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Midoriya caught the action just out of the corner of his eye. Chalk tumbled out of Aizawa’s fingers mid-stroke, landing back in the tray with a small smack. It didn’t look intentional, his teacher flexing the digits out before picking the chalk back up and continuing where he left off. Midoriya wasn’t sure anyone had even seen it, all wrapped up in answering the discussion questions after the lecture. Nothing similar happened for the rest of the period, and no one commented on it as they left for the locker rooms. Did I imagine it?
Hero training put the incident out of Midoriya’s mind, until the next time. Though it wasn’t much, just his teacher dropping the chalk or clenching his papers too hard, something about it caught his attention. He started looking for specific moments, noting every time it happened.
- Monday: Writing from memory, can only recall the one incident
>>No conclusions can be drawn from Monday other than it started this investigation.
- Tuesday: Dropped chalk twice at the beginning of the day. No instances with chalk in the afternoon, but he had Iida pass the assignment papers out.
>>Chalk too small? All Might could be breaking the pieces, but he always replaces what he breaks a day after.
>>Hands hurt later in the day?
- Wednesday: Off-site training day, held coffee mug all lesson (sometimes with both hands), didn’t write on the board at all when we got back to the classroom
>> It rained all night and most of the morning, easy to assume the rain caused stiffness in his fingers. Cause is still unknown at this point, but even without asking, it is safe to assume there is some lasting damage from Nomu’s attack that is manifesting.
By the end of the week, his list had spread to three pages, his hypotheticals for why filling the spaces between occurrences in the same rambling his mutterings took on. Of course, the others had noticed, but it still surprised Midoriya when it came up on Friday.
“Aizawa, one second?” Midnight tapped the door frame as she waited in the gap. The folder she waved smoothed out the start of a scowl on Aizawa’s face.
“No fights,” was all their teacher gave them as he exited the room, knowing by now they wouldn’t stay in their desks and anything that interrupted class time would become gossip until his return.
“Did you notice?” Ashido asked as soon as the door shut, practically leaping out of her chair to talk with Hagakure.
“Yes!”
“Only one drop this time!”
“You were right-“ “Yeah”
“Huh?” Confusion rose from the back of the room as the gossiping group extended across the entire front row; even Shouji and Ojirou were joining in.
“Do you think he notices?” “What?” “He has to, obviously-”
“He doesn’t say anything though.”
“The curvy letters are the worst.” “Yeah”
“Wait, about what?”
“Mr. Aizawa keeps dropping the chalk.” Came the clarification, only to further the interest of those who hadn’t noticed it.
“Why are you paying attention to that?” “How did you notice this?”
“I mean, what else are we going to do?”
“Take notes maybe?” “But it’s so interesting”
“Yeah” “True, I wonder-”
“Wonder why it’s happening.”
“Deku, what do you have in that book of yours?”
“Huh?” Conversation suddenly turned on him, the boy started. “I don’t-”
“You started writing in it as soon as he left the room.” Mineta immediately pointed out, literally pointing to the notebook in question. “You’ve been taking notes all week.”
“Ah Mineta-“ Midoriya began, feeling called out, before the rest of them clambered for details. It wasn’t often that the class wanted his analysis on the situation; it was still too easy for him to fall into muttering off on a tangent.
“Who cares why,” Bakugo interrupted. He hadn’t left his desk other than to sit on top of it, arms crossed tight at the conversation. He glared at everyone in the room individually, as if challenging them to refute his words. “He’s still able to teach just fine, ain’t he?”
A general mumble of agreement rolled through the class. That was true. They all knew how hard Mr. Aizawa worked after all; they had been given days off for the USJ Incident, and the first day back, he had shown up, completely mummified with their lesson plan ready. During their two weeks of training, he had been available to discuss strategy, training plans and routines to go into the Sports Festival prepared. Then at the Festival itself, his input had been interspersed with Mic’s running commentary, supporting them. All the while, their assignments had been graded and returned with minimal delays, feedback written in careful notations from other teachers.
“We just,” Voices overlapped, excuses and reasons piling onto each other in a familiar rush of opinions and emotions and feelings that Class 1-A felt towards their homeroom teacher.
“He doesn’t show that he cares, but”
“He does, he obviously cares”
“Yeah” “He always has something good to say-”
“In a roundabout way”
“And,” “to make sure,”
“He works really hard”
“Protected us” “Yeah”
“We want,” “He came back so quickly so,”
“We want to make sure, he’s okay too.” It was soft and sincere, combining the wandering thoughts into one ideal.
