Chapter Text
It all went downhill from there.
The next letter drawn looked more like a swirl than any letter Izuku had ever seen, but he still attempted to guess. After a couple incorrect answers, the quirk apparently decided to try again. The issue with that was it hadn’t thought to smooth out the water before restarting, so the ripples overlapped and cancelled each other out, creating a riot of motion that kept distracting him from the shape his quirk was trying to show him. Still, he threw out a guess, and predictably got a denial, followed by another attempt at forming the shape with the same problem.
Izuku could feel the quirk’s frustration building under his skin, every attempt getting messier and bigger, not even waiting for him to guess anymore. “Maybe we should try a different way?” He asked hesitantly, only to be met with what sounded like two cannonballs hitting the water, one right after the other, the most decisive no he’d heard yet. Yet after that the splashing slowed, until it stopped entirely. The secondhand frustration he had been feeling faded into resignation, and once more it traced a v.
Izuku waited a few moments, but when nothing else happened he asked, “you want me to call you V?”
An affirmative.
“Are you sure? We could try-“ but the answer came before he could finish. Yes, it was sure.
“Well okay then!” Izuku did his best to shake off the sudden dour mood. “Nice to meet you, V.” Now that he thought about it, the name suited it. Or, him? Them? Calling a being ‘it’ felt insulting, but he didn’t know if the quirk even had a gender at all. It wasn’t a person, not in the traditional sense at least, but neither was Nezu and he still had pronouns.
Well he had two options; he could either freak out about it some more, or simply ask.
“So um, what-“ Izuku cut himself off, remembering just in time that he couldn’t ask open-ended questions. “I’ve been using ’it’ pronouns for you in my head, would you prefer I use something else instead?”
One plop confirmed V’s opinion, and Izuku was confronted with the conundrum of how to ask what pronouns to use instead. But that was easily solved with a little thought. “Okay, can you do one for he/him, two for she/her, and three for they/them? Oh and four for none of the above.” That last option would open a whole other can of worms, but they’d cross that bridge if they needed to.
Plop. Plop. Plop. Well that answered that question. It was a good thing he thought to ask! He didn’t want to offend them accidentally.
Wow, there really was just a whole person living inside his head! A person who had existed since the Dawn of Quirks!
(Izuku had briefly considered that the sentience might be a product of it being passed down so many times, but even he thought that was a little too absurd. Quirks didn’t just grow consciousnesses, not even weird overpowered intergenerational quirks.)
But… he frowned. All Might didn’t know they existed, and neither did his mentor, though she’d apparently told him stories of One For All guiding its users. Which likely meant that V used to communicate with their holders, but stopped for some reason. Maybe they’d gone dormant and Izuku had just woken them up somehow?
Well, best way to find out was to ask. “V, were you dormant before now?”
Two plops.
“So you’ve been awake and watching this whole time?”
A complicated mix of emotions accompanied the single sound, a little quieter than the ones before.
“Oh,” Izuku tried to imagine it, experiencing the world through someone else’s eyes, no one to talk to, no choice on what happened at all. “That sounds lonely.”
This time, the sound was almost inaudible, like a single drop of water hitting an ocean, the ripple disappearing almost as quickly as it arrived.
“Well, you have me now.” The words sounded altogether too small, too inadequate, too presumptuous even. Who was he to say that decades of loneliness could be cured by his mere presence, when V hadn’t even chosen him? Maybe they didn’t even like him, or want him around. Maybe they’d rather be someone else’s quirk. He didn’t want to bring it up, but V had been denied too many choices over their life for him to take away yet another one.
So Izuku steeled himself and asked, “Would you rather… n-not have me?” He couldn’t exactly ask if they wanted to be transferred, for fear of listening ears, but V would understand what he meant.
The answer was immediate. Two splashes, each the approximate size of a boulder, radiated out, soaking his pants in the strange golden not-water, but apparently V decided that wasn’t good enough. Izuku was suddenly flooded with emotions, enough to knock the breath out of him.
