Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The clothes in Shouta’s closet can be divided into three categories: Hero uniforms, a couple of outfits for his downtime, which are occasionally the same thing, and a pile of shit his friends have forgotten at his place over the years. Today, he marks a fourth.

The suit Nemuri had gotten him was nice and sharp, not at all what he’d been expecting to wear as someone whose job it’ll be to melt into the wall once he gets there. Or maybe this is exactly what security detail for families of that caliber wear—far be it from him to know—but that didn’t make it any less jarring.

It’s black, obviously, made-to-measure, though he has no idea how she pulled that off, and above all, knowing her, mind-fuckingly expensive.

It's so expensive that she won’t even tell him how much.

“I’m gonna find out anyway,” Shouta says, eyes narrowed at her, “The tag’s still on there, I saw it earlier.”

She shrugs, “I’ll take it off.”

“I’ll take it back.”

“I’ll eat it!” She yells.

“Eat shit!”

A passerby glances at them and they grumble back down into tentative peace.

It’s hard to tell with her sunglasses on, but she’s almost certainly been rolling her eyes at him nonstop since he first started asking. The two of them are standing just outside UA’s doors, slightly to the side as kids filter in and out. She’s got two dry cleaning bags thrown over her arm and he’s got a backpack hanging off his shoulder, but he’s also got two of her duffle bags cutting off circulation to the other, so he thinks the least she could do is answer a couple questions.

“Thanks for the suit,” Shouta says after a moment, “I like the suit. It’s just-” He tries thinking of a word, tries to stretch its definition enough to fit fake sisters, expired ice cream, and thirty-one years inside of it, “Money.”

“My money.”

“That I’m gonna reimburse you for,” He says, earning him another eye roll. But having debts to strangers is a terrible enough thought, and being indebted to his own friends might actually shove him off the edge. “You shouldn’t be spending your money on any gifts.”

“I’ve got a fuck ton to spare, thanks,” she sighs, it’s the same one she always uses when she thinks he’s being stupid, “And don’t think of it as a gift, think of it as an investment. An early Christmas investment.”

He gives her a weird look, “For what?”

She shrugs, “Office parties. Office dinners. Graduation day for your kids, if ever you decide to finally dress appropriately for that sort of thing.”

And wouldn’t that be interesting, wearing a suit to someone else’s big day when he hadn’t even bothered to wear one for his own? He really never wore one anywhere— he never had a reason to, and so he never got one. He guesses the next thing out of her mouth would’ve been weddings, funerals, familial embezzlement, and court hearings, since apparently that’s all that’s left after high school.

“Besides,” She continued, “No cheap ass suit of yours would’ve ever been let through the door.”

“We’re security.”

“Even security has standards.” She grinned suddenly, holding one of the dry cleaning bags up against his shoulders, “And I think you’ll look dapping— Just don’t let him see you.”

In the last couple of days, ever since Tsukauchi fucked him over and All Might, in a rare show of solidarity, un-fucked him over, they’ve taken to referring to Hizashi in the third person. It was their new thing. The first of them, anyway.

Because he tried getting time off for their trip only to be shot down by Nezu because he used all his vacation days going on a bender across Okinawa. And now he’s in a shit mood locked away up in his tower and needs to drag the rest of them into it too. And if they say his name three times they’ll be guilted into staying here forever.

He’s the whole reason they’re loitering out here, anyway, waiting for his car to pull in. They wanted to see him one last time before they fucked off to the beach just to reassure themselves that he won’t wither away while they’re gone. They’ll wish him well, remind him to wear his nighttime retainers, and ride off into the sunset. Well, catch a train off into the sunset. If he can get his ass down here in time, anyway.

“He’ll be fine,” Shouta says, mostly to himself. He said the same thing about All Might teaching a class.

Nemuri hums along anyway, “He will. He’ll be lugging trash around, too, so that’s something to keep him busy,” He tenses under her hands and her smile dips, “What?”

“Nothing,” He says, “She just isn’t staying with him. We decided against that.”

“Really?”

“I decided against that.”

“Was it the hairspray thing again?” She asked, “You know he feels bad about that.”

The hairspray thing was the second thing, and what they’d taken to calling Hizashi’s inability to recognize that there was a place and time to spray chemicals everywhere. Bathrooms were fine, hospital bathrooms weren’t, and waiting rooms at veterinary clinics definitely weren’t. And no, Shouta doesn’t think he feels bad.

“He shouldn’t,” Shouta lied, “It’s his lifestyle, I'd only fuck it up if I made him adjust to Trash. The arrangement’s better this way.”

“Arrangement?” Her brows lifted, “I figured you’d set her up with ten open cans and a bucket of water. Who else would trash be staying with?”

And that was the last thing.

Because, honestly, no one. There was no one Trash could possibly be staying with if not Hizashi. Shouta’s neighbors didn’t know him and he didn’t know them, he’s evidently got no family and, by extension, family friends to speak of, and the assholes down at the police station would sooner gas his place before they babysat it.

So as awful as it sounds, he was fully prepared to crack open a month’s worth of food for her, if not set her loose on school grounds to live off the rats and pick her up when he got back. Because where would he find someone so stupidly willing to drop everything on such short notice? Well—

He gave a light shrug, “Somebody.”

“Who!”

“Just somebody,” He reiterated, trying and failing to peel himself away from her hold. It only served to make her dig her nails deeper into his shoulders, “And I can tell when you say her name with a lowercase t.”

She must’ve been able to tell that perseverance would only get her so far with him, because she dropped the whole thing just a minute later, falling back into their go-to plan of people-watching while feeling sorry for themselves. So far, Mrs. Bakugo was the target.

It seemed he and Nemuri weren’t the only ones getting a head start on vacation, as the woman was exhaling into her hands while Midoriya and her son lugged suitcases back and forth from the dorms to her car. Distantly he realized that as their teacher he should be throwing a bigger fit about someone so blatantly ditching his class, but with Vlad and, well, that guy taking over, it wasn’t really his problem anymore, was it? Blame his charity on the Christmas spirit, he guessed.

“Did you know Midoriya and the Bakugos were so close?” Nemuri asked, eyes following the two boys’ movements.

“Not until recently,” He admitted. He knew they had some type of history, he just figured it was the bad kind, not the Kumbaya road trip kind. He hasn’t decided exactly what it is yet.

“Where do you think they’re going?”

“Group therapy.”

She hummed, “I was thinking Yamagata.”

“Or that.” Midoriya tripped over his own feet and Bakugo caught him by his hood before dropping him again. Both of them looked thoroughly spooked by the encounter, “I guess it’s nice, though.”

“I’ll bet,” She laughed, “Less yelling.”

Shouta got the feeling that the yelling wasn’t Midoriya’s biggest concern; it was when Bakugo ever got too quiet that the boy seemed to lose his nerve. Yelling got them talking, in a way, and talking might’ve gotten them here, with the sleepovers and the family vacations that Shouta’s guessing don’t happen for the kid that often. So yeah, it was nice.

