Chapter Text
In his defense, he hasn’t slept more than two hours straight in the past three days, between undercover patrols for that one police case, lesson planning to meet the ever-changing needs and assorted fuckery of the Nightmare Class, and penning scathing counterpoints to the Ministry of Education’s latest attempts to cut funding to UA’s counseling budget (like taking professional therapists away from teenage superheroes already racking up PTSD could ever be an ideal move in ensuring public safety or any kind of strong and internationally competitive Hero program).
Which is why, when a reporter appears out of nowhere in the orangish-pink glow of just past dawn, disrupting Aizawa’s stumble toward the main campus from the dorms, Aizawa responds to the manically bleated assault of her question with a blank, “The fuck?”
She gets it on camera. Of course she gets it on camera. Aizawa entered into a mutual pact of hatred and disdain with the entirety of the nation’s media when he was still what Mic calls ‘the angriest baby hero I’ve ever seen’ (which is such bullshit—surely Bakugou or, in a quieter and objectively more terrifying way, Todoroki took that title from him three months and four explosions ago). The point is, reporters today go through an entire training on keeping some kind of recording device in hand whenever Aizawa is in the vicinity. There’s a policy called ‘Always Prepared’ and the training includes a lovingly cultivated sample of Aizawa’s Greatest Soundbites, all of which are audibly scathing and contain far too many ‘fucks’ for one of UA’s finest educators. Aizawa knows this because Principal Nezu somehow obtained the training slides and played them during Aizawa’s last performance review, sipping calmly at his tea as Aizawa’s recorded voice instructed some nameless reporter to ‘get his shitting camera equipment away from my kids’ in the background.
(Aizawa didn’t ask how Principal Nezu had obtained these slides, because the answer would have been a cheerful smile that implied blatant misuse of technological systems and Aizawa honestly didn’t have the energy. It wasn’t like the Principal was going to get caught, and besides, he’d ended the performance review with full marks and a raise, so.)
“No need for hostility or language,” says the reporter, in the viciously eager tones of someone who would actually prefer both. “Just an answer, if you please. Is it true that one of your male students has been wearing the female uniform to class?”
“I don’t…probably?” That sounds like something his class would do. Specifically, that sounds like something Aoyama would do, and now that he thinks about it, he vaguely recalls Aoyama twirling into class on several occasions, skirts spinning, and exclaiming something like, “Sensei, don’t I look pretty today?”
Aizawa had said ‘sure’ in response, he remembers now. Looking pretty was an important component of Aoyama’s hero identity, and also his personal one, so really, who was Aizawa to do anything less than support his definition of it? He always paired his skirts with sensible combat shoes and honestly, the cropped tops he sometimes wore during Quirk training actually made his ability more accessible.
“You’re unsure?’ the reporter asks.
“I don’t actually pay that much attention to what my students wear,” Aizawa explains. “So long as uniform requirements are being met.”
He probably wouldn’t even care if uniform requirements weren’t being met, to be honest. He also has to bite back the urge to elaborate with, ‘There’s so much about my class I deliberately don’t pay attention to’. Not because he cares if this reporter knows that, but because Ashido will absolutely uncover that information somehow, and then pout about it for days.
“You consider a male student wearing the female uniform ‘meeting uniform requirements’?” the reporter presses.
“It’s still a uniform, isn’t it? Just because it’s got a skirt doesn’t mean it’s exclusively for girls.”
Aizawa does not understand the disconnect here. He can think of…at least six currently operational professional heroes who identify as male and have skirts attached to their costumes. Some because ‘I can get a larger range of movement’ and others because ‘I like the way it twirls when I fight!’ and you know what? Both explanations are totally valid. It’s clothing. It’s an entirely personal choice. It doesn’t even exist anywhere near the list of Aizawa’s current concerns.
The reporter all but shoves her camera phone, still recording, against his face. “You don’t think that it sets a dangerous precedent? Allowing students to superimpose their own beliefs on clearly defined ideals?”
Aizawa goes wholly, totally blank for approximately fifteen seconds. Because okay. Okay. He hasn’t slept. His head is whistling with exhaustion and his bones have taken on that hollow, eerie weightlessness that comes with running on the final dregs of adrenaline and caffeine. The bags underneath his eyes are so big that they actually hurt. He’s holding back hair he hasn’t brushed in three days with two broken pencils and a plastic spoon, he’s pretty sure there’s an ink stain on the corner of his mouth because he fell asleep in the middle of grading Midoriya’s latest ‘twelve pages over the requested count’ analysis of whatever hero Aizawa had assigned this week, and there’s a crack in his ‘World’s Best Dad’ mug that his Nightmare Children gifted him with that is definitely leaking coffee all over his shirt.
This reporter has her phone in his face and a glint in her eye and is apparently and obviously from one of those news outlets that Aizawa can’t listen to for more than thirty seconds at time, lest he pop a blood vessel in his head. Aizawa distantly, darkly recalls Principal Nezu mentioning something about attempting to foster more favorable relationships with these news outlets by giving them a supervised tour of the campus before academic hours, which means that this woman must have pissed their esteemed leader off during the tour and was thus maneuvered into bumping into Aizawa’s media-resenting self, since Principal Nezu’s position doesn’t allow the freedom to spit verbal disdain like Aizawa’s does. There’s no other way this woman could be roaming the campus unchecked—Principal Nezu knows everything and has cameras everywhere and is probably watching this exchange from his office right now, sipping tea and smiling through the quiet anger this morning’s tour had apparently provoked and waiting for the outcome that he’d already predicted before Aizawa even left the dorms this morning.
Well. Far be it from Aizawa to disappoint his superior. He’s never once been able to out-maneuver Principal Nezu, and he doesn’t really care enough to try, especially when this woman is standing here and asking about clothing choices like wearing whatever they’re comfortable in in any way impacts the ability of Aizawa’s students to be amazing heroes when they’re not busy being little shits.