Izuku, predictably, burst into tears, overwhelmed by the sheer amount of care his quirk felt for him. He felt their affection, their protectiveness, their righteous anger that he could only assume was directed at his bullies. He felt like a stuffed animal clutched to a toddler’s chest as they screamed “mine!” at the top of their tiny lungs. Maybe it should have been stifling, the way his mother’s love felt sometimes, but instead it only felt reassuring. They were in this together, a team, and there was not a force of this earth that could separate them now.
He cried until the flow of emotions stemmed, turning into a much more faint nervous concern that Izuku could only interpret as an apology. He sniffled, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes and nose as he took a moment to collect himself. “I’m okay,” he shot a slightly wobbly smile at the horizon, “just got a little overwhelmed. Just, thank you. Your support, it… it means a lot.”
A breeze ruffled his hair, and he imagined it was the quirk’s way to say you’re welcome.
He basked in it for a second longer, before shaking himself. “Anyway,” he reached for the abandoned paper and pencil, “we should get back to work. Let’s see…”
Izuku read through the rest of the three or so pages of the document, out loud to make sure V could hear it too, and quickly came to the conclusion that it had little relevance to their situation, if any at all.
“How are we supposed to fill this out?” Izuku complained, “You can’t exactly help me with chores or borrow my stuff. And what am I supposed to say, ‘don’t feel too loudly after 10:30’?” He stopped. “Wait, do you sleep?” Two plops. “Huh. I wonder if you could actually affect my sleep by feeling enough and projecting hard enough, like you did just now.” He considered it for a moment before shrugging. “Eh, sounds like it’s not worth the potential lost sleep to test. What circumstances would that even be useful in?” He sighed. “And there I go again. Where were we?”
The wind nudged the paper in his hand, making it appear to flap a little bit.
“Oh right, that. Well, Aizawa-sensei did say the goal was just to get us to communicate, so goal accomplished, right?” Two plops, and Izuku huffed. “That was a rhetorical question, smartass. But yeah I agree. I want to be able to give him something tangible at the end of this. So how about,” he flipped the paper over to the blank side on the back, “we make our own agreement?”
He didn’t wait for the sound of V’s agreement before he started to write. In a stroke of genius, he wrote “Midoriya Izuku and V’s Brainmate Agreement“ across the top of the page. “What do you think?” He said, grinning to himself. There was no “verbal” response, but the emotions he got off V didn’t feel negative so he took that as a “looks great!”
“Alright, what’s next?” Izuku hummed, thinking it over, but he drew a blank. “Ugh, the only time I’ve done anything even sort of like this is when I asked my mom to knock before entering my room. And you don’t have a room, much less a door to knock on.” He sighed, staring out at the ocean. “But, well, this place is kind of like a room, isn’t it? Still missing a door, but maybe we can work around that.”
The water lapped at his feet, and he took it to mean “how would we do that?”
“How about, if I enter and you don’t want me here, you give me some kind of signal? Then I can leave and make sure not to bother you for a while.”
A single plop, then Izuku was confronted with a tsunami barrelling towards him. Instinctually, he screwed his eyes shut and braced for impact, but it never came. Cautiously opening an eye, he found the sea was just as calm as it had been a moment before. It took him a moment to understand, but when he did he smiled. “You want that to be the signal to leave you alone?” A plop. “That works, really well actually. A little too well, you scared me!” He scolded playfully.
The quirk somehow managed to convey their unrepentance while doing nothing at all.
Izuku rolled his eyes. “Since I have a feeling this is going to come up at some point, I’m putting a ban on sarcasm when you have no way of signaling if you’re being sarcastic. It’s just going to get confusing.”
That caused a dizzying combination of emotions that he had no hope of making sense of, but he had a pretty good guess on what they meant.
“Are you complaining because I can be sarcastic but you can’t?”
A moment of silence, then a single plop.
“Well if you can figure out a way to clearly indicate you’re being sarcastic, I’ll be happy to lift the rule, but otherwise it stands. I don’t want our conversations to turn into me asking if you’re being sarcastic every other question. Got it?”
