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Shouta knows about his parents' quirks, despite getting in the middle of a fight with a villain when he was four and sadly not around anymore, he knew what they were.
He also knew that his father had a cat mutation and despite not giving his physical appearances to his son he definitely passed down some interesting abilities.
Maybe it was why cats liked him so much, or maybe it was why he liked sleeping so much and could literally sleep anywhere if he stayed in place for long enough.
Hizashi Yamada, married Shouta Aizawa when they were twenty one and since then the blonde had noticed a lot of things that the dark haired man does that seem particularly cat-like.
At first Hizashi thought that his husband liked cats so much that he was projecting his love for them in his own behaviour.
The first thing the blonde noticed was that whenever Shouta yawned, his tongue would curl, much like a dog or a cat's would. The second thing relates to the first in which Shouta has fangs. He noticed them first when they were having a particularly rough make out session when they were fifteen behind the school.
Shou had begun trailing down his neck when he felt the slightest nip at his collarbone followed by more. Hizashi would say that he didn’t like it if you asked him but secretly he did. As Shouta accidentally drew blood he realised for the first time how sharp his boyfriends teeth actually were.
As he looked towards his husband's sleepy yawn in the morning sun, he saw them glinting in the honey covered room. He placed the information in the back of his mind and didn’t pay much attention to it. Loads of people have small mutations from their bloodline. Take Hizashi’s eyes for example, bright green and almost without pupils.
So he didn’t think much about it.
The next thing was something that he’d known Shouta had for a while. Lactose intolerance. He said his dad was lactose intolerant and had left it at that. So Hizashi, again, didn’t think much about it.
The fourth thing was noticed once again through a makeout session behind the school. Shou’s tongue was like sandpaper. Hizashi wasn’t complaining, it sent electricity down his spine despite his silent giggles at how it tickled.
Once again, he didn’t think anything about it.
One of his favourite parts of Shou was how his pupils shifted much more easily than anyone he knew. Whenever he saw a cat he liked, his husband or something shiny, his pupils would dilate to a size that almost took up his entire iris. It was how Hizashi knew he liked the soup he made, or when he was relaxing with his cats, or when his husband would kiss him in a certain way that made shivers go down his spine.
But he realised it all one morning.
It was a normal Saturday, July 16th and they had nothing on that day. Class 2-A were safely in the dorms or at their parents house where Shouta knew that they were safe.
Hitoshi wouldn’t emerge from his room until at least twelve o’clock, and Eri knew where the bowls and cereal were by this point and that most of the household deserves not to be woken up at half seven on a Saturday.
The honey dipped room was cascaded in warm sunlight, pillows and blankets messed up from last night and a couple of old cat stuffies scattered around.
Hizashi stared into the eyes of one that he had had since he was four, an old but loveable lion stuffie called lolly as she slowly slid down the side of the white sheets and fell onto the floor with a rattle of beans.
Hizashi scoffed and turned around to be faced with a sleeping Shou. His black hair messed and tangled, falling over his peaceful facial features. He looked beautiful. Hizashi was overcome with a familiar warmth as he pushed the tangled mess of hair out of his husband's face, smiling softly at the scrunched face he made at the slight disturbance, only to relax when the blonde began to card his fingers through the mess of thick black hair.
He continued for a minute only to stop, there was a sound. He initially thought that it was Eri in the kitchen, but it wasn’t. It was closer and more constant, but quiet.
He strained his ears as much as he could, but his hearing aids could only do so much. He liked to put them in first when he woke up, just in case there was a fall out of bed or a smashed bowl he had to take care of.
No, it had gone now, it must have been a cat under the bed.
His fingers subconsciously started to work through his husband's hair again, finding the knots and untangling them, making the mop of black hair smooth to work through as he started to wake up a bit more than before.
It was there again, the rumbling. It was too loud to be one of the cats underneath the bed, that was a more muffled sound that he sometimes heard before taking out his hearing aids and going to sleep.
There wasn’t one on the bed, he knew that much.
Hizashi looked towards his husband, dozing peacefully in front of him, and his eyebrows knitted together. Hizashi shuffled a bit closer and pressed his ear against the steadily breathing chest of Shouta.
The vibrations echoed through his body in the steadily repeating rhythm of breathing. His husband purrs.
It was the only thing that came to mind as he stared into the lovingly tired eyes of his husband.
They stared at each other for a moment before Shou yawned wide enough that he could easily compete with one of their more sleepy cats, such as bastard, before closing his eyes and leaning closer to Hizashi, the stuttering purr he heard before starting up again.
Hizashi laid there for what felt like years before he finally spoke.
“Shou?” He got a very deep, sleepy hum in response.
“You didn’t tell me you could purr” Clearly Shouta was still half asleep as he relied very honestly.
“Of course, I didn’t want you to find out” Hizashi could help but hold back his laughter as a wide grin spread across his face.
“Why don’t you want me to find out Shou?” In response he got a half mumble into his shirt as his husband buried deeper into the fabric, wrapping his arms around Hizashi as he gently stroked his hair, the stuttering purr vibrating the air.
“Shou?” He nudged “why didn’t you want me to find out?”
