Chapter Text
Shouta despised hospitals.
The scent of cleaning materials intermingled with the fading scent of blood and death. Wheels squeaked quietly against the tile, never a loud disturbance to other patients. Quiet hums of the crackling intercom drifted above him, a soft voice calling for Dr. So-and-So or a nurse. That ever-present hum of noise and energy from the nurses’ station. The sight of visitors drifting around as if they were ghosts, red-rimmed eyes, and forlorn expressions; curled up on uncomfortable plastic chairs as they awaited to be informed on the fate of their loved ones.
He hated it even more when one of his kids found themselves in one.
His phone vibrated quietly in his pocket—likely Hizashi, updating him about parking, or Midoriya Inko, wanting to know if there were any updates he’d be able to tell her, or, perhaps, it was Nezu—but Shouta hadn’t moved to open it. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes for a moment, taking a breath to keep his rising emotions at bay.
“Midoriya.”
A wobbled, trembling breath. The body beside him shuddered into existence, and Shouta had the morbid comparison of a marionette getting yanked upright by its’ strings, never able to gain autonomy. Shouta swallowed a grimace at the sight of the blood (Shinsou’s blo—) pinking Midoriya’s hands, caking beneath his fingers.
“Midoriya,” Shouta repeated; softer, gentler than he had ever been, faced with Midoriya’s blank, distant gaze. “I need you to breathe.”
A wheezed noise escaped Midoriya. Good enough.
“That’s it,” Shouta coaxed in a quiet tone. His hands remained perched on his lap, but he angled his body to show he was attentive to Midoriya’s behavior. Given Midoriya’s violent flinch and reaction to when Shouta had touched him earlier, back when they’d arrived at the hospital, he did not want a repeat. “Keep breathing like that, Midoriya. Deep breaths.”
Midoriya continued those soft, wheezing noises for breaths. Color bloomed back into his face at some point. He no longer looked half a second away from passing out, which Shouta counted as a success. His phone buzzed twice, and he continued to ignore it.
They’re just kids. Exhaustion draped over the line of Shouta’s shoulders, wrapped tight as if it were a shock blanket. All of them are just . . . children.
(Shouta had been a child, once.)
(So was Oboro.)
“. . . Sensei,” Midoriya managed to say, bottom lip wobbling. A part of Shouta hoped the kid wouldn’t cry, but then scolded himself for that line of thought. Crying was a natural coping mechanism, especially when in the aftermath of trauma. Just because he had a stunted emotional range didn’t mean his students had to have it. “Aizawa-sensei, what ha-happened to-to him? Who would . . . wh-who would do that . . ..”
I don’t know, Shouta wanted to say. Except he did know. He knew the sick and twisted people often crawling in the underbelly of the underworld. He had fought, and arrested, sadistic pieces of shit who thought nothing twice about slicing through a child, making them bleed for their own enjoyment. He knew, even, what foster care was often like, especially for kids with rare and powerful quirks like Shinsou’s.
He knew how cruel adults—even, children—could be to those who didn’t fit within the standard norms of society. He knew the consequences that followed being ‘othered.’
There was only one thing Shouta could do, nonetheless. Comfort and ground Midoriya, and, once Shinsou was out of the ICU, provide support and safety as best as he could. Midoriya slumped against his side, and didn’t flinch back when he pressed a grounding hand against those green curls. “We’re going to figure it out,” Shouta responded because it was important that Midoriya’s questions, however rhetorical, wouldn’t go unanswered.
Midoriya clung to him. He didn’t complain, even when the kids’ grip dug into his skin. He’d slap on a salve later. His phone buzzed again. He took a moment to send a few updates, taking a bit of time given he could only really use one hand.
“Er . . . Pro Hero Eraserhead-san?”
Quiet shattered around his ears. Midoriya made a soft, almost choked, noise in the back of his throat, jolting like some startled cat. Shouta raised his head to see a doctor—Sasaki Yuu, according to her nametag—with an empathic, though solemn, smile on her face. Although most of her PPE had been removed, he could spot a few dried stains . . .
. . . Blood, Shouta noted in the back of his mind, a cold horror sinking deep into his spine. Shinsou’s blood. His student’s.
Dr. Sasaki took a breath, and then motioned for Shouta to follow her. “I’d like to speak with you Shinsou-kun.”
