Archive of Our Own

Midoriya woke up crying.

There was no scream, no startled jerk against the mattress, no confused attempt to tear the IV from his arm. Shōta almost wished there had been. Screaming would have been easy to understand. Pain, a nightmare, disorientation from the medication still dripping steadily into his vein, those were things Shōta knew how to deal with.

Instead, Midoriya's eyes opened slowly beneath the sterile white glare of the hospital lights, unfocused and glassy with whatever combination of exhaustion and medication was still weighing him down. He stared blankly at the ceiling for a moment, his breathing shallow, and then tears welled without warning and slipped silently from the corners of his eyes, disappearing into the mess of green hair against his pillow.

Shōta was out of the chair before he was fully awake himself.

"Midoriya."

The reaction was immediate. Midoriya flinched hard enough to pull at the leads stuck to his chest, his fingers twitching against the blanket as though he'd been caught doing something wrong. The heart monitor gave an irritated little chirp in response.

Something about that lodged unpleasantly beneath Shōta's ribs.

He stopped at the side of the bed instead of reaching for him. Every instinct told him to check the kid over himself despite the fact that a nurse had done exactly that less than twenty minutes ago, but Midoriya was staring at him now with wide, frightened eyes, and Shōta had no intention of giving him another reason to recoil.

"Easy," he said, lowering his voice. "You're in the hospital. You're safe."

For several seconds, Midoriya only looked at him. His eyes moved sluggishly over Shōta's face as though he needed to make sure he was actually there, and Shōta watched awareness return piece by piece.

Then his face crumpled.

"Sensei—"

Shōta's stomach dropped at the sound.

He'd heard Midoriya scream before. He'd heard the sharp, involuntary cry dragged out of him when bones snapped beneath the force of his own Quirk, heard him choke on pain and somehow keep moving anyway. He'd watched Recovery Girl reduce him to a pale, trembling mess during treatment and then listened, incredulous, as the kid apologized to her for being an inconvenience. Pain was something Midoriya knew how to endure with a frankly disturbing amount of practice.

This wasn't pain.

Whatever had broken open behind those green eyes was something else entirely, and Shōta recognized it with a certainty that made his stomach sink.

Grief.

"I'm sorry," Midoriya whispered.

The apology was so quiet that the soft mechanical hum of the room nearly swallowed it. His fingers curled into the thin hospital blanket, knuckles whitening as he dragged it closer against himself.

Shōta's brow furrowed. "What?"

Across the room came the faint rustle of fabric as Naomasa straightened from where he'd been leaning against the wall. He'd been there for most of the night with him, long after there'd stopped being any professional reason for him to stay. At some point he'd disappeared and come back with coffee, setting a cup beside Shōta without asking and settling back against the wall with his own. Shōta's was empty now. Naomasa's sat forgotten on the windowsill, long since cold.

He didn't approach the bed, but the quiet scrape of his shoe against the floor brought him a little closer, the exhausted slump disappearing from his posture as his attention sharpened.

Neither of them had managed to get much out of Midoriya before he'd lost consciousness at the scene.

They knew the bare facts. There was an attack, and All For One was there. By the time Shōta and the responding heroes reached Midoriya, the fight was already over. They'd found him alive, which was the only fact Shōta cared about for several terrifying minutes as the paramedics worked around him.

Alive, but barely.

There was blood soaking through his costume. Bruising had already spread beneath his skin, and his breathing had sounded wet enough that Shōta hadn't needed the paramedics to tell him something was wrong with his ribs. One arm had been dislocated, two fingers fractured, and there were ugly marks around his throat that Shōta had deliberately avoided thinking too hard about while they loaded the kid into the ambulance.

None of it explained what had happened to his Quirk.

The doctors didn't understand it either. Midoriya's injuries were serious but treatable, and nothing they'd found explained the other change. Whatever strange energy his body had once produced—the power Shōta had watched tear through concrete, pulverize robots, and repeatedly threaten to pulverize Midoriya along with them—was simply no longer there.

It wasn't suppressed or exhausted.

It was simply gone.

Shōta spent the last several hours sitting beside Midoriya's hospital bed trying not to think about what that meant, because there was no point speculating until the kid woke up and could tell them himself.

Now Midoriya was awake.

And he was crying like someone had died.

Shōta pulled the chair closer to the bed, the legs scraping softly across the floor, and sat so he wasn't looming over him. He kept his hands loose on his knees where Midoriya could see them.

"Sorry for what?" he asked.

"I—I couldn't—he—" Midoriya's breath caught somewhere high in his chest, the words tripping over one another before he could force them out. His fingers tightened around the blanket until the thin fabric bunched between his fists, and the monitor beside the bed answered his rising panic with a quicker, more insistent rhythm.

"Slow down." Shōta kept his voice low, resisting the urge to reach for him when the kid already looked ready to crawl out of his own skin. "You don't have to get it all out at once."

"He took it."

Every muscle in Shōta's body went still.

At the edge of his vision, Naomasa shifted. It wasn't much, only the faint scrape of a shoe against the hospital floor and the soft rustle of his jacket as his arms dropped from where they'd been loosely folded across his chest. He didn't interrupt, didn't ask the obvious question. He simply watched, his attention fixed on the bed now, and when Shōta glanced toward him for the briefest second, Naomasa met his eyes. The look was steady and familiar: I'm here. Keep going.

Midoriya didn't seem to notice. He was staring down at his own clenched hands as though they belonged to someone else. "He took it. He took it, and I tried, Sensei, I really tried. I knew I couldn't let him have it, I knew, but I couldn't—I wasn't strong enough, and he—"

"Midoriya." Shōta pitched his voice firmly enough to cut through the spiral, but the kid barely seemed to hear him.

"I'm sorry."

"Stop apologizing and breathe."

"I can't." The answer came on a thin, strangled exhale. His chest was rising too quickly now, each breath shallower than the last, and the monitor's beeping accelerated with it.

"Yes, you can." Shōta leaned closer, keeping himself in Midoriya's line of sight. "Look at me, kid."

It took a few seconds. Midoriya's gaze kept skittering away, toward the blanket, the IV taped to his arm, anywhere except Shōta's face. When he finally managed to look up, his eyes were wet and terrified.

"I lost it," he whispered.

"I know."

"No, you don't!"

The words tore out of him loudly enough to cut through the mechanical hum of the room. Midoriya froze almost before the last syllable had left his mouth, his expression changing so quickly that Shōta felt something twist painfully in his chest. The grief was still there, but now horror crowded in beside it—not horror at whatever had happened to him, but at the realization that he'd raised his voice at his teacher.

"I—I didn't mean—" His breath hitched again as he tried to push himself farther into the pillows. "Sensei, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell at you, I swear, I just—"

"I don't care that you yelled."

"But—"

"I care that you're hyperventilating."

That stopped the apology before it could fully form, though Midoriya's mouth remained open around it. Shōta watched another tremor run through him and finally reached out, setting one hand carefully on his shoulder. Even through the hospital gown he could feel the kid shaking beneath his palm, fine tremors that seemed to have worked their way into every muscle.

Behind him, Naomasa shifted near the window next to his forgotten coffee on the sill. If Midoriya needed a nurse, Naomasa would have one through the door before Shōta finished asking. If anything said tonight needed to be remembered or acted on, he was listening. For now, he left Midoriya to Shōta, and simply knowing he was there took some of the pressure off.

"Do you want me to get your mother?" he asked. "She can come sit with you while you calm down."

"No!"

The word came out so loudly and so suddenly that Shōta felt Midoriya jerk beneath his hand. The monitor protested with another frantic series of beeps as the kid tried to push himself upright, only to wince and fall back against the pillows.

"No, don't—please don't get her. Please, Sensei, don't tell her. She can't—" Midoriya swallowed whatever he'd been about to say, his breathing deteriorating again as fresh tears spilled over. "Please. I don't want my Mom in here."

Shōta stared at him.

That was an odd reaction.

More than odd, actually. He'd met Inko Midoriya. He'd watched the woman cry over her son's injuries, argue with the most famous hero in Japan over whether U.A. could be trusted with him, and nearly vibrate out of her chair with worry. Everything Shōta had seen of Inko Midoriya suggested the kid was loved fiercely. He'd certainly never seen anything that explained why the mere suggestion of bringing her into the room had frightened him this badly.

Yet he'd reacted to the suggestion of bringing her into the room as though Shōta had threatened him.

Something shifted quietly behind him. When Shōta glanced back, Naomasa's expression had changed by barely anything, but they'd known each other long enough that barely anything was plenty. He'd noticed it too.

A question for later.

There were already too many of those accumulating tonight.

"Okay, okay," Shōta said, turning his attention back to the bed. He kept his voice deliberately even and gave Midoriya's shoulder a small squeeze. "I won't get her."

Midoriya searched his face as though he expected an argument. "You won't?"

"Not right now. You said no, so no." Shōta waited until some of the panic loosened around the kid's eyes before continuing. "But you need to try and breathe with me, okay? That's the deal."

A tiny, unsteady nod.

"Good. Come on. In."

Shōta deliberately drew in a slow breath of his own, exaggerated just enough for Midoriya to follow. The kid tried. His inhale came ragged and shallow, catching halfway down before collapsing into a weak cough around the remains of a sob.

"Again," Shōta murmured, keeping his hand steady on Midoriya's shoulder. "Slower this time. Don't force it."

Midoriya's fingers twisted tighter into the blanket as he tried to obey. For a moment his gaze remained fixed on Shōta's hand, following the small movement of his thumb against the fabric of the hospital gown, but then his eyes lifted.

Their gazes met.

Whatever Midoriya found in Shōta's face seemed to undo the fragile control he'd managed to claw back. His mouth trembled, his chin crumpling as a fresh sob tore loose. He squeezed his eyes shut, but that only sent more tears spilling down his cheeks, and suddenly he was crying in earnest again, shoulders shaking beneath Shōta's hand as he struggled to drag air between the broken sounds.

"I can't—" he choked out.

"You are." Shōta tightened his hand gently around his shoulder, enough to make sure Midoriya could feel that he was still there. "You're breathing. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just stay with me and do it again."

Midoriya opened his eyes. They were red-rimmed now, frightened and miserable, but they found Shōta's again and stayed there.

"That's it," Shōta said quietly. He took another slow breath, watching until Midoriya tried to match him. "In."

The next inhale made it a little farther. It still shook on the way down, and another sob caught at the end of it, but this time Midoriya managed to fill his lungs before letting the breath escape in a trembling rush. His fingers remained locked around the blanket and tears continued to track silently toward his ears, but the frantic rise and fall of his chest began to ease by degrees.

The monitor was slower to follow. Each sharp beep still came too close to the next for Shōta's liking, but gradually the rhythm began to stretch out.

He kept his voice low and his hand steady, holding Midoriya's gaze whenever the kid could manage it.

"Good. Again."

He could do this. He'd dealt with panicking children before, even if that particular skill had never appeared in any of the job descriptions he'd signed. He'd dealt with Midoriya panicking before, which arguably deserved its own specialized certification. Usually there was a recognizable path through it: stop the spiral, get him breathing, determine what had happened, then deal with whichever disaster the problem child had managed to throw himself into this time.

This should have been the same.

Except every answer Midoriya gave him seemed to create three more questions, and Shōta was beginning to get the unpleasant feeling that whatever had happened tonight had started long before All For One ever laid a hand on him.

Midoriya swallowed hard. His gaze dropped again, settling somewhere near Shōta's wrist where his hand still rested against the boy's shoulder. "I was supposed to keep it safe."

Shōta's brow furrowed.

He heard Naomasa's breathing change behind him, a quiet inhale that told him his partner had caught the wording too.

Not my Quirk.

It.

Shōta rubbed his thumb once over the fabric covering Midoriya's shoulder, grounding rather than comforting—or that was what he told himself, anyway.

"Your Quirk?" he asked.

Midoriya gave a jerky nod, his fingers tightening again around the blanket as though he needed something solid to hold on to.

"Why?" Shōta asked.

For several seconds, the kid only stared at him. His breathing had steadied enough that the monitor was no longer throwing a fit, but Shōta could feel the tremors that hadn't stopped beneath his palm. Midoriya's gaze dropped to the blanket and then flicked uncertainly toward Naomasa before returning to him. There was hesitation there now, tangled up with the fear and grief, and Shōta recognized it for what it was.

He was deciding whether he was allowed to answer.

Shōta didn't fill the silence for him. He kept his hand where it was and waited, watching Midoriya worry his bottom lip between his teeth until the kid finally seemed to come to some kind of decision.

"I—I wasn't born with it."

The room went very quiet.

There was a sudden rustle as Naomasa straightened fully. Shōta's own hand went still against Midoriya's shoulder, his thumb stopping halfway through the small, repetitive motion he'd been using to ground him.

"What?"

Midoriya's throat worked visibly before he managed to force the words out. "I was Quirkless."

That, at least, Shōta knew.

He'd seen Midoriya's middle-school records. Quirkless had been there in black and white, buried among medical information and the spectacularly useless academic reports Aldera had provided.He'd noticed the discrepancy during his first review of the class files and assumed Aldera had screwed up the records. After watching Midoriya obliterate a zero-pointer with one punch, a clerical error had seemed considerably more plausible than the kid somehow being Quirkless.

Apparently, someone hadn't checked the wrong box.

"I was Quirkless," Midoriya repeated, and his voice cracked over the word this time. His eyes dropped again, fixing on his own hands. "Until All Might. He—he chose me."

A cold, unpleasant weight settled beneath Shōta's ribs.

He became distantly aware of Naomasa moving closer, not enough to crowd the bed but enough that his presence registered at Shōta's shoulder rather than across the room. Neither of them looked at the other. They didn't need to. Shōta could practically feel the questions accumulating between them.

"Chose you how? For what?"

Midoriya's breathing hitched, and for a moment Shōta thought they were about to lose what little progress they'd made getting him calmed down. His hand tightened slightly around the kid's shoulder.

"Easy. Just tell me what happened."

"He gave it to me."

Somewhere behind Shōta, Naomasa made a very quiet, very disbelieving sound.

Shōta didn't turn. He was having enough trouble keeping his own expression neutral without seeing whatever was written across his partner's face.

There were several possible interpretations of he gave it to me. Most of them were absurd. Unfortunately, there was one interpretation that fit far too neatly with the impossible strength Midoriya had appeared to develop sometime between middle school and U.A., the bizarre similarity between his power and All Might's, and the amount of personal attention the former Number One had paid to one otherwise unremarkable first-year student.

Shōta dismissed the possibility because Quirks didn't work that way. Apparently, he'd been wrong about that too.

"All Might," he said slowly, watching Midoriya's face, "gave you his Quirk."

Midoriya nodded.

Not trained him to imitate it. Not helped him develop his own. Not inspired some late manifestation that happened to resemble All Might's.

Gave it to him.

"All Might gave you your Quirk?" Naomasa asked quietly.

It was the first time he'd interrupted, and Shōta glanced toward him. His partner had moved away from the wall entirely now. One hand rested against the back of the empty chair beside him, fingers curled around it, his expression carefully controlled in the way Shōta knew meant there was a great deal going on underneath.

Midoriya's eyes darted toward him, and Naomasa's expression softened immediately.

"Sorry," he said, lowering his voice. "One thing at a time."

Something in Shōta's chest loosened at that. Barely. He turned back to Midoriya and found the kid looking at him again.

"It's called One For All."

Shōta stopped breathing for a beat.

The name hit somewhere unpleasantly close to recognition, and the memory surfaced before he could reach for it: a voice too calm for the things it had been saying, All For One speaking as though everyone around him were pieces on a board only he could see.

One For All.

Shōta had heard those words exactly once before.

From him.

His fingers tightened against Midoriya's hospital gown before he caught himself and deliberately relaxed them. Behind him, Naomasa had gone so quiet that Shōta knew he'd made the same connection.

All For One had attacked Midoriya.

All For One had taken his Quirk.

And Midoriya woke up sobbing because he failed to keep it safe.

A cold line began to trace its way down Shōta's spine.

There was something here, something much larger and much uglier than a villain stealing a powerful Quirk from one of his students, and Midoriya had apparently been carrying at least part of it without Shōta knowing a damn thing. The realization sat badly in his chest, cold and heavy, because every new piece of information only made the shape of the problem less clear.

He needed answers, but he needed the kid calm enough to give them.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

The question came out quieter than he'd intended. Midoriya's head jerked up at once, and Shōta watched fresh tears gather along his lower lashes before the kid even managed to answer.

"I wanted to," he said quickly. His voice frayed almost immediately, words crowding together as though he were afraid Shōta might stop listening if he didn't get them out fast enough. "Sensei, I did. I'm sorry, please, I wanted to tell you so many times, I just—I couldn't."

A tightness pulled beneath Shōta's ribs. He kept his hand where it rested on Midoriya's shoulder, careful not to let the anger beginning to stir show in his grip. "Why not?"

Midoriya looked away. His fingers had gone back to worrying at the blanket, twisting the thin fabric tighter and tighter around themselves until his knuckles blanched. For several seconds there was nothing but the steady electronic chirp of the monitor and the faint hiss of the air vent overhead.

When the answer finally came, it was almost swallowed by the room.

"It's a secret."

Shōta frowned, not at Midoriya, but at the implication. "I'm not asking because I want to punish you for keeping something from me."

The kid's eyes lifted cautiously, still wet and uncertain.

"I need to understand what happened to you," Shōta continued, keeping his tone measured. "If I'm going to help you, I need to know what I'm helping with. That's all."

For a moment, it looked like Midoriya might give in. His mouth opened, then closed again, and Shōta could almost see him turning the words over, weighing fear against whatever trust he was trying to place in the room. His breathing shortened again, not enough to set the monitor shrilling but enough that Shōta noticed.

"You don't understand." The words broke on the way out. "It's a secret. That's why I couldn't tell you. I wasn't supposed to tell anyone. I wasn't allowed to."

That stopped him.

Not I promised I wouldn't.

Not I thought I shouldn't.

I wasn't allowed to.

Shōta glanced over his shoulder and found his partner already watching him. Their eyes met for barely a second, but it was enough. The tired warmth Naomasa had carried through most of the night had disappeared beneath something sharper and more controlled, the look he wore when a witness said something that changed the direction of an entire case.

When he turned back, Midoriya was watching him with a strained, frightened expression, like he'd realized only after speaking that he'd revealed too much. His shoulders had drawn inward beneath the hospital gown, and the hand not tangled in the blanket had curled protectively against his stomach.

Shōta forced some of the tension out of his own posture. Whatever questions that sentence raised could wait a few minutes. Right now, the kid looked one badly phrased question away from falling apart again.

"All right," he said, easing his grip on Midoriya's shoulder and rubbing his thumb once over the wrinkled fabric beneath it. "You're not in trouble."

Midoriya blinked at him.

"I mean it." Shōta waited until the kid was actually looking at him instead of at the blanket. "I'm not angry with you for keeping a secret you were told you had to keep. But if that secret is part of the reason you're lying in a hospital bed, then I need the truth to understand what happened to you."

Midoriya swallowed hard. His eyes flicked once toward Naomasa, and Shōta caught the uncertainty there before the kid looked back.

"You don't have to tell it perfectly," he added. "You don't have to remember everything in the right order, and if you need to stop for a minute, we stop. No one's going to drag it out of you."

A tiny bit of the panic eased from Midoriya's face, though the fear remained.

Naomasa stayed quiet behind them. He didn't step closer or insert himself into the conversation, but his presence had shifted subtly, less detective now and more silent backup. Shōta could feel it without looking: the certainty that if Midoriya broke down again, he wouldn't be handling the room alone.

"All right," Shōta said after a moment, softening his voice. "Start from the beginning. As far back as you need to go."

Another apology immediately threatened to crumple Midoriya's face, his lips parting around what Shōta was becoming depressingly certain would be I'm sorry.

One raised eyebrow stopped him before he could get it out. "And without apologizing for how long it takes."

His mouth clicked shut, the words visibly swallowed.

From behind Shōta came a soft, suspicious noise that might have been a laugh if the room hadn't been so tense. A quick glance over his shoulder found Naomasa attempting to look entirely innocent and not quite managing it.

The sound drew Midoriya's attention too. For the first time since waking, something other than fear or grief touched his expression. The corner of his mouth twitched, small and uncertain, as if he'd nearly forgotten how to smile and wasn't sure he remembered the mechanics.

It vanished almost as quickly as it appeared, but Shōta would take it.

After a shaky breath, Midoriya loosened his grip on the blanket just enough to smooth one thumb nervously over the wrinkles he'd made. His gaze dropped to his hands, and when he finally began to speak, his voice was quiet and rough from crying.

The story came slowly.

The story didn't come out neatly, but Shōta hadn't expected it to. It came in fragments, pulled loose between uneven breaths and the occasional sob Midoriya couldn't quite swallow. Sometimes he doubled back because he'd forgotten something important; other times he stopped halfway through a sentence, eyes darting toward Shōta as though he expected to be told he'd already said too much. More than once an apology slipped out despite the warning, growing quieter each time Shōta gave him a look for it.

No one rushed him. Naomasa remained nearby, silent except for the occasional shift of his shoes against the floor or quiet acknowledgment when Midoriya glanced his way. Shōta kept his hand resting lightly against the kid's shoulder and listened as a childhood began to take shape between halting sentences.

Midoriya had been four when he'd learned he was Quirkless. He remembered the doctor's office in details that were too precise for something that had happened more than a decade ago: the X-ray glowing on the wall, the doctor pointing out the extra joint in his little toe, his mother's hand clenched around his own. He remembered asking what that meant. He remembered understanding the answer mostly through the way his mother started crying.

"She kept saying she was sorry," Midoriya murmured, staring down at the blanket. "I didn't really understand why she was apologizing. Not then."

Something uncomfortable tightened in Shōta's chest.

The father entered the story only briefly. Hisashi Midoriya already spent more time away than home, and after the Quirkless diagnosis the absences stretched longer until eventually he simply stopped coming back. Midoriya said it without anger and hurried onward as though it wasn't important enough to linger over.

Heroes had remained important, though. Maybe more important. They became something Midoriya watched through a screen with the volume low while his mother slept, something he studied obsessively and filled notebook after notebook trying to understand. Other children learned to use their Quirks. Midoriya learned how everyone else's worked.