Another plop, somehow managing to sound petulant.
“Anyway, moving on.” He said as he fished jotting down their first two rules. “I guess the next thing would be what to do when I need some alone time. But, is that possible? Can I just tell you to stop watching and you can?”
One plop, but the feeling that accompanied it was heavy, something like dread filling Izuku’s bones.
“You could,” he said slowly, “but you don’t want to.”
Another plop, followed by a pause before two more.
“Yes and no? So, kind of?” He thought about it. “You don’t want me to ask?” Another yes and no. “You don’t want me to ask too much?” Just a yes this time. It made sense, now that he thought about it. Being locked inside your mind with nothing to do or see, trapped with your thoughts and nothing else, sounded like hell.
“How about this: I’ll only ask when I think I really need it, and only for, how about an hour at a time?” V agreed with his terms, their relief making him sag his shoulders from the secondhand release of tension.
That reminded him… “About the emotion sharing thing, does that go both ways?” A plop. “And you’ve been blocking them, right? Making them so I don’t feel them as strongly, or at all?” Another plop. “Should I be doing that? I don’t want to be constantly bombarding you with my feelings.” Two plops this time, accompanied by a string of emotions that he couldn’t name but made it obvious that they thought what he’d just said was adorable. Which made no sense to him, it was basic courtesy, but saying so to V just got more of the same, plus some particularly violent hair tussles.
“Whatever,” he huffed, rolling his eyes. “Where were we again?”
~~~
It ended up taking most of the remaining class period to finish up the agreement, though most of that was due to the limited communication. They did figure out some new signals for V to use in the process, though. Three ripples for maybe/sometimes, like the yes and no answer V had given before, and four for ‘I don’t know’. And this-or-that questions were easy: the order he said the choices in would correspond to the number of ripples needed, just like he’d done with the pronouns. So one ripple for the first option, two for the second, and so on. More would likely come as they talked, but those got them through the rest of their agreement.
There wasn't all that much to it, really. Besides what they’d already established, Izuku agreed to meditate every morning so that V could communicate with him throughout the day, provided that they didn’t try to distract him during class. He was pretty sure the meditation would become unnecessary for maintaining their emotional connection soon enough, but he figured it would be good to continue doing it anyway, just for practice.
Next, Izuku insisted that they do things that V wanted to do regularly, to make up for when they didn’t have any input at all. He suggested starting with a weekly movie night, where the quirk would pick the movie. They seemed hesitant about it, apprehensive maybe? But apparently decided it wasn’t worth a refusal when they couldn’t actually make any counterpoints, so they agreed.
That was around the point where he got a little sidetracked. Would they be able to communicate like this when Izuku wasn’t actively meditating? He’d spent a lot of time in a state of half-meditation over the past few weeks, but he couldn’t see the water when he did that, would he be able to hear it? “How can I even hear it to begin with? Sound is vibration, and to hear a sound it has to vibrate my eardrum, is it doing that manually somehow? Or am I hallucinating the sound? Does it even count as hallucination if it’s an aspect of your quirk? Unless it’s not the quirk itself and my mind is—“
Izuku was broken out of his mutter storm by the feeling of water on his face. He blinked, bringing up an arm to wipe away the non-existent liquid, and realized V had splashed them, like a kid at a public pool. He felt like he should be offended, but he was mostly just embarrassed. “S-sorry, V.” He hunched, bracing automatically for a blow, physical or verbal, but all he got was a gentle feeling, something like acceptance. He shook himself, plowing ahead. “All of that is to say, we should test if we can talk like this when I’m not here.”
He received an agreement, and went to open his eyes.
And blinked. His eyes were open, had been open for a while. When had that happened? He wasn’t sure, but he hadn’t noticed a change, was still staring out at the golden ocean even now that he was aware of it. “Well that’s new.” Maybe it was another aspect of the quirk? Maybe V really was manipulating their senses, either on purpose or by accident. He was pretty sure that he hadn’t just gotten really good at meditation. “Are you doing this? Replacing my visual sensory input?”
