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She’s getting too old for this.
That’s the main thing Shuzenji thinks as she quickly thanks the UA driver and hauls ass into the hospital. She’s gotten a pre-briefing. Sixteen-year-old male, massive tracheobronchial injury, avulsed human bites in the right thigh and calf, concussion of unknown degree, jaw and nasal fractures.
Hitoshi Shinsou, Shouta and Hizashi’s boy. He was the only child patrolling tonight. And someone tried to murder him.
She shakes the thought off for now. She’s got enough to worry about, having been on the phone with a resident getting the play-by-play for the last thirty minutes. She’s got a hellscape waiting for her. They need her Quirk if he’s going to live, or live the live he intends to, at least.
She scans her badge and pushes the bay doors open with a huff. “What have we got?”
“He just came back from CT. We had to intubate him downstairs—his airway’s swollen up in the last hour—”
She cuts the resident off with a hm . “Where’s the imaging?”
“Shuzenji!” Aizawa—distrusting Aizawa—yells, eyes flashing at her, then turns back to his son to murmur, “Hitoshi, Recovery Girl is here, you’re going to be fine.”
Shinsou, limp on the trauma bed, simply blinks at the ceiling, lips curling around the ET tube in his mouth. He’s at least partially sedated from the RSI, good. As she waits for the staff to bring her the images, she takes a brief look at him to confirm what she’s already heard on the phone:
He’s been bleeding profusely from the right leg. Even though the compression bandages on the wounds seem to have quelled most of it, the white sheet on the bed below is soaked in red. They’ve already hung two units of blood, and a glance at the monitor shows he’s swung into the depths of hypovolemic shock. His scalp is bleeding, too, his lavender hair patchy where chunks have been ripped out. And his face—his face is bruised to hell. Petechiae blooms all over his cheeks and eyes, painting them in a false blush. Bloodstains streak in patterns where his vocal modulator normally would be. Finger-like ecchymosis creeps out from underneath the c-collar on his neck.
“No c-spine injury, correct?”
“Still awaiting imaging to confirm.”
She considers it. “C-collar off.” she snaps. “I need to see what’s underneath. And someone bring me a damn stepstool.”
As she suspected, the bruising is all over his neck, from hands much, much larger than hers. It’s only beginning to purple now, deeply contrasting the paleness of his skin.
And, as children’s hands tend to do, Hitoshi’s hands start to wander as soon as the collar comes off, reaching to claw at an invisible attacker. His wide, childlike eyes flash and blink rapidly, searching for a reality that’s escaping him.
“Aizawa,” she snaps at his father, who can only be described as stricken .
He jolts at attention and does as silently asked. “Hitoshi, you’re okay.” He takes his hands and holds them gingerly. One hand is…suspiciously swollen and disfigured, and she’s able to diagnose it in just a glance. “I’m here. Dad’s here. You’re safe.”
Hitoshi pulls his hands away and begins to sign. He may not be able to speak, but nothing can keep Hitoshi Shinsou from communicating.
Whatever he says, it makes Aizawa’s dry eyes wet . “I know, I know, he’s gone. He’s gone, kid, I took care of him.”
“Broke your fifth and fourth metacarpals in the process, huh?” She scoffs. “You’re next, after Hitoshi.”
The stepstool she requested is placed in front of her, in time for her to properly make eye contact with Shinsou and reach her hands up. “Hello, Shinsou, dear. Can you hear me?”
His eyes flick to hers, and one hand weakly waves.
“I’m going to gently, very gently , touch your neck and take a listen with my stethoscope. I want you to hold on to Eraser’s hands while I do so and not fight me. Can you do that?”
He flicks his eyes to Aizawa and signs YES . Then his hands cement into Aizawa’s.
She then begins to feel for crepitus, feel for thrill. There’s a very slight carotid thrill under her fingers, which she confirms with her stethoscope—yes, there’s the bruit.
“I need that imaging, now ,” she barks, leaving her hand out for someone to place it there. Sure enough, she lifts the film to her line of sight and pulls her glasses up.
She’s no radiologist, but she’s seen enough over these years. There’s trauma along his carotid, fractures in his hyoid bone and all along his larynx, which is surprisingly calcified for a kid his age.
