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Chapter Text

Yagi was barely holding it together when Aizawa arrived. 

“It was a kid,” he gasped out. Yagi had his hand balled up into a fist and the fist pressed to his lips, as if to remind himself that he could not start screaming. “Or. Young person, maybe 20. Homeless, I think. Activated their Quirk on reflex and then ran. The kids—” Here, he pressed his fist harder to his mouth, sucked in a wheezing breath, as if the air itself was pushing down something with physical weight. “The kids—”

“Scattered immediately,” Aizawa finished for him, and Yagi managed a nod. 

Yagi’s eyes were so dilated that the blue was almost invisible. He shook violently. He looked like a scarecrow in a windstorm.  

Someone activated a Fear-Inducer Quirk so powerful that it reduced All Might to this — of course Aizawa’s class had bolted. 

“I’m sorry,” Yagi gasped out, and his apology did not twist Aizawa’s heart, it didn’t . “I tried to— I tried—”

“It’s fine,” said Aizawa shortly. “You got hit with it too. Not your fault.” He turned to face the other direction, moved to walk away. “I’m going to get them.”

Yagi’s hand shot out, wrapped itself around Aizawa’s upper arm. Aizawa paused. 

“Midoriya,” croaked Yagi. “I need to — I need to get — Midoriya— “

Aizawa exhaled. He carefully extracted himself from Yagi’s grip— and, fuck, he always forgot how giant Yagi’s hands were. 

“Toshinori. I’m going to get them,” he repeated, firmer this time. “I’ll bring them back here. All of them.”

And then he walked towards the Ghost Quarter’s entrance, to do just that. Behind him, Yagi crumpled into a shaking, shivering pile on the ground. 

.

The several-mile stretch of cityscape was called the Ghost Quarter, because nobody lived there. It was a remnant from one of Japan’s earliest big-threat villains, named Seismic, whose ability to control earth and ground-matter was still one of the strongest recorded Elemental Quirks to ever exist. The Ghost Quarter was the site of the final battle to take him down. It had been hard and gruesome. A shudderingly high casualty number. The damage to the city itself had been astronomical. 

And, because of the strength and nature of Seismic’s powers, the damage was also irreversible. The land was fractured down to the bedrock. Geologists called it a ‘tectonic anomaly,’ the ground so unstable that any efforts to build anything on it would result in catastrophe. 

The abandoned cityscape was mostly repurposed for education reasons these days, hero training or support item testing, though if Aizawa was remembering correctly it was also used as a filming location for movies occasionally. And, apparently, it was considered something of a Holy Grail for the urban exploration crowd, because it was fairly heavily guarded and difficult to get into. 

His class had gone there as part of a unit on minimizing collateral damage. 

His class had been hit by a very powerful Fear Inducer Quirk. 

Aizawa couldn’t think of a worse group of students to be hit by something like that. His highly trained, deeply traumatized, shockingly codependent problem children. 

“We can’t all go in at once,” Midnight explained to him. “Terrain is too unstable for most of our quirks, or even more than one person, not to mention we don’t want to spook the kids anymore than they already are.”

They really, really didn’t. And the least likely to spook the students was Eraserhead, who also just happened to have the ideal Quirk for the job. 

So Aizawa was going in alone. 

The kids had trackers in their shoes during field trips— a precaution taken after the disaster at their training camp. Mic was on the monitor and the comms, a voice in Aizawa’s ear, to direct him to them one at a time. 

Go in. Find his students, one at a time. Knock them out by breaking a capsule of Midnight’s Somnambulist, which could last about a half hour away from her body. Send up a single, and another teacher would carefully pick their way to the sleeping kid and bring them to the base outside the Ghost Quarter while Aizawa moved on to the next one. 

Simple plan. A good plan, even. 

It was just the one part that made Aizawa’s chest ache— one at a time.  

He stood at the entrance to the Quarter. Exhaled. 

“You can hear me, Eraser?” Mic’s voice in his ear, checking the coms. Grounding in its own right. 

“You’re coming in fine,” he responded. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes, more out of habit than anything else, and then pulled a rebreather over his nose and mouth, so he wouldn’t breathe in the Somnambulist himself. 

“I got the kids on the monitor,” said Mic. “Who are we going to first?”

Aizawa ignored his knee-jerk responses, the part of him that was screaming ‘All of them, all of them at once, all 19 right away.’

Breathe. Compartmentalize. Be rational. 

He knew these kids. That was the reason they were sending him, and not Midnight. 

“Who’s on the move, Mic?” Aizawa asked. 

“Right now?” A pause, as Mic looked over the monitors. The tiny blipping dots of his terrified, panicking students. “Currently moving are Ashido, Iida, and Bakugou.”

