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Your back to the ocean, burning red
(but I am still standing)
Sometimes I want you back
But not today
I found her bleeding over the sink
But when you said sorry
You were looking at me
His mother was such a tall, imposing figure in his memories that seeing her now was disconcerting. The dark curly hair kept short and shiny, so unlike his own, framed a pair of black eyes who found him as soon as he stepped onto the UA's grounds. She must have been waiting, he thought, slow.
The picture in front of him swam before his eyes, doubling down, as if he was looking at it through broken glass. Shouta blinked and he had to clench his fists, digging inside the rough skin of his palms to stop himself from sinking into memories that were best of left to rot in the past.
The present, though, didn’t seem much better.
Emiko Aizawa stood in front of the entrance to the dorms, a blue skirt hugging her figure, a flowing shirt to match, elegant and simple, and Shouta held his breath, feeling numbingly young. She clutched a red purse between chipped nails. Not painted, he noticed dimly, the detail branding itself in his mind. He didn’t remember a day in his life when his mother didn’t have her hands perfectly cured, the nails long and red.
(Look at me, Shouta, his mother would say, grabbing his face with her slim fingers, pressing hard enough to leave half-moon marks on the skin. Look at me when I speak, you ugly bastard. He never could. The harsh lines on his face and neck were the only thing they could exchange. The only thing that mattered.)
He blinked again.
He thought of his stained track suit that he hadn’t found time to wash out between patrols and class and how his hair—too long, his mother’s voice clicked, an echo of a memory. He could hear it even then that she was standing close enough he could reach her if he wanted to—were sticking to his forehead because of sweat.
What was she seeing, now that she was looking at him?
Shouta didn’t move, letting her scrutinize him. He had to bend his head to stare at some point in her face – not the eyes, never the eyes, but close enough.
She barely reached his shoulders.
It was startling.
The silence stretched thin between them, poisonous, leaving his mouth dry and his back tingling with the urge of backing away.
He was thirty, but he felt ten all over again.
Somewhere behind him the kids mumbled in confusion, uncertain about what was going on.
They were just getting back from a little impromptu outing at the mall. It had started with Bakugou haunting him down in his room, waking him up from a well-deserved nap and ordering that he needed to do some grocery shopping, because if the others liked to live on ‘unhealthy, disgusting food’, as he had called it, it was on their own livers. Kirishima had overheard this, of course, and decided to tag alone. Before he knew it, he had left the dorms with a list of things to buy (“Why do you need so many clothes pegs?” “Dark Shadow likes to munch on them.” He had refrained from asking any more questions after that.) and five kids following him like ducklings.
“Sensei?” Midoriya asked, nervous, peering from behind him, eyes darting between him and his mother.
His heart clenched, and time stuttered forward again as he remembered where he was.
Shouta suddenly didn’t want the kids with him; he didn’t want his students standing in the same area with his mother, he didn’t want her to look at them. His heart picked up until it was all he could hear. She won’t do anything, he thought, but it came from underwater. Maybe. Maybe.
He blinked, unclenching his fists. He couldn’t feel his hands, but he tried to shake them anyway.
You don’t have to make it good, Hizashi had once told him, when everything had felt too impossible to deal with, heavy without a bottom ground to stand on. Shouta had floated around until Hizashi had broken the door of his flat down and stomped inside, forcing him into the shower. You don’t have to make it good. You can simply try to make it better.
He counted three breaths in, three breaths out, and forced his jaw to unlock from where his teeth had been grinding against each other.
“Go inside and put the groceries away,” Shouta ordered stiffly, hoping his voice was steadier than he felt, trying to act as normal as he could. He knew he had probably failed when none of the kids left.
“Who is this, kero?”
His mother’s eyes lowered from him to Asui, and she smiled. Shouta didn’t feel relieved at all.
Breathe in. She won’t do anything to them.
(He would never let her.)
He blinked.
Then, she spoke. “Hi, hello, dear. I’m Shouta’s mother.”
Her voice made him straighten his back, muscles pulling tightly in a way that made his old scars ache deep under his skin.
He had thought he could no longer remember it.
Somewhere, along the years, between counting the days since he had last seen his mother to celebrating two years away from home to forgetting he had been keeping a counter altogether, he had thought good riddance, and locked her in a remote part of himself he would never had to reach for again.
He had thought he had forgotten her voice.
He had been wrong.
