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Shouta was used to kids showing up to his office hours for a variety of reasons. Everything from a Villain attack to needing help with assignments to Midoriya and Bakugou going at each other again and breaking something important. Like Midoriya’s bones.
He’d seen every one of his students at least once, though a few far more often than others. Iida came to mind, partly in his role as class president, partly because he was just faster than everyone else and therefore often went to get help or ended up in Shouta’s office first. Midoriya, shockingly enough, seemed to avoid Shouta’s office like the plague, but he was occasionally coerced to knock on the door if it was related to Bakugou or a member of the Izucrew.
Over the months, Shouta had also seen various mixtures of students. The Izucrew or the Bakusquad showed up in pieces of their whole a lot. Occasionally two or three people would show up at the same time to try to give him different perspectives on a conflict or disaster. Sometimes, people who needed the same thing would come together. Yaoyorozu and Iida for class president related issues, Kaminari and Aoyama for paperwork to utilize designed-for-Heroics Quirk support gear outside of classes, all six girls – plus Kirishima, Midoriya, Shoji, and even Koda – to file a dozen each reports for everything from sexual assault to Quirk discrimination, all with the same perpetrator.
Hitoshi had integrated himself into the class after Shouta had expelled Mineta, and now Shouta was used to seeing his wild purple hair tagging along with the Bakusquad and the Izucrew.
In general, though, there were pairings he had come to expect. Bakugou and Midoriya, if they’d gotten into a fight. Midoriya and Todoroki, if the latter had said something particularly worrisome and heartbreaking about his childhood and Midoriya needed to make sure someone was actually told. Iida and Asui had unfortunately become a rather common pair, since Iida was fast and could carry her and Asui had already mastered the quick-honest-and-necessary incident report. Any number of the Bakusquad, usually after doing something stupid and hurting themselves, breaking something, or both at once.
He had never seen this combination before.
Aoyama, Asui, and Ashido filed into the room at his beckon, and Shouta did a double take. There was no mistaking, though. Three previously unconnected students were standing in front of his desk, clearly having intentionally arrived together.
“Hello, Ashido, Aoyama, and Asui,” Shouta said levelly, “who’s dying this time.”
Ashido, acting as the apparent leader of the group, winced and chewed her lip. “Nobody’s dying…”
“Bleeding?” Shouta prodded. “Broken something. Broken their own bones again. Been kidnapped and/or attacked.”
Ashido shook her head, glancing at her companions for support. Asui offered her a wide froglike smile and Aoyama sparkled at her encouragingly.
“No, there’s no problems,” Ashido managed, “or, well, no immediate problems. No one’s hurt, we just noticed- I noticed-” She paused and glanced at Aoyama, who nodded encouragingly. “We noticed that you- after what happened on Friday, your- um…”
Shouta stared at her as she trailed off, biting her lip again. He officially had no idea what she was talking about. He’d healed and recovered almost completely from his injuries on Friday, with only the cut over his eye remaining. Since it was a much more fiddly injury in a more difficult location that had already had a great deal of surgery done, he needed to go to a real doctor and get some x-rays and whatever else to deal with the issue. In the meantime, he’d gone back to wearing a long sash-style bandage/eyepatch over the empty socket where his ruined false eye had been carefully removed.
She could be talking about that, but the eyepatch and bandaging were both relatively unobtrusive, and not really something she – or any of the people she’d brought with her – could do anything about.
“Your hair, monsieur,” Aoyama cut in smoothly.
“My hair,” Shouta said flatly, resisting the urge to reach up and touch it. There was nothing there, and touching the choppy, uneven ends made his spine crawl and his gut twist. “What about it?”
“Ah, just that there may be some… minor… ah…” Aoyama also trailed off with an apologetic v-shaped smile, his gaze fixed somewhere over Shouta’s shoulder.
“It’s ugly, kero,” Asui piped up.
Ashido winced but tentatively nodded. “It could use some… touching up.”
“Straightening out,” Aoyama added, like he had ever done anything in his entire life that could possibly be described as ‘straight’.
“It looks like a two-year-old’s art project after they first discovered scissors,” Shouta agreed, “Unfortunately, I cannot go to any public hair salons and Present Mic has been banned from cutting anyone’s hair after he gave Midnight an unintended undercut.”
Ashido blinked, clearly trying to picture Midnight with an undercut – she had rocked it, obviously, but the fact remained that she hadn’t actually wanted an undercut – but Aoyama was quicker on the draw.