‘ Rational, Shouta,” he repeated to himself. Head, not heart. Never heart, in a situation like this, at least not yet. Think about each of the kids, the terrain, the threats. Who was in the most danger?

He listened to the world around him. He couldn’t hear any explosions. 

“Iida first,” said Aizawa, and then took off to where Mic’s voice guided him. 

.

All Iidas ran like joy. They ran like running was the only thing that freed them. They ran like it was a struggle, every day, to keep themselves moving at a walk. Like they constantly forced themselves to move at the speed of others, until the moment they kicked off the ground. 

Tensei ran like laughter, back when they were all in school. Like easy jokes and gentle teasing and sure-win, low-stakes bets (usually poking unsuspecting underclassmen into a doomed foot race). 

Tenya, Aizawa had discovered over the course of teaching him, ran like an exhale. Like tension leaving the shoulders. Like the only time he wasn’t thinking and worrying about a hundred different things was in the second before the run started. 

That was not how Tenya was running now. This was the stuttering, desperate gait of someone who knew exactly what they had to lose, and was certain they were seconds away from losing it. 

It was twisted and painful and not anything Aizawa ever wanted to see on his 15-year-old student.

Aizawa managed to keep pace with him, but barely. He needed to do this fast. A lesson, well-remembered from Tensei’s laughing bets— only fools thought they could beat an Iida in an endurance run, even a terrified teenaged Iida. Or maybe especially a terrified teenaged Iida. Tenya ran back to campus from USJ, after all. 

“Iida,” he attempted. Yagi had been fairly coherent under his fear, after all. 

No response. Iida’s eyes were unfocused and glazed, darting to things that didn’t exist, that Aizawa couldn’t see. 

“Iida Tenya,” he tried again, hoping the more personal aspect of a first name would help, that maybe the shock of his teacher being so familiar would be enough to get the kid to look at and see him. 

Iida skidded to a stop, and then used his momentum and an impressive hip pivot to deliver what would have been a cheekbone-crushing punch to the face, had Aizawa been a little slower. 

Thankfully, Aizawa was not a little slower, and Iida was panicking enough that his aim was sloppy. Aizawa ducked under the arm, and performed a well-practiced move— capture weapon up and around the arm, roll to one side, pull the attacker off balance. 

Iida fell and sprawled, another indication that, whatever he was seeing, it wasn’t his teacher. Aizawa sent out the other end of his capture weapon to bind his feet and keep him still.

He was not prepared for Iida to keen, or start struggling with a kind of desperation which cracked bones. He kicked out with both his bound feet, and Aizawa threw himself backwards to avoid the impact.

“Release me,” Iida snarled, his voice breaking. His eyes were wild and unfocused, seeing something, obviously, but not anything real. “Let go of me.” 

He struggled like he was drowning. Like the only thing which would make him breathe again was getting up onto his feet and continuing to run. Where, Aizawa couldn’t know— he didn’t even know if he was running away or running towards.  

“Iida, you’re under the influence of a Quirk,” Aizawa tried, once more, in a desperate hope it would work the third time. 

Idea responded by yanking and twisting the arm caught in the scarf, straining it in a way that Aizawa knew would pull ligaments if he didn’t put a stop to it. He shook one of the Somnambulist capsules into his hand, flicked the rebreather around his neck up around his nose and mouth, and then lunged forward to immobilize his student before he hurt himself. 

Aizawa got one hand on Iida’s shoulder, cracked the capsule, and held him as he struggled and the gas disseminated through the air. 

And then Iida started crying. 

Deep, chest-rattling sobs, bubbling out of him in time with his weakening thrashing against Aizawa’s hands, as the Somnambulist took effect. 

“I need,” Iida gulped out, tears on the edge of his voice. “I need to get there in time. I cannot fail him. I cannot fail them. I need to get there or everyone is— everyone is going to—” He was falling still now, struggling against his heavy eyelids. 

“You got there, Iida,” Aizawa found himself mummering to him. “You did it. Everyone’s fine. Just go to sleep and I’ll take care of the rest.”

“I can’t—”

“Sleep.”

With one last weak thrash against his teacher’s hands, Iida’s eyes fell shut, and his body went slack. 

Aizawa carefully slid Iida’s glasses off his face, and put them into the front pocket of his uniform. He tapped the comlink on. 

“Iida’s secured,” he said, “send somebody to get him.”

“Ectoplasm’s already moving, Eraser,” said Mic. “Who are we going to next?”

Aizawa took a moment to center himself again. ‘Rational,’ he reminded himself, ‘rational.’ Aizawa knew his kids. 

