that I'm doing it. He'll notice. He notices everything."
"He does," Hizashi agreed. "So don't try to hide it."
Shouta looked at him.
Hizashi shrugged, something almost gentle in it. "You don't have to explain it. You don't have to make it a moment. You just have to stop doing the thing you were doing." He paused. "He's a smart kid. He'll figure out the rest."
It wasn't a solution. It was barely a direction.
It was more than Shouta had walked in with.
He looked back at the screens. The class was beginning to disperse. Gathering their things before filtering toward the doors in loose groups.
Bakugou stomped away. Shunning his usual friend group with a snarl. Shouta saw Midoriya track the action, his expression almost neutral. Almost. He was too expressive, felt too deeply to hide what looked like grief.
He watched the freckled boy waver. Midoriya was never one to turn away from someone who needed help –no matter what it might cost him. But Shouta watched him turn away. It looked like it hurt to do so.
You have to care for the people who don’t like you at a distance.
Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who taught Midoriya that lesson.
With a touch, Todoroki redirected Midoriya’s attention. They were the last out, as usual. Unhurried.
The guilt was still there. It would be there tomorrow and for a long time to come.
But Hizashi was right— it would take everything if he let it. Including the ability to be something better for the boy than he'd been before.
He wouldn’t allow that.
When he finally stood and followed Hizashi out, he had something he hadn't walked in with —
Not forgiveness or resolution.
Just the next thing to do.
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