“We can do that without butting into his business.” Bakugo continued to glare, though Midoriya could see his crossed arms had loosened.
“Aww! I didn’t know you cared so much!!” Sensing a weakness, Kaminari cooed, grin appearing like a flash of his quirk, just as quickly snuffed out by Bakugo’s yell.
“Do you want me to come over there?!” As if signaled by the explosions and the voices rising to pick a side and/or stop their classroom from gaining any more scorch marks, the classroom door slammed open, completing the routine everyone in 1-A had grown accustomed to. Aizawa didn’t look surprised to see the chaos, students on desks that weren’t theirs, papers scattering with the motions, quirks making the air heavy as they deactivated in a rush. He turned back to Midnight after a quick glare, waving a hand and making a plan that was lost under the new noises of everyone scrambling to sit proper before he could turn back around and use his capture tool alongside his quirk.
“He probably feels the same, Midoriya.” Tsuyu’s voice popped up right next to Midoriya, and he jumped.
“Huh?” When had she gotten all the way over here?
“Your arm,” She clarified, then before bounding away added, “I think you two have something in common.”
Do we? Midoriya looked down at his notes, still open to the newest entry, his right hand on the desk and its small tremor from writing all morning. He had gotten used to the tremor, the aches and moments of pain. It was another necessary obstacle to achieve his goal.
The lesson resumed but he found his attention on the contents drifting towards his teacher himself; the stiffness of his arm Midoriya hadn’t noticed before, eerily similar to his own on bad days; his hand finishing the assignment details, the chalk that tumbled past the tray, shattering on the floor. The class held their breath with a rare moment of self-preservation, saying nothing as the writing portion was ignored in favor of finishing the instructions aloud.
As they were dismissed for the day, Midoriya made a decision.
----
Already assigned to cleaning duty that afternoon, it was easy for Midoriya to give excuses for his friends to not wait for him. They gave him a knowing look, as if they had picked something up he hadn't.
They had, he thought under his breath, volume low as he swept. Why hadn’t he picked it up sooner? Injuries were common for Heroes, especially the path he was heading on. He even had a section in his notebooks dedicated to cataloging injuries, a separate section for his own. He had seen his teacher get hurt at USJ, he knew what his own pain felt like when he used too much One for All. Were there similarities beyond that? Worth talking to his teacher about? Tsuyu seemed to think so. His friends seemed to think so. All arm injuries weren’t the same though, were they? There was a difference between a broken arm and a shattered one-
“Midoriya,” Aizawa’s voice startled him out of his mutterings. “If you have questions, you should ask them.”
“Oh-” He looked at his teacher, the hands in question smeared white with chalk from cleaning the board, and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Is that all-?”
“I noticed- the class noticed,” He amended. “The class noticed your hands shaking more-dropping things or having one of us pass out papers- and you don’t always write on the board in the afternoon. Not like you wrote that much to begin with but-”
“Kid-” There was a sigh in the word, a familiar noise of interruption, but Midoriya couldn’t stop now that he had begun. His stream of thoughts felt to be the only appropriate response in the moment.
“Only Asu-Tsu-, Mineta and myself saw you get hurt but the rest saw later. How many healing sessions did it take? Why are there no scars? What did-”
He could hear words, though they sounded far away, spoken at the end of an echoing tunnel. It had been several weeks since the USJ Incident, but that did not stop his rambling from taking him back, the pull of the teleport quirk rushing them away, the panic of his classmates solidifying into a plan, the noise of Nomu stepping on his teacher’s arm, the splintering heard over the cement cracking apart, still stark in his mind. Midoriya could still feel Aizawa’s arms against his chest, blood ruining his uniform, the nonexistent grip trying to keep steady, keep the ribbons of his capture weapon accessible even as they moved-
"And how do you use your capture weapon now? It requires some precise control and the technique would have to change to accommodate-"
"Mi-"
“And you have patrol routes, who takes over those? What would happen-”
"Midoriya!" He jolted out of his thoughts, attention returning to the room and the very alive Aizawa standing in front of him. The breath caught in his lungs emptied, matching his teacher’s sigh. "I did ask for your questions but sheesh kid."