He’d gone to Iida first because he knew there was no way Iida would react to fear this intense in any way but running. He knew that, of all his student’s, Iida was one of the only ones who had a chance of slipping out of the Ghost Quarter, or colliding directly with one of the electric fences on the perimeter. 

Aizawa listened. He still heard no explosions. 

He knew his kids. 

“Bring me to Tokoyami,” he said.

.

Aizawa saw Dark Shadow before he saw Tokoyami. Rising over the crumbling wall of a ruined building, thrashing back back and forth like a particularly well-coordinated swarm of bees. Larger than he usually was, but Aizawa expected that.

Aizawa also knew what Dark Shadow did when his human panicked, and it was an overcast day, which didn’t help. He only wondered why they were staying so stationary. 

He vaulted the wall, and the answer made his stomach drop. 

Tokoyami must have found some kind of electrical wire in the building’s rubble. He had used it to lash his right hand, from wrist to elbow, to a piece of rebar which warped its way up through the foundation. Whenever Dark Shadow reached the limit of his range, Tokoyami lurched forward, but did not move. 

The wire was biting into his skin. Right beneath the notch of his wrist, a cut was bleeding sluggishly. 

Aizawa took another hesitant step forward. At the sound of his footfall, Dark Shadow screeched and swooped in closer, and Tokoyami cringed away from him, curling closer to the crumbling wall. 

“Don’t come any closer!” he cried out, voice breaking like a dropped glass. “Stay away from me, I’m going to hurt you.”

Aizawa dropped into an easy crouch, and Dark Shadow passed above him with a pained roar.

“Tokoyami—” 

“Mr. Aizawa, please stay back.” Aizawa froze momentairy, not expecting the kid to be able to recognize him. “I’m going to hurt you,” Tokoyami said again, more to himself, this time, than to Aizawa. “I’m going to hurt you. I always end up hurting someone. I always make things worse.”

Tokoyami was one of Aizawa’s more reserved students. His dramatics, while present— because Aizawa had yet to meet a 15-year-old without dramatics— were understated and turned inward. He was quiet about his emotions, feeling them deeply but rarely expressing the need to share them with the entire world around him the way, say, Kirishima did. 

This level of panic and self-hatred was uncharted. 

Aizawa moved another step forward, slowly. Dark Shadow flew straight up, and Tokoyami arched as the end of their range was hit. He sucked in a long, pained breath. 

“I can’t control him. I can’t control him.” Tokoyami’s voice faded into muttering, over and over, a mantra to keep time to the way he rocked himself back and forth. He buried his beak in his knees. “I’m going to hurt you. I can’t control him.” 

Aizawa looked up, at how high off the ground Dark Shadow was. He measured the distance between himself and Tokoyami, thought back to the last time they tested Dark Shadow’s reflex speed in Hero Training. 

Sometimes, even for Underground Heroes, the best course of action was the most direct one. 

Aizawa ducked low and darted forward, the capsule of Somnambulist already in between his fingers. Dark Shadow dove towards him, eyes feral, streamlined into a perfect divebomb. Tokoyami curled himself closer to his bound arm, a “No” tearing itself out of his throat like it was something alive. 

Aizawa cracked the capsule, tossed it with the precision of all his years as a pro, and then rolled to the side as Dark Shadow approached the ground. 

Tokoyami gasped in twice on a sob. His break was still buried in his knees, but each breath brought the Somnambulist deeper into his lungs. Aizawa dodged another strike by Dark Shadow, but already he was slowing— Midnight’s Quirk worked fast. 

Tokoyami inhaled again, and then started to sway. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Sensei.” 

“It’s okay, Tokoyami. It’s okay.” Aizawa watched Dark Shadow sink back to his person. “Nobody got hurt. You did well, kid.”

Tokoyami swayed against the bindings on his arms and Dark Shadow was nearly back to his usual size, butting up against Tokoyami’s damp cheek like a strange little cat. 

“I’m sorry,” the kid murmured out one more time, before going absolutely limp, breath evened out in sleep. 

Aizawa moved . The wire was now taking far too much of Tokoyami’s body weight, forcing his arm into an awkward angle, cutting directly into his skin. 

He sliced through the wire with his knife in one smooth motion, and then caught the kid as he slumped to the ground. 

Aizawa could have gone his entire life without knowing how tears made Tokoyami’s feathers clump. 

He tapped his com, but Mic was already speaking. 

“Sending someone to his location now, Eraser.”

“Do we have a medic at the gates?”

“Yep,” said Mic, “and Recovery Girl on standby once we get all your chicks home.”

“Okay. Good.” Aizawa carefully folded Tokoyami’s injured arm to his chest. “Tokoyami is going to need bandages, at the very least.”

“You got it.”

After one last moment spent at Tokoyami’s side, Aizawa got to his feet. Mic gave him a moment to think. 