Mrs. Bakugo caught their eyes and the two of them dropped their heads in a small bow, almost sending Nemuri’s floppy beach hat off in a landslide.

“Morning,” She grinned, “Going somewhere?”

Shouta nodded, “Yes.”

He could feel Nemuri’s hard eyes beating into him at the lack of elaboration— it’s unnecessary— but the mother only laughed.

“Detailed as ever,” She said.

Nemuri laughed along with her if only to cloak the confusion of what the woman would know about ever. As far as his friend’s concerned, their one and only meeting was after the Kamino incident, and that wasn’t exactly such a happy little tea party. Shouta reminded himself not to elaborate again later.

“Well, fine, stay that way,” Mrs. Bakugo sniffed, “You’ll never know where I’m going either.”

“We,” Bakugo hissed.

“Whatever.” She eyed Shouta and Nemuri’s attires, taking in the paper-thin fabric of his shirt and her floral dress that needed to be restrained just to stay still in the wind. “Is there a reason you’re still here, though?”

“Waiting on Present Mic,” Shouta said, pulling his phone out almost on instinct, “We wanted to say bye before we left.” He eyed the blank screen and opened the messenger app, finally fed up with the cold, “Guess he’s late today, though.”

“Mic-sensei?” Midoriya asked, eyebrows pinched, “But he slept at the dorms yesterday.”

Shouta’s fingers froze over the keyboard, “What?”

“He said he was locking himself in his classroom and he wasn’t coming out until you guys left,” Bakugo said. The edges of his mouth were curled downward as if the effort it took to dilute Hizashi’s emotional soliloquies into monotone statements had taken a toll on him, and he needed to retire to the backseat immediately. “Something about everybody leaving in the end.”

“Oh screw him,” Nemuri spat, slapping Shouta’s phone to the ground. He stared at her as Mrs. Bakugo grinned. “Hell do we do now?”

“Head to the train?” He shrugged, picking up his phone and brushing the dirt off it. He was trying his best to act casual despite his schedule being fucked up, down, and sideways. “By the time we get there it’ll have already left, we might as well get lunch before the next one.”

She perked up, “Thai?”

Like shit. “Sure.”

“He’s lying,” Midoriya said, all wide-eyed like he hadn’t meant for that to come out. Of course, now that it had he didn’t seem to care much about the what the fuck? look Shouta was giving him. “Sorry, it’s just, he’s lying. You’re gonna end up at a vending machine. Maybe a water fountain. Sorry.”

“You don’t sound sorry,” Shouta said, forgoing his stoicism for a moment.

“Apologies.” Midoriya slipped into the car and that was that.

“But where are you going?” Mrs. Bakugo asked, a little more invested now. Part of it might’ve been pity, they did look like a couple of hungry nomads poorly dressed for the cold, anyway. But then there was something else to it, like this unwanted conversation somehow had higher stakes than it did a second ago. “We might be able to take you there halfway.”

Well, no. That’s unprofessional. He’d also rather shoot himself. Not to mention he—

“Hayama beach?” Nemuri cocked a head, “More so in the town part of it though, so any highway would do.”

Shouta went to ask his friend why she hated him when suddenly, Mrs. Bakugo was laughing. It was small at first, a harsh scoff. Then, upon more silence, genuine fucking cackles.

“Oh my—“ She coughed, “Oh my fucking god. Inko, get out here—“

Shouta made to hold his hand out, “Wait—“

“INKO!”

"Mitsuki."

And then there she was, behind the car and leaning over the roof to peer at them, having gotten out of her seat and not bothered to close the door behind her. She didn’t expect to stay out here long, then, but that was fine, this one minute was enough to make his case.

“It’s eight in the morning,” She continued, like that explained her blank visage perfectly. It did. She cocked her head towards the front entrance and a couple of loose strands fell to her face, she still looked put together. “Kids are still coming in.”

She was straightforward in a way that Shouta hadn’t expected Midoriya’s mother to be. He pictured rosy cheeks and perpetually wet eyes, not this carefully polite stoicism. But he guesses he had a habit of misjudging parents and downplaying All Might’s hardships with them. She was a lawyer, in any case, so he shouldn’t be too surprised, especially since she was a Midoriya in every other sense of the word. Green eyes, green hair, only much tamer than her son’s.

Her gaze trapped him for a moment, the intensity of it rendering him mute, and only Nemuri brought him back.

“Mrs. Midoriya,” His friend said. She did a little bow. Shouta followed suit.

“They’re heading out to the beach, too,” Mitsuki said, and Shouta’s head shot back up. Too? “You think they could fit in the car?”

“What?” He said before he could stop it. He didn’t like his own vocal cords being caught off guard, and even the kids looked put off.

Mrs. Midoriya ignored him, her willingness to let them tag along shocking him into silence again. What was it with these people and a lack of boundaries? “If you can get Katsuki to move to the back.”

Muffled curses came from the car, and if Shouta unfocused his eyes he could see Midoriya just past the tinted windows, unblinkingly watching the scene unfold before him. How much amusement did he get out of his mother’s antics? And was that what the rapt attention was? Amusement?

“Easy enough,” Mrs. Bakugo said, “But what about the—?”

“It’s fine,” Shouta cut in, swatting away Nemuri’s flimsy elbow that threatened to puncture his kidney. “Our train’s coming in a couple hours— we’ll get lunch.”

“Lunch with us,” The blonde woman shrugged, “We’ve got a couple pitstops planned anyway, you wouldn’t be intruding.”

“Still,” He said, urging as best he could without bordering on rude, pointedly not risking a glance at Nemuri, “Six is a lot for a car. There’s less… air.”

“We’ve got windows, kid.”

Kid? Even Midoriya’s mother threw her a look.

“I really—”

“You’re coming,” Mrs. Midoriya said, a small smile gracing her face, thinly veiling the strong resolve. And that was that.

———

Shouta thinks he should’ve paid more attention in his psych class, back when they were discussing the importance of dreams, because maybe if he did he could pinpoint some moment in his subconscious that foreshadowed this happening. Any dreams taking place in the woods, nightmares of getting crushed under the Nomu again, because that’s a bit what this was like.

Mitsuki’s—Mitsuki and Inko as they’d insisted Nemuri and he call them—car smelled at times like cotton, then eucalyptus, then pine. It was a circuit of all the fancy scents he’d expect to find in a housing supplies store, wafting around the candle aisle. It brought him back to those parent-teacher conferences right after Kamino, pretending to use Mitsuki’s bathroom when all he really wanted was to escape the shitshow of their family dynamic in the living room, washing nothing off his hands and appreciating the lingering smell of her soap. That was good, that was clean and stable like everything else in her home, and it was paradise compared to now.

He still felt like he was getting interrogated, only now instead of her home, instead of being suffocated under a Nomu, he’s sandwiched between the two Midoriyas.

Inko was in the passenger seat, gazing out the windshield and fiddling with the toll pass as Mitsuki patted the wheel to the beat of the hushed radio. Shouta was right behind Inko with Nemuri to his left, and Midoriya and Bakugo were behind them in the same configuration. His legs were cramped, and Nemuri wasn’t helping with her manspreading, but it wasn’t that bad. He liked the smell, the seats, the breeze. He just didn’t like the questions.