The dream hadn't disappeared simply because the world told him it should.

Middle school entered the story reluctantly.

Shōta didn't like the way Midoriya skimmed over those years. He liked even less the way his shoulders tightened whenever Bakugō's name came up, or how quickly people weren't very nice about it replaced what sounded suspiciously like years of bullying. Naomasa shifted once behind him at that, and Shōta knew without looking that his partner had noticed the evasion too.

Another question for later.

Then came All Might.

Midoriya's voice changed when he reached that part. There was still reverence there, painfully enough, but it had become tangled with something Shōta couldn't quite identify.

He heard about the sludge villain first: the pressure crushing Midoriya's chest, the burning in his lungs when he couldn't breathe, the awful certainty that he was going to die while something forced itself down his throat.

Then Midoriya told him how he'd woken up.

"All Might was slapping my face," he said, lifting one hand vaguely toward his cheek as if this were an entirely ordinary detail. "Not hard or anything! He was just trying to wake me up."

Shōta stared at him.

Midoriya continued before he could decide which part of that sentence to address. Apparently, after regaining consciousness from an attempted suffocation, he'd realized All Might was leaving, grabbed onto the hero without permission, and been carried into the air before All Might noticed the extra passenger. That discovery had nearly ended with Midoriya being kicked loose in mid-flight.

"He caught me," Midoriya added quickly.

Of course that was the part he thought needed clarification.

They'd landed on a rooftop. Dropped might have been the more accurate word, judging from the way Midoriya described it, though the kid seemed determined to frame the entire experience as his own fault for grabbing onto All Might in the first place.

What he didn't mention was a hospital, an ambulance, a paramedic, or apparently so much as a medical examination after being rendered unconscious by a villain who had filled his airway and nearly suffocated him to death.

Shōta went very still. "You lost consciousness."

Midoriya blinked at the interruption. "Um. Yeah?"

"Because you couldn't breathe."

"Yes."

"And after you regained consciousness, what medical treatment did you receive?"

The confusion on Midoriya's face answered before his mouth did. "I was okay."

Naomasa let out a quiet breath through his nose, apparently arriving at the same conclusion Shōta was.

"That wasn't my question."

Midoriya's brows drew together. "All Might got the sludge out of my mouth, and I could breathe again."

Shōta waited.

When it became clear he expected more, uncertainty crept into Midoriya's expression. "Was I supposed to go to the hospital?"

His teacher closed his eyes for a moment.

An unconscious fourteen-year-old had regained consciousness to the Number One hero slapping him awake, received no medical evaluation after an attempted suffocation, then somehow ended up clinging to that same hero several stories above the ground before being deposited on a rooftop.

Midoriya apparently never considered any part of this unusual enough to question.

"Yes," Shōta said, opening his eyes again. "You were supposed to receive medical attention."

"Oh."

That small, bewildered response did absolutely nothing for Shōta's temper.

He felt Naomasa watching him now. His look said later, and Shōta reluctantly listened. The list was getting disturbingly long.

For now, he listened as Midoriya described standing on that rooftop with the man he'd worshipped since childhood and, still shaken from an attack that had nearly killed him, asking the question he'd apparently been carrying since he was four years old.

"Can I be a hero without a Quirk?"

Shōta's hand froze against Midoriya's shoulder.

The kid wouldn't look at him as he explained what All Might had said.

No.

Not cruelly, according to Midoriya. He was very careful about that, rushing to soften the answer almost as soon as he'd repeated it. All Might had been injured. He'd been tired. He was only being realistic. Hero work was dangerous, especially for someone without a Quirk, and there were other ways to help people. Police work, for example. Midoriya recited the reasoning with the practiced cadence of someone who had gone over it many times before, sanding down every sharp edge until he could hold the memory without cutting himself on it.

Then All Might had left.

That detail caught Shōta's attention more than Midoriya seemed to expect.

"He left you on the roof? By yourself?"

Midoriya glanced up. "He had to go. His time was running out."

"That isn't what I asked."

A faint crease appeared between the kid's brows. "I mean… yes. But it wasn't a big deal. He had more important things to worry about."

Shōta wasn't convinced. Something unpleasant had begun crawling along the back of his neck, an instinct he couldn't justify yet but had learned not to ignore.

Midoriya picked nervously at the blanket. "I stayed up there for a little while. I was looking over the railing and thinking about what he'd said, and…" His voice faltered.

Shōta watched his fingers stop moving.

"And?"

For several seconds, Midoriya said nothing. His eyes remained fixed on the blanket while his throat worked around a swallow.

"I don't know. I just thought maybe I should've—"

He cut himself off, and something about the silence that followed made Shōta's stomach turn cold. Beside him, Naomasa went completely still.

Midoriya seemed to realize what he'd nearly said, because his eyes widened and he hurried onward. "It doesn't matter. I didn't do anything. Then I heard the explosion and went downstairs, so—"

Shōta let him continue.

He wasn't going to force an admission out of an injured, overwhelmed kid who was already struggling to breathe through half this conversation. But he filed the moment away with everything else: fourteen years old, nearly suffocated, no medical care, the person he'd idolized telling him the dream he'd built his life around was impossible, and then being left alone on a rooftop while he stared over the railing.

Maybe Midoriya hadn't meant what Shōta thought he had. Shōta desperately hoped he hadn't, even if he didn't believe it.

He let his hand fall away and leaned back in his chair, giving Midoriya the space to continue. Midoriya's fingers twitched at the loss of contact before curling into the blanket instead, and something in Shōta's chest tightened at the sight.

The kid hurried into the next part of the story, and for the moment, Shōta kept every one of his opinions about All Might firmly to himself.

Then came the second sludge-villain attack. Bakugō trapped inside it, professional heroes surrounding him, no one able to get close without making things worse. Midoriya described standing behind the police line and watching.

Then he described running.

"You didn't have a Quirk," Shōta said slowly.

Midoriya shook his head.

"No weapon."

Another shake.

"No training."

"I threw my backpack."

Naomasa made a quiet sound, something between disbelief and a sigh, while Shōta closed his eyes for one long second and tried to summon patience from whatever reserves he had left.

"Of course you did."

"I had notebooks in it," Midoriya offered, as though the contents of the backpack somehow made running barehanded toward a villain less suicidal.

"That does not improve the situation."

A faint flush crept into Midoriya's cheeks. "It distracted him."

"That is also not the point."

"I know, but…" The embarrassment faded from his expression, replaced by something quieter. His fingers resumed their restless movement against the blanket, smoothing over a wrinkle only to create another. "Everyone else was just standing there watching."

Something in his voice made Shōta stop.

Midoriya's gaze dropped again. "There were heroes everywhere, and they kept saying they couldn't get close. Their Quirks weren't right for it, or there was too much fire, or they'd make it worse. They all had reasons." His mouth tightened, and for the first time since he'd started telling the story, there was something almost like anger beneath the grief. "They were heroes, Sensei, and they were just… standing there. Making excuses for why they couldn't even try."

The last word came out rough.

"I could see Kacchan's face." His fingers curled against the blanket. "He couldn't breathe. I knew what that felt like. I knew what was happening to him, and everyone was watching it happen."

Shōta's eyes dropped briefly to the hand curling tighter against the blanket.

"So I had to do something."

There it was.

Not I thought I could win. Not I had a plan. Not even I thought I could help.

I had to do something.

Shōta knew that impulse. Every hero worth the title knew it, that violent little pull beneath the ribs when someone was in danger and standing still became impossible. He couldn't fault Midoriya for possessing it.

He could, however, fault the collection of trained, licensed adults who apparently left a Quirkless fourteen-year-old feeling like he was the only person in the street willing to move.

"You didn't have to be the one to fix it," Shōta said quietly.

Midoriya finally looked at him. "Someone had to try."

There wasn't any bravado in the answer. Midoriya said it as though the absence of anyone better equipped automatically made the responsibility his, and the realization sat badly with Shōta.

He leaned back slightly. "We'll come back to that."

Midoriya's expression turned immediately wary.

"That wasn't a threat."

"It sounded like one."

"It was a teacher statement."

"That doesn't make it better."

A quiet snort escaped Naomasa before he could disguise it as a cough.

For the briefest moment, something almost sheepish crossed Midoriya's face, and Shōta let him have it. The kid had been crying since he woke up; Shōta wasn't going to object to anything that pulled him out of that grief for a few seconds.

The moment faded as Midoriya continued.

All Might had found him afterward.

You can become a hero.

Those words had changed everything.

What followed was ten months of training intense enough that Shōta's irritation steadily curdled into something uglier. Before school, after school, weekends, whatever time Midoriya could spare. Running. Lifting. Cleaning an entire stretch of beach littered with years' worth of garbage and discarded appliances. Building a body capable of receiving a Quirk that, apparently, could be transferred from one person to another.

And then Midoriya reached the mechanism of that transfer.

Shōta held up a hand. "Wait. How did he give it to you?"

Color rushed into Midoriya's face, which was immediately concerning.

"Midoriya."

"I had to… ingest his DNA."

Shōta stared at him. Naomasa was quiet for a beat before asking, very carefully, "What kind of DNA?"

Midoriya looked like he wanted the mattress to swallow him. "Hair."

Neither of them said anything.

"His hair," Midoriya clarified miserably.

Shōta dragged his hand down his face. "He had a fourteen-year-old eat his hair."

"He didn't make me."

"That is somehow not the part of that sentence I'm having trouble with."

A strangled sound came from behind him. Shōta glanced back to find Naomasa covering his mouth, eyes suspiciously bright.

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I absolutely was not."

Midoriya made a tiny noise that might have been mortification or, possibly, the beginning of another laugh. Shōta decided not to examine either possibility too closely.

There were some details he could process when he wasn't contemplating murder.

One question, however, couldn't wait.

"Did your mother know?"

Whatever fragile amusement had survived the discussion of All Might's hair disappeared from Midoriya's face. His gaze dropped immediately to his lap, shoulders drawing in as his thumb found the edge of the blanket and began worrying at a loose thread.

The pause before he answered was just long enough to sharpen Shōta's attention.

"Yes."

It was too simple an answer for a question that had apparently made the kid retreat into himself.

"All of it?"

Another hesitation followed, longer this time. Midoriya's fingers curled around the blanket, and when he finally spoke, his voice had fallen almost to a whisper. "Yes. About All Might giving me his Quirk, I mean. She knew about the training. She knew I was going to get one."

About All Might giving me his Quirk.

That qualifier did not escape Shōta.

Neither, judging by the sudden absence of movement behind him, did it escape Naomasa.

The detective had been quiet throughout most of Midoriya's explanation, content to listen and let Shōta guide the conversation, but Shōta knew his partner's silences well enough to distinguish relaxed observation from focused attention. This was the latter. Neither of them needed to look at the other to know they'd caught the same gap.

Shōta considered the ten months Midoriya had just described. The hours spent away from home before and after school, weekends surrendered to hauling rusted appliances and mountains of trash across a beach, the drastic changes to his diet and his body. Midoriya had been fourteen. There was no reasonable way Inko could have missed what was happening to her son, even if she hadn't known every detail from the beginning.

"She knew you were training with All Might?"

A small nod. "Not right away. At first she just knew I was training for U.A. Eventually All Might talked to her."

That was new.

Shōta felt his brows draw together. "He spoke to her personally?"

"Yeah." Midoriya rubbed his thumb harder over the blanket seam. "It was getting harder to explain why I was gone so much. Mom was worried, so he came over and talked to her. He told her he wanted to train me and that he thought I could become a hero."

Shōta could picture that conversation with uncomfortable ease. Inko Midoriya spent fourteen years raising a Quirkless child in a society built around Quirks. She'd watched her son's dream become less attainable with every year and, judging by what Shōta was beginning to piece together about Aldera, watched other people make damn sure he knew it. Then the Symbol of Peace himself had appeared at her door and told her that her son had potential.

That he could give Midoriya a chance.

How the hell was a frightened mother supposed to weigh the word of the Number One hero against everything she'd been told her son's entire life?

"Did she know about the danger?"

Midoriya's fingers tightened around the blanket. "She knew it was really powerful."

"Midoriya."

The kid swallowed. "She thought… she thought having a Quirk would make things better."

Shōta frowned and Midoriya's voice dropped further. "For both of us. She said people would stop looking at me like there was something wrong with me. That I'd finally have a chance to do what I wanted." His thumb worried endlessly at one of the blanket's seams. "She was scared about U.A., but she was happy when I got the Quirk. I was happy."

The way Midoriya carefully narrowed all of it to All Might gave me a Quirk. The assumption that simply possessing one would make their lives better. The fact that a mother who had spent years watching her Quirkless child be treated as lesser might have been willing to believe the greatest hero in Japan when he offered to change that.

Then came the entrance exam.

The zero-pointer was different now that he knew what had preceded it. Shōta remembered watching the footage and seeing an absurdly powerful Quirk wielded with absolutely no control, remembered wondering what idiot had allowed a child to reach fifteen without learning how to regulate his own strength.

Now he knew.

Midoriya hadn't had fifteen years to learn control. He'd barely had the Quirk at all. The jump had shattered both legs; the punch had destroyed his arm. One For All had torn through the body of the fifteen-year-old it had been handed to because that body had never been given the time or instruction necessary to survive it.

Shōta's jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

The story kept going.

The Sports Festival came next, and with it shattered fingers and an arm damaged badly enough that Recovery Girl had warned Midoriya about permanent consequences. Then Gran Torino, Stain, Muscular, Kamino—event after event Shōta already knew, except every familiar incident now carried information he'd never been given. Every broken bone looked different when viewed through the knowledge that the power breaking them had belonged to an adult who had deliberately placed it in Midoriya's hands.

Through all of it, one name kept surfacing.

Sometimes Midoriya said the name quietly, almost as if speaking it too loudly might summon the man into the room. Other times he stumbled around it, swallowing hard before forcing himself to continue. Each time, Shōta felt the tension ratchet tighter, and the picture forming in his head became uglier.

All For One was not simply the villain who had fought All Might at Kamino. He knew about One For All. He had history with it, wanted it, had apparently been trying to take it for years—and somewhere along the way, that responsibility had been passed to Midoriya along with the Quirk itself. A fifteen-year-old hadn't merely inherited All Might's power. He'd inherited the enemy attached to it, a conflict that had begun long before Midoriya had even been born.

And somehow, no one had thought his homeroom teacher needed to know that one of his first-year students had been dropped into the middle of it.

A thought occurred to Shōta then, cold enough that his stomach tightened.

"Did you know?"

Midoriya blinked at him, confusion breaking briefly through the exhaustion. "Know what, Sensei?"

"When he gave it to you." Shōta kept his voice carefully controlled, though he could feel Naomasa's attention sharpen behind him. "Did you know about All For One?"

The hesitation was small. A slight hitch in Midoriya's breathing, a tightening of his fingers around the blanket, his eyes sliding away from Shōta's face.

It was answer enough.

"Midoriya."

"No," he whispered.

For a moment, Shōta closed his eyes and breathed slowly through his nose. Anger would accomplish nothing right now. More importantly, the person responsible for that anger was not the injured child sitting in front of him.

When he opened his eyes again, Midoriya was watching him warily.

"Did you know someone might eventually come after you for One For All?"

"No."

The answer came a little faster this time.

"Did you know there was a specific person who had been hunting it?"

Another small shake of his head.

Naomasa shifted, the sole of his shoe making a faint sound against the tile. Shōta could practically feel his partner cataloguing every answer.

"And before you accepted it," Shōta asked, "did you know using One For All could damage you badly enough to leave permanent injuries?"

"All Might told me I needed to train my body first," Midoriya said quickly. "That's what the beach was for. He said I needed to be strong enough to handle it or my limbs could—"

"Try again."

The words came out harder than Shōta intended.

Midoriya immediately shrank. His shoulders curled inward, chin dropping toward his chest, his entire body drawing tight as though bracing for something.

Not arguing. Not defending himself.

Bracing.

Shōta's anger vanished beneath something colder.

Not because he wasn't furious. He was. Every new piece of this story gave him another reason to be.

But Midoriya had just reacted to Shōta's anger as though it belonged to him, and it absolutely did not.

When Shōta glanced aside, Naomasa was watching him rather than Midoriya now. His expression remained controlled, but there was something steady in it, a quiet reminder to breathe before Shōta did something unhelpful with the fury steadily accumulating beneath his skin.

Pulling the chair closer, Shōta settled beside the bed rather than looming over it and rested his forearms loosely against his knees. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

"Before you agreed, Midoriya. Did you understand that taking this Quirk could permanently damage your body?"

The kid's throat worked around a swallow. "No."

Shōta nodded once, because that was all he trusted himself to do with the answer. "Okay."

Midoriya's mouth trembled.

He pressed his lips together like he could stop it, but that only made it worse. His next breath caught halfway in, shoulders hitching with it, and when he finally spoke, his voice shook badly enough that the words nearly broke apart. "It's not okay."

"No," Shōta admitted after a moment. "It isn't."

Midoriya's face crumpled. "I lost it."

There was something about the way he said it that hurt. Not it was stolen. Not he took it from me. Even now, Midoriya was framing what had happened as something he'd done wrong.

"You did," Shōta said carefully, unwilling to lie to him.

"He has it now."

"Yes."

"Sensei, you don't understand."

The words should have sounded frustrated. Maybe even accusatory. Instead, they came out thin and frightened, and Shōta finally understood what he'd been hearing underneath that phrase every time Midoriya repeated it.

Terror.

The kid wasn't telling him he was too stupid to understand. He was begging him to understand why this was so terrible, why Midoriya was sitting in a hospital bed grieving a Quirk more fiercely than his own battered body.

"If he has One For All, then—then everyone…" Midoriya's breathing began to quicken again. "All Might said it was the only thing that could stop him. The only thing he couldn't take, and I was supposed to protect it. I was supposed to make sure he never got it, because if he did, then no one would be able to—"

"Midoriya."

"I knew that. I knew what would happen, and I still couldn't stop him." His voice broke, and he pressed the heel of one trembling hand against his eyes. "I should've—"

Then he stopped.

Shōta waited.

The unfinished sentence hung between them, and every instinct he had told him he wasn't going to like whatever belonged at the end of it. Midoriya's hand slowly dropped back into his lap, joining the other in a knot of pale fingers and twisted blanket.

"Should've what?"

No answer came.

Even the room seemed too quiet around them, the steady chirp of the monitor suddenly intrusive. Somewhere Naomasa shifted away from the wall. He didn't come closer yet, but the movement told Shōta he had heard the same thing in Midoriya's voice.

"Midoriya," Shōta prompted, softer this time.

The kid's shoulders began to shake.

"I should've died."

For one impossible second, Shōta's mind simply refused to process the sentence.

He had spent the night preparing himself for bad news. He had watched paramedics cut Midoriya's costume away, watched blood stain their gloves, listened to doctors list injuries while telling himself that none of it mattered because the kid was alive. He had prepared himself to hear that Midoriya's Quirk was gone permanently. He had not prepared himself to hear his student say that.

Naomasa moved closer. Shōta heard him this time, two quiet steps across the tile before he stopped somewhere just behind him.

Midoriya kept talking, apparently mistaking Shōta's stunned silence for permission. "If I'd died before he could take it, then it would've been gone with me. He wouldn't have it now. I knew that. I knew I couldn't let him get it, and I tried, Sensei, I really tried, but I wasn't strong enough and I should've just—"

"Stop."

The word came out sharp enough that Midoriya recoiled, shoulders jerking toward his ears as his eyes went wide.

Shōta regretted the volume immediately, but not the interruption. The thought of what the kid had been about to say—of how easily the words had apparently come to him—sent something cold and furious twisting beneath Shōta's ribs. He opened his mouth, ready to cut off whatever protest came next, when a warm hand settled on his shoulder.

Naomasa's palm moved once, a slow, firm rub over the knotted muscle there. "Shō."

Nothing more than his name, spoken quietly enough that Midoriya might not have understood the warning threaded through it. Shōta did. He knew that tone, had heard it after bad patrols and worse cases, usually when he was three seconds away from letting anger get ahead of judgment.

I know.

But look at him.

Shōta breathed.

Naomasa's hand squeezed once before easing away, though he stayed close enough that Shōta could feel the warmth of him at his back. When Shōta looked at Midoriya again, he made himself actually see the kid rather than the implication of what he'd nearly said: tear-streaked cheeks, trembling hands, shoulders hunched defensively beneath a hospital gown.

His student. Frightened, hurt, and apparently convinced that being alive was something he needed to justify.

Shōta forced the anger back where it belonged.

"Do not finish that sentence," he said again, quieter this time.

"But—"

"No." He shook his head, keeping his voice controlled now. "I'm serious."

Fresh tears spilled over Midoriya's lashes. He scrubbed at them immediately, almost angrily, as though getting rid of them fast enough might mean they weren't happening at all.

Shōta held out his hand.

He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.

Midoriya's gaze caught on it for barely a second before his fingers closed around Shōta's. Then his other hand was back at his face, wiping furiously at tears that refused to stop coming.

"You don't understand what he can do with it!"

His grip tightened with the words.

Shōta didn't think the kid even realized he was doing it.

He just held on.

"I understand exactly what you just told me."

"Then you know!" His voice rose despite the tears, cracking under the strain as his other hand pulled free of the blanket to gesture helplessly between them. "You know what he can do now. You know how many people could get hurt because I couldn't stop him!"

"What I know is that you're sitting there telling me your death would have been preferable to losing a Quirk."

"It would have!"

"No."

This time the word didn't come out as a shout. It was flat, immediate, and absolute.

Midoriya stared at him as though he couldn't understand how Shōta could possibly disagree.

"Midoriya, kid," Naomasa said.

The kid's gaze flicked past Shōta toward him.

Naomasa stood just behind Shōta's chair, one hand resting loosely against its back, his expression gentler than it had been while listening to the details of One For All.

"I've spent most of tonight trying to figure out whether you were going to wake up," he said. "So has your teacher."

Midoriya's face crumpled slightly.

"And before you start," Naomasa added when he saw the kid's lips part, "I'm not saying the Quirk doesn't matter. From everything you've told us, it matters a great deal. All For One having it is a problem, and probably a very serious one."