Two safe, now. 

“Bakugou next.”

.

He knew he could trust Bakugou not to instantly start blasting. 

His student had his fair share of issues, God knew, but Quirk control was not one of them. Aizawa had seen Bakugou shrug his way through situations which, traditionally, caused Quirk control to slip in children his age— being startled, an unexpected blow, stress, dealing with too much sensory information. From what Aizawa understood, Bakugou essentially spent his entire childhood focused on little else except Quick control and perception. 

He knew how to make his explosions dangerous, but that also meant he was well-practiced at making his explosions safe. 

So Aizawa knew he’d have enough time to get to Iida, his flight risk, and Tokoyami, whose Quirk reacted so poorly to heightened negative emotions, before he moved to Bakugou. 

That being said, a Quirk like that and a terrain this unstable was a recipe for disaster, and Aizawa needed to move quickly. 

In his ear, Mic said, “He’s moving between the three buildings to the right of you. Keeping to the ground floors, mostly.” 

“Got it.” 

Aizawa moved to the center of the street. He dropped his stealth training. Made his footsteps heavy and consistent, kicked some pebbles and debris around as he went.

He stopped, body loose, senses heightened. Ready. 

“You can come out now,” Aizawa called, voice echoing. “Come on. I know you’re hiding.” 

“Interesting strategy,” muttered Mic, but Aizawa ignored him. 

“Come out, Katsuki,” he said again, adding just a touch of mocking to his voice this time. “You know what’s going on here, on some level. You’re smart enough for that. Come out.” 

A long silence followed. 

And then an entire teenaged boy rocketed out of the lower window of the building closest to him, shoulders turned to shield his neck and arm outstretched, sparks jumping off of his fingers. A scream on his lips. 

Aizawa pivoted towards him, Erasure flaring to life and capture weapon flying outward. The sparks died on Bakugou’s fingertips, but his movement did not stop. He ducked under the ribbony white material and continued his charge. 

“Fuck you!” Bakugou roared around a cracking voice. He tried for a blow to the solar plexus, which Aizawa weaved away from. “Finally decided to fight me like a man, huh? Instead of slinking around corners and whispering shitty threats like some B-movie villain? Get some new fucking material , I’ve heard it all before.” 

‘Slinking around corners and whispering shitty threats?’ The buildings Bakugou had been running between loomed above them. Aizawa’s heart clenched. What had the kid been running from, in there? What poured out of his own head to chase him through ruined hallways?

Bakugou fell back to prepare for another attack, and Aizawa got his first good look at the kid. There was dirt and ash smeared on his face, and the collar of his gym uniform was ripped, but otherwise he seemed blissfully unharmed, at least physically. 

Bakugou’s was twisted into a wild snarl. His pupils were dangerously blown. He was looking in Aizawa’s direction, but his gaze was not locked on his teacher’s face. It was as if he thought he was facing off against an opponent significantly taller than Aizawa. 

He probably did. 

Bakugou reached out his hands behind him to propel himself forward, but he was still caught in Erasure. Aizawa watched his student’s hands clench and tremble. 

“What did you do to my Quirk, you sick bastard?” he ground out. 

“It’s me, Bakugou,” said Aizawa, “it’s Eraserhead. You know what my Quirk does.” 

“Don’t give me that crap,” Bakugou snarled back, and Aizawa gave up on getting the kid to see him. “I don’t care what you did to me. I can beat you anyway.” 

And then he rushed in again. Sloppy, the kind of combat that Aizawa would tear apart if they were in training, but they weren’t. He wished they were. 

Aizawa got his capture weapon around one wrist, and then spun the kid around into a restraining pin, his arm barred over Bakugou’s chest. Bakugou began to struggle like a wild thing trapped in a snare, snarling like one as well. Aizawa cracked the Somnambulist capsule in his palm and cupped it over the kid’s face, forcing him to breath it in. 

“Let go of me,” Bakugou gasped out, still yanking even as he slowed. “Fucking— let go of me, I’m not going to let you take me again. You’re not going to take me again. No, no, shit, no — Fuck, Deku, stay back—”

And then Bakugou’s legs gave out, and he relaxed in his teacher’s arms, dead asleep. Aizawa, careful as a surgeon, laid him down on the ground. 

He knew what was chasing Bakugou through those buildings now, at least. 

Mic’s voice broke the moment, low and familiar in his ear. “That was rough, Sho.”

“Codenames in the field,” Aizawa said automatically. He had to be Eraserhead, right now. If he took even a moment to be Hizashi’s Sho, he’d never be able to get through this. 

“Understood,” said Mic, because he did. “Someone’s enroute to him now. Where to next, Eraserhead?” 

He had to keep going. 

.