"S-sorry.” Midoriya slowly unclenched his fingers around the broom handle, watching the white fade, leaving only his scars to affect their surfaces.
“Sit. Before you pass out.” Following the instructions, Midoriya sat with a thump in the seat behind him, Aizawa perching on the desk straight across. He stared for a moment, examining something in his student before saying, “Breathe, in with me,” The instructions were direct, no nonsense Pro-Hero tone making them easy to obey without thought, calming his breathing until the room felt real and Midoriya could feel the shake in his body slide down his right arm and dwindle away. “Better?”
He nodded, a bit embarrassed, but okay. Aizawa looked a moment longer, then gave a small nod, satisfied the answer was the truth.
“I told you and the class when the bandages came off,” His teacher started. “I’m fine. You all should be more concerned with yourselves, and you especially with your own injuries.”
Midoriya nodded again, eyes downcast, watching Aizawa’s hands shift in his lap instead. He saw the sigh build up before he heard it.
“Here, see?” Aizawa shoved up his sleeves and displayed his hands, held steady as Midoriya reached out after a small hesitation. He turned over the left hand, then the right. The surfaces of his palms and fingers were heavily calloused from the days and years working with the capture tool running across them. Small scars broke the lines of his knuckles, some faint in the skin they marred; some were deep nicks and scrapes, as if a traditional healing techniques were used and the wounds reopened several times over before a healing quirk could finally seal the edges. Aizawa’s forearms were the same; a few large scars stubbornly clung on but the rest of the skin was mostly unmarked underneath arm hair that was short and coarse from growing quickly under a quirk’s influence. The skin wasn’t shredded as it had been, wasn’t mottled, wasn’t pocked with new skin sealing up the old; strength returning to the limbs made them solid. Midoriya could feel Aizawa’s heartbeat through his fingers on the man’s wrist. Alive, and just fine. He looked up.
“How?” Feeling drained by the relief the inspection gave him, he asked the simplest question he could think of.
“I see Recovery Girl for internal treatment, and her Recommendations for exercises. At home and on patrol, I alternate between wrist and arm braces to keep them steady.” Aizawa explained, patient as he had been during Midoriya’s exploration of his arms. “It’s a slow process, there are bad days, and better days. Medicine, traditional and quirk-based, can only do so much against the damage.”
He flipped over their joined right hands, tapping the scars on the back of Midoriya’s with his thumb. The callouses caught on the scar’s edges, still fresh from the Sports Festival. “You may always have these scars, and the bad and better days with your recovery, but you will recover. It is worth dropping the chalk a couple times-or getting notes from a classmate-” Aizawa gave him a pointed look. “while doing so.”
“What keeps you going through the bad days?” Midoriya asked, having an idea what the answer would be, but wanting to hear it nonetheless. His own arms made their aches known with the question, asking internally if their pain was worth it. The day had been long, they said, training in the morning another push towards discovering his threshold; but, Midoriya knew, it was worth it- he was going to be a Hero. Aizawa raised his brows, snorting.
“You know the answer, problem child.” There was a smile behind the words, his teacher hoisting the pair to standing. Separating, Aizawa shook out his sleeves, brushing off any residual chalk powder now dusting both of their hands, moving back to his desk. Sensing the end of the conversation, Midoriya put the broom up, pausing at the front of the room when his teacher held out a piece of paper. “Recovery Girl can provide you some more resources. You should be seeing her this week anyways.”
Midoriya held the paper with both hands, eyes roaming the contents with excited curiosity. It was a list of items for home care, books and tapes with exercises and a pass to extend the time of his next appointment with Recovery Girl to discuss everything listed. He bowed, “Thank you!”
“Get going, your friends are still waiting.” Aizawa waved towards the door, the gesture more stiff than usual now that Midoriya knew was he was looking for.
“Right!” He dug through his bag, carefully paper-clipping the note to the half-finished notes from the day before swinging his bag on.
At the door Midoriya paused, looking back at Aizawa bundling up the last of his pages on the podium, tucking them under an arm. There was still something to say, he knew. “Aizawa-”
“Hm?”
“Thank you.” for saving us, for being here now, for being a hero.
The weight behind the words was there, a small genuine smile returned. “Get, before I drum up something for you to do.” There was no heat behind Aizawa’s reply, casually disinterested in the emotion shared, though genuinely touched by it anyways.
“I’m going!” Midoriya grinned, racing down the hall to catch up to his friends.