Shouta moved swiftly to hide Asui with his body, sickened at how his mother smiled at his student. He wanted her as far away from here as possible. He wanted to be as far away as possible. No, he needed her gone, now, then, he needed her to step away. He needed this to have never happened. He heard Midoriya muttering a soft ‘mother?’, and he saw in his periphery Todoroki shrugging.
His mother looked back at him, the movement slow, and her face contorted itself into a faded cut.
His capture weapon felt too heavy around his neck, like barbed wire sinking in his throat, making it hard to speak or even breathe.
“The groceries will go to waste,” he reinforced, forcing his mouth to open and his brain to make some sense.
The world around him seemed to have lost its boundaries, twisting, the school looming over him, behind his mother, swaying dangerously.
Not now, he told himself. He had to get the kids home.
He didn’t expect that it would be Bakugou, of them all, to obey him first, but he must have heard the urgency in his words, because he just tsked and stepped forward, scowling.
“I’m not dealing with you extras whining about lack of food again, assholes,” he scoffed, and soon after, first Kirishima, then Midoriya, Asui and Uraraka followed, still looking unsure but feeling reassured when Shouta nodded at them. Todoroki only remained, his face blank, stoic as ever but with a newfound tension Shouta wished to erase.
“I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” he promised, not taking his sight off the woman but softening his words just enough for his kid to notice the change.
Todoroki pursed his lips, but nodded, assuaged. “We’ll wait for you to eat,” he said, before disappearing inside the gates.
He bit back a sigh. Those kids, he thought exasperated.
Shouta didn’t relax his stance until they were all inside, the echo of their footsteps and their quiet chatter disappearing in the halls.
The courtyard seemed to eat all the noises, making it impossible for sound to reach them.
Only a few steps separated him from his mother, yet the distance stretched between them, an invisible chasm that went beyond the simple lack of communication of those twelve years.
He observed his mother’s figure, the abyss looking back, head tilted up—and oh, when had that happened? After he left home, for sure. He remembered looking up at her as she walked down the stairs and pressed her hand on his head, something akin to a pat, if not for the spike of fear he had felt, if not for the way her fingers had subtly curled in. He had been eighteen then, and he was sure he had been shorter, hadn’t he?
He was thirty now, about to turn thirty-one, and his shoulders were broader, and his skin wasn’t littered with scratches he couldn’t explain to anyone, and nobody had chased him around with a blindfold in a long time. Hizashi could touch his neck without him flipping and throwing him across the room. A few months ago, Asui had asked if she could practice braiding on his hair and he had, even if slightly reluctantly, agreed, and it had been fine.
Shouta was thirty, and he had a life, and he was taller than his mother.
It was such a small thing.
It seemed impossible to believe in.
“You grew up,” she said, her tone flat, curling around each vowel. He tried to read into it, wondering if there was a layer, some dusted emotion peeking through the simple words. But, even if there had been something, Shouta wouldn’t know how to pick it up.
You grew up.
He had. Shouta wetted his lips, feeling a tiny cut on the skin there burning slightly.
Somewhere between growing pains and grief, gentle forehead kisses and hand signs, fallen buildings and new beginnings, he had grown, and now his scars didn’t ache as much when it rained.
I grew up, and you weren’t there.
Was that fair of him to say this? He grew up, she wasn’t there. He wondered which emotions would seep inside those words if he let them out. If he would exhale them with relief, with finality, as to say, I grew up because you weren’t there. Even without you, I grew up.
He was scared he would feel the ghost of melancholy, of a sadness so deep worn he had forgotten it even existed.
Why weren’t you there?
Because he had left.
“We all do, eventually,” he settled for.
Why did I have to leave? The shape of a five years old cried out inside his bones. He sat quiet on his hands, not making any sound, and waited for his mother with a mixture of hope and confusion. He didn’t speak, but he never had anything to say anyway.
It was hard to find things to say when nobody listened.
Years later, and the words of that version of him crawled out of his stomach, pressed against his ribcage, his throat, like thorns he had learnt how to swallow. They still left a bloody trail, though.
There was nothing there for that kid, he realized with startingly clarity. As he looked at his mother, who didn’t reply at all, seemingly just interested in studying him, he thought that there may be nothing here for him, too.
Exhaustion washed over him, a tidal wave reeling in, and he sighed, dropping his shoulders. The world still swirling with unreality, but growing more focused, the ground now fixed under his feet, and he was able to hear the traffic in the background, the sound of the city he had learnt to call home.
With his vision cleared, he looked at his mother better. The woman in front of him had dark curls, but with the light shifted just right he could see they were striped with grey. The weary, shaky hands, that had struck him earlier, now fitted perfectly with the way the sleeves of her shirt seemed to fall down a bit too much.
