Chapter Text
The thing about being loud is that no one asks you how you're doing. They just assume they already know.
Hizashi Yamada had built an entire life around that principle, brick by deliberate brick, until it stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling like a personality. YEAAAAAH, LISTEN UP, LISTENERS! He didn't just say things. He announced them, projected them, threw them out into a room like confetti so that no one would look too closely at the hand doing the throwing. Monday morning, and the halls of U.A. were already ringing with his voice before most of the students had finished their coffee (or whatever concoction they drink in the morning to survive class). "MORNING, LISTENERS! Rise and shine, because English waits for no one, not even the guy who can literally stop time with his voice — wait, that's not a thing I can do, forget I said that, let's talk about conditional clauses!" A ripple of laughter went through Class 1-A. Denki groaned theatrically, Mina was already doodling something in the margin of her notebook, and Bakugo had his head on his desk, which — for Bakugo — counted as attentive (enough).
Hizashi grinned, wide and easy, the kind of grin that had taken him years to manufacture on command. It didn't cost him anything to make it. That was the whole point of practice. You did a thing enough times that it stopped requiring effort, stopped requiring him, really — just a well-worn groove the face fell into. He taught the lesson. He cracked the jokes. He fielded Sero's terrible pun with an even worse one, and the class ate it up, and by the time the bell rang he'd expended exactly zero percent of the energy it looked like he'd expended, because none of it had come from anywhere real. It was a recording of enthusiasm, played back at full volume.
That was the trick nobody clocked: the loudest person in the room is very often the person working hardest to make sure you don't look past the noise.