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“Run this by me again,” Shouta said staring at the wall.
God, he loved wall time. It was almost as rewarding as floor time. He did hate when wall time got interrupted by absolutely nonsense.
Todoroki was staring at Shouta, but Shouta was not breaking eye contact with the goddamn wall. He had a lot of interruptions to his sacred times of wall and floor time during the year. This will not be one of them.
“I think my dead brother is a revenant.”
One day, Shouta will snap. And when they wheel him away, he will point to this moment and others as the reason why he cracked. Today, during wall time, is not that day.
He did bend enough to sigh and say, “What the fuck, Todoroki.”
“Why did he drag you into this?” Shouta asked Midoriya. Sure, the kid broke bones and had a savior/martyr complex a mile wide that the homeroom teacher was planning on lovingly, in a school-sanctioned way, beating out of the kid.
Or at least forcefully stuffing something like a “self-preservation instinct” into his little skull.
Uraraka, Shouta understood, that little agent of chaos was gleefully anticipating the next weird theory that Todoroki came up with. Iida was here because of what happened in Hosu and, like, a life debt or something. He was hoping that the teen didn’t swear a blood pact. Tensei had a weird thing about those in their third year at UA.
Asui, the genius, had just decided not to show up and was working on a group project with Ashido, like a normal student.
Midoriya, however, always made a Face when ghosts or ghouls or creepy stuff were mentioned. The kid was scientific and logical to the extreme. He did not believe in ghosts, ghouls, goblins, or monsters. He definitely did not believe in revenants that have risen from the dead to give Shouta new headaches.
C’mon, Midoriya, Shouta thought he had a consistent ally in this.
Midoriya turned pink. He looked shifty-eyed over toward Iida and Uraraka. He blushed more.
Ah.
A more powerful force than skepticism.
Romance.
Or something like that.
He will not say the other word he wanted to say out loud in regard to his underaged student because that’s how you end up on some kind of watchlist. And he just did not want to think about his students having those kinds of urges, thank you motherfucking Mineta. As far as he was concerned, they held hands and close-mouthed kiss and got the Talk from Recovery Girl that was equal parts informative yet traumatizing.
Shouta’s pretty sure that he’s on the watchlist that HPSC had that noted: “heroes who could potentially just turn into open revolt”. Not that they would say it allowed, but Shouta knew those assholes had that sort of list.
Todoroki stared at them solemnly.
Shouta wished for death.
He couldn’t even have fucking wall time as his student projected the evidence on the wall.
Later, once Dabi had his whole “dance” moment or whatever, Shouta would be having wall time yet again. And not think about how, technically, Todoroki was right. He didn’t have a revenant brother, but he did have Schrodinger’s fucking brother.
Criminals should have just kept kicking Endeavor in the nuts. The man never deserved to have kids, and he seemed like the asshole to blame any infertility on his wife. Who he apparently drove to the point of insanity and she maimed their child.
What the fuck, Heroic Public Safety Commission? Even you corrupt bastards had to know that was a ticking time bomb waiting for some enterprising young reporter with loose morals and a looser understanding of doctor-patient confidentiality to gleefully dig into.
Shouta shoved aside those thoughts.
Wall. Time.
He was having wall time. He couldn’t have floor time for a while, but he could have wall time for his hospital bed.
It was less enriching since he was down both an eye and a leg, but such things took time to adjust to, he supposed. Or maybe it was the drugs that the hospital had him on. Shouta was no martyr. He’d go with the good stuff for the time being.
Hawks opened the door, presumably to check in with Shouta about the mission or something, but he stared at the younger hero with his most dead-eyed expression that he could muster.
“I had,” he began, not moving his eyes from the wall, “to sit through a four-hour lecture about how Dabi was a fucking revenant of Todoroki Touya. I had to listen to Todoroki give the most deadpan, dead fish-eyed speech in my entire life. While there was a whiff of teenage pining and teenage hormones in the room. I have to live with that, Hawks. If I ever meet Dabi, then I’m punching him in the throat.”
Hawks stared at Shouta.
And closed the door.
Yeah, that’s what he thought.
Wall. Time.