She tuts gently, “How much dilaudid has he gotten so far?”
“Half a milligram, ma’am.”
“Push another half, please.” She smiles down at him. “We’ll get you feeling better, Shinsou. I’m just going to look at your leg now, and then I’ll heal you, alright?”
YES. Then, he flips into another sign.
“‘Please,’” Aizawa interprets. “He said ‘please.’”
Her heart twists.
All it takes is a peek to confirm the damage she knows is there. Shinsou falls into slumber as soon as she applies her Quirk, eyes slowly blinking shut.
The curtain pulls open violently while she carefully, carefully extubates him, trying not to cause any more damage to the tissues in his throat that she just barely healed. “Shuzenji, is he—”
“Your son will be fine,” she says to Yamada, fastening the c-collar back on Shinsou to try and remind him to stay still when he wakes.
“He doesn’t look any better!”
“You’d really have me fix cosmetics at a time like this?” She examines around his oropharyngeal area, wincing when he barks out a few involuntary coughs to clear his airway. His high-pitched stridor has reappeared now that the ET tube is gone, but it’ll have to do.
“He sounds…” Yamada covers his mouth with his hand.
Aizawa’s eyes narrow. “Doesn’t that mean his airway is blocked still?”
“Someone paid attention in my class,” she scoffs. “I’ve done all I can do. I’ve repaired the fracture in his hyoid bone and the carotid damage, and I’ve completely healed the bite wounds. That leaves all the superficial wounds and the fractures in his larynx.”
“His larynx is fractured?” Yamada touches his own throat. “But—his Quirk, he needs his voice —”
“Tomorrow,” she insists. “It would have killed him if I healed it all tonight, he’s already too exhausted.” She takes the time to hook him up to CPAP, checking to see if the air running through it is humidified, fitting it to his slack face gently. “This mask will keep his airway open, and he mustn’t take it off. He’ll spend the next twenty-four hours in hospital hooked up to it, and I’ll heal the rest of his injuries tomorrow evening.”
She pauses to gauge their reactions. Both of them look at a loss, like the children they once were.
“Your job,” she outlines carefully, “is to keep him calm and comfortable until then. Do you think you can do that?”
They nod. Yamada swallows, Adam’s apple bouncing. Aizawa twitches like he wants to do something with his hands, settling them both in his capture weapon.
“Aizawa,” she tuts and holds her hand out. “Give it here.”
With a deep flush and a grumble, he presents his swollen, disfigured right hand.
“Jesus, Shou,” Yamada winces.
She kisses it gently, lighting the room up with the green of her Quirk.
“You still need a splint for the next forty-eight hours,” she says. “But you should do fine.”
The tired hrmfg she gets in return indicates he will do no such thing. Fine, if he wants a crooked hand, he can have a crooked hand, ungrateful boy.
“Alright, boys,” she sighs. “I’ll see you this time tomorrow. Call if you encounter any problems.”
She leaves them there, huddled around their son, and prays they’ll make it through the day.
It could be worse, Hitoshi thinks. He could be, like, dead, or kidnapped.
No. Instead, he’s waking up inside the hospital for…what could be the first time today, or potentially the fifth. Time slips away here. But he feels more solid this time, at least. Things feel more real. Including the angry talking above him.
“—you don’t understand , this is directly linked to your investigation—”
“Hizashi, can you get off the phone and not talk about ongoing investigations in public?”
God, his head aches . Is that Yamada and Aizawa? He blinks up at the ceiling, too tired to move and look to see who it is.
He tries to take stock of himself.
- Everything hurts.
- …
Alright, well, he tried.
“—I don’t give a fuck that it’s four in the morning and you don’t have his testimony yet, I’m telling you that he works for Garaki, and you need to push this to Tsukauchi’s department immediately !”
He really should figure out if that’s Yamada. If it’s not, he could be in very deep shit. Wasn’t he about to be kidnapped?
Yeah. Yeah, there was the big guy with the silver teeth and the portal and the choking and oh shit, his neck.
He reaches his hands up to touch, to see—
“Hizashi, get off the goddamn phone!” Hands scramble to hold him back. “Hitoshi, don’t touch, kid, you’re okay.”