In all her fancy shine, she was also touched by the hands of time. She was nothing more than a beautiful, stained picture.
He saw, as he no longer heard his heartbeat in his ears, the rush of blood quieting down, that his mother had more power in his dreams than in this reality.
“Why are you here?”
She pressed her lips together. The gesture reminded him of himself, and Shouta was surprised at the lack of bitterness at that.
“I wanted to see you,” she said after a moment, bemused. And how weird, that she too sounded surprised by her own statement. Like she didn’t know why she was here in the first place, like she just realized that she was indeed here.
The words pressed again. What do you see, when you look at me?
When Shouta looked at Emiko, he saw himself.
He didn’t know what to think about that.
Once, when he was twenty and injured after a fight that had taken too much time off his patrol, he had wandered off, meaning to get home where Hizashi was probably waiting for him. In his haze, he had found himself in his childhood neighborhood instead.
He hadn’t gone back there since leaving at eighteen. He had stood, confused and dazed, wondering why his feet had brought him there, a place he had left with the intention of never seeing it again. He had called Hizashi, eyes so dry they burned, who had tracked him down and taken him back to their apartment. I was looking for home, he had mumbled, tired from blood loss and sleepless nights.
As he had fallen into a slumber, Hizashi treading his fingers into Shouta’s curls, humming something softly, he had wondered how he had mistaken that haunted house for a home, when his boyfriend’s arms kept him warm against the weather.
This—standing in front of his mother, so close to the dorms, where a bunch of his students were probably making a mess of the kitchen, where his husband was waiting for him, like always—felt just like then.
Shouta stared at her. For the first time in what felt like all his life, he brought himself to look her in the eyes. They were the exact shade of his own. When he was a kid, smaller than most, he used to believe she could read all his mistakes and secrets with her eyes. A pair of black holes, sucking him in and bending his will to submission.
Now, those eyes that had starred in so many of his nightmares, were just eyes.
Maybe they always had been.
And Shouta, Shouta was tired.
So he saw his reflection in her face, a broken mirror, slump down with a lightness he had never believed he could feel.
“You saw me.”
Shouta had spoken plainly, but the words carried heavy in the sweet April air.
He spotted a blonde mess of hair was peeking from one of the windows as it was opened, just for a second, before going back inside.
Warmth bloomed in his chest.
What do you see? He thought, but it was muted now. What did you want to see? Once upon a time, he had dreamt of his mother tucking him in bed, telling him how good he was, that she saw how much he was trying.
It didn’t matter anymore. Whatever she saw in him, it was dead and gone. Sunk underneath the tide of life.
You never love me, his mother used to tell him. My own child doesn’t love me.
But she had been wrong. Shouta had loved his mother. Despite the tears and the bruises, that scar still aching behind his neck that would never fade completely, he had wanted them to be a family. And then he had walked out and buried that wish with dirt in a graveyard that held no corpses. He had never stopped wanting a family. With his mother there, he could only think, just not with you.
“Those kids,” she began, stopping for a moment as he tensed a bit, then continuing, “they seem to look up to you.”
She spoke with bewilderment, like she couldn’t believe that was possible. Some days, neither he did.
He ignored that. “You should go,” he said instead.
She looked lost, glassy eyed. A ghost from the past, one where Shouta didn’t belong anymore.
He didn’t move.
She stared at him one more time, her hands tightening around her purse imperceptibly, hesitating on the invisible line between them. But Shouta didn’t have anything left to say.
A gentle breeze picked up, and his mother smoothed an invisible crease on her skirt. “Perhaps you’re right.”
Then she left, and it was like she had never been there in the place. But, as she passed down the path, next to him, she reached out with her hand, and, stretching her arm, she put it on his head, a faint memory of a ruffle. “You’re nothing like me,” she murmured, treading her fingers in the mess of his hair.
Neither of them had looked back.
The next moment, she was gone.
Shouta let himself believe that it was relief that he was feeling. The same relief he had heard in his mother’s parting words.
And maybe, he thought, the sun coming down, his light shining behind the school, maybe it had really been that.
“Goodbye, mom,” he whispered, no one there to hear.
When he walked towards the dorms, the raucous roar of his students slowly crept to him.
“Yo! Let me heeeeelp, come on, Bakubro!”
“Go eat some sticks, SHITFACE! Last time you tried you blew it all up!”
“This won’t be like last time! Come ooon!”