"Then—"

"But you're talking as though there were only two possible outcomes tonight." Naomasa's fingers tightened briefly around the back of the chair. "You keep saying either you protected One For All or you should have died protecting it. Those aren't the only choices."

"I couldn't stop him."

"No," Naomasa said gently. "You couldn't."

The simple agreement seemed to catch Midoriya off guard.

"That doesn't mean you were supposed to die trying."

Midoriya's gaze dropped. His fingers tightened around Shōta's hand, not quite enough to hurt.

Shōta felt some of the anger inside him settle into something colder and steadier. Naomasa had given him exactly what he'd needed: a moment to get hold of himself, and words that separated the problem they actually had from the horrifying conclusion Midoriya had drawn from it.

He leaned forward, forearms settling against his knees as he waited until Midoriya reluctantly looked at him again. Their joined hands shifted with the movement, but Midoriya didn't let go.

"No, Midoriya. It would not have been better if you'd died."

"But One For All—"

"Is a Quirk."

"It isn't just—"

"I know it isn't just anything to you, Midori—" Shōta stopped.

The name caught strangely on his tongue.

He looked at the kid in front of him—the frightened sixteen-year-old with swollen eyes and tear tracks drying against his cheeks, still trying to explain why his own death would have been an acceptable price to keep someone else's power out of the wrong hands—and something in Shōta refused the distance of it.

"Izuku."

The kid went very still.

So did the hand in Shōta's.

Behind him, Naomasa's hand tightened almost imperceptibly against his shoulder.

Shōta didn't take it back.

"I've been listening, Izuku." He kept his voice firm without raising it, holding the kid's startled gaze. "I know what One For All meant to you, and I'm beginning to understand what it means to All For One. That doesn't change what it is."

Izuku shook his head, tears tracking freely down his cheeks. He looked almost more shaken by the use of his first name than by the argument itself, but when he spoke, he still reached desperately for the thing Shōta apparently wasn't understanding. "It was All Might's."

"I don't care."

That finally stunned him into silence.

The words had come easily, and Shōta realized he meant them exactly as he'd said them. He didn't care that One For All had belonged to the Symbol of Peace. He didn't care how old it was, how powerful it was, how many people had carried it or what grand purpose they had assigned to it. Those things mattered in the larger sense, of course. Tomorrow they would matter a great fucking deal when Shōta, Naomasa, Nezu, and every hero they could trust had to figure out what to do about All For One possessing that kind of power.

But none of those things made Izuku worth less.

Even thinking the name felt different.

More personal than Shōta usually allowed himself with his students, crossing one of those quiet boundaries he'd maintained so automatically that he'd never needed to think about it before. He should probably examine that later.

Right now, he couldn't bring himself to regret it.

Izuku's lips parted, but no sound emerged. He looked bewildered, as though Shōta had said something in a language he didn't understand.

So Shōta made it simpler.

"I care that you're alive."

Something in Izuku's expression broke. His mouth trembled, breath catching painfully in his throat as his eyes filled all over again, and his fingers clenched around Shōta's hard enough that Shōta felt the pressure in his knuckles. He tightened his own grip just enough to answer it.

Shōta didn't look away. He wanted the kid to see his face when he said it. More than that, he needed Izuku to understand that there wasn't a hidden qualification coming afterward. No but. No calculation waiting to place his life on one side of a scale and One For All on the other.

"You had a Quirk taken from you," he continued, quieter now. "A powerful one. An important one. One we're going to have to deal with being in the wrong hands, and I'm not going to lie to you and pretend that isn't serious."

A tear slipped down Izuku's cheek and disappeared beneath his jaw.

"But you survived." Shōta tightened his hand around Izuku's, just slightly. "And I'm sure as hell glad you did."

Izuku's fingers clenched around his.

His face twisted for a moment, like the words had found somewhere tender he hadn't been prepared to have touched. Another tear followed the first, then another, and Izuku ducked his head as though embarrassed by them.

Shōta let him.

A moment later, Naomasa's hand settled quietly on his shoulder. Shōta didn't look back. He didn't need to. The familiar weight was enough.

He let the words settle between them, too.

"I am not going to sit here," Shōta said, "and let you call surviving a failure."

Izuku looked back at him, eyes wet and bewildered.

"It wasn't your fault."

A tiny crease appeared between the kid's brows, the words seeming to confuse him more than anything else.

Shōta leaned forward a little farther. He didn't release Izuku's hand. "None of it."

Izuku's breath caught, and Shōta felt the tremor that ran through his fingers.

"You didn't ask All For One to come after you. You didn't choose to have your Quirk stolen. You didn't fail because someone stronger than you overpowered you, and you sure as hell aren't responsible for whatever that man chooses to do with what he took." Shōta watched disbelief spread slowly across Izuku's face and hated, suddenly and viciously, how foreign the words seemed to him. "Whatever happens next is on the adults who are going to deal with it. Not on you."

"But I—"

"No." Shōta's voice stayed gentle this time. "None of it was your fault, Izuku."

The kid simply stared. His eyes were wide and shining, his mouth slightly open, and there was something almost painfully stunned in his expression, as though no one had ever offered him that possibility before. As though Shōta had just reached into the tangled mess of guilt he'd been carrying and cut a thread Izuku hadn't realized could be cut.

His hand had gone almost limp in Shōta's, the desperate grip from moments before loosening as if some of the fight had finally gone out of him. Shōta adjusted his hold before their hands could slip apart and kept it there.

"He's right, you know."

Izuku's gaze shifted past him.

Naomasa moved around the chair just enough to put himself within the kid's line of sight, though he kept his distance from the bed. There was no detective's careful neutrality in his expression now, only quiet certainty.

"I've been listening to everything you've told us," he said. "Nothing I heard makes what happened your fault."

"But I lost—"

"You had something taken from you," Naomasa corrected gently. "There's a difference."

Izuku went still.

Shōta felt his jaw tighten. Every version Izuku had given them placed himself in the active role—I lost it. I let him take it. I wasn't strong enough—when the reality was painfully simpler. All For One had attacked him and taken it. Even now, lying bruised and bandaged in a hospital bed, Izuku was finding ways to make himself responsible for what someone else had done to him.

Naomasa's expression softened. "Listen to your teacher, kid. He might be a grumpy, chronically sleep-deprived pain in the ass, but he cares about you."

Shōta turned his head slowly. "Was that necessary?"

"I thought so."

Izuku made a small, startled sound that might have been the beginning of a laugh.

Naomasa's mouth curved. "See? He didn't even argue with the part that mattered."

Shōta considered several responses and discarded all of them when he felt Izuku's fingers shift in his.

For several seconds, nobody spoke. The monitor continued its steady rhythm beside the bed, soft electronic beeps filling the space where Izuku seemed unable to find words. Naomasa's hand remained warm against Shōta's shoulder, his thumb moving once against the fabric there before going still.

Something shifted in the hand Shōta was holding.

Izuku's fingers shifted again, the last of the tension slowly bleeding out of them until his hand rested easily in Shōta's. They simply relaxed, settling more comfortably against his palm.

Shōta looked back at him.

The tension hadn't left Izuku's face entirely. His eyes were still red, his cheeks wet, but some of the awful, desperate certainty had finally eased. His next breath came a little easier. Then, almost tentatively, one corner of his mouth twitched upward.

It wasn't much of a smile. Barely one at all.

It still hit Shōta somewhere behind the ribs.

Naomasa saw it too. Shōta knew because the hand on his shoulder gave one small squeeze.

There you are.

For one fragile moment, Shōta thought maybe they'd gotten through to him. Not fixed it—nothing about this could be fixed in a single conversation—but enough. Enough that Izuku might believe them tonight. Enough that maybe the worst of this particular conversation was behind them.

Shōta was searching for something else to say, something that might make even a fraction of what they'd told him actually stick, when hurried footsteps sounded in the corridor.

They were easy to ignore at first. Hospitals never truly went quiet, even in the middle of the night. Shoes squeaked against polished floors, carts rattled past open doors, voices rose and fell at the nurses' station. Shōta barely registered this particular set until they slowed outside the room.

Izuku's faint smile lingered. His hand remained loose and warm in Shōta's.

Then the handle turned.

The door opened hard enough to strike the stopper with a dull thud.

"YOUNG MIDORIYA!"

For one suspended second, the entire room seemed to freeze.

The quiet hum of the hospital faded beneath the echo of that booming voice. Naomasa's hand went still against Shōta's shoulder. The hand resting in Shōta's went completely still, too.

It wasn't tense, or gripping. Just still.

Even the steady electronic rhythm beside the bed seemed suddenly too loud, each beep cutting sharply through the silence that followed.

Izuku went white.

Not startled. Not relieved to hear a familiar voice after everything that had happened.

White.

What little color remained in his face drained away so quickly that Shōta's attention snapped from the doorway back to the bed. Every muscle in Izuku's body locked beneath the blankets, shoulders rigid. His fingers remained motionless in Shōta's, the easy warmth from moments before gone rigid and unresponsive in his grasp. His breath caught somewhere high in his chest and stayed there for one terrible beat before escaping in a thin, shaky exhale.

The monitor noticed before anyone spoke. Its calm rhythm stumbled, then began to accelerate.

Shōta felt Naomasa's hand leave his shoulder as his partner straightened beside him, the movement subtle but immediate.

Izuku recoiled.

It was barely a movement, no more than a small jerk backward into the pillows, but his hand slipped from Shōta's in the same instant. His fingers dragged briefly across Shōta's palm before disappearing beneath the blanket, curling tight against his chest.

Shōta's hand remained where it was for a second, suddenly empty.

Just like that, every inch of ground they'd gained seemed to vanish.

Izuku didn't look toward the door or at him.

That bothered Shōta most. He stared down at the blanket, eyes wide and fixed, as though refusing to turn his head might postpone whatever was about to happen. The faint smile from moments ago was gone. So was the fragile ease that had finally begun to settle into his face.

The reaction sat cold and heavy in Shōta's stomach. This wasn't a student relieved to see his mentor, and whatever it meant, Shōta was suddenly very glad he was still sitting beside the bed.

Slowly, Shōta lowered his empty hand to his knee.

He turned toward the doorway.

All Might stood there—or rather, Yagi Toshinori did. There was nothing of the towering figure plastered across billboards and television screens, no impossible shoulders or enormous grin filling the room with effortless confidence. His clothes hung awkwardly from his thin frame, his face hollow-cheeked and pale beneath the hospital lights. One hand still gripped the door handle as he caught his breath, hair disheveled as though he'd come running the moment he heard.

For half a second, some of Shōta's anger loosened.

Of course Toshinori was terrified. Whatever else Shōta had learned tonight, whatever increasingly ugly questions he had about the choices the man had made, he'd never doubted that Toshinori cared about Izuku. He'd seen the pride, the worry, the poorly concealed hovering. If someone had called to say his successor had nearly died, then the fear written nakedly across his face made perfect sense.

Then Toshinori's gaze found the hospital bed and Izuku shrank beneath it.

"All M—" Izuku's voice caught before he could finish the name. He swallowed hard enough for Shōta to see the movement of his throat and tried again. "All Might, I—"

Toshinori's eyes swept over him: the bruising darkening one side of his face, the bandages disappearing beneath his hospital gown, the IV taped into the crook of his arm. For one fleeting second, something raw crossed the man's expression.

Toshinori turned toward Shōta and it disappeared. The familiar smile appeared in its place.

Shōta had seen that smile on television more times than he could count. Bright, broad, reassuring. The expression All Might wore while standing in front of cameras after disasters, promising frightened civilians that everything was under control.

It looked wrong on Yagi Toshinori's hollow face.

"Aizawa," he said, too pleasantly. "Thank you for staying with Young Midoriya. I know it's been a difficult night." His gaze flicked briefly toward Naomasa before returning to Shōta. "Would you mind giving us a moment? There are some things I need to discuss with my successor privately."

Shōta might have considered it before tonight.

Then he looked at Izuku.

Their eyes met.

And whatever consideration Shōta might have given the request died immediately.

The kid didn't say anything. Shōta wasn't sure he could. His lips had parted around a breath that refused to become words, and his fingers were twisted so tightly into the blanket that the tremor in them had worked its way up his forearms.

But his eyes were speaking just fine.

Wide. Wet. Terrified.

And fixed on Shōta.

Izuku had pulled his hand away the moment Toshinori walked through the door, retreating into himself so quickly that every fragile inch of progress they'd made seemed to disappear with it. But now he was looking at Shōta like he was waiting to see what he would do.

Whether he would stay.

Whether he would make him face this alone.

Shōta understood, he wasn't going anywhere.

Please.

Something inside Shōta settled with absolute certainty.

Like hell.

He wasn't leaving his kid alone with anyone while Izuku was looking at him like that.

Shōta shifted in his chair instead, settling more firmly beside the bed. It was a small movement, but deliberate, and he saw Izuku's gaze follow it.

"No. That is not happening."

For a second, Toshinori's smile held. Then it began to strain at the edges. "Aizawa, listen. I appreciate your concern, but this is a private matter between Young Midoriya and me."

"Not tonight, it isn't."

Toshinori's expression tightened. "This concerns information that cannot be shared."

"I already know about One For All, Toshinori."

The smile vanished.

Toshinori stared at him, whatever response he'd been preparing clearly lost somewhere along the way.

Beside Shōta came the quiet sound of Naomasa clearing his throat. "As do I."

Toshinori's head snapped toward him.

Naomasa, who had stepped forward to stand beside Shōta's chair, close enough that the message was obvious without making the movement confrontational. His posture remained easy, but his expression had settled into the careful neutrality Shōta recognized from a hundred interviews. "Midoriya told us what happened."

Toshinori looked past them to the bed. "You told them?"

The question was directed at Izuku, and the effect was immediate. He flinched hard enough to jostle the IV line, shoulders jerking toward his ears as though he'd been struck. His gaze dropped at once, whatever fragile steadiness Shōta had managed to coax back into him disappearing beneath a fresh wave of guilt.

"I—I had to, All Might." His fingers twisted tighter into the blanket. "I'm sorry."

Shōta's jaw clenched.

Another apology. Not for doing something wrong, but for telling his teacher and a police detective why he'd nearly been killed. For breaking a secret after waking injured and terrified in a hospital bed. Worse, the apology had come automatically, before Toshinori had even accused him of anything. One question in that particular tone and Izuku had folded in on himself, already bracing for disappointment.

"We needed to know, Toshinori."

The words came out calm, but there was enough steel beneath them that Toshinori's attention shifted away from the bed.

Shōta held his gaze. "He's my student. He was attacked because of One For All, and neither his homeroom teacher nor the detective investigating that attack knew enough to understand why. He didn't do anything wrong by telling us. In fact, I should have been informed long ago."

A tiny sound came from the bed, Izuku's breath catching at the last sentence.

Naomasa shifted, and a brief glance caught the tightening around his partner's eyes. He'd noticed the flinch too. When Toshinori looked toward him, Naomasa gave a small, deliberate nod.

"He's right, All Might," he said. "We couldn't help him without knowing what happened."

Toshinori's mouth tightened. It was clear he wasn't happy with the answer, but Shōta had already turned his attention back to Izuku. The kid's head remained bowed, shoulders hunched beneath the hospital gown, his fingers still knotted in the blanket.

Something unpleasant settled deeper in Shōta's chest.

Izuku wasn't reacting like someone who'd merely broken a promise.

He was reacting like someone who expected consequences for it. Like asking for help—telling two people he trusted the truth when he was hurt and terrified—was itself some kind of betrayal.

Toshinori's displeasure lasted only a second before he seemed to catch himself.

"Of course," he said quickly. "Of course. Given what happened, I suppose there was no avoiding it."

His smile returned, a little thinner than before, and he turned his attention back to Shōta as though the matter were settled.

"Then you understand."

Shōta's eyes narrowed.

"You understand what One For All is. What it means. What's at stake now that All For One has it." Toshinori gestured toward the hallway. "Which is precisely why I need to speak with Young Midoriya alone."

"No."

Toshinori blinked.

Shōta hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't needed to.

"Apparently," he said, "we understand very different things. What I understand is that he woke up less than an hour ago after being attacked by All For One."

"Aizawa—"

"He's injured, exhausted, and overwhelmed." Shōta kept his voice deliberately even. "So whatever you need to say to him, you can say with me here."

Toshinori's gaze moved between Shōta and Naomasa before returning to the hospital bed. Izuku had drawn in on himself beneath the blankets, shoulders hunched and chin lowered, as though making himself smaller might somehow make him less visible.

Shōta saw the exact moment Toshinori noticed.

For one hopeful second, he waited for it to matter. He waited for the man to see the tear tracks on Izuku's face, the trembling hands knotted in the blanket, the way his breathing had started climbing again after they'd spent so long getting it under control. He waited for the concern he'd seen Toshinori show his successor a hundred times before to win out over whatever else had brought him through that door.

Instead, something in Toshinori's expression sharpened.

"What happened?"

Izuku's fingers twisted tighter into the blanket. The question struck him like an accusation despite the absence of one, his shoulders pulling even farther inward as he stared down at his hands.

Neither he nor Naomasa had to say anything; they'd both heard the strain beneath those two words, the fear wrapped so tightly around them that it was already beginning to sound like anger.

Izuku opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Toshinori took another step into the room. "What happened to One For All?"

And just like that, Shōta understood why Izuku had gone white when the door opened.

His chair scraped softly against the floor as he rose, putting himself on his feet without consciously deciding to do it. Naomasa moved with him, not quite stepping between Toshinori and the bed but positioning himself close enough to intervene if this went where Shōta was increasingly afraid it would.

"Toshinori," Naomasa warned.

"I—"

The faint sound from the bed cut him off.

Naomasa fell silent as Shōta looked back at Izuku. His head was still bowed, his face hidden behind the fall of his curls, and for a moment Shōta wasn't entirely sure he'd heard him at all.

Izuku swallowed, his fingers tightening another fraction in the blanket.

"He… took it."

The words came out in a thin, broken whisper, so quiet Shōta might have missed them if he hadn't been beside the bed.

Toshinori didn't.

He stopped dead. The last of the color drained from his already pale face, his mouth falling slightly open as he stared at Izuku. For a moment the whole room seemed to hold itself suspended around him, even the steady sounds of the hospital fading beneath the silence.

"He…" Toshinori swallowed. "He took it?"

Izuku's face crumpled. "I'm so sorry, All Might."

"No." Toshinori shook his head once, then again, the movement becoming more frantic as he stepped even closer. "No, no, that can't—Young Midoriya, tell me this isn't true."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Tears spilled down Izuku's cheeks again, his voice breaking around the words. "I tried."

"How?"

"I—I tried to stop him. I couldn't—"

"How could you let this happen?"

Shōta's head snapped toward Toshinori so quickly that pain pulled through the back of his neck.

Izuku folded inward.

There was no other word for it. His shoulders curled forward, his chin dropped, and his hands tightened around the blanket as though he were trying to disappear inside it.

"I—I didn't mean to."

"You knew what was at stake." Toshinori's voice had begun to rise, fear sharpening every word. "You knew what could happen if he ever got his hands on One For All."

"I—I know."

"You knew he could never be allowed to possess it!"

"I know!" Izuku's voice cracked. "I know, I tried—"

"Do you have any idea what you've done?"

"Toshinori."

Naomasa's voice cut across the room, low and unmistakably warning. He'd moved another step forward, and Shōta caught the tension in his posture, the rigid set of his shoulders that meant his patience was rapidly reaching its limit.

Toshinori either didn't hear him or couldn't. His attention had narrowed entirely to Izuku, to One For All, to the catastrophe he could already see unfolding beyond the walls of this room. He didn't seem to hear the monitor accelerating beside the bed either, each shrill beep coming faster than the last as Izuku struggled to breathe through his tears.

"I told you how important this was." Toshinori dragged a shaking hand through his hair. "I told you what he wanted. All For One with One For All—do you understand what that means? I cannot imagine anything worse."

Shōta stared at him, something cold and terrible settling into place inside his chest, until a small, broken sound from the bed pulled his attention away.

Almost a whimper.

"I'm sorry," Izuku sobbed.

"I trusted you."

"I'm sorry."

"I chose you."

Another sob hitched painfully through Izuku's chest. "I'm sorry."

"I gave you everything. Everything I had left."

"I know!" Izuku pressed the heel of one hand against his mouth, but it did nothing to contain the sound that escaped him. "I know, I'm sorry All Might, I tried—"

"And you let him take it!"

"I'M SORRY!"

The scream tore through the room.

The monitor erupted with it, its alarm shrilling as Izuku doubled over as far as his injuries allowed, one arm wrapping around his middle while the other covered his face. His whole body shook with the force of his sobs.

Shōta moved before he'd consciously decided to.

One step put him between Toshinori and the bed.

The effect was immediate. Toshinori's view of Izuku disappeared behind Shōta's body, and Shōta intended to keep it that way. He planted himself there, shoulders squared, hands loose at his sides only because curling them into fists would be a very bad idea.

"All Might. Enough."

The title came out quietly.

That was deliberate.

Not Toshinori. Not now. The familiarity he'd been willing to extend minutes ago had evaporated somewhere between How could you let this happen? and the child behind him screaming apologies for being attacked.

Toshinori finally looked at him.

"Leave."

Confusion flickered across the man's face. "Aizawa—"

"Don't bother."

Those two words stopped him.

Shōta could hear Izuku crying behind him, each breath catching wetly in his throat. He wanted to turn around. Wanted to sit beside the bed again, get the kid breathing, remind him of everything they'd just spent the last half hour trying to make him believe.

Instead he held his ground, because the thing hurting Izuku was standing directly in front of him.

"You don't understand," Toshinori said, desperation creeping back into his voice. "You heard the story, but you don't understand what One For All is. What it means."

"I understand plenty."

"You couldn't possibly. You haven't carried it. You don't know what we've sacrificed to keep it away from him, what happens now that—"

"I understand that my student woke up less than an hour ago after nearly being killed."

Whatever Toshinori had been about to say died on his tongue.

"I understand that he woke up crying because someone attacked him, overpowered him, and forcibly stole his Quirk." Shōta kept his voice low, but every word felt sharpened on the way out. "I understand that before you walked through that door, he was already blaming himself for it."

"Aizawa—"

"And I understand that you have spent every second since you arrived making that worse."

Behind him, Izuku's breath hitched.