He immediately pushes the hands off, or tries to—he’s got the strength of a newborn squirrel—then tries to at least turn and look to see what’s holding him down, but he can’t move his neck? He looks and looks and looks with his eyeballs, straining against his skull—his neck isn’t working, why isn’t his neck working—he’s in a hallway of some sort and there are lots of people and sounds and God he wishes he had just stayed asleep because everything hurts.
Everything has gone still now. Or, at least, Yamada and Aizawa have gone still, faces aghast with something as they look at him.
He makes the approximate sound for, “Wh—?”
And then he wishes he hadn’t. He starts to cough—it sounds like a dog barking, how the hell is he making that sound?—and it burns like Bakugo’s held a hand to his throat and tried to set him on fire. His hands reach up again, discovering there’s a plastic mask over his face, which he instinctively rips off.
His breathing immediately gets eight times worse. Oops.
“Shit, Hitoshi,” Aizawa says, catching where he threw the mask and bringing the plastic back to his face. “Breathe. In.”
He tries, opening his mouth a little to gasp like a frog. His chest keeps spasming with coughs, his eyes watering.
“Out.”
It’s agony . It’s almost worse than the part where he was actually being strangled. Air gives him no relief. He has no alternative than to ride it out and trust he’ll be okay, which sucks .
“In.”
But he obeys—he always listens to Aizawa, he just instinctively knows Aizawa’s going to tell him the right thing to do.
“Out. Good.” Aizawa steps back slightly, widening his field of vision. “You’re okay. Don’t try to talk, your larynx is fractured.”
Oh. That’ll do it.
“Can you sign instead?”
WHAT… he starts, mind blank, even though he has a million questions. TIME WHAT?
“Four-oh-three AM,” Yamada fills in. “You’ve been here six hours. We’re still in the ER, but they should have a bed ready for you upstairs soon so you can get some rest in the quiet. You’ve been in and out.”
He looks as much as he can, given that there’s a neck brace keeping him from twisting, oh. Yamada sits at the foot of the gurney. Aizawa leans against the wall with one hand reaching over the bed, curved over Hitoshi’s body in a protective move. He’s in a hallway—nurses pass by, glancing at him to make sure he’s alive—and it is rather loud. How he slept through this, he’s not sure, but he does feel the lingering fatigue of Recovery Girl’s Quirk clogging his veins and weighing down his eyelids.
“You seem more with it now, though, kiddo. How’re you feeling?” Yamada rubs his hand along Hitoshi’s uninjured thigh.
He raises his hand: UM…
He takes stock with a clearer head now: there’s a dull ache in his leg where that bastard bit him, twice , and he’s been changed out of his costume to place dressings in the spots that ache the most. Who changed him out of his costume? He hopes they left his boxers on.
He brings his hands to his face, feeling gently. There are bandages there, too, up on his forehead where he’d been pulled by the hair and along his cheeks where his modulator was. His nose has been splinted where that huge fist decked him, and his battered jaw aches when he opens his mouth experimentally.
The memories sting more than the wounds do, though.
And his neck—well, he can’t feel anything but the brace. He’s not sure if he wants to feel anything more.
He must look like shit.
I LOOK-like SHIT? he signs, unable to hide the smile that creeps up on him.
That strikes the right chord. Aizawa scoffs at him and Yamada laughs, head thrown back.
“I’ve seen worse,” Aizawa grunts and moves to ruffle his hair, then settles on just carding through it gently with his big, calloused hands. “You’ll be okay, kid.”
He doesn’t want to ask this question, but he does anyway: MY VOICE—
“Will be fine by this evening, when RG comes to heal you again,” Yamada fills in. “She couldn’t heal you all the way, you were too exhausted. For now, you’re a little too swollen to breathe on your own, so that’s why you have the mask.”
“You kept pulling it off,” Aizawa grunts. “Don’t do that anymore.”
SORRY.
Aizawa just keeps carding through his hair, almost like he’s self-soothing. But it feels good for Hitoshi, too, so he can’t complain.
He thinks back. The look on Aizawa’s face in the ambulance, the sound of his breathing now, the tightness in his brow and the clench of his jaw.