“So you’ve been at UA for how many years?” Mitsuki asked.

“Eight.”

“Jesus, that’d make you, what, twenty-four when you first started out?” Close enough, but she didn’t wait for a response, “I was barely out of university at twenty-four, I couldn’t imagine myself taking on kids anywhere near that age. Well—” She shrugged, “Except the brat, I guess.”

“Die,” Bakugo said, at a normal volume for once. Maybe he thought he was whispering, but Shouta had a feeling he just wanted to listen in. Damn snoop.

“It’s more like six, though, with the way he’s only half there in the winter,” Nemuri points out. “Makes me look real bad every year, considering I’m the one who brought him in.”

“And do you like it? Teaching? Children?”

“Sure.”

“Like’s a strong word, he means.” Nemuri laughs again. Should he be laughing every now and then, too? “Drains the hell out of both of us but we keep coming back. Must be some kind of addiction.”

Mitsuki mirrors her laugh, “How bad are they at drawing for you to dread it?”

But at least he’s managed to finally direct the bulk of it towards Nemuri, once Mitsuki realized that she’d only ever get one-worded responses out of him. A sentence at best.

He didn’t wanna be rude, that was never his intention. He never wanted to give a bad impression, either, that just sort of naturally happens with him. The last time he tried to amend that was maybe his first year of UA, right before the sports festival when everyone in the locker room was having a jolly old time wishing each other luck. Shouta shook the hand of this kid who had thrust it out at him before their match. The kid predictably didn’t reciprocate when he lost.

He might’ve tried with the kids once, too. Like that time he encouraged Kaminari to face his fears, or expelled Midoriya to help him face his fears. And he ended up—

Shouta looked back at Midoriya, who was staring right back at him. He turned around.

Yeah, no, something’s wrong with that fucking kid.

“—and why’s that?” Inko asked.

Shouta ignored it at first, positive she was speaking to Nemuri, but when he noticed that everyone in the car had their eyes on him he realized he’d perhaps zoned out a little too much. Why what? Why were their drawings bad?

“…The arts are historically underfunded.”

She cracked a smile, “No, why are you absent for half the winter?”

“Ah, I go on missions.”

Nemuri was no doubt gearing up to elaborate on his behalf again, but Inko pressed on.

“Don’t you do that year round?”

“A lot of missions.” He straightened up after another beat of silence, realizing this was gonna take longer than he’d hoped, “A couple per month is the norm, but since nobody likes working in the cold, a lot more positions free up, so…” More silence. “I just take those.”

She hums in a way he really doesn’t enjoy, sympathetic and disapproving all at once, and for once he doesn’t see her so clearly. He never understood the hate people had against work, the repetitive input and output of labor and money. Work was comfortable, it was more uniform than socialization, and cleaner than eating and drinking. And you get paid! He thought a lawyer of all people would understand that, but fuck him, he guessed.

“Can’t have that,” She says with a smile. Shouta would smile back if he wasn’t sure it’d come out just as unappreciative and forged as he knew it’d be. “I bet your family weeps when you pick up another shift around the holidays.”

“Mm,” His eyes squint as he wobbles his head a bit, “It’s alright. All my missions are at night anyway, so I’m with them during the day, at least. They sleep a lot and they really only need me for my money, so I doubt they’d mind if I took up more hours—“

“He’s talking about his dumpster cat again,” Nemuri says, eyes shut like she can’t even stand to look at him. The rest of them had apparently been looking at him like a sad freak, so maybe it was for the better.

Shouta sniffs and restarts, “The rest of my family’s fine, too. They’re busy, anyway, far be it from them to judge.” He clears his throat. “Advertising industry never sleeps, ‘specially not during Christmas, it’s why I’m getting it ov- getting together now.”

“What industry doesn’t your family work in?” Midoriya asks. His voice is a whisper and too loud all at once, strange in a way that makes Shouta scared to turn around and check just how close that kid’s freckly face is to the headrest of his seat.

“Domestic care.”

Nemuri snorts and her eyes fly open as a polished hand slides over her mouth, but it’s too late, Inko’s attention has already been stolen.

“And you, Kayama-san? Are you here to join them?” She asks.

An ultimately nice woman, Shouta decides, and lets the balancing scale he has of Inko Midoriya tip a little more on the kindhearted side. He admits it was more neutral before, her tuts and absences at school events not exactly working in her favor, but anyone willing to put up with them in an enclosed space must be a saint at their core.

Truthfully it doesn’t make sense to assume Nemuri’s tagging along to his family reunion, not when she’s physically assaulted him five times since meeting the parents and has a bunch of beach garb on. But since ice has begun to form on the perimeter of Mitsuki’s windshield, and no one with common sense would plan to tan in this weather, it’s awfully generous of the woman to assume Nemuri is one of those level-headed people.

Nemuri nods with a smile and flops against him so they’re shoulder to shoulder, like two kids forced into a keepsake photoshoot. “I’m practically family.”

“Yamada-san, too?” Inko asks.

“Screw—”

Shouta elbows his friend again until she recoils back over to her side of the car, cutting her off. He sighs and looks at Inko again, an apology written over his face as he starts from the beginning, “No.”

“But how about you two?” Nemuri asks, perking up and gesturing to the other passengers in a way that doesn't make clear whether she’s referring to Midoriya and Bakugo or their mothers. Shouta guesses it might as well be the same thing, and Inko takes it from there.

“Well, we went to the same high school together.” She began, mirroring Mitsuki’s smile in the way women do when they’re about to telepathically riff off each other. “We met through a mutual friend—realized we were totally best friends without him—“

Mitsuki looks apologetically at Shouta at that moment, a smile and upturned eyebrows, for God knows what reason. He figures it’s because, much like her and Inko’s situation back then, if this car flips and crashes on the highway, they're not exactly pulling him out first. They’re probably already planning a grieving girl’s night with Nemuri.

Mitsuki swiveled her head around and picked up where Inko left off, “—And then, of course, naturally driving forces parted us. Inko went to law school, I fucked off to fashion school, and—“

“We met right back here.”

“Pregnant. So obviously—“

“Obviously.”

“We did all that pregnant bullshit together and obviously—“ Obviously. “—raised our sons as best friends. So, here’s to hoping we can keep this shindig going till we’re old and grey.”

An odd hush comes over the car, one that suffocates them even as Bakugo slips in a could’ve at least waited for Auntie Inko to catch up that has him halfheartedly dodging Mitsuki’s claws. Inko was silent in satisfaction at how the rest of her years would play out, Shouta and Nemuri stayed quiet as if expecting to hear the rest of the story, and the boys—

Shouta glanced at them in the rearview mirror, the way they stared straight ahead with wide eyes, clasped hands, and pale faces. He imagined how funny it’d be if they were praying, looking for some salvation when they knew their teacher wouldn’t spare them any.

