#readerxaizawa

Chapter 1

         It was bitterly cold out, the kind of cold that clung to your skin and left raw red noses and cheeks behind. It was a short walk from your apartment to the grocery store, it was all up hill and tonight, it was against the wind. The cold weather had come in fast; you’d lost your winter jacket last spring in a fire that took out half of your building. Annoyingly, it seemed that villains usually acted up in poorer neighborhoods, it was always the low-income apartment complexes that fell casualty to attacks. There was less of a hero presence, and while you had your provisional hero license you still weren’t allowed to patrol your neighborhood alone at night.

         You hugged yourself against the biting wind, jewels of frozen rain whipping against your face. The dull golden glow of the grocery store doors was a blur through the tears forming in your eyes but none the less grew closer. The smell of sample soups and baking bread pierced through the onslaught of cold, a small pocket of warmth melting the air surrounding the doors. Two orange glowing heating lamps hummed on either side of the door, the awning keeping the rain from snuffing the lamps out.

         The store was near deserted, not a surprise considering it was ten o’clock at night. In your general experience there were three types of people who shopped this late at night, shift workers, insomniacs and hungry stoners.  You scurried off towards the baskets and faced the wall pulling the wad of bills out of your pocket, counting carefully. A lot of the first years at U.A.  were in need of a tutor and you were in need of some cash, they passed their classes and their  parents paid pretty well and as long as the session were between school hours and your serving job you could afford some actual produce every once and a while. You shoved the bills back in your pocket, there should be enough for the basics and something green.

         You grabbed a basket and began your wander through the aisles, you knew what you were going to grab but it still felt nice to pretend you had options. You were rounding the corner to an aisle when a can pyramid of wet cat food collapsed into your legs, you stumbled back grabbing onto to a shelf of pickled herring to keep from toppling over.

         “Fuck, sorry!” a familiar voice shouted. The ground tremored and a jar of herring shattered sloshing liquid down your arm. You looked up to see your English teacher, Mr.Yamada, one hand slapped over his mouth the other gripping a can of cat food.

         “Fuck!” he cursed into his hand.

         “I-it’s okay!” you laughed shaking the herring juice off your hand. Seeing your teacher in the wild felt weird on its own let alone seeing them demolish a cat food pyramid in a messy bun and exploding jars of herring. You couldn’t help but laugh, like really laugh. You dropped your basket and held your knees as you laughed. He joined in, the embarrassed blush draining from his face. The two of you laughed until a rather flustered older lady in a branded apron scurried down the aisle with a mop.

         Mr. Yamada apologised profusely and promised to pay for the broken merchandise. The woman, however, lit up when she saw him and assured him that it wasn’t necessary. She must have been a listener of his radio show because eventually Mr. Yamada was signing the back of some crumpled receipt paper and she was smiling to herself as she walked back to the cash registers at the front of the store.

         “Sh-should we clean up the mess for her then?” you asked looking at the abandoned mop.

         “No, I should be cleaning up. You should be getting back to your parents, they’re probably wondering where you’ve been.” Mr. Yamada said scratching the back of his head and staring down at the felled cat food pyramid.

         “Oh, uh-” you stuttered, it had been a while since someone in your life hadn’t known. It felt weird explaining your situation, you had gotten used to being on your own by now and the looks you got when you did were hard to bear. The looks that you used to read as sympathy had begun to wear on you as pity and with every new person that knew, there was one more person afraid to retraumatize you by bringing up anything family related.

“No, I’m all on my own, have been for a couple of years.” You sighed and sucked it up. He was a teacher, what was he going to go do? Teach you nicer? You knelt down next to the pile of cans and began a poor excuse of pyramid construction. “I-I can help!”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Mr. Yamada said, a dark look crossing his face ever so briefly. He quickly replaced his grimace with a somewhat theatrical smile. “Thank-you!”

He joined you on the floor stacking cans, but clearly missing the point of pyramid stacking. “You were late for class this morning, everything okay?”

You blinked and kept your eyes trained on the cans. You had been honest so far, might as well keep going. “Yeah, sorry. I got off work late last night and was just so tired I slept through my alarms. It won’t happen again.”