Toshinori's expression tightened. "This is bigger than what happened to one person."

There it was.

Naomasa moved to stand beside him, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched. The movement was quiet, but Shōta felt the support in it all the same.

Before turning to Toshinori, Naomasa glanced back at the bed.

Izuku was watching them now, still pale, his fingers twisted tightly into the blanket. Naomasa's expression softened.

"It's okay," he said quietly. "We're right here."

Izuku's throat worked around a swallow. He didn't answer, but some of the panic in his eyes seemed to ease at the words.

Only then did Naomasa turn back.

Whether Toshinori noticed the closing of ranks or not, Shōta couldn't tell. He didn't particularly care. His attention remained fixed on the man in front of him.

"I think," Shōta said very quietly, "you should choose your next words extremely carefully."

Toshinori's expression tightened. "You don't know what One For All is, Aizawa. This is bigger than—"

"No," Shōta cut in. "I know what Izuku is."

That stopped Toshinori cold.

"A child." Shōta took a step closer, putting even more distance between Toshinori and the bed behind him. "My student. A sixteen-year-old boy who woke up believing he should have died rather than let someone take your Quirk from him."

Something changed in Toshinori's face.

It was small. So small Shōta might have missed it if he hadn't spent his entire career learning to read the fraction of a second before someone lied, attacked, or ran. Toshinori's eyes shifted past him toward the bed, his mouth tightening as his expression flickered with something complicated.

There was shock there.

There was pain.

But there wasn't surprise.

And there wasn't nearly enough horror.

Shōta felt the anger inside him go suddenly, terribly cold.

He stared at Toshinori, replaying everything Izuku had told him: the secrecy, the responsibility, the insistence that One For All could never be taken, the immediate certainty that death would have been preferable to failure. He'd assumed those conclusions belonged to Izuku, born from the same self-destructive instinct Shōta had been fighting since the first day the kid shattered his own finger in front of him.

Now, looking at Toshinori's face, he wasn't so sure.

"You knew."

Toshinori's gaze snapped back to his.

The silence that followed was answer enough.

Shōta stared at him, something cold settling deeper with every second Toshinori failed to deny it. "You knew he thought like this."

"Young Aizawa—"

"You knew." His voice remained quiet, but the words came harder now. "You knew that if it came down to his life or keeping One For All away from him, Izuku would choose the Quirk."

Toshinori's mouth tightened. "He understood the responsibility he accepted."

"He was fourteen."

"He chose this."

The answer came so quickly that for a moment Shōta could only stare at him. The monitor continued its uneven rhythm, every few beats reminding him that Izuku was still there, still listening.

"You approached a Quirkless fourteen-year-old who worshipped you," Shōta said. "You told him the dream he'd had since he was four was impossible. Then, after watching him run toward a villain with no Quirk, no training, and no way to defend himself, you came back and offered him the one thing he'd wanted his entire life."

Toshinori's expression hardened. "That is not what happened."

"Which part?"

"I saw something in him. Something no one else had recognized."

"You saw a child with no sense of self-preservation."

"I saw a hero."

"You saw both." Shōta took another step forward. "And you used one to get the other."

A sharp breath came from the bed.

Shōta hated having this conversation in front of Izuku. Every instinct told him to stop, get Toshinori out, and deal with the rest somewhere the kid couldn't hear it. But another part of him—the part rapidly realizing how much information had been deliberately kept from Izuku—was no longer certain that protecting him from the truth would be any kinder.

So he asked the question he already knew the answer to.

"Did you tell him about All For One?"

Something tightened in Toshinori's expression. His gaze flickered toward Izuku before returning to Shōta.

"Before he agreed," Shōta clarified. "Before the training. Before you gave him One For All. Did you tell this fourteen-year-old that accepting your Quirk meant inheriting the attention of a man who had spent generations hunting its holders?"

"There were circumstances—"

"Did you tell him?"

"No."

Behind Shōta came the faint rustle of blankets as Izuku curled farther inward, pulling his arms closer to his body as though the conversation itself had become something he needed to protect himself from. Shōta caught the movement from the corner of his eye, and nausea rolled slowly through his stomach. Every answer was making the shape of this worse. Izuku hadn't accepted One For All knowing what it truly meant; he'd accepted the version of it Toshinori had chosen to give him.

Shōta forced his attention back to the man in front of him. "What about the damage it could do to him? Before Izuku agreed to any of this, did you tell him that One For All might destroy his body?"

Toshinori didn't answer immediately. "He knew he needed to prepare for it. That was the purpose of the training. His body needed time to become capable of handling the power."

"That isn't what I asked." Shōta's voice remained controlled, but only just. "Did he know that if his body couldn't handle it, using the Quirk could shatter his bones? That he could permanently cripple himself with the power you were offering him?"

A beat of silence followed, broken only by the faint hitch of Izuku's breathing from the bed.

"No," Toshinori admitted.

Beside Shōta, Naomasa let out a slow breath. "Jesus, Toshinori."

There was no anger in it. Just disbelief, quiet and exhausted, and somehow that was worse.

Toshinori's shoulders stiffened. Shōta didn't give him time to defend himself. "Did you tell his mother?"

That landed differently.

Toshinori frowned, not with guilt or hesitation, but with something closer to confusion—as though he couldn't understand why Shōta would even need to ask. "Yes. Of course she knew."

Behind them, Izuku's breathing stopped. Then, so quietly Shōta almost didn't hear it—

"What?"

There was something in the way Izuku said it that made every muscle in Shōta's back tighten. He turned toward the bed and found the kid staring past him at Toshinori. The tears had stopped falling for the moment, leaving damp tracks across his cheeks, but the grief had been pushed aside by bewilderment.

"What do you mean?" Izuku whispered. "Mom knew?"

Toshinori's expression shifted, and Shōta saw the instant he realized he'd revealed something Izuku hadn't known. His eyes flickered away before returning to the bed. "Young Midoriya, your mother and I discussed the risks involved."

Izuku frowned. "When?"

The question came quickly enough that Toshinori hesitated.

"I was there when you talked to her." Izuku's voice had taken on a confused, almost pleading edge. "When you explained One For All. I was sitting right there. You told her about the training and that you were giving me your Quirk, and she was scared because it was so powerful, but…" His brow furrowed harder as he searched his own memory. "You didn't tell her about All For One. I would've remembered that."

Shōta turned slowly back toward Toshinori and caught Naomasa doing the same beside him. Neither of them spoke at first, but the shared look was enough; they'd both heard the same hole in the story.

"When?" Shōta asked again.

Toshinori took several seconds to answer. His shoulders had gone rigid beneath his clothes, and his gaze flickered toward Izuku before settling somewhere over Shōta's shoulder. "Later. I spoke with her privately."

"Without me?"

The disbelief in Izuku's voice pulled Shōta's attention back toward the bed. Izuku was staring at his mentor as though he were trying to reconcile this conversation with a memory he had been certain he understood.

"It was a conversation between adults," Toshinori said.

The monitor gave a sudden, uneven chirp as Izuku's heart rate jumped. Shōta heard it, saw Naomasa glance automatically toward the display, and felt his own anger narrow into something colder.

"A conversation between adults," he repeated, slowly enough that Toshinori's jaw tightened.

"There were details I didn't believe he needed to carry yet. He already had enough to focus on with the training and learning to control One For All."

"Except those details were about him." Shōta gestured toward the bed, unable to keep the disbelief entirely out of his voice. "About the danger attached to the Quirk you were putting inside his body and the people who might come after him because of it."

"He was fourteen," Toshinori said, as though that explained the decision.

Somehow, that made it worse. "Exactly. He was fourteen. Which is why the adults responsible for him should have been making damn sure he understood what he was agreeing to, not discussing the consequences of that agreement after the fact while he wasn't in the room. If he was too young to hear the risks involved, then he was too young to agree to them without knowing," he said, his voice dangerously calm. 

"Shō," Naomasa murmured.

There was no warning in it this time, only a quiet reminder.

Izuku was still listening.

Shōta knew. That was the fucking problem.

He swallowed the rest of his anger and dragged his attention back to what mattered—not what he wanted to say to Toshinori, but what Izuku needed him to find out.

"What exactly did you tell her?"

Toshinori glanced toward the bed before answering. "She knew One For All carried significant risks."

"What risks?"

"She knew the power could injure him before he learned to control it. I explained that his body might not initially be capable of containing its full strength and that the consequences of using too much could be severe."

Behind Shōta came the faint whisper of fabric slipping through loosened fingers. When he glanced back, Izuku was no longer clutching the blanket. His hands lay open and almost limp against it, all that frantic tension abruptly gone as he stared at Toshinori with an expression Shōta couldn't quite name. It wasn't only hurt. There was confusion there too, the slow disorientation of watching someone familiar become a stranger in front of him.

"She knew?" Izuku asked, his voice barely carrying across the room.

Toshinori hesitated before answering, choosing his words with a care that only made Shōta distrust them more. "She was concerned. Of course she was. Any mother would have been. But she also understood what an extraordinary opportunity One For All represented for you and what having it could allow you to become."

Izuku swallowed, his eyes never leaving him. "But she knew I could get hurt."

"She knew the risks," Toshinori said, making a small, impatient motion with one hand as though it hardly mattered.

It was a careful distinction, one meant to soften the truth without technically denying it, and it didn't help. If anything, Izuku seemed to fold further into himself, his gaze finally dropping to the hands lying uselessly in his lap as he tried to reconcile the mother who had worried over every injury with the knowledge that she'd apparently understood some of those injuries were possible before he'd ever received the Quirk.

Something in Izuku's expression cracked, and Shōta remembered the way he'd defended his mother less than an hour ago. She thought having a Quirk would make things better. She was happy when I got it. I was happy.

Izuku believed his mother's fear had come later, after she'd watched her son destroy his body. He'd believed she'd celebrated One For All because, as far as she knew, it was a gift: a chance for her Quirkless child to finally have the future he'd always wanted.

Apparently, that hadn't been the whole truth.

Naomasa stepped slightly closer to Shōta, his attention fixed on Toshinori now. "Did she know about All For One?"

Toshinori went quiet, but this pause felt different from the others. He wasn't searching for an answer so much as deciding how much of it he was willing to give them, and from the way Naomasa's expression tightened beside him, Shōta knew his partner had noticed too.

"That's the part that matters," Naomasa continued, some of the gentleness leaving his voice. He still sounded calm, but there was a detective's precision beneath it now, leaving little room for Toshinori to retreat into careful phrasing. "Did Ms. Midoriya know that someone was actively hunting One For All?"

"Yes."

A tiny sound came from the bed, little more than a breath catching where it shouldn't. Shōta looked back immediately and found Izuku pale again, staring at Toshinori with wide eyes. His lips moved once before he managed to force the words out. "Mom knew about him?"

Toshinori straightened slightly, and Shōta watched some familiar fragment of the Symbol settle back over him, shoulders squaring as though authority might somehow make the answer easier to hear. "Your mother understood that One For All came with significant responsibilities. She knew there were people who might seek to misuse its power and that possessing it carried certain dangers."

"No. Don't do that."

"Excuse me?" Toshinori frowned at the interruption, his fingers tightening briefly around the edge of his jacket before releasing it.

"Don't hide behind words like responsibility and danger when we're talking about a specific man who murders people for this Quirk." Shōta shifted just enough that he could keep Toshinori in front of him without losing sight of Izuku in his periphery. "We're well past euphemisms. Did you tell her that All For One had hunted the people who carried One For All before you?"

A muscle moved in Toshinori's jaw. "Yes."

"And did you tell her he'd killed them?"

Toshinori hesitated again, but this time irritation followed close behind it. His shoulders drew back, expression tightening as he looked at Shōta.

"Yes, but—what does that matter?"

Shōta's gaze hardened. "Answer the question, All Might."

Something in his tone made Toshinori's mouth snap shut.

Shōta waited.

After a moment, Toshinori exhaled sharply through his nose. "Yes. I told her."

Izuku's breath hitched behind him, and Shōta had to resist the urge to turn around. If he looked at the kid right now, he wasn't sure he'd be able to keep this conversation under control.

Instead, he held Toshinori's gaze. "Did you tell her that putting One For All inside her son could make him one of those people? That All For One might eventually hunt Izuku because of what you gave him?"

"I explained that there was a possibility All For One would learn of him and that, if he did, there would be risks."

"Possibility," Shōta echoed, disbelief roughening the word. "Did she understand that this wasn't some abstract danger attached to hero work? Did she understand that there was a specific man who had killed previous holders of this Quirk and might one day come after her child for exactly the same reason?"

"She understood that there was a possibility he would become a target."

Shōta studied him for a moment, increasingly disgusted by how carefully every answer was being shaped. "And knowing that, she still agreed to let her fourteen-year-old son carry it?"

For the first time, irritation broke openly through Toshinori's composure. His mouth tightened and his shoulders stiffened, defensiveness replacing the careful restraint he'd been clinging to since the questioning began.

"She understood what having One For All could allow him to become."

The words landed harder than Shōta expected, not because they were loud or particularly cruel, but because of how easily they reduced everything they'd just discussed—the broken bones, the target on Izuku's back, the dead predecessors, the danger Ms. Midoriya had apparently known her son was accepting—to the price of becoming something more than Quirkless.

Izuku sucked in another breath that seemed to catch somewhere painfully high in his chest.

Shōta didn't need to turn to know what that answer had done to him, but he did anyway.

The kid looked devastated.

Not the frantic devastation from waking without One For All. This was quieter. His eyes had dropped to his open hands, his face gone slack with the effort of fitting this new information into everything he'd believed about the past two years.

His mother had known.

Not everything from the beginning, perhaps. Not when she'd first cried and hugged him because All Might had offered her Quirkless son the impossible. But at some point afterward, Toshinori sat down with her without Izuku present and explained that the gift came with shattered bones, hunted successors, and a man powerful enough to kill the people who carried it.

And she'd let him keep carrying it.

Shōta remembered Izuku's voice from earlier, soft and defensive even while he cried.

For years, Izuku had apparently believed his mother had simply wanted him to have a chance. That she'd celebrated One For All because a Quirk meant doors opening instead of slamming shut in his face. That her later fear of U.A. came from discovering, piece by piece, just how dangerous hero work could be for her son.

Now he was learning that she'd known far more than he'd ever been told.

Shōta watched Izuku stare at his empty hands and felt anger turn sick and heavy in his stomach.

All for the sake of a Quirk.

"So let me get this straight. You told his mother the Quirk could destroy his body. You told her there was a homicidal supervillain attached to it. You told her accepting it could put a target on her fourteen-year-old son, and the two of you decided to go forward anyway."

"You're stripping away the context."

"What context makes that better?"

Toshinori took a step toward him, one hand lifting in frustrated emphasis. "She understood what his life had been like! She knew what being Quirkless cost him. One For All gave him a future he otherwise would never have had."

Shōta felt his stomach turn.

"And there it fucking is."

"Aizawa—"

"You decided the chance to have a Quirk was worth risking his life."

"That is not what I said."

Toshinori moved another step forward.

Shōta turned fully toward Toshinori, leaving the bed at his back. The movement put him squarely between the man and Izuku.

Behind him, Izuku's breathing hitched. The quiet crying Shōta had been half-aware of sharpened into something rougher, each breath beginning to catch around a poorly muffled sob.

"It's exactly what you said." The anger Shōta had been forcing down all night finally began bleeding through. "You took a child who'd spent his entire life being told he was lesser because he was Quirkless, offered him power and his dream in the same breath, and apparently every adult involved decided that was enough to justify the rest."

Toshinori opened his mouth.

Shōta didn't let him. His voice dropped. "And then you made him keep it secret from the very people who might have taught him how to use it without breaking himself."

Toshinori's hands curled at his sides. "He wanted to be a hero!"

"He was fourteen!"

"Shō," Naomasa said quietly.

Neither of them heard him.

"He understood—"

"No, he didn't!" Shōta's voice finally rose. He stepped forward before he realized he'd done it, forcing Toshinori to either hold his ground or give some of it up. "You just admitted he didn't know about All For One when he agreed. He didn't know the Quirk could permanently cripple him. He couldn't understand risks you deliberately hadn't told him existed."

The sobs behind him were louder now, no matter how hard Izuku seemed to be trying to swallow them. Naomasa glanced toward the bed, concern tightening his expression.

Toshinori held his ground, face flushing as he drew himself up to what little height his skeletal form afforded him. "I trained him."

"You prepared his body to carry your power. That's not the same thing."

"I prepared him to save people."

"You prepared him to replace you."

Toshinori flinched.

It was small, but Shōta saw it.

"Enough." Naomasa's voice cut sharper this time. "Both of you—"

Then Toshinori stepped forward too, closing the distance Shōta had created between them. "And now he's thrown away the power that made it possible!"

The words struck the room like a physical blow.

And then the sound behind Shōta disappeared.

The hitching breaths, the muffled sobs, the desperate attempts to pull air through tears—all of it stopped at once.

Shōta went still.

That was worse. Much worse.

Regret hit almost as quickly as the realization. He'd known Izuku was behind him. He'd heard the crying getting worse, heard Naomasa try to rein him in, and he'd still let Toshinori drag him into a shouting match over the kid's hospital bed. He should have known better.

He turned enough to look over his shoulder.

Izuku wasn't crying anymore. He wasn't doing much of anything. The anguish that had twisted his face moments ago was simply gone, replaced by a terrible, empty stillness. His hands lay limp against the blanket where they'd been clutching and twisting it, his eyes fixed somewhere in front of him without seeming to see.

Shōta's stomach dropped.

Naomasa saw it too.

"That's enough." He was already moving toward the bed, his voice leaving no room for argument. "Both of you. Stop."

But Toshinori was staring at Izuku now, and whatever fear, grief, rage, and decades of sacrifice had been twisting tighter inside him since he'd entered the room finally found somewhere to go.

"I would never have let this happen."

Izuku stared back at him, his face still wet with tears, but Toshinori seemed to take his silence as permission to continue.

"I carried One For All for decades," he said, his voice roughening as he spoke. One hand came up to press against his chest, fingers bunching in the fabric there. "I fought him more times than you can imagine. I lost my health, my career, nearly my life, and still—broken body or not—I never let him take it."

Shōta felt his hands curl into fists at his sides. Behind him, the monitor kept up its steady electronic rhythm, but another sound had begun to disappear beneath Toshinori's voice: Izuku's crying. Not because he was calming down. The ragged little breaths were becoming quieter, tighter, as though the kid were trying desperately not to make a sound.

"All Might." Shōta kept his voice low, but there was enough warning in it that Naomasa glanced toward him.

Toshinori either didn't hear it or chose not to. His attention remained fixed on the bed. "You understood what you were entrusted with. You knew what depended on you."

"All Might, stop."

This time the warning came sharper, and Shōta shifted toward the bed, putting more of himself into Toshinori's line of sight. It should have been enough to break whatever tunnel vision had taken hold of the man. Instead, Toshinori leaned slightly to look past him.

"I chose you because I believed that heart of yours made you worthy."

A small sound escaped Izuku, barely more than a breath catching painfully in his throat.

Naomasa heard it too. Already beside the bed, he turned fully toward Izuku and rested both hands gently on his upper arms, rubbing slow, steady passes through the thin fabric of the hospital gown. "Hey," he murmured, trying to catch the kid's unfocused gaze. "Don't listen to him. Izuku, look at me. You don't have to listen to any of this."

Izuku gave no sign that he'd heard him. His fingers slowly loosened from the blanket, not with any sense of relief, but as though they'd simply lost the strength to hold on. They fell open against the white fabric, limp and motionless, while the trembling that had wracked his shoulders began to fade into an unnatural stillness.

Naomasa's hands slowed against his arms. "Izuku?" His voice softened further, concern bleeding through now as he gave one arm a careful squeeze. "Stay with me, kid."

Cold unease crawled beneath Shōta's ribs. He caught the growing alarm on Naomasa's face and stepped forward, putting himself more firmly between Toshinori and the bed.

"Stop." His voice dropped into something low and dangerous, every trace of the shouting gone. "Toshinori, that's enough."

Toshinori's chest rose sharply with his next breath. His face had flushed, grief and frustration twisting together beneath the anger, and when he spoke again, his voice cracked around the words. "And now you're just as powerless as the day I found you."

Whatever remained of Izuku's expression vanished.

The change was so complete that Shōta felt his own anger falter. Izuku's shoulders no longer shook. His hands lay motionless against the blanket, fingers slack, and even the tears had stopped falling, clinging wetly to his lashes while he stared at Toshinori with an awful, vacant stillness. The monitor beside him continued to beep, obscenely normal in a room that suddenly felt too quiet.

Naomasa reacted first. His hands tightened gently around Izuku's arms, one sliding down to his forearm as he bent closer, trying to put himself somewhere in the kid's vacant line of sight. "Hey, kid—" His thumb rubbed slowly over the hospital gown, the motion deliberately steady even as urgency crept into his voice. "Don't listen to him, okay? Just listen to me."

Izuku didn't respond. His eyes remained fixed somewhere beyond Naomasa, glassy and distant, as though the words weren't reaching him at all.

Shōta barely registered Naomasa's voice.

He was watching Toshinori.

Watching the man's mouth tighten. Watching his jaw work. Watching anger win over whatever instinct should have told him to look at the child in front of him and stop.

Shōta saw the next word forming.

"Don't you dare—"

"Worthless."

For a heartbeat, the only sound in the room was the steady beep of Izuku's monitor.

Then Naomasa swore.

Shōta was already in motion. His hand struck the call button beside the bed hard enough that pain shot through his thumb, the plastic giving an angry little click beneath the force of it. He didn't need a nurse yet. He needed someone else with the authority to remove Yagi Toshinori before Shōta did it himself in a way hospital policy would almost certainly object to.

Behind him, a chair scraped sharply across the floor. Naomasa stepped closer to the bed. There was still no response.

Shōta's stomach twisted, but he couldn't turn around. Toshinori was still standing there, still close enough to see Izuku, and Shōta wasn't giving him another chance to speak to the kid.

He stepped directly into the man's line of sight. "Get out."

Toshinori blinked as though he'd forgotten anyone else was in the room. "Young Aizawa—"

"Get the fuck out."

