prompt ideas if ur still up to it! mayhaps smth with shirakumo & aizawa, like a memory, or how he might see him still in ppl like midoriya? or more villain!midoriya maybe because i think your take on that is really neat!
for my 30 min fic challenge / read more: ‘30 min fics’ tag | commission me!
In the cold, pristine hospital hallway, Aizawa Shouta allowed himself one minute of weakness. He leaned back, shoulders hitting the wall first, and then he shut his eyes and felt exhaustion wash over him.
It was late. He’d been permitted to visit, and remain, as his students’ teacher and as their emergency contact. Three students, each in varying conditions. Shouta knocked his head back against the wall, feeling a dull pain at the impact.
His phone buzzed. Hizashi, most likely; Shouta ignored it. He would respond later.
As he kept his eyes shut, memory bloomed in the darkness. It rose in his throat and choked him in the same moment. Midoriya buried under rubble as his friends knelt, panicked but determined to get him out. Uraraka had pressed bleeding hands to concrete chunks, and one by one they had floated as the others shoved away stone. Shouta had arrived then, panic bursting in his chest.
When they’d gotten him out, Midoriya was unconscious. Shouta, uncaring of what anyone thought, threw himself down and pressed desperate fingers to his kid’s pulse point and thought, no, please.
“Oboro,” Shouta murmured. With that his minute ended, and Shouta opened his eyes again, pushing himself off the wall.
He was protecting the children, Iida had reported later, sitting in a hospital bed with his arm in a sling. His glasses were cracked and skewed to one side.
That sounded familiar. That sounded like Midoriya— that sounded like something Midoriya would throw himself into, without hesitation and without thought. He seemed to have an affinity. Where there was pain he felt it, almost an instinct. Shouta understood that, to a degree; where Midoriya seemed to know surely, when other people were hurting, Shouta knew danger like it was a knife constantly pressed to his throat. When he moved, he felt it, noticed it from out of the corner of his eye.
Shouta slipped into the second room in the center. Uraraka was still awake, gazing out the window. She shifted, surprised, when Shouta entered.
“Sensei,” she said, offering him a small smile.
Uraraka nodded, but her expression fell just slightly. He wasn’t used to this. Uraraka was a girl who smiled often and broadly. The one here was quiet and solemn.
“Did you need something from me, sensei?”
He shook his head back. “I wanted to see how you were doing,” he told her simply. Her shoulders slumped. Shouta took the silent invitation to cross the room, crouching by her bed.
“Can you,” she whispered, holding out her hand. Shouta wasn’t sure what she wanted, but he grasped Uraraka’s hand in both of his and felt her heart beat between his fingers.
“You’re alive,” he told her, “and you saved everyone. There were no casualties. You did alright, kid.”
Uraraka made a pained noise, and started shaking. He knew her well enough now to guide her into a hug, feeling her clutch at the front of his shirt and crying into his shoulder.
“It’s over,” she said, voice shaking. “Sensei, why am I still scared?”
“It’s okay to be scared,” Shouta told her. “You might feel that way for a while.”
“I don’t want to,” Uraraka admitted, and he pressed a hand flat against her back and bent his head over hers.
Could Shouta promise that? The fear hadn’t left him. It’d chased him, stepping on his shadow and watching him stumble when it did. An uninvited guest, but a guest nonetheless, one he’d learned to welcome and shake the hand of.
But he remembered there were bright spots, too. Rarely, most often coaxed out by Hizashi, Shouta allowed himself to leave the fear at the door and pause, momentarily, to look at what he had and not the empty space of what he had lost.
“I- I don’t… we’re not even pro heroes, yet,” Uraraka said. She reached up and wiped her eyes, and Shouta recognized the moment was over and stepped back. “I just think, like, sometimes I’m- we’ll lose… we’ll lose him. Because he’s like that. And I don’t want to.”
“Not for a long time yet,” Shouta said, “I won’t let him.”
She smiled, briefly, but it fell again. “I don’t think you can stop him.”
Shouta considered the thought carefully. One room over, Midoriya was lying on a similar bed fast asleep. Shouta had spoken to him briefly—Midoriya’s first question was to ask after the two children he had been protecting, and then his friends. But he’d admitted he had been scared, for a moment, that he was going to die.
You don’t want to, Shouta told him, gripping his arm tightly. He thought he saw Oboro in Midoriya’s face—they didn’t look similar, but they had the same light in their eyes. They smiled. And Midoriya had done exactly what Oboro had done, but only one of them had survived.
If asked, Shouta wouldn’t have been able to choose between one or the other, if he could have saved only one. He would have done anything to save them both.
But Shouta was glad Midoriya made it. Glad that Shouta had pressed his fingers down and felt the faint pulse beneath the pads of his index and middle finger.
No, Midoriya said back after a long moment. I’m not ready to.
“You’re his friend,” Shouta said after a long moment, “do you know what responsibility that gives you?”
Uraraka licked her lips and said carefully, “To be there for him.”
He nodded once, decisively. “Your responsibility is simply that. To be there for him. To be his friend—so when he needs to, he can look over and see you there.”
Shouta sighed. Hizashi had done that. They’d spent nights together, Shouta’s throat raw from screaming; Hizashi had stayed, chose to stay, even though it hurt him, too. That alone had saved Shouta, time and time over, in a way that heroes did.
“I am his teacher, not his friend,” he said after another moment. “Unlike you, my responsibility is to teach him—to guide him, to guide all of you down the right path.”
“You’re doing a good job,” Uraraka whispered when Shouta didn’t continue. “You’re always- you always… you seem to always be right where we need you to be.”
Shouta huffed. “I don’t.”
“It’s true,” Uraraka insisted. Shouta had only done what he had wished someone had done for him—reckless in his grief, driven in his untempered anger. Hold your arms out. Steady.
Uraraka paused. “What is it, then, sensei? Your responsibility?”
“To teach him,” Shouta said, “that his life is worth the same as the ones he saves—that it does not count as a victory just because he takes a blow meant for someone else. I see something in him.”
“Me, too,” Uraraka admitted. “I think… we all do.”
“I’d like to see him become a hero,” Shouta said firmly, “and I will get him there.”
Uraraka lifted her gaze to his. Shouta thought, I see Oboro in all of them. Their kindness and their compassion, their bright minds, their selflessness. And—their youth. Oboro had been young, and Shouta had outgrown his memory though it remained where it was, tucked away.
But the difference was there. Shouta did not have children, but he’d watched generations step foot into the world as pro heroes. He was a pro hero himself, and though once unfathomable to his fifteen-year old self, a teacher. They could become more than what Oboro had been, what he was not allowed to be. Shouta would see Midoriya do it, one day, where Oboro had not.