“Nah, that’s okay. It happens to the best of us.” He waved a hand over his head and smiled warmly. Eventually he gave up on helping the forming of the pyramid and decided instead to just hand you the cans that had fallen out of arms reach. You thought about telling him you could reach them with your quirk but couldn’t bring yourself to endure having him go back to stacking.

 “You know, if the whole hero thing doesn’t work out you could be a professional cat food pyramid stacker.”  he laughed as he admired your somewhat lopsided spire of cat food cans.

“Glad to know my homeroom teacher believes in me.” You grumbled melodramatically.

“It could be a fun double gimmick!”  he exclaimed waving his hands about. “Like how I’m a radio host and hero, you could, ya know-”

“Stack cat food cans and be a hero?” you entertained the ridiculous thought.

“Yeah, I see big things coming from it. Lifetime supplies of cat food, billboards of you swarmed in cats…” Mr. Yamada continued listing possibilities varying in absurdity.

You looked down at the puddle of pickling solution and glass and sighed, toeing a large piece of glass with your shoe. You grabbed a box of cereal you had been planning to buy and ripped open the top taking out the bag of cereal and putting in back in your basket. Then you placed your hand on the bottom of the box and turned it upside-down so the opening was facing the floor and focused on pulling the glass up into the palm of your hand. Like a vacuum the shards of glass were sucked up into the box and you flipped it over before releasing your gravitational pull.

“Smart.” Mr. Yamada grinned and grabbed the mop to finish the job. “We better get the glass and mop back to her.”

You grabbed your things and walked to the front of the store with Mr. Yamada, he with the dripping mop and you with your jingling box of glass. When the cashier from earlier caught sight of you two she turned bright red and apologized for leaving you to clean up the mess. Mr. Yamada assured her that it was his fault in the first place and he should have anyways. You nodded along when she spared you a glance between lovestruck gazes at your teacher.

A young man in the same branded green apron, noticing his coworkers lack of productivity, opened the next till and waved you through. By the time you were done with you whole grocery order for the week Mr. Yamada was also stepping away from his till with his two cans of cat food and a receipt inked with a red heart. Mr. Yamada paused at the door to zip up his coat and put on his gloves.

You did the same and zipped up your layers of hoodies and tugged your beanie over your ears, bracing for the frigid walk home.  “Where’s your coat?”

“Oh, I don’t- I need a new one. I’m a ten-minute walk away, I’ll be oaky.” You said stuffing your hands into your pockets. It had been a while since anyone had chastised you about dressing appropriately, you felt a little bit of warmth fill your chest.

“It’s freezing raining out, fine my ass!” Mr. Yamada exclaimed, exasperated. The tower of pop cases next to him swayed.  He winced and continued quieter. “I’ll give you a ride.”

“Thanks, but I should be okay wa-”

“It’s fifteen below and raining ice, you’re not walking.” He said. Something told you that it was settled, there was no arguing. It’s not that you didn’t appreciate the generosity, it would be nice not to have to thaw yourself out when you got home, but he’d have to see where you lived and that left a pit of embarrassment forming in your stomach.

“Thank-you.” You said quietly. He nodded and clicked a button on his car keys, a black car down the block humming to life under the heavy hail. The two of you stood under the heat lamps in a silence you were sure felt more awkward for you than from him.

“So,” you tried. “what’s your cats name?”

He smiled and looked at the food. “She’s Mr.Aizawa’s cat really, her name is Sushi and she’s a dramatic little snob who only eats fancy wet food.”

“But is she cute?”

“Adorable.” He beamed. “Okay, let’s make a dash for it.”

The two of you took off through the hail and practically jumped into his car, which felt like an oven on your chilled limbs. The car itself was nearly immaculate aside from a neatly folded up leather jacket laying across the back seat and the light dusting of white cat fur clinging to the cloth seats.

“Okay, which way am I taking off?” Mr. Yamada asked throwing the cans of cat food int eh back seat.

