Work Text:
Today is Shouta’s one real day off of the week, which means he should have expected the interruption.
The pounding on his door stops, and Shouta closes his eyes again, burrowing deeper into his sleeping bag and pulling his pillow over his head. Maybe if he wishes really hard, they’ll go away, he thinks.
Which, of course, means the pounding resumes right about then.
Uggh.
Shouta doesn’t bother climbing out of his sleeping bag to shuffle to the door.
“What is it?” he asks grumpily, swinging it open.
The problem child’s face stares back at him, drawn with panic, fist still suspended in the air, and something in Shouta’s chest clenches.
(Not his heart, of course, that would be ridiculous.)
“Well?” he asks, arching an eyebrow when Midoriya doesn’t seem inclined to answer.
That seems to snap him out of it, because Midoriya shakes himself. He doesn’t bother with niceties, or babbles nervously about something Shouta can’t understand — just blurts out a single question.
“Do you trust me?” he asks, his eyes glittering like hard emeralds.
Shouta’s stomach falls as he lets his sleeping bag drop around him. Midoriya’s shoulders drop in relief.
“Of course,” Shouta says, grimacing and already mentally rearranging his schedule. “What do you need?”
The surprise in Midoriya’s eyes, as quickly as he tries to mask it, kind of hurts.
“I need you to do something for me. You can’t ask questions, we don’t have the time for that,” Midoriya continues, his nervous babbling returning as he bounces on the heels of his feet.
Shouta rolls his eyes. “Problem Child, I said yes already. Do I have the time to put my hero costume on, or should we leave now?”
Midoriya’s lips quirk up into an amused smirk for a moment as he quips, “You mean you’re not wearing it already?”
(As a matter of fact, Shouta kind of is — there is a reason he chose his costume to be as practical and comfortable as it is, and most of it is so he doesn’t get surprises like this, where he has to go off and fight in civilian clothes.
Also, he’s lazy.)
His smirk falls when his eyes land on the clock behind Shouta, and he swallows nervously. “We’re going to be late,” he mumbles to himself, so low Shouta almost misses it.
Then, louder, he adds, “We need to go.”
He takes off without another word, and Shouta only barely manages to grab his capture scarf on their way out — it’s the most important part of his costume anyway.
Midoriya leads him to some kind of abandoned warehouse.
Tellingly, Bakugou’s already there, as well as Uraraka.
Even more tellingly, Iida is missing, and so is Todoroki.
Shouta freezes. “What’s going on, Problem Child?”
“Yeah, I want to know that too, Deku,” Bakugou grumbles, his eyes narrowed. “It’s my day off, you know, I don’t have to spend it running after your dumbass ideas.”
Mine too, Shouta thinks woefully.
Midoriya rolls his eyes. “You don’t take days off, Kacchan,” he retorts.
Before anyone else can add anything, though, he stops, swallows, and looks toward them. He looks like the pro hero he is, and Shouta’s chest fills with something like pride.
And then Midoriya looks back at the building he led them to, and Shouta sees the fifteen-year-old he had been, unsure and too quick to please.
“Just, let me go in first,” he says.
“Go in where—” Bakugou starts to angrily spit out before Uraraka drives her elbow into his side with a sunny grin.
“Isn’t that obvious?” she says.
“Duh, Round Face, I was referring to the fact that Deku here still hasn’t told us why we’re even here!”
Shouta sighs and reaches up to rub his temples. God, why is it that even graduated, he cannot escape this class?
“Deku,” Shouta states, grinning into his scarf as his former students — already higher up in the heroic rankings than Shouta ever got — snap to attention. “What’s the situation?”
Midoriya swallows visibly, but the way he pulls back on the mask of Deku, the pro hero, is glaring. It steadies him, and in turn, steadies everyone else.
He explains the situation quickly, but clearly — a group of villains, holding Todoroki hostage to ‘pay for the crimes his father committed’.
“They won’t hesitate to kill him,” Midoriya tells them, green eyes haunted with shadows they shouldn’t have, “so we need to go in hard, but also carefully. Todoroki won’t be able to use his quirk, and neither will be if we get into a ten-meter radius around him, but they won’t know that we’re expecting that. Which means we can surprise them — if we’re careful.”
“How do you—” Uraraka starts, her voice startlingly soft.
Midoriya cuts her off with a feverish look. “Just trust me, okay? I promise I’ll explain everything later, just… We don’t have a lot of time, we need to do this now.”
Bakugou snorts and cracks his knuckles. “Fine by me,” he grunts, and Uraraka nods with a grim smile too.
Midoriya turns to Shouta last, eyes vibrant with hope, and Shouta gives him a single, terse nod.