He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. Shōta planted himself between Toshinori and the hospital bed, shoulders squared and feet set, making the boundary physical when apparently words had failed to make it clear enough.

"You don't understand what he's done!"

"I understand exactly what you've done." Shōta took another step forward, forcing Toshinori either to give ground or stand chest-to-chest with him. The larger man retreated half a pace. "You walked into the hospital room of a child who was beaten badly enough to lose consciousness, who woke up terrified and blaming himself for being attacked, and you called him worthless because he survived having something stolen from him."

"He didn't just have something stolen from him!" Toshinori's hands curled at his sides. "You have no idea what All For One can do with that Quirk."

"And you apparently have no idea what you're doing to the kid who had it."

"This is not about his feelings!"

The words made Shōta's jaw clench so hard it hurt.

The monitor began to climb again, the intervals between each electronic chirp shortening. Naomasa's voice threaded quietly beneath it.

"Easy, Izuku. Don't worry about them. Just look at me, bud."

Shōta wanted to turn around. Every instinct demanded that he check on his student, his kid, but he could hear Naomasa there, steady and close, doing exactly what Shōta couldn't while he kept the threat in front of him from getting any nearer.

Toshinori dragged a shaking hand through his hair. "He knew what was at stake. He knew the one thing that could never happen, and he allowed himself to be overpowered anyway. He should have known better!"

Shōta went utterly still, not because the anger had disappeared, but because it had suddenly become too cold to burn.

The anger that had been burning hot beneath his skin seemed to extinguish all at once, leaving something much colder behind. For a few seconds, he only stared at Toshinori while the words settled into place.

He should have known better.

Behind him, the monitor chirped faster.

Then Shōta heard Izuku's voice in his memory, broken by sobs less than half an hour earlier.

I should've died.

His eyes narrowed.

There had been something wrong with Toshinori's reaction when Shōta told him that. Shock, yes. Pain. But not surprise. Not the immediate horror Shōta would have expected from someone learning that a child he supposedly cared about believed his own death was preferable to losing a Quirk.

At the time, Shōta hadn't wanted to understand why. Now, standing here with Toshinori in front of him and Izuku silent behind him, he did.

"He should have died."

The words came out quieter than Shōta intended, carrying none of the anger that had filled his voice moments ago. They weren't quite a question, but Toshinori reacted as though they were. His mouth tightened, and his gaze flickered toward the bed before returning almost immediately to Shōta. The hesitation lasted only a second, but it was enough. There was recognition in his face—an awful, unmistakable understanding of exactly what Shōta was asking him.

Beside the bed, Naomasa fell silent, whatever reassurance he'd been murmuring to Izuku cutting off mid-sentence.

Shōta closed the remaining distance between himself and Toshinori until barely an arm's length separated them, searching his face for any sign that he'd gotten it wrong.

"That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Aizawa—"

"No." His voice remained low, but the last of his restraint was beginning to fray around the edges. "You've spent the last ten minutes telling me how important One For All is. You've told him he should have known better than to let it be taken. You just called him worthless for surviving without it." Shōta gestured once toward the bed without taking his eyes off Toshinori. "So say what you actually mean."

Toshinori's throat moved, but no answer came.

Shōta could hear his own pulse now, heavy and insistent beneath the distant hum of the hospital. Somewhere behind him, Naomasa was still murmuring to Izuku, trying to coax him back from wherever he'd gone, but Shōta couldn't pull his attention away from the man standing in front of him.

"If those were his choices—if Izuku could either lose One For All or die before All For One could take it—you think he should have died."

This time, there was no mistaking it for anything but a question. Toshinori's gaze shifted toward the bed again, and something about that look made another piece fall horribly into place.

"That's where he got it from."

Toshinori's eyes snapped back to him.

Shōta felt sick. "That stupid idea that he should've died with the Quirk rather than let All For One take it. He got that from you, didn't he?" His voice stayed low, but anger had begun creeping back into it, cold and vicious around the edges. "Maybe you never sat him down and said the words exactly like that, but you taught him what mattered more. Every time you told him what One For All meant, what he was responsible for, what he had to become—you taught him that losing it was worse than losing himself."

A faint sound came from the bed, and Shōta's jaw clenched. He wanted to turn around. He wanted to go to Izuku, get Toshinori out of the room, and undo every word the man had put into that kid's head. But there was one answer he needed first.

"So answer me." He stepped closer, leaving almost no space between them. "If those really were his only choices, which one was he supposed to choose?"

Naomasa shifted closer to the bed, one arm coming around Izuku's shoulders as he pulled the kid carefully against his chest. His other hand came up to cradle the back of Izuku's head, tucking his face in against his shirt as though he could shield him from the rest of the room by sheer force of will.

"Hey," he murmured, voice low near Izuku's hair. "You don't need to hear this. Stay with me."

Izuku didn't resist. If anything, he folded into the contact, hands bunching weakly in the front of Naomasa's shirt while the detective kept one arm wrapped around him and rubbed a steady hand between his shoulder blades.

Only then did Naomasa look over Shōta's shoulder at Toshinori.

"Toshinori." The quiet reassurance in his voice was gone now, replaced by something genuinely alarmed. "Think very carefully before you answer that."

For half a second, Toshinori hesitated.

It was half a second too long.

His shoulders sagged beneath the weight of something that might have been grief, and when he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. Devastated, even.

It didn't make the answer any less unforgivable.

"He should have died with it."

Shōta hit him.

There was no warning, no shouted threat, no conscious decision that Shōta could identify afterward. One moment Toshinori was standing in front of him, those three words still hanging in the air between them, and the next Shōta's fist connected hard with his jaw.

His Quirk flared with the movement.

Heat prickled behind Shōta's eyes as Erasure snapped into place, his hair lifting around his face while the familiar pressure of activation burned through his stare. Toshinori's already-thin frame jerked sideways under the force of the punch. He stumbled into the chair behind him, caught it badly against the back of his knees, and went down hard enough to send it skidding across the tile with a metallic shriek, tipping over with it.

For a moment, Shōta could hear nothing except his own breathing.

His fist throbbed. His eyes burned. Every muscle in his body had gone rigid, and somewhere beneath the fury a distant, rational part of his brain informed him that he'd just punched the former Number One hero in a hospital room.

He couldn't bring himself to care.

Toshinori sat half-sprawled against the floor, one hand braced against the tile and the other pressed to his jaw. Shock had wiped every trace of the Symbol from his face.

Shōta took a step toward him.

"Shō." Naomasa's voice stopped him more effectively than a hand could have.

Not because the anger was gone. It wasn't. Shōta could still feel it crawling beneath his skin, hot enough that his fingers curled again before he forced them open. But Naomasa wasn't warning him about Toshinori.

He was reminding him who was behind him.

Izuku.

Shōta dragged in a slow breath through his nose, but it did nothing to ease the ache lodged beneath his ribs. When he finally looked down at Toshinori, Erasure was still active, his eyes burning with the strain of it.

"You don't get to say that about my kid."

Toshinori's eyes widened, and for a moment Shōta didn't understand why. Then his own words caught up with him.

My kid.

He hadn't meant to say it. Hadn't thought about it at all, really. The words had simply come, instinctive and certain, somewhere between hearing Izuku say he should have died and watching the man he'd trusted confirm it.

Shōta could have corrected himself.

He didn't.

"You don't get to stand in his hospital room, look at him alive after someone nearly killed him, and tell me the better outcome would've been his body in a morgue because at least your fucking Quirk would've died with him."

"Aizawa, you don't understand what—"

"No."

Toshinori's mouth snapped shut. His hand rose almost absently to his cheek, fingertips brushing over the spot where Shōta's fist had connected. He winced at the pressure, jaw shifting once beneath his palm, but whatever argument had been forming seemed to die before it reached his tongue.

Behind Shōta, the monitor was still sounding too quickly, and he could hear Naomasa murmuring to Izuku again. That sound kept him anchored more effectively than anything else could have.

Shōta blinked at last.

His hair settled slowly around his shoulders as Erasure released, but he didn't take his eyes off Toshinori.

"You are done talking to him."

Toshinori pushed himself shakily upright against the overturned chair. "One For All combined with his power could make him unstoppable. Thousands could die. Millions. Society itself—"

"And Izuku is still not an acceptable casualty."

"You can't possibly—"

"I can." Shōta's injured hand curled once at his side, sending a fresh throb through his knuckles. "I just did."

He stepped backward, deliberately placing himself between Toshinori and the bed again. Naomasa was still murmuring quietly to Izuku, the words too soft to make out beneath the blood rushing in Shōta's ears.

"If the only way you know how to save the world is by deciding which child deserves to die for it, then you're not the person we're trusting to figure out what happens next."

Toshinori remained on the floor for another moment, one hand cupped against his jaw while the other braced against the overturned chair. Shock still showed plainly on his face, but underneath it Shōta could already see the argument rebuilding itself.

"Get out."

"Aizawa, listen to me." Toshinori caught the chair and used it to drag himself upright, wincing as his fingers brushed his reddening cheek. "I know how this sounds, but the needs of one person cannot outweigh—"

"No." Shōta cut across him before he could finish. "You put the weight of society on the shoulders of a Quirkless middle-schooler who already thought his life was worth less than everyone else's, and then you taught him that carrying that weight until it killed him was what made him worthy."

Toshinori's expression tightened. "I taught him sacrifice."

"You exploited the fact that he already thought he was disposable."

The words made Toshinori recoil as though Shōta had struck him again.

Good.

Shōta advanced, slow and deliberate, and this time Toshinori gave ground. His knuckles throbbed with every beat of his pulse, the residual burn of Erasure still scraping behind his eyes, but the wild edge of his anger had settled into something colder.

"You said you couldn't imagine anything worse than All For One getting One For All." He gestured toward the bed without looking away from Toshinori. "I can."

Toshinori's jaw tightened beneath the hand still cradling it.

"Izuku dying."

The answer stopped him. Shōta let the silence hold just long enough for it to sink in before Toshinori shook his head.

"You cannot mean that."

"I do."

"We're talking about millions of lives, Aizawa. If All For One can use One For All the way we fear, then—"

"Then millions of lives become our responsibility." Shōta stepped closer, forcing Toshinori another pace toward the door. "The heroes. The police. The government. Every capable adult whose job it is to deal with exactly this kind of nightmare. They do not become the sole responsibility of one sixteen-year-old lying in a hospital bed."

"He may have been the only person capable of stopping him."

"Then we find another way."

Toshinori's face twisted, frustration finally breaking through whatever composure he'd managed to recover. "There may not be another way!"

"Then we fucking make one!"

Shōta's voice cracked through the room, loud enough that the monitor behind him answered with a sudden quickening of electronic beeps.

The sound cut straight through his anger.

His mouth snapped shut. Regret twisted immediately beneath his ribs, sharp and familiar after what had happened only minutes ago. He'd already let Toshinori drag him into shouting over Izuku once tonight. He wasn't doing it again.

Shōta drew in a slow breath and forced his voice back down before he spoke again.

Toshinori stared at him, one hand still cradling the side of his reddening jaw.

"I would rather have Izuku alive and Quirkless than dead with your precious power safely buried with him."

"Aizawa—"

"I would rather have him alive with nothing."

A sharp breath came from the bed.

Shōta heard it. He didn't turn around.

"Do you understand me?" His hand fell slowly back to his side. "Nothing. No Quirk. No license. No costume, ranking, or grand destiny waiting for him at the end of all this. If those are the choices, I would rather watch that kid spend eighty years stocking grocery-store shelves and bitching about his taxes than stand over his grave knowing the adults around him decided his death was an acceptable trade."

Something in Toshinori's face faltered.

"Aizawa…"

He sounded smaller now. For the first time since entering the room, some of the fight seemed to drain out of him, his shoulders sagging beneath clothes that already hung too loosely from his frame.

Shōta didn't care.

Or perhaps he did, somewhere beneath everything else. Toshinori was his colleague. His friend, in some complicated sense. A man who had sacrificed most of his body and his entire adult life trying to keep other people safe.

None of that made this forgivable.

"I would rather have him happy. Healthy. I would rather have him grow up and have some boring life where the worst thing I have to worry about is whether he remembers to sleep and pay his electric bill." His throat tightened, but he forced the last words out anyway. "More than any Quirk, I would rather have him alive."

Toshinori's eyes shifted past his shoulder, toward the bed.

Shōta moved immediately, stepping into his line of sight before he could look at Izuku for more than a second.

"No."

Toshinori blinked. "I need to speak with him."

"No, you don't."

"There may still be something we can do about One For All. If some remnant remains, if the transfer wasn't complete—"

"It's gone."

"We don't know that."

"The doctors found nothing, and Izuku says it's gone. Until someone gives me a reason to believe otherwise, it's gone."

Toshinori opened his mouth, but Shōta held up a hand before another argument could come out.

"What exactly are you trying to accomplish here?"

That stopped him.

Shōta waited, but Toshinori only stared back at him, one hand still resting against his bruised jaw.

"The Quirk is gone," Shōta continued, forcing his voice to remain level. "You can be angry about that. You can be terrified about what All For One might do with it. Hell, you can hate every decision that led us here. None of that changes what happened." He gestured toward the bed behind him without taking his eyes off Toshinori. "Standing here telling Izuku what he should've done differently doesn't bring One For All back. Making him feel worse about surviving doesn't fix a damn thing."

Toshinori's expression tightened. "But All For One—"

"Is an adult problem."

Frustration flashed across Toshinori's face. "You can't simply decide that."

"I can decide that the sixteen-year-old who was nearly killed tonight isn't dealing with it from this hospital bed." Shōta folded his arms, ignoring the protest from his bruised knuckles. "Izuku is my student. My responsibility. He's injured, traumatized, and you have actively worsened his condition since the moment you walked through that door."

His gaze flicked briefly toward the bed. Naomasa was still there, keeping Izuku tucked against his chest and speaking to him too quietly for Shōta to make out the words. The sight hardened something inside him.

When he looked back at Toshinori, there was nothing left to debate.

"So if you're here to help him, support him, or remind him that surviving the worst night of his life isn't something he needs to apologize for, then you can start acting like it." Shōta paused, giving Toshinori every opportunity to understand what he was offering him. "If you're here to make him feel guilty because you lost your Quirk, then get the fuck out."

Toshinori went very still.

"Whatever needs to happen next can wait. He can't."

The door opened behind them before Toshinori could answer.

Two nurses stood in the doorway, one already looking from the monitor to Izuku while the other took in Toshinori's swelling jaw, and Shōta's reddened knuckles with an expression that suggested she understood far more than anyone wanted her to. A security officer hovered behind them, one hand near his radio.

Naomasa stayed beside the bed for another moment, one hand still resting gently against the back of Izuku's head. He bent closer and murmured something into the kid's curls, too quiet for Shōta to make out from across the room. Whatever he said seemed to reach him. After a few seconds, Izuku gave a small, exhausted nod against Naomasa's chest.

"Okay," Naomasa murmured, another few words following beneath his breath. Izuku nodded again, more deliberately this time, and some of the tension eased from Naomasa's face. He gave the kid a small, reassuring smile and smoothed a hand once over his curls before straightening. "Good. That's good, kid."

Then he stepped away from the bed and moved immediately into the space between Shōta and Toshinori, heading off whatever question the nurses might have been about to ask.

"I've got this," he said quietly, brushing a hand over Shōta's arm as he passed. His fingers lingered just long enough to draw Shōta's attention, and when their eyes met, Naomasa glanced toward the bed before looking back at him.

The message was clear without either of them needing to say it. Stay with him. I'll deal with this.

Shōta answered with the smallest nod. Toshinori had followed Naomasa's glance and was trying to look past them toward the bed, but Shōta shifted immediately, putting himself squarely in the way. Whatever the man might still want to say to Izuku, he'd said more than enough for one night.

"Leave."

Something tightened in Toshinori's face. Anger, regret, maybe the first real understanding of what he'd done—Shōta didn't particularly care which. He only cared that, after a long moment, the fight seemed to drain out of the man. Toshinori's shoulders sagged, and when Naomasa placed a firm hand between them and began steering him toward the doorway, he went without another argument.

This time, Toshinori left.

Naomasa went with him, keeping one hand firmly between Toshinori's shoulder blades as he guided him into the hall. At the threshold, though, he paused and looked back at Shōta.

"I'll handle him, Shō. Go take care of the boy."

There were going to be questions. About One For All and All For One. About Izuku's mother. About why the former Number One hero was leaving a hospital room with a rapidly swelling jaw and why Eraserhead's knuckles were split open. The nurses had certainly noticed, and Naomasa was going to have his hands full keeping the situation from becoming an even bigger disaster than it already was.

All of that could wait.

Shōta looked past him to the bed. Izuku was still watching them, pale and exhausted, but he was watching. Present enough to have nodded for Naomasa. Present enough that Shōta could reach him.

"Thanks, Nao."

Naomasa's expression softened for the briefest moment. He gave Shōta one last nod before pulling the door closed behind him.

The latch clicked.

The door clicked shut behind Naomasa and Toshinori, and the sudden silence felt almost unnatural after everything that had filled the room only moments before. There was still noise, of course—the hum of the ventilation, footsteps passing somewhere beyond the door, the too-rapid electronic rhythm of the monitor beside Izuku's bed—but without Toshinori's voice pushing against his own, Shōta became abruptly aware of how hard he was breathing.

He stayed facing the closed door long enough for the adrenaline to begin draining out of him. His knuckles throbbed, and when he looked down his hands were trembling just enough to piss him off. He curled his fingers once, winced at the protest from his right hand, then shoved both into his pockets before turning around.

Izuku was staring at him.

The kid looked wrecked. His eyes were swollen and red, his face blotchy from crying, and he'd somehow managed to make himself look even smaller beneath the hospital blankets than he had before. The monitor betrayed the panic his stillness tried to hide, each beep coming much too quickly for Shōta's liking.

He exhaled slowly and made himself unclench his jaw. "Your heart rate is going to bring half the hospital in here if you keep that up."

Izuku's mouth opened, but nothing came out. He closed it, swallowed, then tried again. Shōta could practically watch the words fighting for position behind his teeth, and given the night they'd just had, he should have been prepared for which one won.

"I'm sorry."

For a moment, Shōta could only stare at him.

Izuku stared back, looking increasingly uncertain as the silence stretched between them.

With a groan, Shōta pulled his hands from his pockets and dragged them down his face, carefully avoiding his burning eyes. "We're going to work on that."

A tiny, startled sound escaped Izuku. It wasn't quite a laugh, but it came close enough that some of the tension in Shōta's shoulders eased.

Izuku's gaze drifted downward, settling on the hand Shōta had shoved back into his pocket. He worried at his lower lip for a moment, expression caught somewhere between disbelief and the lingering shock of everything that had happened. "You punched him."

Shōta hummed. There wasn't much point pretending otherwise. Half the hospital floor had probably heard Toshinori hit the ground, and the nurses had certainly seen the aftermath. He flexed his aching fingers inside his pocket and felt the beginnings of what promised to be an impressive bruise across his knuckles.

"Felt good, too."

Izuku made a strangled noise.

Shōta raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"You—you punched All Might."

"I was there."

"Sensei!"

There it was again, closer to an actual laugh this time, though it came out wet and horrified around the edges. Izuku stared at him as though Shōta had just confessed to kicking a puppy rather than punching a grown man who had very much earned it.

"You can't just punch All Might!"

"I've discovered that I can, actually."

"But—" Izuku gestured helplessly with his good hand before seeming to remember the IV attached to it and lowering it again. "He's All Might."

"He's Toshinori Yagi, and he was being an asshole."

Izuku's mouth fell open.

Shōta watched the outrage, disbelief, and reluctant amusement fight for control of his expression and decided he preferred all three to the hollow look that had been there a few minutes ago.

"You can't say that about him."

"I can do that too."

Izuku stared at him, caught somewhere between offense and disbelief. "Sensei."

"What?" Shōta raised an eyebrow, entirely unrepentant. "You seem to have developed some very strange ideas about my limitations tonight, problem child."

That did it.

A laugh escaped Izuku before he could stop it—small and cracked and immediately tangled with a sob. His hand flew to his mouth as though the sound itself had surprised him, and for one brief second his eyes squeezed shut.

Then his face crumpled.

"S—Sensei…"

The word broke halfway through.

Shōta's amusement vanished.

He was beside the bed before he had time to think about it. He made it to the bedside just as Izuku lurched toward him, apparently forgetting every injury, bruise, bandage, and IV line attached to his body in his sudden determination to close the distance between them.

"Easy kid—shit, watch your arm."

Shōta caught him by the shoulder before he could pull the IV from his vein, one hand immediately shifting to support his back as Izuku grabbed fistfuls of his shirt. There was nothing graceful about it. The bed rail dug painfully into Shōta's thigh, the IV tubing stretched far enough that he had to reach over and pull some slack toward them, and Izuku managed to knock his forehead directly into Shōta's chest.

Then the first sob tore out of him.

Shōta froze.

It wasn't like the frantic crying from earlier. There were no apologies tumbling over one another, no desperate attempts to explain One For All or All For One or why he should have done better. Izuku simply broke against him, his entire body shaking as he buried his face against Shōta's shirt and cried hard enough that each breath seemed to hurt.

For one stupid second, Shōta had absolutely no idea what to do with his hands.

Hizashi would have known. Hizashi could hug someone without looking as though he'd been handed an unexploded bomb and asked to improvise. Nemuri was good at this too, able to gather one of their students against her and somehow make comfort look as natural as breathing.

Shōta dealt in practicalities. He knew how to clean wounds and wrap sprains, which students forgot breakfast when they were stressed, and which ones needed to be ordered to sleep before they'd admit they were exhausted. He kept protein bars in his desk, emergency supplies in his apartment, and knew exactly how to put himself between a child and something that wanted to hurt them.

This was different.

Except, looking down at the mess of green curls pressed beneath his chin and feeling Izuku tremble violently against him, Shōta supposed maybe it wasn't.

The kid needed something and Shōta could provide it.

And if he couldn't, he'd learn.

The thought settled with surprising ease. There were plenty of things Shōta didn't know how to give him yet, plenty of softer forms of care that had never come naturally to him. He could learn those too. For this kid, he would.

For his kid.

The words caught somewhere beneath his ribs, warm and terrifying in equal measure, but he didn't push them away. He was going to have to get used to this.

