Work Text:
“Muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…”
Aizawa wore a blank look as he watched Eri doodle in her coloring book while quietly repeating ‘muh’ to herself. Now, Aizawa had never considered himself a very curious person, but this had been going on for about ten minutes now, and just about everything about this situation was starting to eat at him. He needed answers.
“Eri,” he said gently, prompting the girl to pause her activity to look up at him, “what are you doing?”
“I’m coloring.” She held up the book to show him the page she was working on; a flock of ducks all colored pink.
“No, I meant with your mouth,” Aizawa clarified.
“Oh, I’m doing the thing Deku does,” she answered like that cleared anything up.
While she went back to her coloring, Aizawa was left even more confused than before. “The thing Deku does…?” He repeated, struggling to understand how the mind of a six-year-old operated.
“Muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh-muh…” Eri started doing that thing again, and that’s when it all clicked for Aizawa.
“Eri, are you trying to mutter like Deku does?”
“Is that what it’s called? Then yeah, that’s what I’m doing.”
Okay, that made a lot more sense. Thinking back on it, this was probably something he should’ve expected. It wasn’t any secret that Eri held a deep admiration for Izuku, with the boy always looking for any excuse to visit or play with her. It was only a matter of time until the girl started picking up on his mannerisms, be it consciously or subconsciously, though this case appeared to be the former.
In the back of his mind, Aizawa wondered how far Eri would take this imitation of her idol. If it was anything like Izuku’s blatant imitation of All Might starting out, that might cause a few problems down the line.
———————————————
The Next Morning…
As usual, Aizawa’s hunch turned out to be at least partially correct, something he wasn’t happy about as he saw Eri come to breakfast with her hair looking like a bird’s nest. It was almost impressive how she managed to make it look so messy.
“Eri did you forget to brush your hair?” He asked, remembering to keep his tone soft and non-confrontational.
“No, I brushed it,” she denied, her hair becoming even more tangled as she shook her head. “I made it look like Deku’s.”
Aizawa sighed. “Eri, after breakfast, you need to fix your hair. You can’t go out with it looking that messy.”
“Why noooooooot?” She pouted. “Your hair’s messy too!”
He pursed his lips for a moment, idly running a hand down his long stretch of hair. His first instinct was to deny that it was messy in the first place, but after getting his fingers tangled up in it, he knew he didn’t have much ground to stand on. “Okay, my hair might be a little messy, but that’s only because I was up all night fighting-”
“Also, why do I need to sit down for breakfast when you get to eat jelly all the time?” Her mind quickly pivoted, pointing to the jelly pouch in Aizawa’s hand.
He guiltily hid his breakfast behind his back. “Eri, I know that sounds hypocritical, but-”
“And how come I have to take a bath when you always smell funny? And how come I have a bedtime when you get to stay up all night? And why do you never cut the hair on your face? That looks pretty messy too!”
Somehow, Eri’s accusation left Aizawa shrinking in his seat like a child being scolded by their parent. Before he could come up with another excuse, the front door to the apartment flew open, and in stepped a familiar face Aizawa always dreaded seeing.
“Midnight, what are you doing here?” He groaned.
“I’m here to clean up your act, that’s what!” Without warning, she sent her whip towards Aizawa, which wrapped around his torso and tied his arms to his sides. “Eri’s right, you know; it’s about time you start setting a good example for your daughter.”
He began to panic when Midnight picked him up and carried him out of his apartment. “Hold on, where are we going?” He grunted, trying and failing to break through the dominatrix’s bindings.
“Where do you think, doofus? I’m taking you to get a haircut.”
“No…” Aizawa’s face paled in horror.
“And then I’ll take you to the spa so you’ll actually smell nice for once.”
“No!”
“And then you’ll get a full eight hours of sleep!”
“NOOOOOOO!!!”
———————————————
Knock knock knock.
“Hello?” Mina answered the door, confused for a moment when she didn’t see anyone there. Was this another case of ding-dong ditching? She never thought any of her classmates could be more immature than her.
“Hello? Miss Pink Lady?” Greeted a familiar voice, prompting Mina to look down.
In a flash, any trace of frustration on her face disappeared as she greeted her visitor with a pat on the head. “Hey there, Eri. It’s so good to see you!” She said in a sickly sweet tone.
“Do you have a marker I can borrow?” The girl got straight to the point. No surprise there, you could always count on children to be more blunt and honest than ninety percent of adults.
This didn’t deter Mina’s good mood though. “Of course! Here, let me get it for you.” She retreated into her room for a moment before popping back out with a black Sharpie in her hand. “Here you go, just try not to sniff it too much!” She joked as she handed off the writing utensil.
“Thanks!” Eri smiled. “Also, how do you spell ‘shirt’?”
“S-H-I-R-T. Why do you need to know?”
In place of a response, Eri uncapped the sharpie and scribbled the letters on her white shirt, which would no doubt lead to permanent staining.
“Uh… what are you doing?” Mina was hesitant to ask, feeling a budding sense of dread as she stared at the word, which appeared upside-down from her perspective.