Slivers of red and blue light flicker in the dark. It slices through the quiet slumber blanketing the neighborhood, a crowd of emergency vehicles near the complex he knows to be Midoriya’s home. Shouta is a blur as he lurches out of the car, distantly hearing Hizashi’s protesting squawk of, “Shou, wait, that’s dangerous—!”
Shouta doesn’t exactly care about the dangers of leaving a car before it’s fully stopped. His left ankle protests at the action, but Shouta has more important things to worry about. His students, for example. His students that have gotten into – something, he wasn’t sure what yet, and called him at four in the morning.
He had wasted little time out rousing Hizashi, considering the man was mostly awake, and grabbed his capture weapon as he all-but flew out of his apartment. He had never run to a car so quickly in his life. Every second they took would mean a potential loss. He would’ve run, but Midoriya’s apartment was too far on foot and needed a train.
His feet slap against the pavement. Gravel pinches one of his toes, causing slight pain. He’d forgotten a slipper in his haste. It takes him less than a minute to reach the sight and slip under the caution tape, the police officers recognizing his jumpsuit and capture weapon.
The first thing Shouta sees is haunting crimson.
Blood.
Distant bile builds in the back of his throat, but he shoves it down. Not the time. Not the time. His gaze is almost erratic as he tries to seek out his students. He should likely ask one of the officers, but—they’d take too long, and they’d want to chat and speculate, and Shouta doesn’t need that right now. What he needs is—
One of the ambulances peels away, siren earsplittingly loud in the early night. He watches it go, hopelessness rising in the distance, when he catches sight of Midoriya’s familiar silhouette. He’s perched on the hood of a police car, looking . . . looking . . . Shouta can’t place his expression. He’s not sure if he even wants to.
“Midoriya.” Shouta stands in front of the teen, who only gives him a listless stare. There’s a shock blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Voices float in the air—the emergency workers, some neighbors, Hizashi—but Shouta blocks it out. Midoriya is his priority. “Hey. I need you to give me some response, kid.”
Shouta reaches out to lay a grounding hand on Midoriya’s shoulder—but it’s clearly the wrong choice, given the full-body flinch and stuttered, almost wheezing, breath it causes. He doesn’t know where Midoriya’s mother is, but frankly, his attention is hyper-focused on his student.
“I’m sorry,” Shouta continues in a calming tone. “I didn’t mean to startle you, Midoriya.”
Midoriya’s lips move, as if he were mumbling, but Shouta can’t decipher his words. He takes a step closer, carefully gauging Midoriya’s responses, and leans in to hear properly.
“. . . Blood,” Midoriya whispers, louder, more frantic, more desperate and grieving. He reaches to thread a trembling hand through his hair, and Shouta spies streaks of red dripping onto his forehead. He never wants to hear that tone on a student ever again. “Blood . . . there’s so much blood . . .!” Midoriya then grips the front of Shouta’s shirt for purchase, for grounding, a wild yet distant look in his eyes, as he gasps out, “Hitoshi – he – he lost so much blood, sensei . . ..”
Shouta feels the world narrow and darken. White noise nestles deep in his ears the longer he stares at Midoriya, at the blood, at that achingly familiar expression on Midoriya’s face. He almost misses the last thing Midoriya whispers, all soft and pitting like a dying ember:
“. . .Why was there so much blood?”
Shouta had never been a fan of hospitals, even before he started his career in Underground Heroics—but he found that he hated them even more as it forced him to stare down at the lifeless state of his student. Dr. Sasaki and her team have managed to stabilize Shinsou for now, but there would be a few more surgeries and sessions with healing quirks before he could even leave the hospital, let alone be considered “recovered.”
If he could even recover from what had happened.
Shouta had remained quiet as Dr. Sasaki informed him of the entire list of Shinsou’s injuries—including old ones that caused him to want to bypass the bureaucracies and just fight Shinsou’s foster parents with a crowbar—but he had festered with rage. It pieced a picture that hadn’t been pretty, and if Shouta’s honest, it was one of the worst cases he had ever seen in his entire career.
Midoriya hadn’t needed to be admitted, given he had no injuries on his person, but he refused to leave the hospital. His mother had dropped off a bag of clothes and other necessities for him, trusting that both Aizawa and the hospital staff would keep her son safe, but she periodically dropped by on her staff rotation to check up on them.
There was something fierce and protective in Midoriya’s eyes the longer Shinsou struggled to breathe. Shouta would be a terrible liar if he said he didn’t feel the same, however. His gaze rarely strayed from the oxygen mask strapped to Shinsou’s face. A part of him felt that if he looked away for longer than a minute, then his student would disappear from his grasp.