Carefully, mindful of the injuries beneath the thin hospital gown, Shōta wrapped his arms around Izuku and held on. His hand settled awkwardly against the back of Izuku's head before his fingers slipped carefully into the mess of green curls, combing through them once in a gesture that felt far more natural than Shōta expected.

"It's okay."

Izuku responded by sobbing even harder, shoulders shaking as he dragged in another broken breath. Shōta grimaced.

Well. Apparently not.

He smoothed a hand slowly over the kid's hair, fingers passing gently through the curls as another uneven breath hitched out of him. "All right. Bad choice of words."

That earned him nothing but another wet, miserable sound against his shirt.

"Shh. You're okay," he tried instead, then immediately felt Izuku shake his head. "No. Fine. You're obviously not okay right now." He tightened his arm slightly when another tremor ran through him. "But you're here. You're alive."

Izuku's fingers twisted tighter into the front of his shirt, bunching the fabric in both fists as though he needed something solid to hold on to and had, somehow, decided Shōta qualified. The realization pulled painfully at something in Shōta.

He tightened his arms in answer, careful of bruises and bandages, and lowered his cheek against the mess of green curls. Izuku's hair was damp with sweat near his temple and tickled irritatingly against Shōta's nose, but he didn't move away. Instead, he let his eyes close for a moment and listened to the kid breathe against his chest, feeling each shudder slowly lose some of its violence beneath his hands.

If Izuku needed something solid, Shōta could be that.

So he held on.

"That's all that matters."

"But, I lost it," Izuku managed between sobs.

"I know."

"All Might gave it to me and I—I lost it."

"You had it stolen from you."

The distinction made Izuku's breath catch, but he didn't argue. After everything that had happened tonight, Shōta would take that as progress.

Another shudder worked through him before the next words came, muffled against Shōta's chest. "I'm Quirkless."

"I know."

Saying it seemed to make something inside Izuku collapse further. His grip tightened until Shōta could feel the pull of his shirt against his back, and for a while there was nothing except crying and the slow movement of Shōta's hand in Izuku's hair.

Then, so quietly Shōta nearly missed it, Izuku whispered, "He hates me."

Shōta's hand stopped, his jaw tightening as anger flared hot and immediate all over again. For one vicious second, he wanted Toshinori back in the room just so he could throw him out a second time, but he forced the feeling down before it could take hold. Toshinori wasn't here anymore, and Izuku didn't need Shōta's fury right now. He needed an answer.

Shōta shifted just enough to look down at him, though Izuku still refused to lift his face from where it was buried against his chest. "Then that is his failure, Izuku. Not yours."

The kid went very still in his arms.

Shōta let the words settle before his hand began moving again, brushing slowly over Izuku's curls in a steady rhythm. "Do you hear me?" he murmured, quieter now. "His failure. Not yours."

For a while, Izuku seemed content simply to stay where he was, face tucked against Shōta's chest while the worst of the sobbing slowly exhausted itself. His breathing still hitched every few seconds, and his fingers remained tangled stubbornly in Shōta's shirt, but the violent trembling had begun to ease.

Then, muffled against the fabric of Shōta's shirt, came, "My mom."

His hand slowed again. There it was. He'd known they would get here eventually, though after everything else tonight, he'd been more than willing to let the subject wait.

"We'll call her."

Izuku tensed immediately, his entire body going rigid beneath Shōta's hand as his fingers tightened in the front of his shirt. Shōta waited for the obvious explanation—that she'd be scared, that Izuku was worried about upsetting her, that he felt guilty for keeping One For All from her—but the silence stretched on until it became clear none of those answers were coming.

"I don't know if I want to."

That wasn't what Shōta had expected, but he kept his reaction from showing. "All right."

Izuku pulled back just enough to look at him, eyes still swollen and red from crying, uncertainty pinching his expression. "Is that bad?"

"No."

"But she's my mom."

"Still no."

Izuku's brows drew together. "I should want her here."

Shōta sighed softly, letting his hand slide down from Izuku's hair to settle against his back, where he kept it warm and steady between the kid's shoulder blades. "Izuku, there isn't a correct emotional response you're being graded on."

The corner of Izuku's mouth twitched, but whatever amusement Shōta had managed to coax out of him disappeared almost as quickly as it came. His gaze dropped between them, fingers loosening from Shōta's shirt only to curl uncertainly against the fabric again.

"I just…" He swallowed, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter. "She knew."

Shōta's hand settled a little more firmly between his shoulder blades, not pushing, simply reminding Izuku that it was there.

"She knew about All For One," Izuku continued, his voice beginning to fray around the edges. "She knew what One For All was doing to me. Maybe not at first, but later she knew, and she never…" His breath caught, forcing him to stop and swallow again. "She never told me she knew."

"No," Shōta said quietly.

Izuku stared down at his hands. Hurt was beginning to overtake the confusion on his face, and somehow that was harder to watch.

"She let me keep doing it."

Shōta didn't answer that one. There wasn't an answer he could give without either defending a woman whose choices he currently didn't understand or condemning her before he knew exactly what had happened.

Izuku's eyes filled again. "She'd get so scared every time I got hurt. She'd cry, and she'd tell me she couldn't take seeing me like that anymore, and I thought—" His breath caught. "I thought that meant she didn't know."

Shōta felt his chest tighten.

"I thought if she knew about All For One, she'd…" Izuku trailed off, fingers curling weakly into Shōta's shirt. "I don't know. Do something."

Shōta heard what Izuku couldn't quite say. He'd believed knowing would have made his mother stop it. Stop her fourteen-year-old son from being made responsible for a war that had started generations before he was even born.

"Maybe she thought she couldn't," Izuku whispered after a moment, already beginning to defend her. "Maybe All Might explained it differently. Maybe she thought—"

"Maybe."

Izuku looked up sharply, and this time their eyes met. There was something painfully hopeful in his expression, fragile enough that Shōta felt his chest tighten at the sight of it.

He was careful with what he said next. He wasn't going to give the kid hope he couldn't promise was justified, but he wasn't going to take it away from him either. Not when they didn't know enough to do either one honestly.

"There are a lot of maybes here," Shōta said gently, holding his gaze. "Maybe she was scared. Maybe she thought she was protecting you. Maybe there are things we don't know yet." His hand moved once against Izuku's back, slow and reassuring. "We're not going to pick one tonight and convince ourselves it's the truth."

Izuku searched his face for another moment. "So… you don't think she—"

"I think we don't know." Shōta softened his voice when some of that tentative hope faltered. "And I'm not going to lie to you just to make this hurt less, but I'm also not going to let you decide the worst answer has to be the right one."

Izuku swallowed.

"We'll find out," Shōta promised. "Just not tonight."

Izuku was quiet for a moment, but Shōta could feel the tension returning beneath his hand. "But what if she really did know everything?"

"Then we'll deal with that."

"What if she thought it was worth it too?"

The question came so softly that Shōta almost missed it. Their eyes had been level a moment ago, but Izuku's dropped now, fixing somewhere near Shōta's chest as his fingers drifted unconsciously toward the old scars crossing his hand.

"What if she thought me having a Quirk was worth…" His fingertips traced the edge of one scar before curling into his palm. "All of this?"

Something cold tightened in Shōta's chest. He knew where the thought was going before Izuku found the courage to finish it, and he hated that the kid could apparently get there at all.

When Izuku spoke again, his voice sounded younger than Shōta had heard it all night.

"What if she would've thought I should've died too?"

"No."

The answer came too quickly, too sharply, and Izuku flinched against him. Shōta immediately regretted the force of it. He eased back just enough to slide his hands to Izuku's arms, rubbing them slowly through the thin fabric of the hospital gown. Then he bent forward, lowering himself until they were nearly eye level, trying to catch Izuku's downturned gaze without forcing it.

"No, Izuku. Listen to me. We're not doing that to you."

His palms moved steadily up and down the kid's arms, warm and deliberate. Shōta stayed where he was, bent slightly to keep himself at Izuku's level, and waited.

Eventually, Izuku's eyes lifted to meet his.

Shōta held them.

"You don't get to hurt yourself with an answer we don't even have yet."

Izuku's brows pulled together. "But you don't know what she thinks."

"No, I don't," Shōta admitted. "And I'm not going to pretend I do."

Izuku's weight sagged a little more heavily against him, and Shōta shifted his hold to support him better. 

"That's exactly why I'm not going to tell you what your mother thinks," he continued, keeping his hand steady against Izuku's back. "Maybe there's an explanation. Maybe there isn't. Maybe we find out things neither of us is going to like." He waited until Izuku reluctantly looked up again, then held his gaze. "But I'm also not going to let you lie here exhausted and terrified and decide the worst possible answer must be the truth."

Izuku's eyes searched his.

"Especially not after someone just spent the last hour teaching you to expect it."

Izuku sniffed, scrubbing ineffectively at his damp cheek with the heel of his hand. Shōta watched him for another moment before a sharp twinge in his lower back reminded him that he'd been hunched over the side of a hospital bed for far too long. Apparently thirty-five was old enough for his spine to develop opinions about emotional crises.

Shōta stayed there for another minute, bent awkwardly over the edge of the bed while Izuku gradually sagged against him. The kid was still holding a fistful of his shirt, though the grip had gone loose with exhaustion, and Shōta let him have the contact until another warning twinge worked its way through his lower back. He grimaced and shifted his weight. As much as he hated to disturb him, he really did need to straighten before his spine decided to make the decision for him.

He had barely begun to pull away when Izuku's fingers tightened.

A small, frightened sound caught in the kid's throat as he followed the movement without seeming to realize he was doing it, shoulders drawing inward while his fist twisted desperately into Shōta's shirt. The few inches Shōta had managed to put between them disappeared almost immediately.

"Hey, hey. I'm not leaving, kid." Shōta stopped and bent back down, settling both hands over Izuku's shoulders and rubbing gently until he managed to catch the kid's wide, uncertain eyes. "I'm right here. I was just trying to straighten my back. That's all."

Izuku swallowed and gave him a tiny nod. Some of the panic eased from his face, but his fingers remained tangled stubbornly in Shōta's shirt.

Shōta glanced down at them, then back at him.

Well, that answered one question. The more complicated one was what the hell he was supposed to do about it.

There were boundaries here for a reason. Shōta was Izuku's teacher, not his parent, and under ordinary circumstances climbing into a student's hospital bed because the kid wanted to be held would have landed somewhere near the top of his extensive list of absolutely fucking not. But there was very little about tonight that qualified as ordinary. Izuku had nearly been killed, woken up to discover he'd lost the Quirk around which he'd built his entire future, admitted he believed he should have died with it, and then listened to the man he'd trusted most confirm that belief to his face. Now he was exhausted, frightened, and clinging to Shōta's shirt like letting go might make the last safe thing in the room disappear.

Boundaries still mattered. Maybe they mattered even more when the kid was this vulnerable, which meant Shōta wasn't going to decide for him what kind of comfort he needed simply because Izuku was too wrung out to ask for it properly.

"Do you want me to stay close?"

Izuku's eyes flicked up to his. He didn't answer aloud, but the small nod was unmistakable.

"Okay." Shōta rubbed his thumbs once over the kid's shoulders, giving him another moment before his back chose that exact second to lodge a fresh complaint. His face tightened. "I can stay like this, or you can scoot over and save Recovery Girl from having two patients in this bed by morning."

Confusion briefly overtook the misery on Izuku's face. "What?"

"Scoot over."

The kid blinked at him, and Shōta could practically see the exhausted gears attempting to turn.

"Only if you want me to," he added, nodding toward the chair before there could be any misunderstanding. "Otherwise I'll sit back down over there. I'm not going anywhere either way."

Izuku followed his gaze to the miserable excuse for hospital furniture and stared at it for a moment before looking back. His fingers were still curled loosely in Shōta's shirt, and something uncertain passed over his face.

"You'd… stay?"

Something about the question lodged painfully beneath Shōta's ribs. He couldn't tell whether Izuku meant tonight or something larger than that, and he wasn't about to ask when the kid already looked terrified of the answer.

"Yes."

"Even if I—"

"Yes," Shōta repeated, softer this time. "I'm staying."

Izuku searched his face for another few seconds before finally releasing his shirt. "Okay."

Shōta remained exactly where he was, waiting until a faint crease appeared between Izuku's brows and realization finally dawned.

"Oh." Izuku glanced toward the empty half of the mattress before beginning to shuffle gingerly in that direction. "You meant actually move."

"Generally what 'scoot over' means."

"It's my bed."

There it was. A tiny spark of indignation beneath all that misery, and Shōta was absurdly relieved to see it.

"And my back is filing a formal complaint. If I stay bent over you like this much longer, Recovery Girl is going to have to treat both of us."

A wet little huff escaped Izuku before he could stop it, close enough to a laugh that some of the tightness in Shōta's chest finally eased. The sound disappeared into a wince when Izuku shifted too quickly, and Shōta immediately reached for the IV tubing before the kid could roll onto it.

"Careful," he murmured, freeing the line where it had caught beneath the blanket and giving it enough slack before lowering the bed rail. "I'm trying to avoid explaining to a nurse why I let you rip that out."

"I didn't ask you to get in here," Izuku muttered.

Shōta paused with one hip barely resting against the edge of the mattress.

"No," he agreed. "You didn't."

There wasn't any accusation in Izuku's voice, but that didn't matter. Shōta had promised himself the kid would get a choice, so he straightened immediately and started to shift his weight back onto his feet.

Izuku caught his sleeve.

The touch was weak, barely more than fingers curling into the fabric near his wrist, but it stopped him just as effectively as the fistful of shirt had earlier. Shōta looked down at the hand and then back at Izuku, whose face had already begun turning pink.

"I didn't mean—"

"Izuku." Shōta waited until the kid's mouth closed before lowering himself slightly so they were closer to eye level again. "Do you want me here?"

Embarrassment warred visibly with whatever need had made him reach out in the first place. For a long moment Izuku said nothing, his fingers still caught around Shōta's sleeve, before he finally gave another small nod.

"Then that's all you had to say."

Only then did Shōta ease his weight onto the mattress. He stayed perched near the edge at first, one foot planted firmly on the floor while he adjusted the IV tubing and made sure there was enough room between them that Izuku wouldn't feel crowded. The bed was narrow enough that Shōta was fairly certain the manufacturer had never envisioned an exhausted underground hero trying to share it with his equally exhausted problem child, but he'd slept in dumpsters, on rooftops, beneath desks, and once in an air-conditioning duct during an undercover operation he preferred not to remember. He could manage this.

When he finally settled back against the raised head of the bed, he found Izuku staring at him. The kid's eyes were still swollen and red, tear tracks drying unevenly across his cheeks, but for the moment bewilderment had managed to push some of the devastation aside.

Shōta raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"You're actually getting in my bed."

"Excellent observational skills. Glad to see the head injury hasn't affected those."

A faint flush crept beneath Izuku's tear-streaked cheeks. "Sensei."

"You approved this arrangement. Complaints should've been submitted before I sat down."

"That's not how that works."

"Too late now."

Another tiny, breathy laugh slipped out of Izuku, and this one sounded a little more like the real thing.

Shōta would take it.

He shifted until his back rested more comfortably against the raised mattress, careful to keep most of his weight toward the edge and leave Izuku as much room as the narrow bed allowed. Then he simply stayed there. He didn't pull the kid closer or put an arm around him, even though every protective instinct he'd developed over the course of this godforsaken night wanted to. He'd offered to stay. Izuku had asked him to stay. Anything more belonged to the kid.

For several seconds, the only sounds between them were the soft hum of the hospital and the steady electronic pulse of the monitor. Izuku picked absently at the blanket, glancing once at Shōta before quickly looking away. Then the mattress shifted beneath them. Slowly, almost cautiously, Izuku edged closer.

Shōta pretended not to notice at first. He kept his eyes forward as the distance between them disappeared inch by inch, giving Izuku the privacy to make the decision without feeling watched through it. But the movement stopped before Izuku actually reached him, leaving a narrow strip of mattress between them.

"Sensei?"

"Hm?"

Izuku's fingers worried at the edge of the blanket. He glanced at the arm Shōta had left resting loosely at his side, then quickly back down.

"Can I really?"

Shōta looked at him.

There was no embarrassment in Izuku's face this time, none of the flustered awkwardness Shōta might have expected from a sixteen-year-old contemplating curling up against his teacher. There was something far worse: uncertainty. Izuku looked like he genuinely didn't know whether the offer was still there now that he was about to accept it, as though comfort were something that could be offered in theory and withdrawn the moment he actually reached for it.

Something in Shōta's chest cracked quietly down the middle.

How long had it been since someone had simply held this kid?

The question came unbidden, followed immediately by several others Shōta didn't particularly want the answers to. When had Izuku gotten so used to handling everything himself that he needed permission twice just to lean against someone? When was the last time he'd been frightened or hurt and somebody had pulled him close without asking what he'd done wrong first?

Shōta didn't know.

He wasn't asking tonight.

But he would.

Soon.

For now, he softened his expression and shifted his arm slightly away from his side, opening the space without reaching for Izuku and making the choice for him.

"Yeah, kid," he said quietly. "You really can."

Izuku searched his face as though checking for some qualification Shōta hadn't said aloud. Apparently he didn't find one. The last few inches disappeared slowly, and then a warm weight settled tentatively against Shōta's side.

Izuku's cheek came to rest against his chest. The hand that had caught Shōta's sleeve earlier curled loosely into the fabric again, not quite gripping, but holding on all the same.

Shōta looked down at the mess of green curls beneath his chin and felt that ache behind his ribs deepen.

All right, kid.

He lifted his arm slowly enough to give Izuku every opportunity to change his mind. When he didn't, Shōta settled it around his shoulders, his hand coming to rest against Izuku's upper arm as his thumb moved once over the thin fabric of the hospital gown.

The response was immediate.

Izuku melted against him, not completely—the kid had spent too many hours wound tight for that—but enough that Shōta felt his shoulders lower and his fingers relax against his shirt. A long, trembling breath warmed Shōta's chest as Izuku shifted a little closer, finally seeming to believe that the offer wasn't going to disappear now that he'd accepted it.

Shōta adjusted his hold carefully around the IV and the bandaged places he'd catalogued earlier, his hand moving slowly over Izuku's arm as he settled him more comfortably against his chest.

He didn't know when this kind of care had become unfamiliar enough that the kid needed to ask, Can I really?

He would find out. Just not tonight. Tonight, Izuku needed somewhere safe to fall apart, and Shōta could give him that much without asking for anything in return.

For a few seconds, Izuku simply breathed against him.

Then the last of the tension gave way.

The first sob was almost soundless.

Shōta felt it more than heard it, a violent shudder passing through the body tucked against his side. He adjusted until Izuku's head rested beneath his chin and pulled the blanket back over both of them, one hand settling securely against the kid's upper arm while the other resumed its slow path over his back.

"I don't know if she cares about me."

Somehow it was worse than asking whether his mother hated him. Hate was at least something Izuku could name and understand. This was the kid quietly questioning whether his mother cared about him at all.

Shōta closed his eyes for a moment, holding him a little tighter.

"I know she used to," Izuku whispered into his shirt. "I think she does. I mean, she's my mom, and she cries when I'm hurt, and she makes katsudon when I'm upset, and she always—" His voice broke. "But if she knew, Sensei, then I don't understand. If she knew what could happen to me and she still let me do it, then maybe she just cared more about me having a Quirk."

Shōta's other hand lifted almost instinctively, fingers slipping carefully into the mess of green curls at the back of Izuku's head. He combed through them slowly, fingertips brushing over his scalp in a soothing rhythm before settling there, cradling him gently against his chest.

"Or maybe she cared more about me being a hero. Or maybe she thought I'd finally be worth something if I had One For All too."

"Hey."

He waited until Izuku reluctantly lifted his head from where his chin had been tucked against his chest.

"I don't know why your mother made the choices she made," Shōta said. "And I'm not going to lie to you just because you're hurting. I have questions for her. A lot of them."

Izuku's mouth trembled, and the fragile control he'd managed to claw back began slipping again. His eyes filled before he could look away, tears gathering along his lower lashes until one finally spilled over and tracked down his cheek.

Shōta caught it with his thumb.

He brushed it away gently, then caught another before it could follow, his hand lingering against Izuku's cheek for a moment. The kid looked exhausted beneath his touch—red-eyed and raw, still watching him with that awful uncertainty, as though he was waiting to find out whether Shōta's patience had finally run out.

It hadn't.

"But I care about you," Shōta said quietly. His thumb swept once more beneath Izuku's damp eye. "So does Nao. And your classmates."

Izuku's breath caught. For a second, he seemed to forget to take another one entirely, his eyes widening as they searched Shōta's face.

Shōta didn't look away. He kept his hand warm against the kid's cheek and held his gaze, letting him see that there was no hesitation there.

"You have people, Izuku. Quirk or no Quirk. Hero or no hero. Whatever happens with U.A., All For One, Toshinori, your mother, or anything else after tonight." His hand squeezed Izuku's shoulder gently. "None of those things determine whether you're worth caring about."

Fresh tears spilled over.

"And before you ask," Shōta added, "no one is making decisions about where you're going tonight. Not until we understand exactly what happened."

"But Mom—"

"Later."

"She has custody of me."

"I am painfully aware that there are laws involved, yes."

Despite himself, Izuku gave a watery little laugh, the sound catching somewhere between a sniffle and a sob. Almost immediately, his face crumpled with embarrassment, and he ducked his head, retreating back into Shōta's chest until his face was hidden in the front of his shirt.

Shōta let him.

He felt the faint warmth of Izuku's breath through the fabric, followed by another tiny, muffled laugh when Shōta's arm tightened gently around his shoulders. His hand came up to settle against the back of the kid's head, fingers smoothing once through the unruly curls.

"Yeah, yeah," Shōta murmured. "Hide all you want. I still heard that."

Izuku made an offended little noise against his shirt and burrowed deeper.

Shōta's mouth twitched.

He'd take that too.

Shōta felt him start to retreat and gave his shoulders a gentle squeeze, keeping him comfortably tucked against his chest before Izuku could put any real distance between them. After a moment, he added. "I'm not deciding your living arrangements from a hospital bed at stupid o'clock in the morning. Neither are you. Tomorrow, Nao and I will figure out what was said, what your mother knew, and what happens next."