“We understand,” he began with a glittering bow, “that strangers wielding sharp objects near one’s person may be… nerve wracking, especially after what you have suffered.” Shockingly enough, Aoyama looked close to tears. Then again, he did care a whole lot about his own hair. Maybe he was thinking about this too hard. “And so, we have come to offer our services in their place, in hopes that the familiar hand of long-stood allies may be an assurance in this trying time.”
Now Shouta knew why they’d brought Asui. He – and Ashido – both turned to the frog girl for translation.
“He wants to cut your hair, kero.”
“Yeah!” Ashido agreed, immediately rounding on Shouta again. “We figured you might be avoiding hair salons and stuff because of, like, trauma, you know, and I took some cosmetology classes that included cutting hair, and Aoyama is…” Ashido paused to look at Aoyama, who struck a glittering Anime protagonist pose, “well, Aoyama, so we thought, maybe, you might let us help you out?”
Shouta narrowed his eyes – eye – in thought. Generally, there were very few people that Shouta trusted with sharp objects anywhere near his person. His parents were on the list, and, depending on the circumstances, his sisters. Occasionally Hizashi, though considering how often said sharp object was a razor when Hizashi was involved, he was on thin ice.
Somehow, without Shouta knowing it, a few members of his homeroom class from hell had worked their way onto that list. Yaoyorozu for her levelheadedness and clear competence, Sato – when not hyped up on sugar – for similar reasons, Bakugou for his skill with and awareness of dangerous items in the vicinity of people, Dark Shadow, shockingly enough, and Shoji.
Most of his students, he hadn’t ever had the chance to screen for that sort of thing.
He’d arranged with his mother to cut his hair the next time they were both free for long enough. She was used to it after cutting both his and his sisters’ hair throughout their childhood, since it was hard to find any businesses that wouldn’t either artificially raise prices or intentionally mess up the requests of a group of four Quirkless people. But the soonest time they could set aside for it was in two, almost three weeks, and Shouta could barely stand to wait another day.
It wasn’t like they could make his hair any worse, right?
He shouldn’t even be considering this, though. He didn’t know how he’d react to anyone but his close trusted few wandering around behind him with sharp objects, especially with the memories of his initial unwanted haircut so fresh.
Apparently, he didn’t come to a conclusion fast enough.
“Or- or not,” Ashido said quickly, “we didn’t mean to offend you or anything! We’ll just leave, sorry!”
“Wait,” Shouta sighed, and Ashido froze, half-turned towards the door. Her eyes darted from him to the door, like she was considering making a break for it. “Where?”
Aoyama attempted a mysterious smile, but Shouta could tell he was startled. Asui tilted her head at him curiously. Ashido openly gaped.
He could practically hear the dial-up sound in her head and see the equations floating in the air around her. Then her mouth snapped shut and she darted towards his desk, practically falling over it.
“You really mean it!? You’ll let us?!”
“I’m already reconsidering,” Shouta said dryly.
“Mph!” Ashido made a determined face, though she wasn’t quite able to smother her delight. “We’ll do you proud, Sensei, we promise!”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Oh! Um, we were thinking in the dorms bathroom? It’s got a nice tile floor that’ll be easy to clean.”
“When?”
“Whenever you get there?” Ashido suggested, “Or whenever you’re ready, I guess. Today or tomorrow or whatever.”
“Have you finished the essay for English that’s due tomorrow morning?”
“Yes!” Ashido grinned, lighting up with pride.
“I have done my due,” Aoyama agreed dramatically.
“I’m just here for support, kero,” Asui shrugged, “but yes, I’ve done it already.”
“Then I’ll see you in… twenty minutes,” Shouta decided. Five minutes to finish up here, five to walk to the dorms, and ten to brace himself and do a quick grounding exercise or two.
“Yeah, see you then!” Ashido flashed him two thumbs up – a gesture she could not have more obviously picked up from Kaminari – and beat a hasty retreat. Aoyama followed, and Asui paused to wave at him as she closed the door. He nodded back, just a slight tilt of his head.
Then, and only then, with no students in the room, Shouta reached up to touch his hair. It was all uneven lengths, lopped off in abrupt shaggy clumps. Even the slight curl in his hair couldn’t save it, and his eye stung for a moment before he quickly pulled his hand away again.
He was over it. It was done. He’d lost some hair, so what. He still had what remained of his Quirk, his eye, all his limbs… Kami, his life was depressing.
He was fine.