“I wanted my shirt to look like Deku’s. He always wears the coolest shirts.” Eri was oblivious to Mina’s look of abject horror, which only increased in intensity after she used the sharpie to draw a pair of diamond-shaped freckles on her face. “Thank you for letting me borrow your marker, Miss Pink Lady. Bye!”
The minute Eri was gone, a sudden sense of urgency compelled Mina to zip back into her room and dial an important emergency number. “Hello, fashion police? The day we’ve been fearing for years has come to pass; Midoriya’s fashion sense is starting to catch on.”
“Dear God…”
———————————————
“AAAAAHHHHH!” A scream racked Izuku’s body as he ran around his room like a chicken with its head cut off, frantically searching every nook and cranny while paying no mind to the mess he was creating while doing so. “Where is it? Where is it?!”
“Midoriya, what’s wrong?” Iida stepped in, hearing his panicked search all the way from the kitchen. “And why is your nightstand embedded into the wall?”
”Because it’s gone, that’s why!” Izuku gestured to a shelf that had remained untouched during his rampage; a collection of All Might figures was lined up across it, with a noticeable gap in the middle. “My Limited Edition Golden Age All Might Figure is gone! I can’t function without it, Iida. I need that figure!”
“Okay…” Iida’s tone was weary as he tried to avoid accidentally provoking the beast. “But if your entire mental state hinges on a single All Might figure, then isn’t that a sign to look for a more stable source of sanity?”
“I don’t need a lecture right now, Iida, I just need the figure! And if I have to quite literally turn this entire dorm building upside down to find it, then I will not hesitate for a second to-”
“Eri has it,” Todoroki poked his head into the dorm to say.
“Oh wait, really?” Dropping the insane act, Izuku ran over to the common room. An odd sense of deja vu washed over him as he spotted Eri playing with the All Might figure he’d been looking for.
“Eri?” He approached, confused as all the other students in the room. “What are you doing?”
“Huh?” She looked up from the figure, smiling as she saw who it was. “Oh, hi Deku! I know you have a lot of All Might toys, so I wanted to collect some too.”
“Awwww… that’s adorable.” It warmed Izuku’s heart to know that even though his favorite hero had retired, he would always be able to attract new fans.
(Though in reality, Eri didn’t know much about this ‘All Might’ character. She just liked him because Izuku did).
“But, uh…” Izuku decided to address the other elephant in the room as he took in the familiar sight before him. “Why do you look like me? Is this an early Halloween costume? Should I have dressed up as you?”
“It’s not Halloween, silly,” she giggled. “I wanted to be more like you, Deku. Because you’re my hero.”
“I… I’m your hero?” A wobbly smile split across Izuku’s face as tears poked at his eyes. One of his biggest goals as a hero was to inspire others, and seeing it done so directly managed to tug at his heartstrings like no other gesture could. “…I think I’m gonna cry.”
“She picked up your muttering habit,” Kaminari informed from his spot on the couch, having been subjected to it for the past fifteen minutes before Izuku came in.
Izuku couldn’t hold himself back any longer. His face quite literally flooded with tears as twin geysers flowed from his eyes, the water rising to his knees after only a few seconds.
“And this is why we need to install a drainage system,” Jiro sighed from the loveseat, which floated across the pool of tears.
“How do you do that thing with your eyes?” Eri asked Izuku, not caring that the water was already up to her shoulders.
Thankfully, Izuku turned off the waterworks as soon as he heard her question. “Huh? You mean my crying? Everyone cries, Eri.”
“I know, but how do you cry so much? I need to know for my research.” She reached behind her back and pulled out a notebook from… somewhere, opening it to a crude drawing of Izuku made in crayon.
If he had slightly less self-control, he would’ve flooded the entirety of UA’s campus.
“So where do all those tears come from?” Eri pressed on, tapping a crayon on the page in anticipation. “Is it your Quirk?”
“What? No. My Quirk is super strength, not super crying.”
“But then how did you make the whole room a swimming pool? I don’t do that when I cry.”
“I mean, it’s not like I’ve been crying this much since I was born. In fact, I didn’t start flooding buildings with my tears until I… got into… UA…” He trailed off, a new series of concerns popping into his mind. He thought back to the second round of the Sports Festival, how he cried so hard the water pressure literally pushed him into the concrete.
He’d cried countless times before then, and never once had that happened. It was almost like he had some sort of latent crying Quirk that had been buffed after receiving One for All. But that couldn’t be true; there was no way he’d been misdiagnosed as Quirkless this entire time… right?
“Uh, I’ll answer your question later. I gotta go do some research and maybe have an existential crisis,” he told Eri with a blank, soulless look before wading through his tears to make it back to his room.
“What’s an existential crisis?” The girl questioned out loud.
“It means Deku needs some alone time,” Jiro answered. “Why don’t you keep playing with his All Might toy in the other room?”
“Okay!” She didn’t question her logic for a second as she swam over to the kitchen.
“Gee, I wonder how long until she starts copying Midoriya’s bone breaking habit,” Kaminari jokingly asked, earning him a dirty look from Jiro.
“Don’t let her hear that. We don’t want her getting any ideas.”