"What if I don't want to go home?"

The question was so quiet Shōta nearly missed it, muffled against his chest and spoken with the hesitance of someone afraid he wasn't even allowed to ask. His fingers paused in Izuku's curls for the briefest moment before resuming their slow path through them.

"Then you tell me."

Izuku's hand tightened in his shirt again. "And then what?"

"Then I listen, and we figure out what comes next. Together." Shōta felt another tear soak warm through the fabric beneath his hand and gently worked his fingers through a stubborn tangle near the back of Izuku's head. "I'm not going to promise you an answer tonight, and I'm not making decisions for you without knowing the whole situation. But if you tell me you don't feel comfortable going home, I'm going to take that seriously."

For a while, Izuku said nothing. His breathing gradually softened against Shōta's chest, though every so often a small tremor still worked through him. When he finally spoke again, his voice sounded younger than before.

"You're not going to leave, are you?"

Shōta looked down at the green curls tucked beneath his chin and gathered the kid closer, one arm secure around his shoulders while his other hand remained buried gently in his hair.

"No, kid," Shōta murmured, settling more comfortably against the pillows despite the complaints from his back. His hand cradled the back of Izuku's head, keeping him tucked safely against his chest. "I'm not going anywhere."

That seemed to be the last thing holding him together.

Izuku broke all over again, burying his face against Shōta's chest as the sobs returned. This time, Shōta didn't search for the right words. He simply gathered the kid a little closer, rested his cheek against the mess of green curls beneath his chin, and let him cry.

Whatever decisions tomorrow brought could wait. Tonight, Izuku needed someone willing to stay, and Shōta could do that much. His hand moved slowly over the kid's back while the worst of the sobs gradually exhausted themselves, leaving behind the occasional hitching breath and a damp patch spreading across the front of Shōta's shirt that he was absolutely going to complain about later.

For a while, neither of them spoke. Izuku remained tucked against him, breathing slowly enough that Shōta had begun to wonder if exhaustion might finally win, when the fingers resting against his shirt curled slightly into the fabric.

"You called me your kid."

Shōta's hand faltered halfway down his back.

Of course he'd heard that.

He briefly considered pretending otherwise, but lying to Izuku Midoriya about something the kid had personally witnessed had historically proven to be an exercise in futility. Besides, after everything Shōta had spent the night trying to convince him of, denying it now felt unnecessarily cruel.

"I did."

Izuku was quiet again. Then he shifted carefully against Shōta's chest, lifting his head just enough to look at him. His eyes were still red and swollen, lashes clumped damply together, but there was something different in them now. Something small and painfully tentative that Shōta was almost afraid to put a name to.

Hope.

"Did you mean it?"

The question landed somewhere beneath Shōta's ribs and stayed there.

Izuku wasn't teasing him about a slip of the tongue. He wasn't even asking whether Shōta had meant the words in the heat of the moment.

He was asking whether he was allowed to believe them.

Shōta looked down at the kid clinging to his shirt. At the freckles half-hidden beneath tear tracks, the bandage near his temple, the IV taped into an arm that had already accumulated far too many scars for someone his age. Less than an hour ago, Izuku had told him he should have died. Since then, Shōta had learned that the adults closest to him had known far more about the danger surrounding One For All than the child actually carrying it.

And now Izuku was looking at him as though the answer to this question mattered far too much.

Shōta sighed softly and resumed the slow movement of his fingers through Izuku's curls. "I don't generally say things I don't mean."

Izuku's fingers tightened slightly in his shirt. "So… yeah?"

"Yeah."

Something fragile moved across the kid's face. He swallowed, eyes dropping for a moment before finding Shōta's again. "Even though I'm—"

The words stopped.

Izuku's mouth closed, but Shōta knew what had been coming. Izuku cut himself off, gaze dropping to his scarred hands.

Shōta understood anyway.

His fingers moved gently through the curls at Izuku's temple. "Yeah, kid."

Izuku looked up.

"Even then."

The kid's breath caught.

"Especially then," Shōta added quietly. "Because none of that was why you were my kid in the first place."

Izuku's lower lip trembled, his eyes immediately shining again, and Shōta gave him a tired look. "Oh, don't start again."

The laugh that escaped Izuku instead was small and watery, but real enough to make the corner of Shōta's mouth twitch. "There. Better."

With a quiet sniff, Izuku tucked himself back against Shōta's chest. His arms tightened around him by the smallest degree, almost tentative, as though he were still testing whether he was really allowed to hold on. Shōta answered by continuing to comb his fingers through the kid's hair, and something inside him settled at the simple trust of it.

They stayed that way for a while, surrounded by the low hum of hospital equipment and the increasingly steady rhythm of the monitor. Exhaustion was beginning to drag at Shōta too, making his eyelids heavy, when Izuku shifted slightly beneath his arm.

"Sensei?"

"Hm?"

A pause followed, just long enough to become suspicious. "Are you and Detective Tsukauchi dating?"

Shōta glanced down. Izuku had gone very still against him and was suddenly fascinated by a wrinkle in the blanket. "Yes."

"Hm."

That was apparently all he intended to say.

Shōta waited a few seconds before raising an eyebrow. "What?"

"Nothing."

"That wasn't a nothing noise."

Izuku's shoulders twitched with a badly suppressed laugh. "I just lost a bet, that's all."

"You were betting on my relationship?"

"No! Well, technically, but it wasn't—" Izuku finally looked up, already flushing. "Kaminari and I had a bet about whether you were dating Present Mic."

The laugh caught Shōta completely off guard.

He choked on it, the sound coming out somewhere between a cough and an incredulous bark before he managed to cover his mouth with one hand. That only made Izuku start laughing too, and for a moment neither of them could quite get themselves under control.

"Hizashi?" Shōta finally managed, still staring at him in disbelief.

"You're always together!"

"We've been friends since high school."

"That doesn't prove anything."

Shōta's eyebrow climbed higher.

Izuku's conviction lasted another second before embarrassment won and he buried his face against Shōta's chest again. "Denki is going to be unbearable about this."

"He's unbearable about most things. You'll survive."

"Sensei."

"What? You want sympathy?"

"You're supposed to support your students."

Shōta considered that, fingers finding their way back into Izuku's curls. "I punched the former Number One hero for you tonight. I think I've exceeded my support quota."

Another laugh shook through Izuku, muffled against his shirt, and Shōta let his cheek rest lightly against the top of the kid's head.

They stayed like that for a few moments, the last of Izuku's laughter fading into something softer. Shōta could feel the kid breathing against him, still uneven every now and then but nothing like the ragged sobs from before. His fingers continued their idle path through Izuku's curls until the hand resting against his chest shifted, worrying absently at a wrinkle in his shirt.

"Sensei? How is everyone?"

Shōta glanced down. "Everyone?"

"The class." Izuku's fingers stilled against his shirt. "They know I'm here, right? Are they okay? Nobody else got hurt because of—"

"They're fine," Shōta cut in before that sentence could become another apology. He gave the curls beneath his fingers a small tug. "And yes, they know you're here. Mostly they're worried about you, kid."

Some of the tension eased from Izuku's body. "Oh. Good."

He went quiet again, but there was something different about this silence. Shōta waited, continuing to comb his fingers lazily through green hair while Izuku apparently conducted some kind of internal negotiation against his chest.

"Did they all go back to the dorms?"

 Shōta's hand slowed in Izuku's curls. "Eventually."

Izuku lifted his head from Shōta's chest enough to peer up at him. "Eventually?"

"A few of them weren't particularly interested in leaving without seeing you."

Interest flickered across Izuku's face before he tried—and failed spectacularly—to disguise it. "Who?"

Shōta looked down at him, watching the kid arrange his features into something painfully casual, as though he hadn't just asked that question with considerably more interest than the one before it.

Oh, this should be good.

"Todoroki was prepared to become a permanent fixture in the waiting room."

Color immediately crept into Izuku's cheeks. Shōta felt one eyebrow rise before he could stop it, and the kid's gaze promptly dropped somewhere around his collarbone.

Interesting.

"Shinsō was worse."

That did it. The pink deepened all the way to the tips of Izuku's ears, his eyes widening before darting away. "He was?"

The question came much too quickly to be casual, and a quiet laugh escaped Shōta before he could contain it, rumbling through his chest beneath Izuku's cheek.

Izuku's head snapped up. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You laughed."

"I'm allowed."

"You laughed at me."

Shōta's mouth twitched as he resumed running his fingers through the kid's curls. "I haven't said a word."

"You don't have to," Izuku muttered, somehow managing to look both suspicious and mortified. "You're doing that thing with your eyebrows."

Shōta hadn't been aware he had a thing with his eyebrows, but apparently that was information he'd be forced to live with now.

"They're just worried about you," he said, taking pity on him before the kid spontaneously combusted. His fingers resumed their slow path through Izuku's hair. "Both of them. A lot."

Izuku's gaze dropped, but not before Shōta caught the small, helpless smile pulling at his mouth.

Huh.

He wasn't touching that particular disaster tonight. He wasn't even entirely sure what he'd just discovered, and frankly, he didn't need to be. Whatever complicated teenage nonsense was apparently developing beneath his nose could remain complicated teenage nonsense for as long as it pleased.

What mattered was the kid currently trying and failing to hide a smile against his chest.

Shōta's own mouth twitched.

Embarrassed was good. Flustered was good. Wondering which of his classmates had refused to leave the hospital was good. After spending most of the night listening to Izuku apologize for surviving, Shōta would happily take whatever ridiculous teenage social catastrophe this turned out to be.

He gave the kid's hair another gentle ruffle. "You can interrogate them yourself when they visit in the morning."

Izuku's head came up again. "They're coming?"

The hope in his voice was immediate enough to wipe the teasing from Shōta's expression. "Of course they're coming."

Izuku blinked at him.

Shōta sighed. Apparently they were still working on the concept that people might actually want him around. "You'll probably have to convince them to leave."

A tiny smile returned.

It didn't erase anything waiting for them outside this room. Toshinori was still out there. Izuku's mother still had to be called. All For One still had One For All, and tomorrow promised more problems than Shōta particularly cared to count.

But for a few minutes, Izuku was laughing, and after tonight Shōta would take every second of it.

There would be meetings, reports, medical evaluations, and a catastrophic amount of paperwork. Nezu would need the entire story. Naomasa would have questions Shōta intended to help him ask in excruciating detail. Toshinori's actions would have to be examined from beginning to end, and whatever conversation awaited them with Inko was not going to be pleasant.

Then there was the question of what happened when Izuku was medically cleared to leave.

Shōta wasn't making that decision tonight. Anger wasn't evidence, and right now he had only Toshinori's version of what Ms. Midoriya had known, when she'd learned it, and how the situation had been presented to her. There were conversations that needed to happen before Shōta decided exactly how furious he was entitled to be.

Still, he had a feeling he knew how those conversations were going to go.

He hoped he was wrong.

Because if Toshinori had told them the truth—if she had known exactly what One For All could do to her son's body, known about All For One and the dead predecessors, known that accepting the Quirk painted a target on her fourteen-year-old child's back, and had chosen to let him continue carrying it without ever telling him what she knew—then Shōta wasn't leaving his kid with her.

Especially not after the quiet, frightened questions Izuku had asked tonight. What if she thought it was worth it too? What if she cared more about me having a Quirk? What if I don't want to go home?

Those weren't questions Shōta was willing to dismiss as exhaustion or panic. Izuku had spent too much of his life being told what he should endure for the privilege of becoming something other than Quirkless. Shōta wasn't going to add going home to an adult he no longer felt safe with to that list simply because it was convenient.

There would be procedures. Nezu would have opinions. Naomasa would remind him, probably repeatedly, that kidnapping his own student remained illegal no matter how strongly Shōta objected to that fact. There would be paperwork, investigations, conversations with social services if it came to that, and whatever legal hoops stood between Izuku and somewhere he actually felt safe.

Fine.

Shōta could jump through hoops.

If the worst of what he'd learned tonight proved true, Izuku wasn't going home with his mother simply because everyone expected him to. Shōta would find another option, and if necessary, that option would be him.

The thought should probably have felt more drastic than it did.

It didn't.

Somewhere along the way, Izuku had already become his responsibility in every way that mattered. Shōta worried about him, protected him, lost sleep over him, kept track of his injuries and bad habits, and had apparently reached the point where punching the former Number One hero for suggesting the kid should be dead felt like an entirely reasonable response. After tonight, denying what that amounted to seemed more exhausting than simply accepting it.

He'd already called Izuku his kid.

He'd meant it.

If circumstances required him to make that official in more than words, then Shōta couldn't find much reason not to.

One thing had already become nonnegotiable: Izuku wasn't dealing with any of this alone again.

Whatever came next, Shōta would be there.

The kid eventually sagged more heavily against him as exhaustion began winning its fight against adrenaline. His grip loosened from desperate fistfuls of Shōta's shirt until one hand rested softly against his side, no longer clinging so much as making sure Shōta was still there. Shōta kept one arm securely around him while his other hand moved lazily through his curls, fingertips occasionally catching on a tangle before smoothing it free.

Gradually, the monitor settled with him. The frantic beeping stretched into a slower, steadier rhythm as Izuku's breathing evened out against Shōta's chest, each exhale warm through his shirt.

He'd almost begun to wonder if the kid had fallen asleep when a quiet voice stirred against his chest.

"Sensei?"

Shōta glanced down at the mess of green hair beneath his chin. "Yes?"

Izuku took a careful breath, and Shōta felt the tension returning before the question even came. "What about All For One?"

His gaze drifted toward the dark hospital window, where their reflections hovered faintly against the glass. That was the question waiting beneath everything else, wasn't it? Somewhere outside this room was a monster who had just acquired one of the most powerful Quirks in existence, and Shōta wasn't stupid enough to pretend that didn't terrify him.

None of what was ahead required putting the weight of the world back onto the shoulders of the child in his arms.

His fingers continued their slow path through Izuku's curls. "We'll figure it out, kid."

Izuku was quiet for a moment. "But what if—"

"It isn't all on you," Shōta interrupted gently. "And it isn't all on me either. That's the point."

He felt the smallest nod against his chest.

"We have people. We have resources. We have some of the best minds in the country available to us." Shōta let the statement hang for a moment before adding dryly, "Allegedly."

A tiny laugh warmed his shirt, and Shōta felt himself smile into Izuku's hair. It wasn't much, but every one of those small, startled laughs felt like dragging the kid another inch away from the edge he'd woken up standing on.

"We'll figure it out."

"Okay."

There was still fear in the answer, but not the crushing certainty from before. Izuku didn't sound as though he believed he had to solve it himself anymore, and Shōta allowed some of the tension to ease from his shoulders. His fingers continued moving idly through green curls while the room settled around them, and for a moment he thought that might finally be the end of it.

Then Izuku shifted against him, burrowing a little more comfortably into Shōta's side before a yawn caught him by surprise. He tried to smother it against Shōta's shirt, but it stretched into a long, sleepy breath anyway, leaving him blinking sluggishly afterward.

"I guess I can't be a hero anymore," he murmured.

Shōta's hand stopped in his hair.

He looked down, expecting tears, but there weren't any. Somehow, that made the words hurt more. Izuku wasn't panicking or spiraling this time. He sounded resigned, like this was simply another fact he had to accept now that One For All was gone.

"Why not?"

He blinked and tilted his head back far enough to look at Shōta. "Because…"

When no explanation immediately followed, Shōta simply waited, giving him the time to work through whatever seemed so obvious in his own head.

The kid's brow furrowed. "I'm Quirkless again."

"And?"

Green eyes stared up at him in complete bewilderment.

Shōta raised an eyebrow. "And what, exactly, makes you think that means you can't be a hero?"

Some of the resignation gave way to confusion. "But you said—"

"I've said a lot of things to you, most of them variations on stop breaking your own bones." He shifted against the pillows, careful not to dislodge the arm around Izuku's shoulders. "I told you that your complete lack of self-preservation was going to get you killed. Repeatedly, as I recall. I don't remember ever telling you that your Quirk was what made you a hero."

"But heroes need Quirks."

"Do they?"

The certainty in Izuku's expression faltered. His mouth opened, presumably with an argument already prepared, but nothing came out. After several seconds, it slowly closed again.

"When I erase someone's Quirk," Shōta prompted, "what exactly do you think I'm fighting with?"

"Well, you still have—" The answer cut off abruptly.

Even exhausted, traumatized, and barely an hour removed from waking in a hospital, Shōta could practically see the gears beginning to turn behind those green eyes. He stayed quiet and let it happen, watching confusion gradually give way to the familiar focus he knew so well.

"You have Erasure," Izuku began more slowly, "but it doesn't physically incapacitate anyone. It just removes the advantage their Quirk gives them, and it doesn't work on mutation types at all, so against them you're basically—"

His eyes widened as the realization finally settled into place.

Shōta couldn't quite stop the corner of his mouth from twitching. "Basically what, kid?"

"Basically…" Izuku hesitated, looking almost offended by his own conclusion. "You fight Quirkless."

"There he is."

A faint flush spread across freckled cheeks as Izuku realized exactly how thoroughly he'd fallen into analysis mode. "I wasn't muttering."

The denial was immediately undermined by another yawn, wider than the first. Izuku tried to swallow it halfway through and failed, eyes squeezing shut as he covered his mouth with one hand. By the time it passed, he was blinking sleepily up at Shōta, whatever dignity he'd been trying to salvage thoroughly ruined.

"You were about three seconds away."

"I was thinking."

"Dangerous habit. I've heard it leads to conclusions."

The tiny glare that earned him was weak, exhausted, and entirely lacking in menace.

Shōta considered it another improvement.

"My point," he continued, "is that Erasure gives me an advantage. A significant one, depending on who I'm fighting. It doesn't throw a punch for me. It doesn't restrain anyone, get civilians out of a collapsing building, or tell me when the idiot behind me is about to pull a knife."

Izuku was listening now. Really listening.

Shōta slipped his hand from the kid's hair and began counting against his fingers. "Capture weapon, support equipment, training, situational awareness, hand-to-hand combat, teamwork—and knowing when not to engage in the first place, which is a skill you're going to become intimately familiar with if I have to drill it into your head personally."

"But without a Quirk, I'd be at a disadvantage."

"Yes."

The immediate answer clearly surprised him.

Shōta wasn't going to lie just to make him feel better. "A significant one, sometimes. There will be villains you shouldn't engage alone. Situations where you'd need different equipment or backup. You'll have to train differently, fight differently, and get very good at knowing your limits." He gave Izuku a pointed look. "That last one was already going to be part of your curriculum."

Izuku ducked his head. "Right."

"Being at a disadvantage isn't the same thing as being incapable."

That quieted him for a moment, and Shōta let the thought settle while his fingers continued their slow path through Izuku's curls. Then, as though he'd only just remembered something important, he added, "And spite."

Izuku looked up at him, brow furrowing. "What?"

"Spite," Shōta repeated, perfectly serious. "Very useful."

A strangled sound escaped Izuku, caught somewhere between a laugh and a protest. "Spite isn't a combat skill."

"It is if you're sufficiently committed."

"Sensei."

Shōta glanced down at him, unable to keep the faint satisfaction from tugging at his mouth. "There. You're arguing with me. You're recovering already."

This time the laugh actually made it out. Shōta felt it shake through the shoulders tucked beneath his arm, warm and breathy against his chest, his hold tightened fractionally around the kid as he let himself enjoy the sound. It faded quickly, but the silence that followed wasn't quite as heavy.

"But…" Izuku swallowed. Hope had crept into his expression so cautiously that Shōta almost couldn't stand to look at it. "Could I?"

Shōta studied him.

Not One For All.

Not All Might's successor or the ninth holder of some ancient power. Not a vessel carrying generations of expectations inside his bones, and certainly not a weapon whose value could be measured by whether he kept that power out of someone else's hands.

Just Izuku. His problem child.

A reckless, stubborn sixteen-year-old with frightening observational skills, notebooks overflowing with analysis, terrible self-preservation instincts, and a heroic impulse so deeply ingrained that Shōta had spent most of the year trying to teach him that saving someone didn't require destroying himself in the process.

One For All hadn't created any of that.

He thought back to the story Izuku had told earlier. A sludge villain wrapped around another child's body while professional heroes stood back, unable or unwilling to act. A Quirkless middle-schooler with no weapon, no training, and no reasonable chance of accomplishing anything had looked at that scene and run forward anyway.

Before Toshinori.

Before the beach.

Before One For All.

Izuku had already been a hero when he'd had nothing but a backpack full of notebooks to throw.

"Yes," Shōta said, and watched Izuku's breath catch.

His arm tightened around his kid's shoulders, drawing him gently back against his side. "You could."

Izuku stared at him for a moment, eyes already shining again, before his face crumpled. The first tear slipped free just as another yawn caught him, turning the breath he dragged in for a sob into something long and shaky instead. He made a miserable little sound afterward and buried his face against Shōta's chest, apparently determined to cry despite the fact that his body had very clearly decided it was done cooperating.

Shōta sighed and rubbed a slow hand through his curls while the kid shook against him. "All right. That's enough for tonight."

Izuku sniffled into his shirt.

"Time to get some rest. You've done enough crying for one night."

There might have been an objection in the muffled noise Izuku made, but it dissolved into yet another yawn before it could become words. His body had gone heavy against Shōta now, the last of the tension gradually draining from his shoulders as exhaustion finally won out. When Shōta looked down, Izuku's eyes were already drifting closed, lashes still wet and clumped together from tears.

"Sleep," he murmured, smoothing the hair back from the kid's forehead. "Everything else can wait until morning."

Izuku hummed sleepily and nuzzled closer instead of answering, cheek settling more firmly against Shōta's chest. For a few seconds Shōta thought he'd already lost him to sleep.

Then the fingers curled loosely in his shirt tightened.

"Stay," Izuku breathed.

The word was barely more than air, heavy with sleep and entirely unguarded.

Something in Shōta's chest ached.

He looked down at the kid, his kid, tucked against him, at the tear tracks still drying across freckled cheeks and the green curls mussed beneath his hand. After everything tonight, after every frightened question about whether people would still want him without One For All, apparently even half-asleep Izuku still needed to make sure Shōta wasn't going to disappear the moment he stopped watching.