“Because” and the rest was caught by the fabric once again.
“Because?” Hizashi tried again, trying to coax the answer out of his husband.
“Because it’s so easy” Hizashi would have slapped himself in the face if his hand wasn’t still in Shou’s hair.
“What’s so easy, Shou?” God this was like trying to wrangle an answer out of a drunk person, and even drunk Shou is easier than this.
“To make me purr, I like pets-“ and the rest was covered by the duvet, and the increasingly loud volume of purrs as Hizashi reached the bottom of Shouta’s head, where his hair stared at the nape of his neck.
Hizashi paused as this information was taken into his still sleepy brain, images flashed from over the years, how much Shouta loves cats, his teeth, his tongue, how he can literally sleep anywhere even on the high doses of coffee intake every day.
“Shou? Shou, do you have a cat mutation?” He got faint murmurs under the duvet “Shou?”
“My dad” his dad, he had talked about his dad a lot come to think of it, over the years of course. He knew that his parents had died in a villain attack when he was four, but he didn’t realise that Shou remembered so much about them. His parents.
It was all starting to make sense now, he had asked once, about his teeth, Shou had dismissed the question with “I have a mutation from my dads side” and they had all left it at that.
Oh what a mistake that was.
—-
The next morning, Hizashi woke to an empty bed, strange, he thought, Shou was never up earlier than him.
He yawned as he put his hearing aids in, turning them on just to catch the end of a conversation that had come from the direction of the kitchen.
Shou was comforting a sniffling Eri, ah, he quickly connected the dots of a broken bowl and went to the toilet.
He came downstairs to find a Shou with messy morning hair and a large coffee in his hand, next was an Eri with red eyes and a new bowl of cereal. Good, Shou had sorted stuff out.
He went to announce his presence, going in for a hug towards Shouta but remembered yesterday morning's sleepy conversation, and directed one of his hands towards Shoutas head.
The effect was immediate. As soon as Hizashi carded a hand through his hair and an arm around his shoulder, a stuttering deep throated purr echoed through the silent kitchen. They all stopped for a minute, Hizashi enjoying his newly found obsession and Shouta in calmed shock before Eri yelled out.
“Catzawa!”
After that it became a frequent sound that the aizawa-yamanda family household could hear. Whether it be early in the morning whilst Shouta and Hizashi sat together with a cup of coffee, a sleepy hand carded through hair and a brush in the other.
Or after school when Eri would come home to initiate a cuddle pile on the living room floor, jumping onto Shouta and burying her face in the crook of his neck. Hitoshi soon came to join the three on the floor, shuffling closer until his back was pressed against Shoutas' side and an arm around his shoulder.
One night Shouta heard the door open, and a dark figure looked in through the doorway. Shouta listened for a moment, finding the soft sniffles and measuring the height of the figure before calling out “Hitoshi?”
Shouta didn’t need to worry about his husband's hearing since Hizashi took his hearing aids out at night as Hitoshi came and shuffled next to Shouta.
“I had a nightmare” Hitoshi croaked as the strong arms of his dad wrapped around him comfortingly. Shouta hummed thoughtfully “do you want to talk about it?”
Hitoshi shook his head before replying with a stuffy ‘no’ and snuggled closer into Shoutas chest.
He hummed a short answer and they continued to lay there in silence before Shouta brought a hand up to Hitsohis head, smoothing out the tangled and ruffled hair in order to comfort if he didn’t want to talk. Shouta slowed his movements as a small vibration came from his son below him.
It wasn’t, purring so to say, it had a similar vibration but it didn’t come from the throat and he knew that hitsohi’s parents didn’t have mutations to give him such vocal chords. It stopped and started in a not so repetitive fashion and there were sometimes short silences before it started again.
“Hitoshi?”
It stopped as soon as he hummed and looked up at him through the dark.
“Are-are you purring?”
There was a moment of silence before Hitoshi replied.
“Yes? No. Kind of?” There was once again some silence before he started explaining.
“I just- I thought it was really cool that you were part cat, and it got me thinking if a human, well someone without the mutation could be able to do it, i didn’t find very good searched for ages , just how the vocal cords to purr are placed in a human with a mutation and I’ve got to say it’s pretty cool, until I came across a website that showed you how to position your tongue into kind of purring, I guess?” He sighed for a moment before saying “I’m sorry, it was weird”
There was a moment of silence before Hitoshi started to pull away and Shouta had to grip him to stop him from slipping out of his grasp. Chuckling as his own stuttering purr vibrated the air around them.
“Cute” was all he stated as he pulled Hitoshi further in as his stuttering purr filled the silent air.
It didn’t take long for Hitoshi to relax, pulling his arms in on himself as he leaned further into Shoutas warmth. Oh how grateful he was when he met eyes with a scruffy dark haired man through the window of the orphanage. As he gets pulled closer into the warmth of his dad. The deep rumbling lulling him into a peaceful sleep.
And if Hizashi finds them like that in the morning it wasn’t anyone's business but theirs, and whoever walks through the hallways of their home to find a picture hanging from a nail in the peach coloured walls.
Nope, it wasn’t anyone’s business.