Two plops followed, then a pause before another four. They might be, but if they were, it wasn’t on purpose.
“Well that’s something to play around with later. I’d imagine that means that I will be able to hear the water even when I’m not here, but still, better try it out.” He scrunched his eyes closed and concentrated on the slightly prickly sensation of sitting on grass, the sound of… huh. Nothing but the sound of gentle waves. He’d thought he’d just been tuning out his classmates really effectively, but apparently the quirk had also taken over his hearing. Freaky.
Oh well. He ran his hands through the grass and thought about what sounds his class would be making, if he could hear them. He imagined (not visualized, he learned his lesson from the well incident) the way the sky looked when they came out, the smattering of chairs, the hairline crack in the wall he was facing, likely left by an upperclassman earlier that day. Slowly, noise began to filter in, the sounds of sparring and cheering and encouragement. Izuku grinned victoriously, opening his eyes.
Only to come face to face with a dark mass approximately two inches from his face.
He yelped (he would deny until the end of days that it was a squeak) and fell back onto his elbows, scrambling backwards like a particularly awkward crab as V silently laughed at him in their head. As more of the shape came into view, he relaxed. It was just Dark Shadow, apparently bored of whatever she and Tokoyami had been doing and curious about the lone person in the corner.
“Dark Shadow!” Izuku looked over his shoulder to see Tokoyami jogging over, looking a little flustered. “You can’t go wandering off like that during training!” He scolded, and the quirk drooped.
“But Fumi,” she whined, “I just wanted to say hi! And class is almost over anyway, so it’s not like we were gonna do anything else.” Tokoyami just huffed and glared before turning to Izuku.
He bowed deeply. “I sincerely apologize for Dark Shadow’s transgressions. I hope she did not bother you overly.”
Izuku clamored to his feet, waving his hands. “Oh no, it’s fine! No harm done.” Dark Shadow, who had shrunk down to about cat size and was currently sulking by Tokoyami’s shoulder, perked back up at that.
“That means I can say hi now, right?” She didn’t pause to wait, even as Tokoyami protested.
“Dark Shadow, don’t-“
She spoke over him. “Hi Midoriya-kun!” Izuku smiled and waved a bit. He didn’t get why Tokoyami didn’t want her to talk to him… “Hi Midoriya-kun’s quirk!” His eyes widened. How did she-?
Tokoyami dropped into another bow, even deeper this time. “I apologize for eavesdropping, but I overheard you talking to Uraraka-san earlier. Dark Shadow got… excited.”
Izuku winced. In hindsight, maybe it hadn’t been the best idea to have a private conversation while walking down a busy hallway in the middle of the school day.
Before he could fall into a spiral of self-recrimination, Dark Shadow butted back in. “Of course I’m excited,” she puffed back up, bristling, “I’ve never met another quirk like me before! You’d be excited too, if you were me.”
The comment was clearly directed at Tokoyami, but Izuku couldn’t help but consider it. To meet someone like you, after years of being the only one… the prospect felt uncomfortably familiar.
(How many times had he dreamt of meeting another quirkless kid, someone who understood? They didn’t have to be his friend, they didn’t even have to talk to him, he just wanted to know they were there. Was it selfish to wish Aldera on some other kid just so he didn’t feel quite so alone? Yeah, probably, but that didn’t stop his guilty little fantasies.)
His heart twinged in sympathy. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that Tokoyami had found out. He’d just been thinking about how he couldn’t cure V’s loneliness by himself, recruiting his friends to help only made sense. Who better to help a sentient quirk than another sentient quirk? And it wasn’t really a secret, after all. It was a weird thing about his quirk, but it’s not like it was suspicious at all. If anything, it made his quirk seem less like All Might’s.
Decision made, he looked back up at the pair in front of him, only to find them engaged in what Izuku had to assume was a heated mental debate, though from the outside it just looked like they were making faces at each other. He might not be able to hear what was being said, but he had a pretty good idea, so he hurried to intervene.