A wisp; dispersing swiftly in the quiet.
Barely four hours had passed since Shouta received that mind-numbing phone call. Hizashi had reappeared at some point with a bag of clothes for Shouta, already aware that nothing short of a national emergency would be able to pry him away from Shinsou’s bedside but had to leave around the third hour for a late night shift at the radio station.
A random show on the TV played quietly. Shouta barely paid it much attention, allowing the low voices and laugh tracks to fade into the background noise of beeping machines and scuffed sneakers, the rustle of scrubs and the hum of murmured voices. Midoriya would scroll through his phone here and there, tapping out a message in the class group chat everyone thought Shouta had no idea about, but, for the most part, remained almost uncharacteristically still and quiet.
Shouta knew he should say something—reassure the teen, at the very least, of Shinsou’s potential recovery. He should offer comfort. Be a shoulder to cry on, whether that be metaphorical or literal, given Midoriya’s natural tendency for tears. Yet Shouta found himself chained in place, words frozen where they formed on his tongue.
He remained transfixed, counting every uneven breath Shinsou rasped out, his mind whirling at the sight of the bandages, and the casts, and the wires and tubes sticking out of the teens’ skin, attached to a near alarming number of monitors and machines.
Tortured.
Shinsou had been tortured.
He wasn’t sure of the ‘who,’ just yet. Those darker parts of Shouta, nursed to fruition by mere proximity of his choice in career, whispered plans of revenge, of justice in the form of broken bones and sprayed blood. Eye for an eye, as the saying went. Shouta knew if he had the chance to meet the person (or persons) responsible for his students’ current condition, he wouldn’t be able to control himself and would likely lose his license for ‘excessive force.’
Said force being that he would slam their skulls against the concrete. Let them see if they liked being on the receiving end of that pain.
. . . Perhaps that was why Tsukauchi informed him he wouldn’t be allowed on the case. Although the detective phrased it much kinder than that, citing “personal conflicts with the victim,” they both knew the truth. Shouta would very much end up in a different cell by the end of the case had he been placed on the investigation team.
Tsukauchi promised updates, however, which Shouta (and his anxiety) appreciated.
There would be questionings, soon, in the later hours, but that was a worry for later. For now, at the very least, Shouta would remain vigilant and do his best to maintain a calm façade, for Midoriya’s sake, at the very least. If anyone else wished to harm his students, well—they wouldn’t get passed the door, that’s for sure.
Shouta leaned against the uncomfortable seating—someone needed to add more to the hospital budgets; his chiropractor was not going to be pleased at their next appointment—and sighed. He briefly pressed his hand against his eyes, even though they weren’t as dry as they normally were, if only to add another pressure to ground him into reality.
“. . . Is – Is Shinsou-kun going to . . . make it?” Midoriya questioned; voice soft and yet it echoed sharply as if he had pulled a Bakugou and yelled. Shouta removed his hand to see various emotions flutter across the kids’ expression: hope, and fear, and grief, and others that flashed by too quickly for him to identify.
Shouta had never been one for meaningless platitudes. They gave false hope and went against his entire pedagogy of logic. That didn’t mean he was heartless, however, no matter what the rumor mill might say otherwise.
“He will,” Shouta assured the teen. Midoriya and Shinsou were both too young for this situation. Hell—Shouta somehow felt too young, and far too old. “He had positive responses throughout . . . his surgeries, so the medical team believe he’ll recover with time.”
Quiet drifted between them for a moment. Shouta observed Midoriya’s expression carefully; he certainly wasn’t a licensed therapist, but he had empathy. He knew, at the very least, how to listen and support someone through a crisis—and this absolutely counted as one. Midoriya visibly struggled with the words he wished to say, and Shouta remained silent, allowing him the necessary space and time to reform his thoughts into words.
Midoriya’s gaze dropped to the supportive cast on Shinsou’s collarbone. “I’m scared, sensei,” he whispered.
Shouta ran fingers through his hair and sighed. “Yeah,” he agreed, softer, his heartbeat somehow in tune with one of the monitors’ consistent beeps. “I am too, kid.”
But—the morning.
Everything could wait until then. For now, Shouta would remain right where he was, protective and alert for any other stressors that dared to show their presence. That was the least he could do, after everything.