Shouta quickly finished the work he was in the middle of and stood, pulling his capture weapon higher around his neck, as though he could replace his missing hair with enough coils of scarf. With a tired sigh, he started towards Heights Alliance.
The walk was familiar, and it always surprised him how relaxing it could be when he wasn’t responding to an immediate emergency. The area was quite green for such a new installation – and despite the chaos that lived inside it – and Shouta took a moment to appreciate that.
He definitely wasn’t procrastinating.
Finally, despite walking at about half his usual pace, Shouta made it to Heights Alliance building 2-A.
“I told you he’d come!” Ashido shouted, bursting through the front door as Shota approached. For a split second, he seriously considered turning around and leaving right then and there. And then Ashido’s hand closed on his wrist, and Shouta couldn’t have dislodged her without breaking a few of her fingers, which he wasn’t even willing to consider, so he allowed himself to be dragged through the doors and into the building.
Bakugou was leaning angrily against the wall, arms folded over his chest and familiar scowl settled over his face. Aoyama was leaning much more dramatically against the same wall, like he was supposed to be fainting fabulously in a trashy soap opera and had paused halfway through. Kirishima had also somehow been roped into this, and had a grin so bright that it hurt spread over his face despite standing next to Bakugou.
“Aizawa-Sensei,” Jirou nodded a casual greeting and Shouta returned it, desperately holding onto the hope that, with Bakugou and Jirou around, they would at least be able to keep this somewhat sensible.
“Come on!” Ashido urged, tugging Shouta to a stool set off to one corner of the room. “We couldn’t use the bathroom because it wouldn’t fit all of us, but we put down a cover, look!”
At the very least, they had put down what looked like a large tablecloth under the stool. Shouta would give them that. And, whether it was intentional or not, they’d managed to find a tablecloth that wasn’t one of UA’s usual heathered tan ones that were almost the exact shame shade as Shouta’s carpet. Either quick thinking on someone’s part – Shouta had his money on Bakugou – or a happy accident.
“And Yaomomo made us a cape!” Ashido whipped a mass of black fabric with a grey collar off the stool. “It’s in your colors!”
“All stylist capes are black, idiot,” Bakugou scoffed. “Come on, old man.”
Well used to it by now, Shouta barely even noticed the insult. Instead, he slipped his hand out of Ashido’s – only possible since she’d been distracted by showing off their setup – and stepped up to the stool.
“Here,” Bakugou ripped the stylist cape from Ashido’s grip and flung it at Shouta, who caught it automatically. “Put that on or whatever.”
“This has sleeves,” Shouta observed as he did just that.
“Yaomomo made it,” Jirou said flatly, popping her bubblegum, “She gave it sleeves.”
Shouta shrugged internally and buttoned the collar properly. He wasn’t going to complain. He’d always disliked the usual stylist capes that they used in salons and even the ones his mother had managed to get her hands on. It made the hyperaware, always-combat-ready part of his brain needle at him when he couldn’t use his hands.
“Okay!” Ashido bounced around the stool, vanishing behind Shouta. He tracked her footsteps automatically even as he kept his head resolutely forward. He was completely fine with someone standing behind him.
Okay, that one was a lie even on a good day. But at the moment he had specifically agreed to let people stand behind him, so he was going to make himself be fine with it.
Bakugou scoffed and grumbled something to Kirishima before storming out the door. Kirishima shot Shouta a grin and followed Bakugou with a call of “We’ll be right back!”
Shouta had only a moment to wonder where exactly they were going before Ashido’s phone was shoved in his face.
“So, we were thinking something like this!”
Shouta grabbed her hand and dragged the phone farther from his face, squinting at the screen. It appeared to be an image search that was displaying half a dozen pictures of women with short curly hair. Shouta had to admit that the common theme did appear to include the sort of haphazard, somewhat bedraggled look he usually went for. The sort of thing that could range anywhere from artfully mussed to literally just rolled out of bed.
“Specifically, I think we could do this!” Ashido yanked her phone away, tapped on it a few times, and shoved it back at him. Shouta couldn’t pick out a specific difference between this particular picture and all the others. The caption underneath it was just a mess of buzzwords – SHORT BLACK HAIR CURLY HAIR EDGY WOLF CUT TRENDY SHORT HAIRCUTS MEN RYUKYU HAIR – but it looked decent enough. He shrugged noncommittally.
“Awesome!” Ashido cheered, “so this cut won’t take a whole lot of upkeep, especially with your curls, it should be fine if you just wash it, you know? Let’s do it!”