“Really, it’s no big deal. If I wanted to keep it a secret I wouldn’t have been talking about it where anyone could overhear. You just startled me, is all.” He explained, scratching the back of his neck sheepishly.
Dark Shadow let out a triumphant little noise. “See, I told you it was fine.” She said to Tokoyami, rolling her eyes, an impressive feat considering her lack of pupils. “So are you going to introduce us to your quirk now, or not?”
Tokoyami shot his quirk an exasperated look, but Izuku just laughed. “Their name is V, but they can’t come out and talk like you can. They can use my senses to watch what’s going on, but they’re stuck up here.” He tapped his temple. “We can’t even communicate all that well right now. That’s actually what we’ve been working on…”
Tokoyami nodded along as he explained his current quirk related tribulations. “Does that make your muttering habit a quirk instinct, then?”
Izuku opened his mouth, then closed it again, considering. Was that even possible?
Quirk instincts were weird. They were most common in emitter type quirks, and were often what allowed a person to use their quirk at all. Like how you don’t need to think about moving your body, a person with an activation-type quirk instinct doesn’t need to think about activating their quirk, they just do it. That’s why quirk counselling didn’t usually have to teach kids how to turn their quirk on, only turn it off and regulate it. Another kind of quirk instinct was what were called craving-type instincts, where a person whose quirk required an outside force or substance would instinctually seek it out. This most commonly manifested as a craving for a specific type of food, hence the name, though it wasn’t always easy for a four year old to tell what, exactly, they were craving. Like Sato, for example, likely craved sugar more than normal, and a person whose quirk activated in the ocean might feel an itch under their skin to go swimming. Craving-type instincts were most common in people with transformation quirks, though they were not exclusive. Mental quirks had their own type that was exclusive as far as he knew: information-type, where a person can instinctually process information given to them by their quirk. Like a person whose quirk lets them see auras based on how a person was feeling would instinctually know which emotion was which color, or a person with a telepathy quirk would be able to parse someone’s thoughts separately from their own.
And then there was the most controversial type: secondary quirk instincts, where the instinct was not directly related to the function of the quirk itself. Everyone and their mother claimed to have one, with various degrees of plausibility. The best documented ones were those associated with animal-based heteromorphic type quirks, like a person with a bird quirk having a nesting instinct, but even that was filled with bias and stereotype, on the parts of researchers and researchees alike. Izuku remembered once reading a case study of a man with a bull quirk who claimed to have the secondary instinct of getting angry and charging at the color red, based purely on the misconception that that was how bulls behaved. It was incredibly difficult to separate out instinct from habit and coincidence, especially since quirks developed so young. Late bloomers were actually highly sought after in the field of quirk instinct study, though there was some argument on whether them showing signs of their instinct before their quirk developed was a sign that their instinct was real or a coincidence.
Could muttering be a secondary instinct of a sentient quirk? It was possible, but he had no way to prove it one way or the other. Still, it showed many of the hallmarks. It was consistent, happening almost every day unless he took steps to prevent it. It had started very early, his mom liked to tell him how he’d been muttering to himself since before he could talk. It didn’t disappear in circumstances where it became a hindrance or bothered those around him, he had enough ruined notebooks and scars to prove that. There was a high likelihood that it-
Wait.
He was an idiot.
Izuku resisted the urge to smack himself in the face. How had he managed to forget that One For All wasn’t biologically his? For the “genius” his friends kept saying he was, he was pretty stupid.
Now that he thought about it, it was probably his lack of quirk instincts that was behind his difficulty with his quirk. If an activation instinct was like moving a muscle, It was like someone had attached wings to his back and told him to fly, while the rest of his classmates were lifting weights and doing cardio. They were training muscles they already had, while he was trying to figure out how to move at all. He theorized that a person who already had a quirk wouldn’t have struggled so much because their pre-existing instincts would have adapted, but it also could have been even worse if their quirk wasn’t compatible.