"Yeah, kid," Shōta whispered. "I'm staying."

Izuku's grip loosened almost immediately and Shōta reached carefully toward the bedside controls and switched off the light, leaving only the muted glow from the hallway slipping beneath the door and the soft illumination of the monitors beside them. Then he tugged the blanket higher over Izuku's shoulders, tucking it carefully around him without disturbing the IV.

By the time Shōta settled back against the pillows, Izuku's breathing had already begun to deepen. The kid gave one last sleepy hum and burrowed closer, his hand still resting loosely against Shōta's shirt.

Shōta wrapped his arm securely around him and rested his cheek against the top of his head.

Tomorrow could have the questions. 

Tonight, Izuku had asked him for one thing.

So Shōta stayed

Naomasa returned about twenty minutes later.

By then, exhaustion had finally accomplished what reassurance, pain medication, and sheer stubbornness hadn't. Izuku had fallen asleep.

He'd fought it longer than Shōta thought physically possible, blinking heavily every few seconds while insisting he wasn't tired, only to lose the thread of his own sentences halfway through them. Eventually his head had grown heavier against Shōta's chest, his grip had gone slack in the fabric of Shōta's shirt, and his breathing had deepened into the slow, even rhythm of complete exhaustion.

Shōta hadn't moved since.

The room remained dark except for the muted glow of the monitors and the thin strip of light beneath the door. When the latch gave a soft click, Shōta's eyes opened immediately, attention shifting toward the narrow wedge of brighter hallway light that appeared as the door eased inward.

Naomasa slipped through sideways and pulled it closed behind him as quickly and quietly as he could. Rather than turn on the overhead light, he pulled out his phone and angled the dimmed screen toward the floor, using the faint glow to pick his way around the chair and abandoned belongings without introducing his shin to hospital furniture.

He made it two careful steps before looking toward the bed.

Then he stopped.

Shōta watched the hard lines that had settled around Naomasa's eyes during the confrontation with Toshinori soften almost immediately. In the faint light from his phone and the monitors, his gaze moved over Izuku first—the kid curled securely against Shōta's chest beneath the blanket, one hand still loosely caught in his shirt—before lifting to Shōta.

A familiar warmth crept into Naomasa's expression.

Shōta narrowed his eyes at him.

Naomasa's mouth twitched.

Don't.

The smile widened anyway.

Shōta couldn't exactly threaten him without waking Izuku, which Naomasa clearly knew and was enjoying far too much.

"Shh," he murmured before he could say anything. "Don't wake him. He just drifted off."

Naomasa nodded and crossed the room quietly. Rather than returning to his abandoned place by the wall, he came directly to the bed, reaching down to take Shōta's free hand. His thumb brushed slowly across Shōta's knuckles, lingering with particular care over the swelling already forming there.

"It's been a rough night," he said under his breath.

Shōta looked down at the kid sleeping against him. Tear tracks still marked Izuku's cheeks, his face pale beneath the bruising, but at least sleep had finally smoothed some of the strain from his features. "It's been too much."

A quiet hum answered him, followed, inexplicably, by a soft chuckle.

Shōta glanced over. Naomasa had lowered himself into the chair beside the bed, but instead of settling in, he was looking between Shōta and the sleeping teenager curled against his chest with an expression Shōta knew far too well.

His eyes narrowed. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Don't start."

That only made the corner of Naomasa's mouth climb higher. His gaze dropped pointedly to where Shōta's arm was wrapped around Izuku, the blanket tucked securely over the kid's shoulders and Shōta's hand still resting protectively in his curls.

"It's just so completely like you."

Shōta already disliked where this was going. "What is?"

Naomasa studied him with entirely too much fond amusement. "You spend years insisting you don't like kids, somehow end up teaching twenty of them, and now I've come back to find you tucked into a hospital bed with one asleep on your chest."

Shōta rolled his eyes, careful to keep the movement from disturbing Izuku. "He's had a bad night."

"Mm-hm."

"Don't."

"I'm just saying." Naomasa's voice softened, though the smile remained. "You're such a dad."

Shōta gave him a flat look. "Oh, stop. This is different."

"Yeah." Naomasa nodded with exaggerated solemnity, as though Shōta had just made an excellent point. "He's your child."

The retort Shōta had been preparing died before it reached his mouth.

Naomasa's amusement faded when he saw it happen.

For a moment, Shōta could only look down at the sleeping kid in his arms. Izuku hadn't stirred through any of it. His cheek remained pressed against Shōta's chest, fingers loosely curled in his shirt, completely trusting that the person he'd asked to stay would still be there when he woke.

You called me your kid.

Did you mean it?

Shōta's hand moved almost unconsciously through the curls beneath his palm.

Yeah.

That was rather the problem, wasn't it?

Shōta looked at his partner, prepared with some dismissive response, but whatever he'd been about to say never made it out. His gaze dropped instead to the sleeping boy tucked beneath his chin.

Naomasa's fingers left his hand long enough to brush through Shōta's hair, pushing a few tangled strands away from his face before settling warmly against the back of his neck. "It's okay, Shō."

"No, it isn't." The answer came more harshly than he'd intended, though Izuku didn't stir. Shōta lowered his voice anyway, anger tightening it into something rough and quiet. "None of this is okay. He thought he should've died, Nao. He woke up apologizing because someone attacked him and stole his Quirk, and then Toshinori walked in here and told him he was right to think that way."

His voice caught on the last few words.

Shōta swallowed hard and looked down at the kid sleeping against his chest. In the dim light from the monitors, Izuku looked painfully young. Tear tracks still marked his cheeks, one hand curled loosely in Shōta's shirt even in sleep, as though some part of him still needed the reassurance that Shōta hadn't gone anywhere.

His vision blurred.

Fuck.

He blinked hard, but one tear escaped anyway, slipping hot and traitorous down his cheek.

Every trace of Naomasa's earlier amusement disappeared. He leaned closer, thumb brushing gently beneath Shōta's eye to catch the tear before it could reach his jaw.

"Don't, babe," he whispered. "Please."

The softness nearly undid him.

Before that thumb could make another pass, Shōta caught his wrist, not pushing him away so much as holding the gesture there between them. "Nao." His voice came out rough, scraped thin by everything he'd been holding back.

Dark eyes searched his face, concern replacing the warmth that had been there only moments ago.

Shōta swallowed against the pressure building painfully in his throat. "If you start being nice to me right now, I'm going to lose it."

Understanding came almost immediately. Naomasa's expression softened, but he didn't reach for him again.

"Okay, Shō," he murmured.

No you need to let it out. No insistence that Shōta didn't have to hold himself together. Instead, the hand trapped loosely in Shōta's grasp turned until their fingers caught, squeezed once, and then slipped away.

That was all.

Somehow, it almost broke him anyway.

Drawing in a careful breath, Shōta lowered his gaze to the kid sleeping against his chest and grounded himself in the slow rise and fall beneath his arm, the warmth pressed into his side, the faint whisper of air against his shirt.

Alive. Breathing. Here.

That had to be enough for tonight.

The pressure in his chest didn't ease, but it settled enough that he could trust his voice again. His fingers moved once through Izuku's curls before he looked back at Naomasa.

"His mother knew," he continued, his voice rougher now. "How could they know all of that and still look at this kid and—"

The rest lodged somewhere in his throat.

Naomasa's fingers returned to his nape, not wiping away tears this time, simply resting there with a quiet pressure Shōta could lean into without admitting he was doing it.

For once, the detective didn't seem to have an answer either. His gaze moved briefly toward the dark window, jaw working before he let out a slow breath.

"He really believed everything he was saying."

Shōta looked at him.

"I questioned him after we left." Whatever fondness had been in Naomasa's expression disappeared beneath something much more tired. "He didn't register as lying once. Not about the kid's mother. Not about what she knew. Not about what he thought Izuku should have done."

Somehow, that was worse.

"I can't say I'm surprised." Shōta's mouth twisted. "He's an asshole."

"Shō."

He gave his partner a flat look.

Naomasa held it for perhaps two seconds before conceding with a quiet sigh. "Fine. At the moment, I'm having difficulty constructing a professional argument against that assessment."

"Thought so."

For a while, neither spoke. Naomasa remained beside the bed, his hand eventually finding Shōta's again while they watched Izuku sleep. The kid shifted once, making a small sound in the back of his throat before instinctively curling closer. Shōta's arm tightened around him without thought, fingers smoothing once through green curls until he settled again.

Naomasa watched the entire thing in silence, his gaze lingering on Shōta's hand as it moved through Izuku's curls before settling on the sleeping kid tucked against his chest.

"He's coming home with us, isn't he?" he asked quietly.

Shōta's hand stilled in Izuku's hair.

The question wasn't entirely unexpected. He'd already turned the possibility over in his own head more times than he cared to admit, but hearing Naomasa say it aloud made it real in a way those private thoughts hadn't. Us. Not some vague alternative placement or temporary solution. Their home.

He lifted his eyes to Naomasa's. "I don't know Nao. Would that bother you?"

For once, the answer didn't come immediately. Naomasa's expression grew thoughtful as he looked back at Izuku, and Shōta waited, unwilling to fill the silence for him.

Shōta appreciated that. This wasn't a stray cat he was proposing they keep or a student sleeping on their couch for a weekend. Izuku was sixteen, traumatized, injured, and attached to an ongoing police investigation and a homicidal supervillain. This wasn't something either of them could agree to casually.

More importantly, it wasn't a decision Shōta got to make alone.

Eventually, Naomasa's expression softened. "We've talked about kids before, haven't we?"

"Yeah, but this is different." Shōta adjusted the blanket where it had slipped from Izuku's shoulder. "We talked about fostering someday. Maybe adopting. In a few years, when things were calmer and we had time to actually prepare for it. We weren't talking about bringing home a traumatized sixteen-year-old in the middle of an investigation."

"No," Naomasa agreed. "We weren't."

"And this isn't temporary in the way taking in a student for a few nights would be. If this goes where I think it's going…" Shōta trailed off, eyes returning to Izuku. "I can't offer him a home and then decide three months from now that it was too much."

"You wouldn't."

"I know."

There was no hesitation in that answer.

Naomasa's thumb brushed slowly across the back of his hand. "Shō, love, you and I both know that if the investigation turns the way we think it will, you're going to fight like hell before you let him disappear into the system."

There wasn't much point in arguing that.

The idea of Izuku being discharged from this hospital only to be handed to strangers while an investigation decided whether his mother had knowingly endangered him made something vicious twist in Shōta's chest. He knew there were good foster homes. He knew there were procedures for a reason. He knew, rationally, that being a teacher who had become violently attached to one particular problem child did not automatically make him the best placement.

He also knew he wouldn't be able to watch Izuku disappear into that uncertainty without fighting for another option.

Naomasa seemed to read all of that on his face. Without saying anything, he eased himself carefully onto the edge of the mattress, mindful of both the sleeping teenager and the IV line, and held Shōta's free hand. He folded it between both of his, thumbs resting warm against Shōta's knuckles.

"Yes."

Shōta's brow furrowed. "Yes what?"

"Yes, I'm more than okay with it." A small smile softened Naomasa's face as his fingers tightened gently around Shōta's. "If that's what you want."

His attention shifted to the kid asleep between them, and the smile faded into something quieter, more thoughtful. "And, more importantly, if that's what he wants."

Shōta followed his gaze to Izuku, still curled trustingly against his chest, completely unaware that the shape of his future was being discussed in whispers above his head.

Izuku slept on, one hand still curled loosely against Shōta's shirt even in sleep, as though some part of him still needed the reassurance that Shōta hadn't disappeared.

"He asked me what would happen if he didn't want to go home," Shōta admitted, keeping his voice low. "I told him we'd figure it out. Then he asked if I was going to leave."

Something tightened in Naomasa's expression, his hands closing a little more securely around Shōta's. "What did you tell him?"

His gaze dropped to the sleeping boy curled against his chest, to the fingers still loosely caught in his shirt even in sleep. "That I wasn't going anywhere."

For a moment, Naomasa said nothing. His thumb brushed once across Shōta's knuckles before he leaned closer and pressed a soft kiss into his hair, lingering there just long enough for some of the tension in Shōta's shoulders to loosen.

"Then I guess neither of us are."

Naomasa was quiet for a moment, his thumb moving absently over Shōta's knuckles as he looked at the sleeping kid between them. Shōta could practically see the pieces arranging themselves behind his eyes, the detective giving way to the man who had spent enough years navigating systems and paperwork to know where the cracks were.

"You still have your emergency foster license."

Shōta blinked. Of all the things he'd expected Naomasa to say, that hadn't been one of them. "It's current."

"Good." There was something almost decisive in the small nod that followed. "Then if things with his mother turn out the way we're expecting, we start there. Emergency placement with you gets him somewhere safe while the investigation is happening, without forcing anyone to make a permanent decision immediately."

With you.

Shōta's eyes narrowed slightly. "You mean with us."

Expression softening Naomasa confirmed. "Yeah, Shō. I mean with us."

Something warm and painful tightened beneath Shōta's ribs.

"We give him time," Naomasa continued, glancing toward Izuku. "Time to recover. Time to figure out what actually happened with his mother. Time to decide what he wants without half the adults in his life telling him what he's supposed to want." His fingers tightened around Shōta's. "And if, after all of that, he wants to stay?"

A small smile pulled at Naomasa's mouth. "Then we figure out what comes next."

The simplicity of it caught Shōta somewhere painfully deep. Naomasa wasn't talking about tolerating Izuku in their home until Shōta figured something else out. He was already saying we. Already thinking about what paperwork they'd need, how to buy the kid time, how to make sure the next decision about Izuku's life actually belonged to Izuku.

"Besides," Naomasa added, amusement creeping back into his voice, "I know you. You're not abandoning this one. Emergency foster license, paperwork, legal arguments, Nezu breathing down your neck—none of it is going to make a difference."

Shōta huffed quietly and squeezed his hand. "Thanks, Nao."

"I'm serious."

"I know." His voice softened. "That's why I'm thanking you."

Naomasa held his gaze, and Shōta found himself painfully aware of just how lucky he was. This wasn't a small thing Naomasa was offering. They weren't discussing letting one of Shōta's students sleep on the couch for a weekend. If things went the way they increasingly suspected they would, they were talking about opening their home to a traumatized sixteen-year-old whose entire understanding of himself had been ripped apart in a single night—and potentially changing the shape of their lives around him.

Naomasa knew that.

He was suggesting it anyway.

Shōta closed his eyes and leaned just slightly into the warmth of his partner beside him, their hands still linked between them.

Naomasa leaned into him in return, pressing a soft kiss to his temple. He lingered there for a heartbeat, close enough that Shōta could feel the warmth of his breath against his hair, before carefully easing himself off the edge of the mattress.

He didn't let go.

Instead, Naomasa settled into the chair beside the bed and adjusted his grip as he went, keeping Shōta's hand loosely wrapped in his. His thumb resumed its slow path across Shōta's knuckles, an absent, familiar touch that asked for nothing and promised plenty.

Shōta let himself have it.

Nothing was decided. Not legally, not practically, and certainly not without Izuku having a choice in what happened to his own life for once. There would be investigations, interviews, conversations with his mother, and arguments with people insisting on procedures Shōta already knew he was going to despise.

But finally, the possibility waiting at the end of all that didn't feel quite so uncertain.

If Izuku needed somewhere to go, they could give him that.

If he wanted it, he could come home with them.

Naomasa's hand was warm around his, Izuku was sleeping safely against his chest, and for the first time since the kid had opened his eyes crying, Shōta felt like maybe they could actually figure out what came next.

Tomorrow they would deal with All For One.

Tomorrow they would deal with One For All.

Tomorrow they would deal with All Might.

Tonight, Shōta had exactly one priority.

His kid was alive.

And no matter what anyone else thought, that had never been the lesser outcome.

End NOTE:

So, fun fact: this entire fic exists because I got mad at a TikTok.

That’s it. That’s the origin story.

I was watching an edit about Aizawa and all the things this man has been willing to sacrifice for his students. His body, his safety, his career, his own well-being, pretty much anything if it means keeping his kids alive and somewhere in it was the quote "I can't imagine a worse scenario than him stealing One For All."

And I remember sitting there thinking:

Really?

You can’t imagine anything worse?

Because I was looking at Aizawa and thinking, this man can.

He can imagine a lot of things that are worse.

He can imagine walking into that hospital room and finding Izuku dead. He can imagine an empty seat in Class 1-A and nineteen kids staring at it. He can imagine having to tell those kids that their classmate had an opportunity to survive, but believed surrendering a Quirk was a greater failure than dying to protect it.

He can imagine having to tell Izuku’s mother that her son could have lived.

He can imagine discovering afterward that Izuku had a choice and chose death because every adult around him had successfully taught him that One For All was more valuable than Midoriya Izuku.

And I think Aizawa could imagine something even more horrifying than that:

Izuku believing he made the right choice.

That was the thought that spawned this entire fic.

Because the interesting part to me was never arguing that One For All doesn’t matter. It does. One For All is enormously important. All For One obtaining it could be catastrophic. People could die. Society could fall apart. Depending on what All For One can actually do with it, the consequences could be almost unimaginable.

Aizawa understands that.

And his answer is still:

Izuku should not have died.

That is the distinction I wanted this fic to explore.

When Toshinori says he can’t imagine anything worse than All For One possessing One For All, Shōta can.

Izuku dying.

Not because Shōta doesn’t care about everyone else. Not because he thinks losing One For All is no big deal. Not because he has some magical solution that guarantees everyone will survive.

He doesn’t.

His argument is that the consequences of losing One For All belong to the adults now: the heroes, the police, the government, the people who built this society, run it, defend it, and get paid to deal with exactly this kind of nightmare.

If civilization has reached a point where its continued existence depends upon one sixteen-year-old boy successfully protecting a Quirk—or dying before someone can take it from him—then civilization has a catastrophic problem.

But that problem does not become Izuku’s responsibility simply because everyone else failed to create another solution.

So when Toshinori says: "There may not be another way!"

Shōta’s answer is: "Then we fucking make one!"

And I think that might be the entire fic in one exchange.

Because Shōta is a teacher. Teachers are supposed to prepare children for the world. And Shōta, of all people, already knows what it means to watch someone far too young die trying to save others. Losing Oboro would absolutely shape the kind of teacher he became and how little patience he has for adults romanticizing a child's willingness to die.

Teachers are supposed to prepare children for the world. They are not supposed to feed children into it to keep it running.

If All For One has One For All now? Fine. Situation’s fucked.

What resources do they have? Who can fight him? What can Erasure do? What intelligence can Naomasa gather? What can Nezu come up with? What haven’t they tried yet?

Maybe they fail. Maybe there really isn’t another way.

But Shōta is going to exhaust every possibility before he looks at a sixteen-year-old lying in a hospital bed and decides, you should have died for us.

And somewhere along the way, that original angry little idea turned into something else, because this fic stopped being only about whether One For All was worth dying for.

It became about what happens to a kid who has spent his entire life learning that his value is conditional.

First, Izuku wasn’t enough because he was Quirkless.

Then suddenly he had the greatest Quirk in the world, and he was special. He was All Might’s successor. He could become a hero. People needed him.

Except that power came with another lesson:

Break yourself for it.

Bleed for it.

Keep its secrets.

Carry its burdens.

Protect it.

And, if necessary, die with it.

And I want to make an important distinction here, because I don’t think Shōta’s objection begins and ends with Izuku being sixteen.

Izuku turning eighteen wouldn’t suddenly make this mindset okay.

There is a difference between sacrifice and disposability.

Someone can understand that their life has value, desperately want to live, understand exactly what they’re choosing, and still decide that they’re willing to give that life to save someone else. Shōta understands that kind of sacrifice. He’s a hero. He’s made versions of that choice himself.

But that isn’t what Izuku is doing here.

Izuku isn’t saying, I chose to die to save my friends.

He isn’t saying, I understood the consequences, considered the alternatives, and decided that protecting these people was worth my life.

He’s saying, I should have died because losing One For All was worse than losing me.

And those are not the same thing.

More importantly, I’m not convinced that belief is entirely his.

Izuku spent his childhood learning that being Quirkless made him lesser. Then one of the people he admired most handed him the most powerful Quirk in the world and, intentionally or otherwise, tied an enormous amount of responsibility, identity, secrecy, and worth to carrying it.

Turning eighteen wouldn’t magically erase that.

Conditioning doesn’t expire when someone becomes legally an adult.

An adult can have the legal right to make their own decisions while still making those decisions through beliefs about usefulness, obedience, sacrifice, and self-worth that were shaped when they were a child.

So I don’t think Shōta’s question would simply be:

Are you old enough to choose this?

It would be: Why are you choosing it?

Do you believe your life matters, and you’re consciously choosing to risk it for people you love?

Or do you believe your life only matters for as long as you’re useful?

Because those are not the same choice.

And I think Shōta would be furious at anyone, sixteen, twenty-two, or forty, who had been taught to mistake the second one for heroism.

That’s really the question underneath all of this. If Izuku has spent his entire life measuring his worth by what he can offer other people, what happens when you take away the thing he believes made him worth something in the first place?

What happens when you take the Quirk away?

What’s left?

That’s the question Izuku is really asking Shōta throughout this story.

Am I still worth something without it?

Do you still want me if I can’t be what everyone expected?

Did surviving make me a failure?

Do I deserve comfort when I haven’t earned it?

If I’m Quirkless again, do I still get to be your student?

And eventually:

You called me your kid.

Did you mean it?

Even though I’m—

And Shōta doesn’t need him to finish.

Yeah, kid. Even then.

Because One For All was never what made Shōta care about this kid in the first place.

And apparently my irritation at one TikTok needed an entire fic to make that argument.

Whoops.

But I’m curious where everyone else lands on this, because I don’t think the central question is necessarily an easy one.

If losing One For All genuinely meant All For One might become unstoppable. If millions of lives really could depend on it, what responsibility, if any, did Izuku have to protect it at the cost of his own life?

And maybe the question I’m even more interested in:

Can we really call something a heroic sacrifice when the person making it has been taught to believe their life is worth less than the thing they’re sacrificing it for?

Where does a hero’s duty end? Does Izuku being sixteen change the answer, or does why he believes he should die matter more than his age?

Shōta has his answer.

I’m very curious about yours.