Thankfully, some of his students were simpler to subdue. 

Ojiro and Hagakure ended up teaming up, finding someplace stable with most of the walls intact, and setting up an impressive, if feverishly put together, defense. They seemed to think they were back at the USJ. Each of them took turns pushing the other behind them, desperate movements of protection. 

The teacher part of Aizawa’s brain, which never seemed to shut off these days, noted to pair the two up more during exercises, as “distract opponent with head-on, aggressive combat, while the human embodiment of stealth brains them from behind” was a decent utility strategy, even if it was less effective as the two of them become slower and groggier from the Somnambulist.

He didn’t think about how their shared last moment before sleep took them was still spent raising their arms to defend each other. 

.

Aizawa also found Satou and Aoyama, of all people, together, both kneeling in a shadowed, filthy alleyway. They don’t even notice his approach. That was terrifying in its own right.

Satou stared fixedly at the wall on the other side of the alley, shaking like a child’s windup toy. As Aizawa got closer, he could see raised lines on both of Satou’s bare arms, obvious marks of his own nails raking up and down his skin. 

He couldn’t do that anymore, though, because Aoyama had tangled their fingers together, and was squeezing them. Satou kept pulling, trying to get his nails back to his arms, but Aoyama squeezed tighter each time. 

“Non, non, mon ami,” he was saying, over and over again, feverish and desperate. “None of that. Stop. Look at me, we’re going to be fine. It’s all going to be fine.” 

Aizawa felt nothing but relief when both of their eyes closed. 

.

His first surprise was this: Ashido came to him , like a bat out of hell, launching an attack that surpassed Bakugou’s in viciousness. 

She was going to be a truly spectacular close-combat fighter, once she grew into herself. She already was now, not giving him an inch, using her size and flexibility to their full advantages. Aizawa had to nearly fold himself in half backwards to avoid an acid-coated hand to the face. 

He sent his scarf towards her and she twirled away like it was choreographed. Ashido’s eyes snapped to his face, as panicked and vacant as the rest of his kids. 

“Do not fucking touch me,” she snarled, like a wild, feral thing, the sweet and sunny girl who bothered him about his coffee habits and taught her classmates how to dance nowhere to be seen. “Leave me alone. If you put your fucking hands on me, I will rip off your fingers with my teeth.”

And then she charged him again, running directly into the Somnambulist Aizawa just cracked between them. 

He caught her with his capture weapon, not his hands. He laid her gently on the ground and requested that specifically Midnight come to get her. 

.

He went to Yaoyorozu next, and cursed himself when he saw her. Because this , he should have known. This he should have predicted. He should have come to her sooner. 

She was nearly emaciated. 

Slumped in the center of the ruined room and surrounded by first aid materials, emergency supplies, water bottles, radios — anything and everything a rescue operation could need — she seemed much smaller than she was. She had her hands tucked to her chest, as if searching for more. She was quietly weeping. 

Aizawa took several more steps into the room. Yaoyorozu did not look up. 

He dropped to a crouch, so they were eye-level. He activated Erasure before she could hurt herself any more. 

“Yaoyorozu,” he said, quietly. 

Yaoyorozu’s head snapped up. She looked at him with utter devastation in her eyes. 

“Mr. Aizawa,” she said, tears falling steadily down her cheeks, “I’m so, so sorry.”

“Kid, what are you—”

“I don’t think I’m going to have enough to give.” She looked at the objects around her. Her tears splashed onto the floor. 

“I don’t think it’s enough, Sensei. I’m so sorry.”

Aizawa took a capsule out of his utility belt and rolled it onto his palm. “Yaoyorozu, I promise you,” he said, “it’s more than enough.”

And he cracked the capsule. 

She was still crying when she slumped to the ground

.

Kaminari was an expressive kid. High-energy, easy-to-read, usually smiling. 

His low moods were uniquely easy to deal with, among his peers — a gruff assurance that Aizawa knew he was trying and valued that above anything else, a chance to try again, a compliment towards his perseverance and progress, and then push him towards his friends to be hugged and jumped on. Even then, it wasn’t something Aizawa found himself having to do very often; Kaminari was also a pretty happy kid. 

Kaminari was currently crying so hard that he couldn’t move. 

Pressed into a corner with his knees to his chest and his forehead to his knees, the kid was crying chest-shaking, silent tears. His fists were knotted into his hair. He didn’t make a sound— no whimpers, no keens, just desperate breaths inward around sobs. 

Little licks of yellow electricity jumped from his skin any time Aizawa got close. 

Aizawa didn’t call out to him. That was more likely to startle him than anything else, and the last thing either of them needed was a full hit of Kaminari’s electricity. 