“Just straight down the hill until you hit tenth street, then take a right.” He nodded a pulled out into the slick road. The low murmur of the radio and hum of the engine kept the silence at bay, it had been a while since you’d been in a car you realized. You’d spent most of your commute time walking or on a bus, neither of which were particularly warm nor comfortable.

“So, you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but who do you live with?” Mr. Yamada asked after a long moment of quiet.

“No one, just me and my sad wilted ivy named Sho.” You looked at him through the corner of your eye, he kept his eyes on the road a sad smile pulling at the corners of his lips. “I was already fifteen when my parents died, and I had no interest in being part of someone else’s family. So, I’m all on my own. Provided that I can prove I can take care of myself and show up once a month to a meeting with my case worker until I turn eighteen.”

The smile slipped and he slowed to a stop at a red-light, the light painting his weary features crimson. “Why don’t you have a jacket?”

You chuckled to yourself, most people weren’t so brazen with their questions. “Last spring the apartment complex I lived in caught fire during a villain hero show down and half of my apartment got torched, my coat along with it.”

“Fuck.” He cursed under his breath, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be swearing so much around you. I-I’m just…fuck.”

The light turned green and he turned the corner. “Turn into the third complex down the road.”

         “You’re case worker, are they the one signing all your permission slips?” Mr. Yamada’s eyes were still trained on the road.

         “Yeah, Mr. Nezu arranged it. Is that a problem?” You felt your stomach drop, you couldn’t afford to miss any training.

         “No, no. I just-” he sighed and pulled off to the side of the road. The two of you sat there in the storm, the radio rumbling about power outages and low temperatures, and the hail beating down on the roof of the car.  “I’ve been your homeroom teacher for two years and I didn’t know about any of this.”

         “I asked Nezu to keep it to himself, I didn’t really want people to know. Everything was so new and upside down in my life that I didn’t want everyone watching me go through it, you know?” You tried to explain, fiddling with the handle of one of your bags in your hands.

         Mr. Yamada stared out at the road for a moment, drumming on his steering wheel before blinking back into himself. He turned to look at you for the first time since you’d gotten in the car. “Yeah, I get that. Y/n, I am your homeroom teacher and you know you can come to me if you need help with anything, right?”

         For the second time that night he made your chest bloom with warmth. It had been so long since anyone had fussed over you that didn’t know what to do with yourself. You kept picking at the bag handle in your hands. You nodded shyly, looking down at your hands willing the warm tears forming in your eyes away. The car was thick with a heavy quiet, it felt like a blanket curling around you. The car began to move again, and Mr.Yamada pulled up in front of the door to your building.

“Okay, well have a good weekend?” he asked as he unlocked the doors.

“You too!” I nodded and gathered my bags. “Thanks, for the ride Mr.Yamada.”

You open the door and got out of the car; the ice hailed down around you as you ran towards the door.

* * *

         The storm had left the world covered in frost and had kept most people from venturing out the next day. For a Saturday in a busy city like Musutafu everything was quiet, so quiet that your manager told you to leave early for the night. It wasn’t as cold as the previous night, thankfully the wind had died down in the morning and the sky remained clear all day. With the streets so empty it felt eerie like something had been lost with the coming of the storm. You hugged your layers of hoodies closer to your body and trudged on through the snow filled streets.

         You had tutoring sessions tomorrow afternoon which usually meant a free lunch or snack courtesy of your “student’s” parents.  That thought got you through the night as you curled up under your bed sheets still wearing a hoodie to bed, having gone to bed with a nothing but a cup of noodles and cheap coffee in you.

* * *

         You had made it through the weekend, mercifully all three tutoring sessions had supplied some kind of snack or drink, one even a full lunch. It was a good day indeed, exam season meant longer sessions which turned out to mean more food and more money.

The world still felt muted under that layer of snow that persisted through the weekend. Shops were slower to open, and chimney smoke greyed out the already pale sky. On Sunday night it snowed again, this time light fluffy flakes that made the city look pretty under the setting sun as you walked to work.

