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It's only on his way out of the building that Shouta realizes he isn't the last one on campus.
Huh, he thinks, vaguely surprised.
He stands there for a long minute beside the open door to the UA staff room, just outside the rectangle of light spilling into the twilit hall. Inside, he can see a familiar mop of green hair as the newest addition to the teaching staff stares listlessly out the window.
It still feels a little strange to see Midoriya here, in the staff room and not in his seat in Shouta's classroom. Midoriya hasn't been his student for years now, but—
Well, sometimes it's hard to remember. Sometimes he still feels like he needs to protect him. Shouta doesn't think he can be blamed.
"That bad, huh?" he asks, and watches Midoriya come back to himself, turning his head to blink at him in surprise.
"What?"
Shouta sighs and takes a step into the room. No, Midoriya isn't his student anymore, but it's not like Shouta's ever been good at leaving well enough alone.
"Your first week of teaching," Shouta says.
"Oh," Midoriya says, and then flushes. "No, I—it was great. I can't believe how smart those kids are, and already so great with their quirks. I was just—"
He trails off, and Shouta doesn't push him on, just crosses his arms and leans against the doorframe and waits.
Midoriya gives a self-conscious laugh and lifts one scarred hand to scrub it through his hair. "They're great kids," he finally says, his voice soft. He looks back out the window again, over the grounds of UA.
When he turns back to Shouta, the look in his eyes is a little lost.
"How do you do it?" Midoriya asks, and the question has an odd lilt to it, like he'd meant to add something at the end. Aizawa-sensei. Shouta's heard him say it a thousand times.
"Do what?" Shouta asks bluntly, though he suspects that Midoriya might mean how do you wrangle twenty kids day in and day out and keep from losing your mind?
Midoriya shrugs. "How do you—deal with it? With having all those kids look at you like you know all the answers?" He ducks his head a little, and fiddles with a few sheets of paper on his desk. "How do you help them be the best versions of themselves they can be? How do you live up to that?"
"You're asking me?" Shouta demands, his voice dry. "Hell if I know, kid."
The word slips out despite himself, but Shouta can't exactly do anything to take it back. Force of habit. He'll have to work on it.
"Well," Midoriya says, not commenting on his slip up at all, "you do it every year. You make it seem so effortless."
"You just didn't see all the sleepless nights," Shouta says. He tries not to to think about them. That's hard, when he still gets nightmares about the war, as if teaching isn't hard enough on its own.
Midoriya raises a skeptical eyebrow. "Considering how much you slept in class, I think I can make a guess."
Shouta shakes his head, but he can feel himself smiling a little. Midoriya—always his problem child.
Now, he supposes, his problem colleague.
"Let me give you a word of advice," Shouta says, and Midoriya looks at him expectantly, like he's back in class. Shouta half expects him to pull out one of his hero notebooks. "None of us know what the hell we're doing. In the end, the most important thing is just to protect them. Be there for them. The rest will all work out." He pauses, and then adds the most important bit: "And whatever you do, don't let All Might lend you his teaching books."
Midoriya blinks at him again, and Shouta sighs, though it's a fond thing. Midoriya's going to make a great teacher, he knows. He has the instincts for it, and the drive. And if Shouta still feels a bit of a need to protect him, to be there for him—
Well, there are certainly worse things.
"Now come on," Shouta says. He pushes himself away from the doorframe and waits for Midoriya to stand. "There's a bar not far from. You can tell me all about your week. First drink's even on me."