“So they’ve always been best friends?” Shouta asks, still staring down the kids, who only seem to shrivel further into themselves at his probing.

“Mhm,” Inko hums, sunlight dappling on her face through the trees in quick flashes as she gazed out the window. He imagined there were three different genres of movies everyone in the car was going through depending on where they were sitting. “Pre-school, kindergarten, junior high. We thought high school might’ve brought an end to that, with the hero course at UA not exactly being so…” she trailed off, her smile resetting. “But, we stand corrected, don’t we?”

A raspy breath of affirmation came from the back of the vehicle, the kind of breeze that ruffled leaves in some foggy, decrepit old town that people feel right before they get murdered. Shouta’s having the time of his life, though.

Or he was, anyway, up until Bakugo hooked his elbows over the space between Shouta and Nemuri and, staring right at her, asked, “So how’d you meet Aizawa-sensei?”

At some point, Aizawa-sensei and Kacchan stopped needing to facilitate each other’s demise, it just started happening naturally, a never-ending chain of nuclear fission. Where’s the explosion that kills us all? Izuku wondered. Then more desperately, where?

Midnight-sensei met Aizawa on the roof, with a kitten in one hand, a sippy cup full of milk in the other, and batting away with his leg a half-naked friend. Of all the things she chose to elaborate on, the cat and the friend’s missing clothes, all Izuku really wanted to know was where the hell his teacher got the sippy cup. He could tell Kacchan wanted to know too, but there wasn’t much time between the end of that story and the beginning of Aizawa’s question about what he and Izuku would do as kids. Things had pretty much gone downhill from there.

Frogs. He and Kacchan would run through streams to catch frogs as kids, with Kacchan holding it up to make Izuku scream, and Kacchan screaming when the thing would jump out of his hand and slip-n-slide across his face. This is hilarious since, as it would turn out, Aizawa-sensei had a bad habit of dropping bugs in Mic-sensei’s things whenever he pissed him off.

Izuku would eat bowl after bowl of this one grainy cereal he hated just because All Might’s face would sometimes—if he was lucky—be on the right corner of the inner flap. Aizawa won customer of the year at his favorite cafe during the season they had just so happened to be doing a brand deal with All Might, meaning Aizawa would have to carry around a gift card with the man’s face on it if he ever wanted his free coffee.

Kacchan and Izuku, by the time the Spring Fling rolled around at Aldera, had to take pictures with each other in their matching suits before they’d be let out, even though neither of them had any intention of going to the dance. Kacchan because he’d rather die, and Izuku because he’d been threatened with death several times as a potential consequence of showing his face. Nemuri had similarly been threatened with death on the event of her forcing others to dance at prom, none of which were followed through on as she made the individual making them—guess—be her arm candy and ward off other guys with his naturally repelling stare.

Suffice it to say that none of them were so fond of this carpooling arrangement anymore.

“Oh, wow, hey,” Aizawa had said all of a sudden, mock surprise in his voice. He tapped his knuckle against the car window, aimed at a small building across the street. “Look at that, exactly where we needed to go.”

Izuku’s mom furrowed her eyebrows, conflicted as to whether Izuku’s teacher had bad eyesight or if she had bad foresight about the man’s character. “The…the liquor store?”

Aizawa-sensei nodded, "Forgot to buy my parents a gift. I could probably get away with being empty-handed at the party tomorrow, giving spirit and…all, but not if we beg for food tonight, too.”

Izuku was beginning to think the man only spoke in complete sentences when it helped him get out of situations faster.

“Problem solved, eat dinner with us,” Auntie Mitsuki grinned as she pulled over. What problem, Izuku wanted to ask, what? “It’ll make up for last time.”

Aizawa-sensei’s face had begun to do that odd thing it did the last time she’d invited him inside for dinner, with wider eyes than he’d usually ever be caught with and an otherwise frozen face. It seemed somewhere between guilt and horror, yet worse now because only three of them knew what the hell she meant by last time.

Now maybe Izuku’s teacher could’ve turned her down again, turned the odds in his favor, but the problem with sitting through a half hour of stories in which the man is renowned for slipping out of plans and wielding the power of empty promises is that you start to learn how to counteract that: don’t ask. Auntie Mitsuki—the moment Aizawa had shut the door behind he and Midnight-sensei, heaved their bags out of the trunk, and shuffled up to the driver seat’s window, gearing up to let her invitation down softly—honked.

“Great!” She yelled over the horn, right into Aizawa-sensei’s shell-shocked face, “Check your email later for the address. See you then!”

And that's how they left each other. Aizawa and Midnight clawing their way out of that car and, fifteen minutes later, Izuku and Kacchan doing about the same under the guise of doing best friend things at the beach, hoping never to have to hear any more of each other. Izuku wondered if they would have to transfer to Vlad’s class by the end of Mid-winter recess.

They’d walked a good distance past the radius their families usually frequented during breaks, if just to avoid any word getting back to them. The town was a little like Izuku remembered it, quiet and unassuming with its gravel streets and grey exteriors, though in his memories the quiet hadn’t seemed so isolating. Some houses were raised now, a byproduct of policies born from old hurricanes, and some streets were closed off to let people hang around without getting run over, but he still couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly spend their vacation here, let alone settle down. Not when people on the street seemed to wander in circles around the block, and people in stores never had any inclination to leave. Izuku couldn't even figure out what he was supposed to be doing or where he was supposed to be going, not when every building, road, and horizon looked the same.

“What the fuck are you doing spinning in circles like that?” Kacchan’s voice rang out from behind him and Izuku once again swiveled to face the noise. His classmate was holding open the door to some seafood place, the scent of fried octopus spilling out and settling like a cloud in the humid air, providing a certain dramatic fog for their entrance when Izuku finally decided to move.

The place’s air conditioning washed over him like a salty wave, and their sandals flopped quietly against the wooden panels, almost unheard from under the reggae music. From behind a buffed wooden bar a hairy arm whose origin led downwards was sliding a rag across the counter, back and forth but occasionally slowing to a stop like he forgot what he was doing. In a moment, they understood why.

“Are you guys open?” Izuku called out, a bit away from the bar in case something weird popped out from behind it. Far be it from him to start an interrogation when he’s off the clock.

He had a dream Kacchan got sucked down the kitchen drain while washing his knives, with just his arm left spinning around in the sink, and ever since then he’s been a little put off by singular limbs. Something did pop out eventually, a man sliding the phone he’d had in his other hand back into his pocket, but he himself wasn’t too weird. Backward baseball cap, open flannel, graphic tee that said Master Baiter—not exactly Lex Luthor they’re up against.

For a couple seconds, the guy just opened and closed his mouth at them, until Kacchan delightfully prompted, “Yes or no, man.”

“Yes! Yes, can I help you? Some stinky fish? Fish congee? No one really comes in around this time so you can—“ He clapped suddenly, before directing his clasped hands between the two of them. “So I completely forgot!” He pointed his hands at Kacchan. “I’m getting…eel.”

The blond boy curled his lip, “What?”

“Red snapper. Volcanic rockfish. Molten-hot koi fish. A betta?”