Was there a way to make up for missing quirk instincts? He’d heard about cases like that, but he would have to do some research on what methods were used to help in those circumstances. Maybe if he-
A hand waved in front of his face, and he startled, jerking back to stare at the owner of the offending object, who happened to be Tokoyami. “Are you alright? I called your name a couple times…” the other boy cleared his throat, looking a little awkward.
“Oh, yeah I’m fine! Just spaced out thinking about quirk instincts.” He gave a little half-bow in apology. “I suppose it’s possible, but I’be never thought about it before. I’ll have to do some testing…”
Dark Shadow cut in before he could go on another mental tangent, saying, “Now can I talk to V?” In a whiny tone, adding, “I know they can’t talk back, but I can ask questions, and you can translate!”
He looked to Tokoyami, who just said, “it is your choice.”
Izuku shrugged and said, “I’m okay with it, but it’s not really my decision.” He continued, addressing his quirk, “V, would you be okay with answering some questions?”
There was a moment of relative silence, long enough that he started to wonder if maybe he was wrong and V wasn't able to affect his senses in the real world. But then there was a gentle plop, a little quieter than the ones before, close to his left ear. He grinned triumphantly and translated, “yeah, V says they’re up for it.”
Dark Shadow didn’t hesitate to jump in and hurl a volley of questions about V’s favorite things. Though it quickly turned more of a long monologue interspersed with occasional questions as she realized how difficult conversations were with someone with such limited options for communication. Even after the bell rang, only a couple minutes later, she continued to ramble as the boys made their way back to the locker rooms.
She even talked while Tokoyami changed. Izuku, who didn’t bother to change since he was going right to training with Aizawa-sensei anyways, just stared at the ceiling and blushed as he listened to the quirk and occasionally translated V’s responses. At least the rest of the boys left them alone, though he suspected that wouldn’t be true if they knew who Dark Shadow was really talking to.
They parted ways soon enough, though not before Dark Shadow cajoled a promise to meet up sometime out of him. He shared a commiserating look with Tokoyami, silently bonding over being bossed around by their quirks. Well, mostly Tokoyami’s quirk, but Izuku was pretty sure that if V could talk they’d be just as bad, if not worse.
As he hurried off down the hall, the warm feeling in his chest made him think he wasn’t the only one who’d made a new friend today.
~~~
As Shouta watched his Problem Child walk out of the gym, engaged in quiet conversation with his purple-haired friend, he resisted the urge to sigh.
The training itself had been… good. Great, even. The kid had been improving in leaps and bounds over the past few days, but today was on a whole other level. Before, his movements had been stiff and hesitant, and he often either concentrated too hard on keeping his quirk active and over or undershot obstacles, or concentrated too hard on making it past the obstacles and lost control of his quirk. Today, the kid was a lot more confident. He still flubbed some jumps and lost concentration a couple times, but he’d lost some of that stiffness and was a lot more likely to get up and try again immediately after failing. His endurance had also improved substantially, his top time with his quirk active going from 3 minutes to 6 and a half. Though a couple times the quirk would turn off out of the blue, leaving Midoriya pouting at the air and attempting to convince his quirk that he was fine and could go for a bit longer.
Shouta was determinedly not thinking about how fucking weird the kid’s quirk was. It didn’t make sense. It acted more like two separate quirks than one, and that thought caused images of the Nomu to dance behind his eyelids every time he blinked, so he shoved it in a box and decided to sort through it when he was safely home again.
No, his main concern needed to be the kid.
If he was being completely honest with himself, the Problem Child had scared the hell out of him that morning. Seeing the usually cheerful and talkative child walk around in a daze hurt, and made him start running the numbers in his head. What are the odds that Midoriya Inko was the world’s greatest liar? What are the odds she wasn’t, but the events of yesterday broke her? What are the odds he’d gotten his kid into a more dangerous situation than before? How badly had he fucked up this time?
His only solace was that he’d be able to talk to the kid privately during their one-on-one afternoon lesson.