He put the kid to sleep, and listened to him self-sooth like a toddler, calming his own sobbing as he dozed off. As if he’d done it a thousand times before. 

.

Aizawa pulled feathers from his hair, lips pulling up into a scowl as he did. Kouda called out instinctively to wildlife when he was that frightened, and they responded as if he was one of their young. 

Aizawa fucking hated pigeons. 

“Not a word, Mic,” he growled over the comms, as he leaned over Kouda to make sure he was unharmed. There was a small bump on his head, probably from falling during a desperate run, but he seemed fine otherwise, thankfully. 

“Wasn’t going to say a thing,” said Mic, like the fucking liar he was.

“Right,” Aizawa snorted, purposely cold. He checked his utility belt, and then hit the comm again. “I need to come back to the gate. Have to get more Somnambulist, I’m all out. Let Midnight know. See you in a few.” 

“Eraserhead, wait,” Mic cut in, voice so serious that Aizawa froze. “I’m about to give you a location. You’re close. You need to go and get Midoriya.”

“I just told you,” said Aizawa, “that I need to go back and get more—”

“No, Eraserhead, you need to go and get Midoriya now.”

Aizawa’s blood went cold. “Why?”

“Because he’s very high up.”  

.

On the list of things Aizawa never wanted to see in his life, Midoriya Izuku dangling his legs off the side of a building’s roof was in the top 10. 

Aizawa stepped carefully, so carefully, closer to his student’s slumped back, his traitorous fucking heart in his throat. He noted Midoriya’s white-knuckled grip on the parapet wall he was perched on top of. He could not startle him. He had to do this exactly right. 

“Midoriya,” he risked speaking, “hey, Problem Child. Could you come back from the edge for me?”

Midoriya kicks his legs a few times, like a child dipping their legs off a dock. “Hi, Mr. Aizawa,” he said, voice oddly flat. “What are you doing here?”

Aizawa took another cautious step forward. “I’m here to get you, Midoriya. Come back, now.”

Midoriya tilted his head, as if he was hearing something, but not Aizawa. His eyes were horrifyingly blank. “It was nice, for awhile,” he said, in that same blank, conversational tone. As if he wasn’t a the edge of a fucking roof.

“What was nice?” Aizawa asked, edging closer. ‘Keep him talking, keep him talking.’ He needed to get closer.

“Being worth something,” said Midoriya, and Aizawa felt a crack fissure open, deep inside himself. 

“What?” The word slipped from his lips almost without his consent. 

Midoriya shrugged. “It was nice to be worth something.”

Aizawa moved with slow, surgical precision. “That’s right, Midoriya. You’re very important to a lot of people.” 

A slow, smooth shake of the head. “I won’t be anymore.”

“That’s not true.” God, why did the kid have to choose to come this high up?

“It is. It’s okay, Mr. Aizawa.” He turned his head to face his teacher, face still horribly blank. For the first time all day, Aizawa wished for a crying child— he knew what to do with a crying Midoriya. “You don’t need to lie. I know that I’m nothing. I don’t matter. Never have — it was stupid to think it could change.”

The kid twitched, then — not, in retrospect, an actual sway forward, but enough of a reminder that one might be coming that Aizawa moved without thinking anymore. He used his scarf for an extra layer of safety and leaned forward, cinching his arms around Midoriya’s waist and throwing the both of them backwards, away from the edge. 

Midoriya was limp in his arms. Boneless like a lack of hope. 

“I wish I wasn’t nothing,” said the kid, quiet, nearly under his breath. Not a plea; just a statement. “I wish I wasn’t worthless.”

Midoriya was far too complacent as Aizawa arranged him in his arms and stood, carrying him like a much younger child. His eyes were still wide, blank, and staring. 

“Why can’t I just be better?” asked Midoriya, as Aizawa started heading back to the gate as fast as he could. “Just enough?”

Aizawa needed all of his kids to be safe. He needed to be rational. There would be time to process whatever this was later.

.

Yagi looked even worse than he had when Aizawa left. He was curled on the steps of the bus, where the students who were already retrieved were sleeping, like a shaking, guarding gargoyle. His head snapped up when he heard Aizawa approach, and the sight of Midoriya in his arms might as well have been a bolt of lightning. 

He jerked forward, arms reaching out to the both of them and making a wounded sound. “Midoriya,” he said, breathless. “Is he— is Midoriya— ”

“He’s fine,” said Aizawa shortly, because he doesn’t have time right now to explain what just happened, to explain that their student is currently limp and staring as if his soul had been plucked out of his chest. “Here,” he said instead, “take him.” And he plopped Midoriya into Yagi’s lap. 