“Why are you naming fish?” Izuku whispered.

“It’s my thing, my place’s thing. I see someone, I find their fish, I kill it, and—puffer. There you go, puffer fish.” He exhaled and spared one glance at Izuku, “Mola Mola.”

“What the hell.”

“Do you know this lady?” Kacchan asked, and flicked up one of the photographs they’d taken with them from the fat folder to show the man.

The photo was of his mother, her eyes almost completely shut from the force of her squinting against the sun. She looks like someone told her to freeze and pose like they couldn’t resist capturing the moment but had no idea how to do it. His mom had her hands clasped behind her back, feet toe-to-to, hair slightly blowing to the side, but all the while smiling at something just past the camera. The owner of the seafood shop tilted his head and smiled back.

“Nnnno idea,” He said. “But then again, if someone like her did come around here, I doubt this would be her first stop. I’d have gone for ice cream or something.”

Izuku raised an eyebrow, “Someone like her?”

The man tapped the photo so that its film quivered slightly under his touch, his finger hovering right over his mom’s blazer, “The dark blue? That’s the Tōyō Gakuen school, wayyy across the river. They don’t come unless there’s a school trip, or there’s something more entertaining here that they don’t have there, rare as that is. So—“ He pointed his finger towards the door behind them, “—think ice cream.”

So they did. Their sandals took them about halfway to the closest ice cream parlor until Kacchan finally got sick of him dragging his feet, in which case only one of them continued in sandals while the other curled his toes around tiny rocks the rest of the way. And when that shop turned out to be a bust, they popped into three more before a corner shop with cotton candy pink walls found them like water in a desert.

“Her? Sure.” The owner said, nodding at the new photo Kacchan had whipped out as he restocked the cups. They figured some variety would be useful for painting a full picture of her; Izuku’s mother was biting some gold medal in this one, not that he knew what for. “She’d come here with her little friends and— hey, she’d get the same flavor as you.”

Izuku hadn’t actually ordered anything, let alone managed a full sentence before the owner spotted him and yelled “Mint chip!” and pulled out the scooper.

He wasn’t sure what it was about this town that made everyone want to classify you as one fish, flavor, or another, or what it was about him that made that process relatively quick. Kacchan, on the other hand, took a bit of deep thinking, the owner working through almost a fourth of the menu until fudge caramel was dubiously settled on.

“Did her friends look like—“ Izuku fumbled with the next photo out of his shorts’ many pockets, this time one taken as a group with his mother sandwiched between a young Mitsuki and another guy with cropped dark hair. “—that?”

The man didn’t even need to think this time, rosy cheeks perking up with a dumb smile as soon as the saturated faces revealed themselves, “Sure, wouldn’t just call him her friend, though. They came here all the time, just the two of them. Grossed everyone out.” He glanced up at them again, smile still in place as if his eyes had pressed down and dragged the image to copy and paste it right in front of him, “They’d sit in those same spots, too.”

Kacchan slid his caramel fudge away, in time with his foot sliding Izuku’s chair further away from their table.

“That’s the face her friend would have right before she ditched them, too!” He exclaimed. He readjusted the striped sailor hat on his head so he could sneak a finger under it to scratch at his bald spot. “Their break up must’ve been a bit of a mess if it was enough to blacklist this spot from them forever, though, so I guess she was right to stay out of the way of the happy couple.”

That was the detail Kacchan and he had decided to hone in on for the rest of their investigation, the couple. Izuku figured something like that would really get him what he needed to know, and would open doors to potential witnesses of the not-so-happy pair, potential family friends, and potential grandparents. But even then he hadn’t yet thrown up the idea of that man being his potential dad, and for the sake of his stomach after that ice cream, he didn’t think he should.

And for a while, it did get him somewhere. Store owners who wouldn’t have recognized his mother had easily latched onto her partner, their hands twitching around the young man’s photographed figure in an almost cradle, as if the memory was a bubble they didn’t want to pop so soon. Many of them marked him as a local, and a few of them even remembered him as a neighbor, but only one of them rolled their eyes.

“You’d think forty would be the age that high school finally left you alone,” The woman muttered. She had straight blonde hair that she kept tucked under the neckline of her Seaside Stop apron, so that some of it puffed up under her chin, but she mysteriously still kept a hair net on. Her name tag—Suah’s name tag—swiveled a bit as she moved around the store, shelving and rearranging things, the pin not quite fastened tightly enough.

“You and her were classmates or something?” Kacchan asked.

He’d been able to dig up stuff about his own mom along the way, whether it was the crumpled bills she’d kept in the waistband of her skirt to pay for everything or the weird things she’d turn into earrings, and now he was firmly committed to finding blackmail material to last him till Christmas. That’s what he claimed, anyway. Izuku thought he just liked hearing about his mom.

Suah shook her head, some strands loosening as she did, “With her? No. Him, though? God yeah. Name began with an A or J or something, dunno.” She stared at the man’s face, all its angles and sharp edges, and her eyes simmered with a mixture of nostalgia and faint annoyance. “But a few of my friends definitely had a thing for him. Idiots.”

“But you do know them?” Izuku’s insistence on grouping them as one collective unit, forcing her to acknowledge them as a pair, finally eased away at her odd resistance as she raised two unimpressed eyebrows.

“I know that girl was super rich,” She cast a pointed glance at his mother’s bright smile, “And this guy super wasn’t. Nothing like that is sustainable, even if you keep it a secret.”

“It was a secret?” Izuku asked.

“How would I know if it was a secret before I found out about it?” She asked, face tilted like one tinted and powdered gotcha! “I only knew about it once it, supposedly, stopped being a secret.”

At this, she took the time to stop in her steps and mimic the shape of a giant baby bump with blown-up eyes and cheeks puffed with air, though midway she must’ve regretted the action because she sliced the baby off down the middle and smoothened out her shirt.

“Sorry, I’m exaggerating,” She sniffed, avoiding their eyes. “It’s just what everyone assumed once the two of them stopped showing up around here, which was a lot weirder for him than it was for her, since he lived here and all.” She spared an apologetic glance at Izuku before she pressed on as if checking to see how far she should go with this. “I’d like to say people felt bad for them, but none of the girls here really liked the girls over there, and none of the parents there wanted their kids hooking up with the kids here. Maybe they could overlook a stupid fling, but—not if a kid comes out of it.”

Izuku supposed he should’ve been a lot more concerned with the whole kid part, the way the word blared at him like a large, angry red arrow pointing towards the inevitability of the man in the photograph being his father. He supposed he should’ve spared some time to think about a lot of important implications, like family, extended family, that being the whole reason he even started this damn thing. Instead, all he could really think to do was point a Might Bar (Might Bar, Suah had said the moment the jingling bells alerted her towards his presence in her store, you look like a Might Bar kinda kid) at Kacchan and say—

“See?” He twirled the chocolate bar in a circle around the other boy’s bored face, “Bad break up. His fault. Not mine.”

“Still a byproduct.” His classmate spat.

“Still winning off technicalities.”