DOCTOR… He signs carefully. DOCTOR WANT MY QUIRK WHO?
“We’ll talk about this later,” Aizawa says decisively.
Yamada, on the other hand, does not seem satisfied by that. “Hitoshi, if I got you a piece of paper to write with, could you give me your statement—”
“I said, later ,” Aizawa growls at him.
Hitoshi furrows his brow, which aggravates the stitches in his scalp. S-T-A-T-E-M-E-N-T I GIVE-you NOW—
“Hitoshi, you need to rest . You’ve only been awake ten minutes.” Aizawa glares at Yamada. “Don’t you agree?”
“I—” Yamada starts, then begins to chew on his fingernail.
Something dark curdles in Hitoshi seeing them this way—they banter, sure, but Yamada and Aizawa don’t fight . Not like this.
YOU FIGHTING WHY? He decides to ask.
They look at each other, silently conversing. That’s more like them.
“This…Hitoshi,” Yamada exhales. “This is an investigation very near and dear to our hearts. Not just because you’re the primary victim, but—”
“Save this story for when we’re not in public,” Aizawa says, bitter and uncompromising.
Okay. His brain hurts too much for this, but he can’t help trying to decipher it. Some sort of past history. Which could be anything, but…
THIS RELATED-to O-B-O-R-O S-H-I-R-A-K-U-M-O?
They stare at him, Yamada’s jaw open wide and Aizawa looking suspiciously misty-eyed.
Yamada swallows and stammers, “How do you know who that is, kiddo?”
Midnight-SENSEI BEFORE TELL-me.
Hitoshi worries the hospital blanket between his fingers as they continue to stare. Yamada’s eyes dart off to the side. Aizawa hasn’t taken a breath in thirty seconds.
SORRY, he signs, recognizing his fuckup a little bit later than he probably would have if he weren’t so beat up. SORRYSORRYSORRYSORRYSORRY—
“Shhh,” Aizawa says quietly, placing his hand on Hitoshi’s twitching one to silence him. “Don’t apologize.”
“You’re one smart cookie, aren’tcha?” Yamada says, rubbing his thigh again. “We didn’t know you knew.”
I DON’T-KNOW MUCH ONLY LITTLE , he defends, which is true. He just knows it was their friend who died and that the case isn’t closed. That doesn’t mean he should have brought it up, though. I…SORRY.
Yamada drags a hand over his face, smudging his day-old eyeliner. “Your dad’s right. We should talk about this later, when you’re feeling a little better.”
“When’s Tsukauchi coming?” Aizawa grunts.
“...Any minute now.” Yamada has the decency to look a little guilty. “But he doesn’t need your statement yet, Hitoshi, just ours.”
I GIVE-him. I AWAKE.
“Famous last words from you,” Aizawa says, a hint of a grin on his face. “You’ve been nodding off this whole time.”
Hitoshi punches his arm weakly and tries to translate Takes one to know one . YOU KNOW BECAUSE YOU SAME.
“Yeah, yeah.” Aizawa rolls his eyes. “Sleep, Hitoshi. We’ll wake you if we need to.”
Aizawa’s hand pulls away from his hair, presumably leaving him alone. And Hitoshi tries to sleep, he really does.
But he gives in about thirty seconds later. He slits his eyes open, grasps Aizawa’s hand, and places it back in his hair.
“We’re here,” he rumbles, deep and comforting. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Only then does he fall asleep.
He wakes a full eight hours later, settled in a quiet hospital room with sunlight coming through the blinds. He’s comfortably propped up. An IV bag labeled Morphine hangs over his head. Yamada sits in a chair pulled up to his bedside, tapping on his phone. The muted room TV plays the news.
Then his face pops up on the news. Oh.
Hitoshi gathers the strength to tap Yamada’s arm.
He startles briefly, then smiles wide. “Good morning, cool cat.”
He points up at the TV and smiles wryly. LOOK. I FAMOUS.
“That you are. Wanna listen?”
Hitoshi fiddles with the remote plugged into the bed—he’s landed in the hospital way too many times as a hero student, he knows how all this works now—and gets it to play sound.