Unfortunately, Eri did end up hearing that, and she did get several ideas that involved the act of bringing harm to her own skeletal structure. After all, if Izuku did it, then why couldn’t she?
———————————————
A few minutes later, Eri hummed contently to herself as she held her arm below a hydraulic press, waiting patiently as it slowly lowered down on her. And ’slowly’ was no understatement, because that thing was seriously testing her patience with how sluggishly it was moving. All Eri could do was sit there and wonder why in the world it was taking so long!
“Probably because of all the times I blew it up,” Mei said, appearing out of nowhere. Eri stopped and blinked for a moment, realizing she’d unconsciously muttered that last part. Just like Izuku! Her pretend muttering really had paid off!
“Anyways, how old are you? Because I think Power Loader mentioned something about toddlers not being allowed in the support lab,” the inventor girl questioned, her eyes zooming in on Eri’s face to better gauge her age.
“I’m not a toddler! I’m…” She paused for a moment to come up with a believable lie. “I’m a hundred and eight.”
“Ah, okay then.” Mei seemed content with that answer as she walked off, only to turn back around a second later, fixing Eri with a suspicious glare. “Hold on, why are you compressing your arm in the first place?”
“So I can be more like Deku.”
“Ah, Ten Million, got it,” she nodded understandably. “But wait, isn’t that something he wouldn’t want you to do?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
“Better call and check just to be sure.” Mei pulled out her phone and held it to her ear. “Hey, Ten Million, there’s a hundred-and-eight-year-old girl who looks suspiciously like you about to crush her arm in the hydraulic press. Is that okay?”
Less than a second later, Izuku burst through the lab doors and pulled Eri away from the machine. “Eri, are you okay?! Are you hurt?! DO YOU STILL HAVE AN ARM?!”
“Uh-huh…” she nodded, though she didn’t seem happy about the fact.
“Thank god…” He let out a relieved breath as he collapsed onto Mei’s Bench Bot, designed to run over to people about to collapse from relief. “You need to be careful around that stuff, Eri. Breaking an arm hurts a lot, and if you got hurt trying to imitate me, I don’t know what I’d do with myself.”
“Oh… sorry I made you worry.” She felt the need to apologize, never one to enjoy seeing her hero in such a state of concern.
“It’s fine Eri, it’s just… Do you know why I broke so many bones in the first place?”
Eri sat down on the bench next to Izuku, figuring what he was saying was important. “Uh, to save people?”
“Well, technically yes. But that only happened because I was so focused on imitating All Might that I forgot to be my own hero. I would’ve avoided breaking those bones if I could.”
“Oh…” Eri looked down, letting his words sink in.
“Do you understand now? It’s okay to imitate someone, but if you take it too far, you might end up hurting yourself. And besides,” he ran a hand down Eri’s hair, straightening it back to how it was before, “I think you’re pretty cool just the way you are.”
Eri’s eyes sparkled with delight at the compliment. “You really think I’m cool?”
“The coolest! Now come on,” he hopped off the Bench Bot, beckoning Eri to follow, “let’s go wipe those freckles off your face. That marker can’t be good for your skin.”
“Okay Deku, I’ll stop wearing your shirts and playing with your toys.”
“You can still do those things, I just don’t want you to copy some of my more harmful traits.”
“So what if I still wanna be all tough and strong like you? Is that a bad thing to copy?”
“No, of course not. It’s never a bad thing to want to become stronger. In fact, I can help you with that if you want.” At Eri’s enthusiastic nod, he reached into his pocket and handed her a detailed workout regimen. “It’s called the Aim to Pass: American Dream Plan Jr!”
———————————————
Ten Months Later…
“Oh no, I dropped my toy,” Eri said, and Aizawa looked up from his newspaper to see the object in question rolling under the fridge.
He sighed, hoisting himself up from his chair. “Don’t worry Eri, I’ll get it for…”
The words suddenly died in his mouth as he watched the little girl effortlessly lift the refrigerator with a single hand. “E-Eri… how did you learn to do that?” He stuttered, feeling genuine fear for the first time in a long while. Not even he could lift that much so easily.
“Deku taught me how to do that! Isn’t he the coolest?” She gave him an innocent smile, mostly unaware of the raw power she possessed.
Aizawa felt the sudden need to stay on her good side. Maybe he’d make her an apple pie later tonight.
———————————————
OMAKE
Mirio: How come she started copying you and not me? I’m feeling a little left out here
Izuku: Togata, you lose your clothes on an almost daily basis
Mirio: Oh yeah…
xxx
Eri: It’s fine if I break my arm. I can just rewind it
Izuku: That doesn’t make it alright!
Eri: But you did the same thing when you fought Overhaul
Izuku: Dangit, these kinds of things always come back to bite me
xxx
Eri: I want katsudon for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!
Izuku: You know I eat other things besides katsudon, right?
Eri: I know, but I tried some and now I wanna eat it forever
xxx
Eri: I like your shoes
Kota: Thanks, they’re the same brand as Midori - HEY!
Eri (running away with the shoes): There can only be one mini-Deku!