“On your dead body.”
“What about me?”
“Shut up, Pikachu, before I blow your face up.”
“Awwww, you’re no fun.”
“WHAT DID YOU SAY—”
He opened the door and slipped inside, taking in the chaos in front of him.
Kaminari, Bakugou and Kirishima were in the kitchen, probably trying to prepare dinner. On the couch Ashido was showing Hagakure the new set of make-up he had brought her—it was, apparently, a very limited edition, and a “must have”, in her words. He had agreed just because he didn’t want her to sneak out to buy it on her own or, even worse, ask Yaoyorozu to make it for her. It totally wasn’t because he was getting soft. Not at all.
Todoroki and Midoriya, who were huddled together, talking quietly between them, locked eyes with him instantly, snapping up to attention.
“Sensei!” Midoriya exclaimed, gathering the attention of a bunch of other kids. He scanned their faces, their greetings resonating in the common room. He grimaced at the loudness, but, just this once, he didn’t call them out on it, and if it was because he found the noise grounding, well, nobody needed to know.
After everyone had calmed down, Todoroki walked up to him, and Shouta barely held in a sigh. “Is everything okay?” Todoroki said, his voice quiet and dressed in concern. Shouta let himself soften his expression and squeezed the kid’s shoulder, wishing he could take away the furrow between his eyebrows. Wishing he didn’t see understanding lingering on the way Todoroki kept his hands too still, his voice too practiced.
So much work to be done, so little time. Shouta was only one person.
You don’t have to make it good, Hizashi chided at him again gently.
Todoroki was in front of him, safe and as away from any harm as he would ever be. That would have to be enough for now.
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Shouta said, hoping to sound comforting. It probably wasn’t, because Todoroki just stared at him some more, but then the boy seemed to accept this was going to be the only thing he would get, and he gave a terse nod back. He looked so young.
Had Shouta ever looked that young too, before?
“Go and relax before dinner,” he said, not unkindly. Shouta pushed the other with a firm hand, until Todoroki scuttled back to Midoriya, who stood anxious in the back fidgeting.
Those kids, he thought again, and maybe this time it was a bit fond. Just a tiny bit.
“Sensei! Sensei!” Ashido called for him, waving at him to come over.
And, because he was fond, just a little, he went to them, and, if the girls begged him to try the new palette on him, “pretty, pretty please! We will take it off before dinner, I promise!”, and if he decided to let them, both Ashido and Hagakure squealing with enthusiasm, well, that was just logical.
That’s what he told Hizashi, anyway, glitters Shouta hadn’t been able to wash off still on his cheeks, when his husband teased him later that night while he held him under the sheets.
In the arms of the person he had chosen to call home, he thought about how, despite everything, Todoroki had smiled during dinner at Midoriya, nothing big and maybe a little unpracticed, but free from any fear, and how Bakugo at given Uraraka the bigger portion, only because “you’re not going to make me waste this, float face”, and how he had pretended not to care when Kirishima had praised his food, and how he didn’t hide his hearing aids from the others anymore, at least at the dorm.
About how he had let Shinsou sneak inside after curfew, leaving Hizashi’s spare room they didn’t need for him, even though he wasn’t a hero student and therefore didn’t need housing, even though he should—could—have gone back home.
So much to be done. He couldn’t fix it all even if he tried.
But—
Hizashi snored next to him, snuggling deeper against the hollow of his neck. In the privacy of their room, Shouta didn’t have to hide his smile.
He just had to make it better.
He fell asleep, and in his dreams, his mother was singing to him while brushing his hair.
“You know, Sho-chan,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, as if that was a secret meant only for him. And maybe it was. “I always wanted to be a singer.”
Shouta, five and thirty, hummed in reply, leaning against her hands that remained gentle. They never pulled at him. “You have beautiful hair, Sho-chan,” she spoke again. “Just like mama. You must take good care of it, alright?”
He nodded, hoping she would sing to him more. He liked it when she did, because she looked pretty and kind and happy. He liked it when she was happy.
Like she had heard him, she resumed her singing, low and tender.
Nothing else happened.
When Shouta woke up, earlier than he would have normally liked, Hizashi still happily huffing in his sleep, he knew he wouldn’t see his mother ever again, not even in his dreams.
Her last goodbye, gone with the threads of golden dawn filtering through the curtains and the phantom of lips pressed against the crown of his head, mouthing those words he had wanted to hear from her all those years ago.
Then he turned around, curled around his sleeping husband, and closed his eyes.