“ ...UA first year and Sports Festival battler Hitoshi Shinsou is confirmed to be the only casualty in last night’s attack. UA has released a statement saying that the hero-in-training is resting comfortably in hospital, being treated for his injuries.”
“Are you ‘resting comfortably?’” Yamada asks.
He signs YES quietly, making sure not to even try to open his mouth in response. In all honesty, he needs to pee, but he’s going to wait until it’s an absolute emergency before he does anything about it, given he’s probably on bedrest.
He gives him a skeptical look. “You want anything?”
COFFEE? He tries. He knows the lingering headache he feels probably has more to do with getting his face crushed in the street, but if it’s already noon, he should definitely have had his coffee by now.
“You can have black, but no cream.”
He frowns as much as he can when his whole face is bruised. Not only did he get the shit beat out of him, but he can’t have his coffee the way he likes? WHY?
“You’re on a clear liquid diet, kiddo, no cream for you.”
He pouts a little. Aizawa would probably let him have cream if he were here. Aizawa WHERE?
“He went to check on Eri. We thought you’d be sleeping a little while longer.” Yamada wiggles his phone in his hand. “I’ll tell him to grab you a coffee from that place you two like, he’s on his way back now.”
O-K. He decides to just go ahead and ask the elephant-addressing question: T-S-U-K-A-U-C-H-I BEFORE COME-here?
Yamada’s whole face changes when he gets serious. “Yup. But they’ve been searching for that bastard forever, so we didn’t need to supply too much info. He’s in Taratrus holding for now, apparently he’ll be indicted, like, today.”
Hitoshi would nod, but he’s physically unable to, so he just kindof stares.
“I’m sorry, kid.” Yamada bites his bruised lip—he must have been worrying it all day long. “We…You never should have been placed in this position. You shouldn’t have been in that quarter of the city last night. He never should have been on the streets. You—”
I WANT BE HERO, Hitoshi just says simply. If he could make facial expressions without his whole damn face lighting up with pain, he would scowl, but as it stands, he just makes a deadpan look at him.
“I know, but what use is—is dying before you can even start your career?” Yamada sucks in a breath through his teeth, making a whistling sound.
He can’t really argue with that.
“Your dad—he feels the same way, but he has a harder time coming to terms with it—seeing you last night, oh, God, Hitoshi, if we had been even a second late…Maybe it’s selfish, but I can’t lose you, too, I can’t . Not to him .”
He wishes he could do something to quell the nearly-visible agony curling off of Yamada’s frame. All he can do is blink while he grips his hand.
“S-s orr-y ,” he whispers, hoarse and painful and broken in a million different places. “S-s-o—” SORRY, SORRY, SORRY.
Something snaps in Yamada. He leans forward and does everything but pick Hitoshi up off the bed, holding him close as if to shelter him from everything around him. “You’re so much like him, fuck .”
And Hitoshi lets himself be held. Lets his pa have this one.
When he finally pulls away, frantically scrubbing the melted eyeliner going down his face, Hitoshi takes a risk and asks, HE—S-H-I-R-A-K-U-M-O…TELL-me, DESCRIBE.
Yamada smiles, a bittersweet thing. “Here. This was my sign name for him.” His graceful pianist’s hands quickly form BOY, then replaces it with the handshape for CLOUDY . “Shirakumo.”
Hitoshi tries it for himself. Shirakumo .
“Mm-hm.”
He uses it in action. Shirakumo DESCRIBE.
“He was a lot like you.” Yamada rests his chin on his hand, balancing on the bed rail. “Maybe he was a little more rowdy. But he was brave and smart and proud and determined.”
Yamada looks out the window for a moment, clearly years away.
“His hair was like yours, too. Blue, though.” He laughs quietly. “And he loved cats. Y’know Sushi? That was his baby first.”
Hitoshi perks up. Sushi’s an old cat now, all white in the face and stiff. THOUGHT Sushi BELONG-to Kayama.
“Nope. Shirakumo found him in a rainstorm.”
There’s a signature drawl from the door: “I found him first.”
“Semantics,” Yamada shoots back, not missing a beat. “And who’s that cutie with you?”
Hitoshi can’t see very well without turning his neck, but he catches Eri out of the corner of his eye, hiding behind Aizawa’s legs.