And then fucking Nemuri had gotten fucking food poisoning and so he had to take over her lessons and miss checking in with his fucking kid!
At least he got to see the kid beforehand. Midoriya had come back from lunch looking a lot better than he had when he’d left, and it didn’t look like he was putting on a brave face or repressing his emotions. Which meant that Shouta had to trust that the kid’s friends had cheered him up over lunch and he was actually fine, or at least better.
But damnit trusting was hard, and it was a good thing Nemuri’s third years knew not to test him, because if they’d tried he would have bit their heads off.
The afternoon seemed to stretch on for far longer than it should have, but eventually he was allowed to go free. He hurried down to the gym and was relieved to find his Problem Child already there, looking to be in just as good spirits as the last time he’d seen him.
Still, that didn’t keep him from watching the kid like a hawk through the whole session, searching for any sign of pain or distraction. This was a parkour gym after all, it would be dangerous for him to lose his concentration for even a moment.
Yeah, even he wasn’t good enough at lying to himself to believe that. But it’s what he’d tell Zashi and the kids if they noticed. Not that Zashi would believe him either, but it was the principle of the thing.
But no matter how closely he watched the kid, he seemed fine. No evidence of physical injury or emotional distress, and he knew he should be relieved. He was relieved. But it was like when he spent an entire patrol looking for a criminal only for them to not show up, or when he spent weeks prepping for a drug bust only to find the base of operations cleared out. Zashi always compared him to one of the cats when they played with the laser pointer for too long, all wound up from the hunt with nothing to kill. But this time there was no hunt, just a traumatized child that he had no idea how to help.
Damn, he needed to call his therapist, stat.
He operated on autopilot as he walked to the car, hung up on his shortcomings, but the closer he got to his destination, the more exhaustion hit him. He’d been running on adrenaline all day and had slept like shit the night before, plagued by memories of his own shitty homelife. So he was looking forward to collapsing into his husband’s arms and listening to him ramble about nothing for a while until they fell asleep on the couch together.
All that went out the window when he slid into the passenger seat only to find Zashi already behind the wheel, looking distressed.
“Zashi?” Shouta didn’t have the energy for more words at that moment, so he reached across the center console and took his husband’s hand in his, doing his best to comfort without speaking. It earned him a grateful if slightly strained smile, though it quickly fell back into a worried frown.
“I’m concerned about our Little Listeners’ home lives.” A frisson of fear shot through Shouta. There was only one pair of students that he could be referring to.
“What happened?” He demanded, unable to keep his own fear from coloring his voice, turning the question into a harsh bark. He winced internally and brushed a thumb over his husband’s knuckles in silent apology, but the man didn’t seem to notice, only shaking his head.
“Nothing. Or, nothing concrete. I just happened to be standing nearby during the boys’ water break, and I overheard Midoriya say he got in a fight with his mom. With how out of sorts he was during class today, I thought I should keep an eye on him while he talked. But, it was Shinsou’s reaction that really worried me.” Zashi shot him the saddest little look, like his heart was breaking into a million pieces. “Shou, he started checking Midoriya over for injuries.”
Shouta bit back the “And?” sitting on the tip of his tongue. He was well aware that that was not a normal response for a teenager to have, but it would have been his response, when he was that age. In fact, it had been his response during their second year, when Zashi had said something similar. It had led to a very confusing conversation that neither of them would fully understand for several more years, as Shouta learned how a family was actually supposed to behave and Hizashi learned what Shouta’s childhood had been like.
Zashi was clearly thinking of the same incident, because he continued, “Midoriya wasn’t nearly as oblivious as I’d been when we were kids, which is concerning in its own way, but he assured Shinsou that he was fine and mentioned his mom apologizing. Shinsou proceeded to tell him that he knew some places he could stay if ‘things got bad’.” Zashi didn’t bother to let go of his hand when he did the air quotes, which usually never failed to make Shouta crack a smile, but the words soured the atmosphere.