When Monday rolled around it was felt like everyone was rolling out of bed from a long nap, fresh faced with sleep still in their eyes. The streets and sidewalks were slicked with ice and made your walk to school a hazard. You fell a few times, bruises forming on your knees and hip as you made it through the gates of U.A.

You shoved your hoodies and beanie into your locker with raw red fingers and tried to warm up your pink nose in your palm before entering the classroom.

“Good morning, Y/n.” Mr. Yamada greeted as he passed behind you. “How was your weekend?”

“Good, thanks!” you let go of your nose and started to fumble with your books. “I worked pretty much all weekend, but it kept me busy and out of the cold.”

“Glad to hear it.” He looked at you for a moment, something unsaid behind his eyes. But then it fell away and he was back to himself.

“You’ll still be on time if you beat me to the door.” He started to walk in dramatic slow-motion, miming fake panic as you shut your locker and walked past him and crossed the threshold.

“Man, can’t believe I lost that race.” He grumbled as he followed you in, a goofy grin on his face. “GOOD MORNING!”

The room shook with his voice and the day started as it normally does, with Mr. Yamada rattling off announcements periodically using his quirk to make sure the students were all awake. The day continued, your next period a practical class co-taught with Mr. Aizawa and All Might. It was a routine rescue drill using the snow to their advantage and making a blizzard obstacle course. You’re team completed your run, faster than usual. You were glowing with pride, high fiving your classmates when Mr. Aizawa waved you over to him. Your celebration was cut short, he was a tough teacher and rarely offered any sort of instruction if it wasn’t constructive criticism.

“Mr. Aizawa?” you asked.

“Y/n,” he looked forward, hands in his pockets. “I’d like to see you in my room at lunch today. I have something I want to discuss with you.”

“Something you can’t talk about here?” You were in shit, you knew it.

He looked at you and you must have looked scared because his eyes softened. “Don’t worry, it’s not a bad thing.”

“Oh, okay.” You still felt uneasy about whatever it was he need to talk to you about but at least he wasn’t going to ring your neck for something you didn’t even know you did. “I’ll see you then.”

He nodded and looked forward again.

 “Good job on the course.” He murmured quietly as you walked back to your team.

***

         Lunch hour came and as promised you made your way to Mr. Aizawa’s classroom, 1-A, while your friends all left for the cafeteria.

         Inside, Mr. Aizawa slouched deeply in his chair snoring and Mr. Yamada was perched on the edge of his desk reading a paper with one hand and drinking a coffee with another. Mr. Yamada looked up and nearly jumped off the desk clamouring to his feet, waking Mr. Aizawa. Despite the fact that everyone knew they were together you had never really been able to picture them as a couple until now. They both stammered out greetings and swayed awkwardly, steeling themselves for something.

         “You wanted to see me?” you asked, their apparent nervousness somewhat calming yours.

         “Oh, yeah!” Mr. Yamada shouted in excitement. “I have- a thing!”

         He turned to Mr. Aizawa who was already picking up a shopping bag from beside his desk. Mr. Yamada waved you closer and took the bag from Mr. Aizawa, thrusting it out towards you. “I-I didn’t want to singe you out in class, so I asked Sho- Mr. Aizawa to ask you here. Um, anyways I don’t know if it’ll fit, if it’s doesn’t I can get a bigger one. Or if you don’t like it we can maybe go looking for one you like better…”

         You took the bag from his hands a lump forming in your throat as you peered inside. You saw a furry hood and black quilted nylon all bundled up and you felt tears fill your eyes. You only vaguely registered Mr. Yamada’s rambling as you reached in and pulled the jacket out to look at it. It was a simple black parka with a grey faux fur hood. The tears openly spilled down your face and you looked up at the pair who were silently watching you with grins plastered on their faces.

You didn’t know what to say, so you just looked at them with tears running down your face for what felt like minutes. When you final managed to get words out all you could muster was a “Th-thank you.”

“Mr. Aizawa picked it out, if you don’t like it.” Mr. Yamada replied awardly.

“I-I like it. I love it. Thank-you, guys.” You sniffed.

“Oh, well in that case I picked it out.” He amended, earning an elbow to the ribs from Mr. Aizawa.