HI , Hitoshi signs. They’ve been working on their JSL together as a family when they get the chance, which isn’t too often, but she’s caught on well.
She peeks out. HELLO, she signs hesitantly. “You can’t talk?”
“We talked about this, remember?” Aizawa says, heaving her up on his hip with an oof. “Hitoshi hurt his voice box.”
She nods quietly.
HOSPITAL SCARY, Hitoshi says carefully, using simple signs. YOU O-K?
She just nods shakily. “But you’re hurt,” she murmurs as Aizawa brings her closer. Her eyes widen as she looks him over.
I FINE , he says, as reassuring as he can.
“This is yours,” Aizawa says, pulling out his phone from Hitoshi’s schoolbag. “We dropped by the precinct on the way over, got your stuff from before patrol.”
YOU SEE S-A-N-S-A? He asks Eri as he turns on his phone. He knows they’ve been friends since Eri’s rescue.
How sad it is that a child’s friends are her rescuers, he thinks. He’s inwardly glad that she’s at least got him and Yamada to support her, people unrelated to the Hasaikai raid.
She cocks her head at his signing.
“We did,” Aizawa fills in. “He’s asking if you saw Officer Sansa.”
“We’re friends,” Eri says meekly. “He’s a cat.”
And Hitoshi laughs for the first time since his throat got fucked up. It’s a barking sound that leaves him coughing and in pain, but it makes Eri smile for a moment.
His phone lights up once it’s booted up, and he switches to the camera to take a good look at himself. He was worried that he’d scare Eri with his undoubtably-nasty look right now, and he’s right. His cheeks and eyeballs are red as beets, speckled with little scarlet blood bruises. His nose is splinted up and his jaw is purpled. His upper forehead is decked out in bandages where his hair was pulled out. And, of course, his neck is adorned with a giant brace. He doesn’t want to know what it looks like underneath.
He snaps a picture and sends it to the 1-A groupchat, alight with 238 unread messages about his late-night escapade. Another fifteen messages come through as soon as he sends it.
SORRY, he signs to her once he clicks his phone off, wholly uninterested in what they have to say. I GROSS.
“No,” she says, climbing up onto his bed as soon as Aizawa lets her go, braver than Hitoshi expected. “Just hurt. I can—”
NO, he signs firmly to the unspoken suggestion of her Quirk. R-U-L-E NO , he fingerspells for her.
She pouts, biting her lip. But Hitoshi just places a hand on her head, ruffling her silver hair.
LOVE YOU, he offers freely. They’ve all been making a point to tell her at every opportunity.
She blushes and buries her face into her chest like a turtle.
But she perks up after a second. “Ooh.” She steals the (black) iced coffee from the drink carrier in Aizawa’s hand that he clocked as soon as he walked through the door. “I got you a present.”
Yamada and Aizawa laugh quietly as she presents it to him.
THANK YOU , he says. He very gingerly brings the straw to his lips and takes a small sip, testing.
It feels heavenly on his throat, the cool running through him like he’s never had a drink in his life. He starts gulping it down—
“Pace yourself,” Aizawa grunts. “Don’t make yourself sick.”
He has a point. Hitoshi slows down a bit at his request.
“And, um,” Eri pipes up from his lap. “I made you this.”
She pulls out a piece of paper from her pink overalls and hands it to him. GET BETTER SOON HITOSHI is written in glitter glue, complete with a drawing of Hitoshi in his costume. With a cape he doesn’t remember having.
“I think you should have a cape. Like Lemillion,” she says, unprompted.
YEAH? He grins, amused.
“Yeah.”
That’s all she has to say, suddenly shy again as she burrows down into his torso. He pets her hair, smoothing down the tangles. No one did her hair this morning since both his parents were with him all night.
The thought of him selfishly taking away her parents strikes across his mind for a moment, bringing a pang of guilt in its wake. He tries to squash it—he’s in the hospital , for Christ’s sake, he’s allowed to have his parents here.
And they’re all together now. That’s what matters, right?
“Eri,” Yamada says after clearing his throat nervously, uncharacteristically quiet. “I was just telling Hitoshi a story.”
She perks up. “I like stories.”
“I know you do, babygirl. You wanna hear?”