“Hold on,” Bakugou snapped, shoving the door open, “give us a second, Horns, this was your idea.”
Shouta’s eyebrows shot up as Bakugou and Kirishima shouldered through the door carrying a floor-length mirror that, based on the painfully pink leopard-print frame, had come from Ashido’s room.
“Here,” Bakugou and Kirishima hoisted it upright, propping it against the counter. “Now you’ve got your stupid salon mirror you wanted so badly.”
Despite his huffing and grumbling, Bakugou was as transparent as a clean window. Shouta knew – and he was pretty sure that everyone else in the building might know – that they carried the mirror all the way down from Mina’s room on the fourth floor to let him see the entire area behind himself. It wasn’t one of the girls’ small handheld mirrors for doing their hair or Aoyama’s picture-sized mirrors or even the narrow wall mirror Kirishima had put up in his room for weightlifting. It was a full-sized freestanding floor-length mirror that was almost a meter wide.
If Shouta had working tear ducts, he might have cried. Instead, he nodded slightly to Bakugou – whose scowl might have softened minutely in response – and settled in to watch Ashido and Aoyama at work.
Shouta hadn’t gone to a professional for a haircut once in his entire life, but he could tell that Ashido knew what she was doing, at least to an extent. She had the theoretical know-how of haircutting and an idea of what she wanted the end product to look like, and Aoyama had the experience of what Shouta’s hair type would look like dry, and together they did startlingly well. When they started, Shouta’s hair looked like an unfortunate sheepdog that someone had dyed black, and Shouta could see it slowly start to actually look good. Much better than Shouta had expected was possible, even if he’d gone to his mother.
“Okay!” Ashido finally declared, stepping back to look at her handiwork, “the cutting is done! I know how to do the big blowout and dry shtick, but I don’t think you’d really appreciate that.”
“Good intuition,” Shouta said dryly, already pulling the stylist cape off.
“It is quite delightful,” Aoyama assured him seriously, “One would, alas, never wish to dazzle in the shadows you frequent, but your hair is no longer a disgrace upon your name and station.”
Shouta had long since trained away the instinct to blink when startled, so he merely stared at Aoyama for a brief moment, speechless.
“You look less like you cut your own hair left-handed with safety scissors while floating in the middle of the ocean,” Bakugou admitted. “Could be worse.”
“Thank you, Ashido,” Shouta said, and almost immediately regretted it as Ashido lit up like a Christmas tree and made a shrill squeal that was so loud and high-pitched it would have made Hizashi jealous.
It was only due to Jiro intervening that Shouta got away without being tackled into an exuberant pink hug, and he was out the door and halfway to the front gate before his ears had stopped ringing. He dug his phone out and texted Hizashi to pick him up by the gate, then shoved the phone back in his pocket.
Shouta leaned against the archway that held the gate mechanism, watching the street for Hizashi’s car. He automatically ran his hand through his hair with a sigh and winced somewhere deep in his heart when the strands were far, far too short. But the stab of pain was… blunted, somewhat. Softened now that the ends were neat and even, no longer at dozens of choppy careless lengths.
His hand caught on something at the back, a clip attached to one of the longest locks of hair he still had. Someone must have snuck it into his hair without him noticing, somehow despite the mirror. It didn’t leave glitter on his fingers when he pulled his hand away, so it must not have been Aoyama.
Shouta popped the clip open and brought it down to look at it.
Safely hidden in the coils of his capture weapon, Shouta quirked a reluctant smile.
Thankfully, the hair clip was not pink. It was mostly plain black plastic, with a black-and-white cat head on one end. The cat had one yellow eye while the other was crisscrossed with a cartoonish pair of pink scars, and it looked supremely unimpressed. Definitely made by Yaoyorozu.
Shouta quickly put the clip back in his hair right as Hizashi’s bright blue mustang pulled up to the gate, and Hizashi rolled the window down. “Hey babe, were you gonna be tired and irritable tonight all on your own?”
“Of course,” Shouta said, slipping into the car. He tilted his head back against the headrest and was almost immediately out like a light.
If, perhaps, Ashido and Aoyama had extra credit points added to their next Observation and Awareness practical, well, they had simply done an exemplary job in displaying those skills. (And if Ashido received a new pair of tap shoes only a week after she accidentally melted her old ones and Aoyama was gifted a tin of glitter-infused hair gel from an unknown source, well. That was between Shouta, his online shopping records, and Hizashi’s now-slightly-smaller stash of stupid hair cosmetics.)