“…shit.” He said, thumping his head back against the headrest. They’d guessed that Shinsou hadn’t had the best life, but they’d been operating under the assumption that he and Midoriya had had similar experiences, based on how the pair interacted. Which meant that they’d assumed the kid was not in immediate danger. But if he had multiple pre-planned bolt holes…
That meant they were dealing with something a lot more serious, and delicate.
“We don’t have nearly enough evidence to start an actual case.” Shouta began, mostly thinking aloud.
“But if we approach the Little Listener, he’s more likely to shut us out than tell us anything at this point. It’s too early.” Hizashi continued. That, plus Shouta having his hands full with Midoriya’s case, was what had prevented them from talking to the kid about what they’d noticed up to this point.
“But if we’re right and the kid is in danger, we don’t have time to wait for him to come to us.” Shouta finished grimly. He remembered being that age, jaded and prideful enough that he would have rather cut his own arm off than ask for help from anyone, especially an adult. If Shinsou was anything like him, and evidence suggested that he was, if they waited for him to reach out they’d end up burying him instead.
Shouta was lucky he’d had Hizashi to lovingly bully him into accepting help. Otherwise, he didn’t know where he’d be.
Zashi rubbed his forehead with the hand Shouta wasn’t holding hostage. “I’m completely at a loss, Shou. How are we supposed to help a kid without helping him?”
Shouta hummed as he mulled it over. As teachers, they had a usual procedure for this sort of thing that they’d both implemented several times over the years, but it was mostly just “wait and see.” Make themselves available, keep a careful eye on the situation, maybe nudge them in the right direction if the opportunity presented itself, but mostly just wait. But Shouta’s gut was telling him that if they tried that here, it would only end poorly. Besides, Zashi was attached to the kid, and he didn’t want to deal with the moping that was sure to come if he suggested they do nothing.
(Was he attached to the kid, who was sharp and witty and had a habit of watching him with stars in his eyes when he thought he could get away with it? Of course not. Why would you even suggest such a thing?)
He was starting to brainstorm ways they could use Shinsou’s obvious hero worship to build trust with him faster when he heard a soft intake of breath. He turned to look at his husband to find him staring back, hope shining in his eyes. “The Little Listener is trying to get into the hero course, right? What if, after he does well in the Sports Festival, we stop by his house to congratulate him and discuss transferring, and if we happen to see something…”
It was a good idea, but it had one glaring hole. “And what happens if the kid doesn’t do well?”
“He will.” Hizashi’s determined look collapsed to one raised eyebrow. “Or if he doesn’t, we’ll figure something out. But have a bit of faith, Shou! You’ve seen how much work he’s put in.”
“It’s only been two weeks. It might not be enough.” But Zashi was right, the kid had improved rapidly in that time. And he showed the kind of passion that Shouta wanted to see out of his hero students, an insatiable desire to be better in every way he can manage. “If he doesn’t place, we’ll still visit. I’ll just ask to mentor him officially instead.”
At Zashi’s intake of breath, he whipped his head around and activated his quirk, just in time to be treated to a high pitched squeal at a normal volume instead of one that was eardrum-rattlingly loud.
“Oops, sorry Shou.” His ridiculous husband looked at him apologetically until he deactivated his quirk. “But seriously, I knew you liked the kid.” Zashi grinned at him in that smug little way he did when he thought he’d won an argument they hadn’t even been having to begin with.
“I see potential in him,” he corrected. Zashi just kept smiling at him, and he huffed. “The kid still has to do well in the festival,” he reminded him. “It’d be too suspicious for him to crash and burn only for us to show up anyway.”
“He will.” Zashi said once again, with the kind of confidence that Shouta could only dream of having.
Now that their plan of action was decided, the thought of continuing the conversation filled Shouta with a wave of exhaustion. So he simply deposited the hand he’d been holding onto the steering wheel and ordered, “drive.”
Zashi laughed at him, but complied as Shouta made himself comfortable. He dozed off almost immediately, the sound of his husband’s laughter echoing in his ears.