Yagi’s arms snake around him immediately, the entirety of his attention shifting to the kid. He ran his hands through Midoriya’s curls and hugged him close, ducking his head as he did. Midoriya, for his part, seemed very willing to be cuddled like a comfort object— he turned his face to Yagi’s chest and closed his eyes. 

“Young Midoriya, Young Midoriya, my boy, oh, my boy, I was so worried about you,” said Yagi, a quiet litany fueled by the Fear Quirk. “I was so worried. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

He rocked the two of them back and forth, and then swapped over to English, letting loose a quiet stream of nonsense — “Little star, little prince, oh, my boy, sweetheart, son, precious thing, I thought I lost you, I thought I lost you—”

Midoriya’s hand fisted itself in Yagi’s shirt, and his shoulders began to shake.

Aizawa turned on his heel and headed over to Midnight. He needed more Somnambulist. He needed to get back out there. 

.

Next, Mic directed him to Sero and Shouji, who were standing back to back in an empty courtyard, fighting viciously against something that he could not see. 

He heard Sero roar at their invisible assailants that he “knew what bastards like them did to kids with mutant Quirks,” and Aizawa wanted nothing more than to sit down and weep, because why had so many people been so cruel to these kids?  

Aizawa watched Sero and Shouji succumb to sleep, faster than the rest of their classmates— they’d already exhausted themselves before they started to inhale the gas. He singled their location to one of his peers. 

He sprinted on. 

.

Jirou stood with her back against a wall, a shaking finger pressed to her lips — the universal sign for ‘be quiet.’ 

“You need to be careful, Sensei,” she breathed as he approached her. “They’re going to hear you.”

“Who’s going to hear me, Jirou?” Aizawa asked, even as she frantically signaled him to hush. 

“Them.” She pointed, with the finger that wasn’t against her lips, to an empty bus stop across the street from them. 

Aizawa said, “I see,” even though he didn’t. “Do you want me to make them go away, Jirou?”

Slowly, shakily, Jirou nodded her head. 

Aizawa broke the capsule in his palm and cupped it under her nose. “Take a big breath in,” he said, and she complied — nothing like the snarky rebel who usually at least questioned his commands. 

She went down easily, and Aizawa caught her. Jirou was one of his smallest students, and was possibly the slightest. She felt like nothing in his arms. 

.

“You’re sure they’re in this building, Mic?” Aizawa asked, walking carefully through the abandoned apartment complex. 

“Yes. Two of them, though they’re not together. Different apartments, it looks like. I can get you to the correct apartment for each one, but you’re on your own once you’re inside. The trackers aren’t that accurate.”

“I can take it from there, then.”

“I know you can, Eraser. Turn here. First one is through the door on your right.”

Aizawa asked, "Which one?”

“Uraraka.”

“Got it,” said Aizawa, and then opened the door and entered. 

He found Uraraka in the sagging kitchen. She paced back and forth, opening cabinets, gathering decades-old canned food and placing it on the table. She seemed eerily calm, moving with military-level precision. Collecting the food, running her hands across the back of each cabinet to make sure she didn’t miss anything. She activated her Quirk and floated a few inches off the ground, to look and see for herself as well. 

Aizawa allowed the Somnambulist to begin filling the room. Something in the way she was standing made him feel like it was a bad idea to approach her, and he knew better than to doubt those instincts. 

Uraraka stared at the pile of food on the dust-covered table. “There’s not going to be enough,” she said dully. She began to inhale the gas, and sat down in one of the chairs when her knees began to feel weak. “We’re not going to have enough.”

She pulled back her fist and hit the table once, hard enough to make Aizawa jump. “There isn’t going to be enough,” she repeated, but angrier this time. 

Aizawa stayed in the doorway, heart beating unusually fast. This was such a quiet, adult fear. It looked wrong on Uraraka’s narrow shoulders. 

She rested her head on her arms, fingers tangling through her hair. Stress, long-lived-in. Fear, but familiar. 

Aizawa carefully paced into the room, and rested his hand on the back of her neck. She leaned up into it, as if she’d known he was there all along. 

“Go to sleep, kid,” said Aizawa, “and let the adults worry about that.”

He said it like they lived in a world where that could be true. He said it, and maybe he was saying it to soothe himself, as much as he was soothing her. 

.

It was common knowledge, within the faculty of UA, that Todoroki Shouto was hiding something. Something awful and painful and too delicate to talk about, which also meant that it was also too delicate for all of them to press on. 

They knew this because Todoroki told it to them, in his wide-eyed confusion when confronted by praise, in his strange, flinching reactions to normal movements. The way he and Midoriya went from barely acquaintances to nearly-inseparable, within the course of a few weeks. 

Todoroki Shouto was quiet, and polite, and kept his emotions perfectly schooled until they broke. He was a dedicated student. A good fighter. The staff even got to watch him begin to stumble into learning how to be a friend. 

