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One day, while Aizawa was sitting at his desk looking up some tech specifications, a regular scene repeated itself: All Might burst in with a loud bang and his usual redundant announcement, stars and sparkles practically flinging themselves from his meaty, rigorously posed body.
As per usual, Aizawa sighed tensely, wishing he wasn't half as hungover as he actually was.
All Might's entrances were always distracting, always too loud, and who knew what he wanted this time. The time and energy the older hero spent staying All Might (usually sprinting around the halls and riling up the children into unintelligible sucker-punching little goblins) exhausted him by proxy, and he had to think there would be an end to it, or at least to the “I am here” nonsense. Everyone knew when he was there. He was the size of a barn.
Aizawa began to close the huge textbook to deal with the noisy super-sized issue currently hurting his head, but a wrapped package whacked down onto the page he was on. It was an obnoxiously yellow box with bright blue and red tissue paper peeking out. He blinked.
Cautiously, he unwrapped it piece by piece, and the gift rolled out onto a pile of tissue paper. It was a coffee mug. A dark blue mug.
All Might was yammering about something in front of his desk, some MadLibs of honor and invading personal space and smashing treasured possessions, and through all the bravado Aizawa finally connected the dots. He was talking about that first night with the broken mug. He blinked again.
Aizawa didn't have favorite mugs, or really favorite anything. It was just an excuse at the time. All Might didn't know that, and he had no intention of updating him.
The way the enormous hero was going on about settling a debt, he likely thought this would cheerfully seal off some troubled portion of their relationship with a bouncy bow, which Aizawa didn't like the taste of. For several reasons, mind, one of which was the entirely rational law of You Still Did That Shit.
To be honest, he didn't resent All Might – Toshinori – losing his shit in his kitchen and trying to transform to prove a point. Not at all. It was going to happen some time, somewhere, so he was glad it didn't happen in front of the students, and if he hadn't erased his powers at the time it probably would have resulted in little more than an indignant lecture about the meaning of being a self-sacrificing idiot and a huffy exit. The only malice and threat of injury that night was all inward-facing, and Aizawa's only choice was to stop the whole messy affair with what resources he had, which were always enough.
As it was, Aizawa was glad to cut through the bullshit that night. It had certainly accelerated the other man's tightening grip on reality, and led to some interesting and ... fun moments. And erections, the mutual sort.
He thought back on the last session they'd had and recounted exactly how he had turned away and kept the older hero blissfully unaware that he wasn't the only one finding everything a bit titillating. The deception had curtailed any potential aftercare, which never sat well with Aizawa, but he thought in the long run it was better than introducing such a complicating element as his own arousal. The homeroom teacher had calculated in the likelihood of a sexual element to their interactions when he initiated all of this, perhaps if just because they were both busy, stressed and sex starved, but the last thing he wanted was to push the focus off of Toshinori's own experience.
After all, he hadn't expected to finesse around his own erection while assisting a coworker with a little physical therapy, but neither had he expected the Symbol of Peace to have a self-righteous fit in his kitchen and require physical restraint to keep him from wrecking the whole place.
Pretty words and gifts aside, it had still happened; he was pretty sure there were still bits of ceramic lingering under his counters, and he was too lazy to clean under there. A new mug wasn't going to help him do that.
As the hero talked on and on, Aizawa leisurely pushed the mug with a single finger, edging it closer and closer to the front of the desk. He waited until All Might looked down at him, arms out in some self-congratulatory pose, before he poked it off the desk entirely, eyes locked with the other hero's. It shattered and All Might dropped to his knees, aghast.
“Oops,” Aizawa told himself not to say and still said it. Damn.
Then he shrugged and said something about All Might being cursed with mug shattering powers and got his bag and left the golden hero miserably gathering up ceramic shards. Because You Still Did That Shit.
Really, he thought that would be the end of it. All Might boisterously gifted him something, and he broke it within a 60 second window. He'd practically said, in as many actions: Don't buy me things, it won't get you anywhere. But of course, always one to blame himself, All Might apparently interpreted this as “I bought you the exact wrong thing,” which led to the hero bringing him a litany of mugs over the next few days, each one of which met a sordid fate.
The floor. The chair. The window. Kirishima and Bakugou. Even the garbage disposal. He was a serial mug murderer without shame or hesitation, all crockery and intentions reduced to shards in his cold hands.
That is, until The Mug.
It was clearly a last minute play. An act of desperation. It was lacking the bow, the meticulous wrapping paper. There wasn't even a note, and the usual self-indulgent keychain marker was nowhere to be seen. It was stowed at an angle in his desk drawer, and he almost didn't see it. Then he did.
His eyes widened. His hands carefully bore it out of the drawer and onto his desk, and he inspected it, tracing the mug's handle with a finger. The handle was warped and a little curly. Because ... it was supposed to be a cat's tail. There was a cat on this mug, a sleek black silhouette with derisive fuck-you eyes, and its tail was the handle. He clutched it to his chest.
Outside the classroom door, unbeknownst to him, Toshinori pumped his fist wildly, nearly knocking out a student who wandered by.
The next day, Aizawa was drinking his black-as-sin coffee out of it. It lived on his desk. It lived in his heart. The female students thought it was the cutest thing in the world, and Aizawa did not care as long as they didn't come within a foot of it or make any overtures of touching it. Otherwise, he was prepared to throw down.
Toshinori did his absolute best to keep a straight face whenever he saw his co-teacher contentedly sipping from it, and perhaps because he knew this particular mug was never to be used as artillery, Aizawa generally ignored him with a faint grimace.
School life went on per usual, with no great confession or best friend pinkie promise between the two men, but the mug had one great side effect. Whenever Toshinori approached his fellow faculty member with lunch, there was a 31.5% increase in the chances (pending weather, student tardiness and hours clocked in the sleeping bag that week) that Aizawa would pull out a chair if the day was Cat Mug day. It was usually Cat Mug day.
Great heroes didn't cackle in malicious, self-congratulatory delight, but maybe that was just because they didn't dare open their mouths. Turns out, Toshinori was learning more from Aizawa than he had ever expected to. He looked forward to their next lesson.