“I don’t win off TECHNICAL—“

Suah shoved another box of rice crackers into the last remaining empty slot on the shelf and fully turned to face him, “I assume you’re the green girl’s kid?” Izuku nodded and she nodded back, only slower. “So you’re, what, looking for your dad or something?”

Izuku shrugged, “Among other things.”

She nodded again, but this time took a second to look him up and down, “Then you might wanna look somewhere else. If they did break up, and if it was ‘cause of a pregnancy, I don’t know. You seem a little young to be their kid.” Her mixture of annoyance and nostalgia finally made way for something else, reprieve. “Not to mention you don’t look a damn thing like him.”

"I think it’s pretty clear who he takes after," Kacchan scoffed.

“Hard to tell since you look so much like your mom, I get it, but I know that guy’s family. Moms with crazy hair, blonde and blue and whatever, it doesn’t matter. All the kids came out with black hair, in the end.” She went back to shelving like she didn’t want to be caught dedicating too much attention to this one theory. “Call me old fashioned, but some genes are meant to stick around. So whoever his spawn was, it’s not gonna be you, kid.”

———

Kacchan gave him his sandals back for the trek to the beach house. And walked at his pace or slower the whole way there. And bought another Might Bar to replace the one Izuku had pulverized on the way out of Seaside Stop. It was nice.

Kacchan cleared his throat, “That hag doesn’t have a clue what she’s—“

“No.”

Shouta unhooked from a spinning rack the thin piece of cardboard that bound a pair of black earphones to them. Careful not to rip anything, he pulled one of the wires just taught enough so that one of the earbuds would stretch out a good distance away from the rest of it, so that Shouta could hold it up to his own ear without filing his face with paper cuts.

He didn’t actually shove it in his ear though, just hovered it, lest an employee come up to him and tell him to take responsibility for his actions. And there, the mock black earpiece just a half centimeter from his skin, him staring into the mirror just inches from his face, he was suddenly struck by how fucking stupid they looked.

“We look hot as fuck,” Nemuri whispered, moving the sunglasses up and down over her eyes, as if she believed that moving them fast enough would eventually let her both wear them and not wear them, and therefore give her a perfectly unfiltered view of how she looked with them on. Schrödinger’s Sunglasses and whatnot.

Nemuri settled on wearing them but pushed them down the bridge of her nose so she could wiggle her eyebrows at him from just above it. For some reason, that was the final straw.

“Oh my god,” He breathed, dropping the earphones into the light blue basket and striding out of the aisle of cheap accessories they were in.

What else was on the bodyguard dress code, besides the suits, sunglasses, and earpieces? A lanyard ID? Their only options here were cartoon dolphins and pool floaties with suggestive expressions—It’s already over.

He felt a presence approaching and didn’t flinch when Nemuri saddled up beside him, the basket knocking uncomfortably between their legs as they walked. Her eyes, from behind the mauve lenses, burned into the side of his face, and while she probably knew something was off, far be it from her to cut him any slack for it.

“Do you recognize anything?” She asked. He raised an eyebrow at her and she did a swooping gesture with her arm about the store, “Does this ring any bells?”

“What, the snack aisle? Not really, no.”

“How about the vibes, then? Good? Bad?” She moved her fingers in flowy motions like there were some energy waves around him, all of which were only visible through her eyes. “And don’t just limit yourself to the store, think collectively.”

He switched the basket to his other hand if just to stop the incessant bumping.

“We walked back and forth across a deserted strip mall, it’s impossible to quantify just how little I feel about—“ He met her eyes very suddenly, “Are you checking me for paranormal activity?”

“You do have an energy about you sometimes,” She grinned, a lot more menacing under the enlarged lenses. With that look, all she needed was the voice of a chain smoker to finally scare Mt. Lady off forever. “Figured I’d try.”

“To locate ghosts.”

“To establish a connection,” She clarified. “Or, no. The opposite of that. Prove there is none.”

Shouta could ask what she means, put the effort into pushing words out of his mouth under blue-white fluorescent lighting, or he could slip the cheapest pair of sunglasses on and pretend the world will always be that delightfully dark. He went with the latter, picking up a pair presumably discarded by an old browser in the store and rolling with it.

“Consider it, what’s the worst thing that could happen at the party?” She asked.

“End of the world.”

"Before that."

"Fucking everything up and getting escorted out by an actual security guard,” He relented.

“Great, see? You don’t want to fuck things up. But so what if you did?” Her own sunglasses quivered as her head accompanied her hands in expressive gestures. “You’re not there for the wages or a recommendation, you’ve got nothing to earn and nothing to lose, so to speak. You’re just there to watch them, like zoo animals.”

“I need to talk to those zoo animals,” He said, circling back around the aisle to grab the lanyard with the freaky dolphins. He’d just turn it inside out or something and that would be it for the checklist. “I need to…reason with them.”

He’d been thinking about it a lot lately, more so as the party drew nearer and the purge siren in his brain got louder. His fantasy about calling his parents and demanding millions of yen as if orchestrating the exchange part of a hostage crisis grew less plausible by the day. And something worse, something legal, began to take its place and take hold in his mind.

He thought his reason for the demand was good enough, and he’s got a well of stories from his youth ready to be drawn on if questioned, but as for how he went about it? The quirk records, the infiltration of their private security contractor, the faked organ failure situation—which, if Recovery Girl’s continued insistence on him avoiding being seen doing patrol was anything to go by, he still wasn’t completely in the clear for with the agents certifying his case. It was only now occurring to him that all of that was not just not by the books but rather a bonfire of book burning.

Extralegal methods would only take him so far. If he wanted any real shot at that money, he’d need at least one solid moment of communication with them, which won’t be possible if he shatters a tray of champagne flutes within the first half hour of walking in. Tray. Trays. Was he expected to contribute his own trays?

“You don’t plan on doing that at the party, though,” She asked, but not really. It was more like insistance. “So unclench a little. Either of us fucks something up, we slip out, take some of their confections with us, and start drafting up the papers. They’re not gonna know who you are, Shou. Kay?”

“Mmh.”

“Kay.”

To emphasize her point of disguise, she slipped the sunglasses off his face and into the basket, jumping in quick high-heeled steps to the checkout counter with them. Shouta joined her after a moment, bringing a box of Godiva chocolates with him on second thought. Mothers liked chocolates right? He hoped they did, he didn’t need any more surprises from them.

“Can we get the…” He narrowed his eyes at the glass case behind the counter, “Bourbon eggnog, too, please?”

“Feeling festive?” Nemuri asked.

He nodded and pulled his card out, staring at her as she plucked it from his hands, “It comes with a Santa hat.” Basically a two-for-one.

He doesn’t realize until a few moments have passed that eyes are still on him, and not from Nemuri.

The woman at the counter was staring at Shouta through greying-black strands, transfixed, the neck of the bourbon still clutched in her hand. He thought she might’ve looked away once he met her gaze, but no such luck.

“Something wrong?” He asked eventually, and her grip tightened as she held back a jump.