But they all knew something was wrong. 

Now, Aizawa stared at the door of a coat closet, at the end of a hallway in a broken, abandoned apartment, and he wished he pushed harder for his answer, instead of letting trust bloom slowly on its own. 

He reached out, grasped the handle. Pulled the door open. 

Todoroki had both hands clapped over his nose and mouth, to muffle any sound even his breathing could make. Above them, his eyes were open and wild and very, very young. 

He was pushed to the very back of the closet, tucked in to himself to become the smallest target possible. As if he wanted to fold himself completely out of existence. He shook. When the light hit his face, he whimpered.  

“Shit,” Aizawa swore, and then fell into a crouch, made himself less of a tall, looming figure. He fumbled for one of the capsules in his belt. “Hey, Todoroki. Let’s get you out of here, okay?”

Todoroki pushed himself further against the back wall. He moved his arms to cover his face, as if blocking a blow. 

“He’s going to,” he said, in a voice that was small and muffled and nothing like the Todoroki Aizawa taught every day, “he’s going to f-find me."

“He won’t,” Aizawa swore, already writing up plans in his head to make that statement absolutely true. “He’s not going to find you. Not ever again.”

He broke the Somnambulist as he slowly coaxed Todoroki out of a well-learned hiding spot, carving another promise onto the insides of his ribs as he did. 

.

There was no doubt in Aizawa’s mind that Kirishima saw dead bodies which weren’t there, right now. 

Kneeling in the center of the street, staring at an empty place in front of him, he was the picture of frozen devastation. Arm half-reached out in front of him, a hesitant, fluttering bird, wanting to touch but unwilling to deal with the implications of that touch. 

He was muttering under his breath. 

“Come on, Eijirou, you might still be able to save them. You can still save them. You know, chest compressions, first aid, just reach out and — God, stop being so useless, stop being so weak, just reach out and—”

His hand floated another inch or so forward, before he snached it back as if it were burned, cradling it to his chest. 

“Move, Eijirou,” he said, rocking himself back and forth, “come on, you idiot, move.”

But he didn’t. He choked on a sob, and Hardening began to climb up his arms. 

“Stupid, stupid — come on, guys, please say something. Shit. Shit. I—”

Kirishima crumpled. He pressed his forehead into the road. Aizawa had the sudden, horrifying mental image of him rearing his head back, and slamming it into the concrete. 

He sent out his capture weapon and restrained the kid without another thought.

Aizawa knew better than to try talking to Kirishima, at this point. It seemed like none of the kids who were this deep in the illusion had the power to see through it on their own. 

He cracked the capsule and waited for sleep to take Kirishima away from whatever he was seeing. 

.

His last student was sitting, still and calm as a picture, on the front steps of what used to be a bank. 

Asui had her chin sitting on her knees and her pinky finger in her mouth. She seemed to be chewing on it thoughtfully, eyes fixed somewhere else on the street. Her breathing was natural. She wasn’t shaking. 

Aizawa walked up to her, slow and steady. His class’s rock. Steady and easy-going and kind. Dependable, even in her fear. 

He sat down next to her. “Hello, Asui,” he said, voice low and calm and steady. 

Slowly, she turned her head to face him. Asui blinked a few times, as if bringing his face into focus. She stared at Aizawa for a long second. 

And then her eyes began to well up with tears. 

“I knew you would find me,” she said. She sounded so much smaller than she usually did. “I knew you would. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re lost and scared, right? You stay where you are, until an adult you can trust comes and finds you.” 

And this, somehow, was what made Aizawa’s eyes begin to flood over. 

He’d met Asui’s mother before. She was a short, round woman, who walked with a limp and kept her hair cut in a practical bob. She had every bit of her daughter’s blunt kindness, and a sense of patience which could only come from raising four children. 

And she had taught her daughter that, if she were ever lost, to stay calm and stay where she was and wait until someone came to find her. Because someone would always come to find her. 

And Asui learned that lesson so deep in her heart that even pure, unnatural fear could not make her forget it. 

“You found me, Sensei,” said Asui, a bit wetly, around the finger she was still chewing.

“Yes, Asui,” Aizawa said, “I found you.” And then he offered her his hand. “Would you like to come home, now?”

Asui nodded, and placed the hand she wasn’t chewing on into his. A young, trusting gesture, despite the fact that their hands were nearly the same size. “Yes, please, Mr. Aizawa. Is everyone else okay?” Tears were still rolling serenely down her face. 

“Yes. They’re all waiting for us.”

“Oh. That’s good, Sensei. I’m r-really glad.”

“Yeah. I am, too.”

Carefully, the two of them stood up, and began to walk towards the gate.