“I have thirty-two reports to file,” he begins, in the flatly crazed tones of someone who’s relationship with ‘proper rest’ is, at best, long-distance. “Because, in the last week alone, my students have managed to destroy more property than allotted in UA’s yearly ‘reasonable losses in the proper training of heroes’ budget. Thirty-two reports this week, and only six of them are from the fire, ice, or tragic miscalculation of super strength that you might expect. Did you know that sentient bird-shadows occasionally experience semi-destructive nesting urges that result in the vicious dismantling of seven desks and the arranging of their warped and twisted remains in the classroom rafters? Because that is something I did not know. Previously.”
The reporter recoils a little from whatever is currently showing on Aizawa’s face. Probably the wide eyes and slightly unhinged grin of someone who has stared into the void of teaching pubescent heroes on the regular and with only a single pot of coffee powering his system. Three months back, Recovery Girl finally implemented the caffeine limits she’d been threatening for years after she’d caught Aizawa grading papers in the teacher’s lounge with his third empty pot at his elbow and all of his hair standing on end, his Quirk activated by the sheer audacity of Iida pretending to be Aizawa’s rule-abiding only hope and then basically responding to Aizawa’s assigned essay prompt of ‘Heroes are often expected to work with people in spite of vastly different and oftentimes directly oppositional viewpoints. Explain how you would respond to a group calling for the dismantling of Pro Hero Retirement Support and Benefits as a ‘drain on citizen resources’ with ‘still save them if required but also heavily imply that they are total assholes’ in perfectly correct and super polite language.
“This is thirty-two reports in addition to the actual mountains of lesson-planning I have to do,” Aizawa continues, “because despite what people think and some news outlets imply about my profession, you cannot actually plan one single lesson for a classroom of twenty children, all with different Quirks. Not if you want them to learn in any real of meaningful way.”
The reporter splutters in a way that perfectly communicates that she does indeed work for one of those referenced news outlets.
“All of this on top of grading, conflict management, the never-ending cycle of my Nightmare Children breaking the dormitory laundry machines, and shitty reporters invading our campus to carry on about a student preferring to wear a skirt like this is any way a real issue, and especially when compared to our students dealing with things like ‘how not to die in the field’ and ‘how to deal with it when someone I know dies in the field’ and ‘Aizawa-Sensei, am I selfish for wanting to be a hero when it means that my family will probably never be safe the second my identity is figured out by those same shitty reporters?’.”
“There are still…” the reporter’s face is red and the fact that her phone is still recording means that it’s picking up her struggle to formulate words and Aizawa is quietly living for it. “Be that as it may…the breaking down of acceptable dress codes is still a concern for many people!”
“Sure,” Aizawa allows. “But something can be a ‘concern for many people’ without being any kind of valid concern. You know?”
And then, because he wants to let this wave of energized agitation carry him into his classroom instead of letting it fade and probably dropping to the grass where he stands, Aizawa steps around the reporter and walks away.
“I wouldn’t try to stick around for a second opinion,” he calls over his shoulder, the words interrupted by two separate yawns. “Something tells me that your little walk-about campus is soon to be ‘discovered’.”
Principal Nezu would never let the reporter stay on campus, now that the students will be stirring in the dorms.
There’s still a story out of it, because of course there is. Principal Nezu prints out the resulting article and puts it in Aizawa’s teacher mailbox, neatly folded and with sentences like ‘total disregard for traditional values’ and ‘blatant disrespect for citizen concerns’ helpfully circled. Mic makes him a little paper crown that says ‘King of Obliterating the Reasonable Losses Budget’ and All Might tracks him down at some point to deliver too-loud and excessively impassioned praise of Aizawa ‘supporting student unconditionally’, booming in spite of the fact that he hasn’t been able to access his muscle form for a while now and his lungs audibly rattle from the force of his volume.
And then, of course, there’s Aizawa’s students, who are physically incapable, en masse, of failing to be shit-disturbers when presented with an opportunity. The day after the article drops, Aizawa crawls into his classroom, the cup of coffee he’d managed to sneak past Recovery Girl’s clearly written and visibly posted caffeine limitations clutched desperately in his hands, and finds Aoyama waiting for him in the doorway. Actually, visibly twinkling in a way that hurts Aizawa’s gritty, perpetually red, sandpaper eyes and swishing the skirt of his uniform. Closer inspection reveals Uraraka and Jiro wearing the uniform slacks, and every single one of his students wearing a yellow T-shirt that reads ‘Nightmare Children’ under their uniform blazers and button-downs. The shirts are obviously custom-made. Aizawa would turn his exasperated look on Yaoyorozu, were it not immediately apparent that this is a collective and unanimous bit of shit-disturbing, and so the exasperation must be evenly divided no matter who made the actual shirts.
After giving them all the full weight of his exasperated look for five seconds, Aizawa says, “We need to get started,” because he’s saving his woefully limited energy stores for the shit-disturbing that actually disturbs.
“Your Nightmare Children love you, Aizawa-Sensei,” Uraraka carols, because he taught her to be fearless and now, he has to live with the consequences of that.
Aizawa looks at the ceiling for a second, blearily wonders if Principal Nezu already knew about the shirts when they met for this morning’s debrief (of course he did, and of course he wouldn’t mention it), and then decides that, too, isn’t worth the energy.
“Take your seats,” he says instead. This is followed by the usual cacophony of cheerful shuffling and scraping chairs.
He could make a special announcement banning further creative adaptations to the uniform. But technically, they’ve still got their uniforms tops on over the shirts, and really, who is Aizawa to regulate uniform requirements when he’s now got written evidence showing how little he cares about it.