She nods eagerly.
“It’s about a friend of me and Shou’s from high school,” he says, a hint of a tremor in his voice. “Do you wanna know how Miss Kayama got Sushi?”
He doesn’t get to go to school for another four days . It’s torture, lying around at home with nothing to do but sleep, watch daytime TV, eat his limited diet of applesauce and pudding, take Vicodin for his lingering aches and pains, and try not to freak about how much school he’s missing. Oh, and he’s still on vocal rest, even though Recovery Girl healed his throat. Something about the swelling. The only person in his class who knows any JSL is Bakugo, so that’s completely unhelpful.
“I know how much it sucks, but just three more days of vocal rest, kiddo,” Yamada says to him with a pat on his shoulder as they drop him off at the entrance to school.
YEAH, YOU TALK A LOT.
“Thank you, smarty pants.” He ruffles his hair, still a little patchy from where it was ripped out at the root. “Hey, drop by to see me and Shou when you’re on lunch, alright? We got something we wanna show you.”
The morning passes by uneventfully, thankfully. Of course, Midoriya and his posse had a kajillion questions for him, which he simply cut off by holding up his notes app: Can’t talk, on vocal rest. It’s met by various noises of disappointment, but for once, he’s glad for the excuse.
Despite Recovery Girl’s miraculous work, there are still yellow-green handprint bruises on his neck. It’s pretty obvious what happened. He doesn’t know why they bother to ask.
Lunch approaches quickly. He finds himself in the doorway to the teacher’s office, bouncing on his feet, unsure of exactly what they want. He knows he’s not in trouble, but historically, he’s usually not been asked to stop by a teacher’s office without a reason. A bad reason.
Instead, he’s met with Aizawa and Yamada, the former hunched over in fake apathy and the latter all jittery. Yamada holds a keyring in his hand, jingling it nervously. “Shall we?”
He follows them around what feels like the whole school, ascending what feels like 82 flights of stairs. He has to break and wheeze twice, embarrassingly enough. But he’s greeted with the heavy steel doors of the rooftop when they finish.
WHY…? he signs.
“You’ll see,” Aizawa says.
They make their way over to the far ductwork, Hitoshi pulling his jacket tight over his chest in the wind. It’s a beautiful fall day. The view shows off the changing colors in the meadow, the gentle hum of the city.
“Here!” Yamada says, waving them over while he bends down to look at something.
And upon squinting, Hitoshi finds an engraving in the ductwork:
The Three Dumbingos! Hizashi-Shouta-Oboro. Surrounding the message is rudimentary sketches of all three of them—short-haired, frowning Aizawa, short-haired, smiling Yamada, and a wild-haired, grinning third one.
HIS HAIR LIKE MINE, YOU RIGHT, Hitoshi signs to Yamada.
“Mmhm.” He grins, a little watery. “This was our little hideaway.”
Aizawa has slumped into the retaining wall, unpacking his and Yamada’s bentos wordlessly. He hands over Hitoshi’s protein shake and they all sit down.
It’s mostly quiet as they eat. Hitoshi pretends that’s because of his vocal rest, not the palpable grief between his parents.
“We…” Yamada says, breaking the silence after several minutes. “...we wanted to start showing you more about Shirakumo. We’ve talked a little already, but, like, truly .”
Hitoshi nods. Even if he could speak, he’s unsure what he would say.
“He’s the reason I am the way I am today. Shouta, too.”
Aizawa nods, stares down at his untouched meal.
More silence passes.
“The first time I saw you, I saw him ,” Aizawa says, voice gruff with disuse, “I wanted Shirakumo to live on in you. I didn’t realize it until Hizashi pointed it out several months into our training, but it’s true.”
Hitoshi fiddles with the hem of his jacket.
“But that’s not fair to you, or him.” Aizawa stares off into the distance. He’s got that faraway look on his face, straight back to Y2K. “He needs to live on by us telling you about him, sharing what we had together with you.”
“So, here we are!” Yamada grins.
And the looks on their faces—Aizawa’s abject despair, Yamada’s plasticky look. They won’t last forever, Hitoshi knows.
He’s glad for the vocal rest, suddenly.
This way, he can listen.