“No, sorry.” She finally scanned the bottle, silently bagging their items as Nemuri waited for the little screen to tell her to remove his card, politely smiling once it did. “Have- have a good night.”

“You, too.”

His friend pushed out ahead of him into the night, and he reached to catch the door before it swung shut. Shouta was only half paying attention to his surroundings, letting Nemuri figure out how far the kids’ house would be from there and where they needed to walk, but he still risked a glance back at the woman through the clouded glass of the store. She didn’t seem off to him, everything from her appearance to her manners coming off relatively normal, but she was still there, still blank, still staring at the spot they’d just occupied.

Auntie Mitsuki answers the doorbell to find Midnight and Aizawa-sensei just outside, the latter a lot like a vampire needing to be let in. His teacher reaches into the green plastic bag he has with him and pulls out a bulky bottle of some thick, white substance.

“Eggnog bourbon,” He says in lieu of a greeting like that’s only allegedly what it is.

“Yuck!” Auntie Mitsuki says with a delighted grin in place of a thank you. “We’ve got drinks on the patio, ice cream in the fridge—I don’t believe in set times for dessert—and all the TV and shit inside. Now, we didn’t pay for premium, so we’re all just gonna have to deal with whatever song comes on, and we share the same cable line as the unit next door and we plan to keep mooching off their channels until the board finally updates our infrastructure, so—“ She made a shushing sound and held a finger over red, puckered lips. “And Katsuki’s taken over the kitchen—Tilapia the boys got from some shop—so, don’t go in there unless you plan on walking out with a knife stuck in your side. Kay?”

“Kay!”

“Came…” Aizawa-sensei nods and holds the bottle up higher, “…with a hat.”

Midnight-sensei decidedly doesn’t listen to the woman’s advice, her body carrying her to the kitchen like a cartoon character smelling pie. If Izuku tunes out the old American Christmas carols and the sound of the sportscaster screaming about a batter being safe, he could hear faint yelling and clattering dishes from the kitchen upon the woman’s intrusion into Kacchan’s space. Unfortunately for Kacchan, Midnight’s sedated much worse than him. And even more unfortunately for Aizawa-sensei, this left him alone with their mothers.

Izuku watched his mother pick at the loose threads in the thin fabric of Aizawa-sensei's shirt, her downturned mouth moving frantically in what was likely a long-winded cautionary tale about why people should always dress snugly for the cold. She didn’t seem to realize that Izuku’s teacher was more stiff under her attention than he was that night at the convenience store, when he was soaking wet in the same outfit as in much lower temperatures. Auntie Mitsuki, for her part, relieved Aizawa-sensei of the bourbon, and the little Santa hat it came with, and let bad ideas involving the two wash over her.

Izuku’s skeptical. Skeptical may even be too light of a word for what he is; he is a non-believer. Godless. So Godless he did a 180° and became a Satanist, but only a Satanist would believe those kinds of lies about their own mother.

It didn’t take much thought to figure out what Suah from the store was implying about her, about the guy who distinctly isn’t his dad, about the existence of someone—distinctly not Izuku—who is his mother’s and that guy’s kid. It was rude, and invasive, and wrong, so so factually wrong.

But what were the alternatives?

Ten minutes of zoning out to Frank Sinatra later, he felt his body tilt slightly to the right as his auntie ushered Aizawa-sensei to sit down on the other side of the sofa. Then he almost completely fell off as his mom plopped down in the middle. His teacher shot him a curious-pitying glance, but it was fine, he made up for it by going completely limp over the left arm. Unfortunately, that only lasted a couple seconds until Mitsuki slid him off so she could perch on it herself.

“So,” Mitsuki took a sip of the eggnog, “Where are you two staying? Not your parents’, I assume.”

Izuku’s teacher shook his head slowly, “Rusty Inn, half a mile from the boardwalk.”

“Did you filter by lowest to highest price and pick the first result?”

His teacher actually brightened at the jab, “Of course.”

“I wished you’d have let us know about your trip sooner,” His mother said, glancing back darkly at Izuku like it was his fault for not staying on top of his teachers’ holiday itineraries, “We would’ve accommodated you. Rooms are so spacious here for a reason, what’s the use if no one fills it?“

“Don’t you hate clutt-AH!” Izuku’s whole torso contorted as his mom pinched his ear, but she only did that when he was right.

Aizawa-sensei kindly pretended not to see him slip out of her grasp and onto the carpet. Instead, he reached over for a peanut from the bowl on the table. His eyes caught on the tiny basket of game knick-knacks they had on there too, from dice to mini dry-erase boards and markers, and locked onto the box of playing cards.

“Next time.” Mitsuki acquiesced with a smile. Her smile grew decidedly less kind in the next second, though, replaced by a scarier, more familiar curl, “It’ll be like having an old friend over.”

From where Izuku’s back was brushed slightly up against his mom’s leg, he could feel her stiffen, and he glanced back in time to see her throwing an incredulous look at Auntie. He’d seen that look before, it was the same one Mina had on that time Aoyama yelled her latest crush’s name out in the middle of the cafeteria. Accidentally, as he continues to claim.

And that could’ve been it, that comment alone could’ve been brushed off. Aizawa-sensei acted kind of old, with his clipped sentences and that air about him that suggested he was moments away from chasing you off his lawn, and it would’ve been easy enough to think that’s what Mitsuki had meant.

Unluckily for her, Izuku had just spent a whole day learning everything and nothing about their old friends, and it was practically ingrained in his genetic code by now to press.

“Old friend?” He asked, tilting his head back so it’d rest on the end of the cushion as he looked at Auntie. All Auntie did was smile even wider at his mom.

“C’mon, tell me you don’t see the resemblance.” She challenged, “It’s uncanny!”

“It’s a stretch.” His mother laughed, light and soft and fake and imperceptibly pleading. All this did was convince Mitsuki to bypass her altogether, focusing entirely on Aizawa-sensei while the man himself just glanced back and forth between the two. Sometimes he’d even look to Izuku, only to realize he barely knew what was happening either.

“Basically,” She said, “We had this friend—“

And he looked just—just like him. Same eyes, same hair, same height, and relative build. That’s why Mitsuki was so freaked out that night in the rain (What night in the rain? his mother asked), it was like seeing a ghost. And they met him in their third year of high school, and dragged him everywhere they went because he scared people off, and—

“Yeah,” Aizawa-sensei's lips twitched with an almost imperceptible narrowing of his eyes, “Why do I feel like everyone in this conversation is calling me ugly?”

That at least had managed to reign in the tide of Auntie’s trip down memory lane as a wave of rushed nonononono’s came flooding in from the both of them.

His mother sent death glares at Mitsuki, “See why we don’t talk like this to people? No one enjoys it.”

Auntie shrugged, though she was slightly hunched from guilt, “I enjoyed it.”

They’re called away by the sound of more dishes clattering, followed by throaty yelling about capers and whatnot, sounding just concerning enough to warrant some referees. Aizawa-sensei remains where he is even as they disappear into the yellowish glow of the kitchen, with no apparent sense of urgency in him to get up and flee, probably because he thinks they’ll come back at any moment.

But Izuku knows his mom, knows that the whole exchange was a horrific enough social blunder for her as a hostess that she wouldn’t dare let Mitsuki subject him to that again. It’s slightly too late for that, though, he thinks, and no amount of backtracking is gonna erase the past five minutes of nostalgia. Nostalgia that Izuku himself had brought on.

But Izuku feels he’s heard enough about resemblances for one day. His teacher had helped him that day at the fair, had held back his own blatant observations of Izuku’s family tree for the sake of his student’s momentary relief, so it’s only right he does the same, in his own way.

“Aizawa-sensei,” Izuku whispers, and the man raises an eyebrow. “Did your parents really have all those jobs? Marine biologist, grocer, advertising, and…?” He floundered, sure there was tons more he could name but not knowing exactly what they were.

“Sure,” He gave a slight head tilt. “All that and more.”

“But why? Don’t you need a bunch of different degrees for that kinda stuff?”

“You’d be shocked at the kind of responsibility people will let you take on if you’re good enough at bullshitting your way through things.”

Izuku wasn’t even gonna ask what bullshitting entailed for this level of multitasking. “That’s how you can do it, but that still doesn't explain why.”

Even Aizawa-sensei had to take a second to consider, the why of it all. It struck Izuku as a little odd that he hadn’t already done that once before, that he was acting as if Izuku was the first to bring it up. But then again, even if someone had asked before, Aizawa-sensei probably wasn’t asked under such festive lighting. Let the Christmas spirit compel you, Izuku thought.

"I guess they got bored,” The man breathed at last.

“Really?” The boy’s eyebrows shot up. It seemed like a lot. He’d gotten bored some days back when he was training with All Might, and the idea of throwing those months away to pick up something else filled him with dread.

Aizawa-sensei nodded, “You don't get it now—or you do, but you just don't realize it—but being bored is terrible. You can be rich or broke, or love your job, or hate it, or hate everything around you, but at least you’re not bored.” He said bored the same way people said a meth addict.

“There’s degrees to boredom, though,” Izuku pushed back. “No way you’d do that on a random Sunday.”

“If you ever wake up, and find that you’re able to map out everything that’ll happen that day, start to finish, you’re bored. Late stage, point of no return, terminally bored. And you’ll rearrange your life away to restart, too.”

Izuku wondered if his mom got bored of her old life, if that’s why she packed evidence of it into orange folders bursting at the seams and entrusted Auntie to keep them out of her sight, out of anyone’s sight. He wants to know what she left behind, why nothing there was worth sticking around for, and what made her leave. But most of all he wants to know if it’s hereditary, if it was inevitable that she’d leave it behind because that's what she does, that’s what her parents had done to him, and it’s what he incites in others to do.

If that is the case, if there’s something inherent that pushes away fathers, grandparents, and best friends, and that it’s only a matter of time, what can slow it down?

“Like, fang shui?” He asks, the empty walls within his house and the rolled clothing of his mother’s closet coming to mind.

“I was thinking of having kids, but sure, that too.” The man thought for a second, “They were mask designers for wrestlers, at some point.”

“Gardening.”

“Sewage system inspectors.”

“Journaling.”

“Artisanal incense makers.”

“Watching the Kentucky Derby.”

"No shit? Them too.” Aizawa-sensei slid off the edge of the couch to join him on the carpet, long legs bending to fit in the gap between that and the table. “Not just horses, though. If odds were tangentially involved, they’d bet on one."

“Were they any good at it? “

His teacher nods, “No. Lost it all, but it was never boring. 's probably the only time they didn’t quit a job cause it was boring, but because someone’s gonna hold an annoying intervention if you don’t. Remember that.”He lightly scratches the frayed edge of the box of playing cards within the basket, “I still miss that, I learned solitaire.”

Izuku remembers Solitaire. He remembers playing it every day during lunch at Aldera and getting really good at it, enough for Mr. Kateyama from the janitorial department to suggest he do it competitively. He remembers the feeling of realizing that he was about to enter a competition to prove how much time he spends alone, too.

“Nobody likes solitaire,” He says definitively.

“Nobody likes solitaire,” Aizawa-sensei agrees and dumps the whole deck of cards on the table to start a round.

A few minutes, a couple more career and past-time suggestions, and a race to flip over a shit ton of cards later, Aizawa-sensei says,

“Astrophysics.”

Izuku let out a low grumble at that. “Now you’re just saying stuff, who jumps to astrophysics when they’re bored?”

The look Aizawa-sensei shot him seemed to say, look who’s talking, the hero analysis notebook burning at the back of both their minds.

“People who aren't any good at it,” He said eventually, a certain wryness tugging at his features. “The real fun’s in never completely understanding something and going from there, like the multiverse theory, or the Big Crunch,” His voice faded naturally into an almost static sound, “Big Freeze, Big Rip, the Bounce.”

Izuku holds it in for about one second before “The what?” comes spilling out. It’s been building up for so long inside of him that it’s a cathartic experience to finally let it out, to ask his teacher what the hell he’s been on about for days.

Aizawa-sensei’s mouth twitches as he flips over the card at the end of that column and finds the Ace of Spades, sliding it up to the top row. Showing him the cards might’ve been a mistake, Izuku thinks, noting the way his teacher hasn’t fully looked at him for the last five minutes. But he’s listening, that he’s sure of. Despite almost nothing suggesting that except the perhaps delusional belief that he knows the man and that Aizawa-sensei knows him. He certainly knows Izuku a lot better than anyone in this stupid coastal town, at least.

“It’s all the ways the world can end,” Aizawa-sensei explains as he picks up a five of Hearts and sticks it over half of a six of Clubs. “The Big Bang happened cause the universe compressed into one point before it started expanding, right? Big Crunch says that expansion will reverse, start shrinking everything back into singularity again. Now, Big Freeze goes against that, says we’ll keep expanding until temperature reaches absolute zero, in which case everything ceases to exist. But the Big rip—“

“We rip?”

“Pretty much. And the Bounce is just the second half of the Big Crunch. Theoretically.” He tacked on. “Crunch compresses us, brings us to singularity, but that sounds familiar, right? That’s what started this shit in the first place, before the bang, before we expanded again. That’s all the bounce is, a cyclical reset.” Aizawa-sensei huffed as he reached the end of the stock of extra cards and began to straighten them up again before flipping the stack back over. “So everything’s new and unknown and you get another gazillion years to worry about the next one. A gazillion years to worry about anything.”

Izuku furrowed his eyebrows, scrunching them together real hard in consideration, before coming to his decision. “I don’t think I’d wanna bounce.”

Aizawa-sensei flipped the first card of the stock over again, revealing that same Jack of Spades, before shrugging as he slouched deeper into the edge of the sofa. His arms came up to balance on his knees and loosely clasped his hands together. And If Izuku was kidding himself, he could almost imagine his teacher was smiling from behind them, where his view of the man’s face was cut off.

“Well, I was already pretty set on it,” His teacher acquiesces, “But I guess I’ll reconsider.”