Midoriya almost shatters with relief.
“Okay, so here’s the plan—”
(“Please work this time,” Shouta thinks he hears Midoriya beg right before he swings the door to the compound where Todoroki is kept open, but then they’re in, and he doesn’t really have the brainpower to spare to think about them anymore.)
Midoriya’s plan goes off without a hitch. It’s impressive how effective it is, really — how Midoriya seems to anticipate the villains’ every move.
Because these villains are clever. They are prepared. Not only do they have someone able to neutralize quirks around their main objective — Todoroki, who is tied to a chair with such intricate bounds it would take time to free him. Time, in an open and unsecured location, where they are outnumbered almost ten to one.
More than once, Shouta actually thinks that they will lose. That those guns the villains somehow acquired will shoot them, and that Shouta will have to watch someone else die, helpless to stop it.
Once, he thinks he himself will die.
And yet, every time, Midoriya is there, kicking an arm away, sending a projectile off course, tackling someone out of the way…
It still takes the four of them to take care of everyone and free Todoroki — who sends out a wave of ice the instant Bakugou knocks out the woman who’d been keeping them all under her quirk-free zone.
Or well, she had been, right until Shouta had used Erasure on her.
The four — now five — of them end up standing guard outside the warehouse as the police sirens grow closer.
“Well, that was barely worth my time,” Bakugou grumbles, kicking at Midoriya’s shins.
Shouta expects… He doesn’t know what he expects. Maybe the usual squabbling these kids get into.
Instead, Midoriya starts out laughing, and everyone freezes.
“Deku…?” Uraraka asks carefully. Worriedly.
She’s right to, of course. Midoriya has never laughed like this before — this kind of hysterical, broken laugh that drags out of him like pieces of broken glass.
Shouta catches a glimpse of his eyes as he grins mirthlessly back at Bakugou. “You have no idea,” he says, barking another bout of hysterical laughter.
Shouta’s stomach churns uncomfortably — he has never been happier to see the police pull up and take over a scene before.
The problem child, of course, winds up back in front of Shouta’s front door the next morning.
This time, at least, he comes carrying coffee.
“I… said I’d explain, didn’t I?” he says, scratching the back of his neck with the hand not holding the coffee.
“Mh,” Shouta hums back, accepting the offering. He sidesteps away from the door, and Midoriya comes in, wringing his hands in front of him. Shouta leads them to the kitchen, but Midoriya doesn’t sit.
Just keeps standing there.
He looks tired, Shouta notices, sipping his coffee quietly. Not just overworked, but the kind of tired that speaks of demons haunting you well into the night — a soul-deep kind of tired, not just the usual fatigue.
Shouta knows it well.
He sips more coffee, watching Midoriya’s face carefully as his former student tries to pull his thoughts together.
“I… This might be a little hard to believe, but—”
Shouta sets his coffee down. “How many times?” he asks.
Midoriya blinks at him, mouth hanging half-open. “How— What do you mean?”
Shouta shoots him a droll look, drumming his fingers against the counter. “Do you think you’re the first person to be subjected to some kind of repetition quirk?” he asks, arching an eyebrow pointedly. “How long did it last?”
Midoriya swallows nervously. “I… You believe me?”
“Obviously.”
Midoriya exhales a wet laugh. “O-Okay. I, erm, Somewhere around fifty days,” he says, but his eyes flicker to the left, so it was probably a number much higher than that.
Shouta’s hands curl into fists as a wave of blinding anger spreads through his stomach — he knows Midoriya isn’t technically his responsibility anymore, but haven’t these kids been through enough?
“And you’re okay with that?”
Midoriya lets out another short laugh. It sounds less broken than the one from yesterday, at least. “Well, we won, sensei, and it’s tomorrow. Well, today. So… Yeah, I guess I’m okay with that.”
Shouta takes his coffee again. “Mmh. And I suppose you’ll be sharing this information with your friends too?”
Midoriya hesitates, but he ends up nodding — good. Shouta won’t have to enlist Yagi and the boy’s mother to guilt-trip him into going to therapy again.
“I just… wanted to tell you first. And to thank you, for going along with it. You didn’t have to.”
Shouta shifts back on his feet, scowling into his coffee. “It’s my job.”
Midoriya’s lips quirk up into a grin. “Not really,” he says. “You’re the one who keeps telling us you’re not our teacher anymore, sensei.”
Shouta snorts. “Watch it.”
Midoriya’s grin brightens. It isn’t the smile he shows the media — it’s worse. It’s the smile he gives to Eri, or Kouta, or even to All Might.
“I just wanted to say… Every time I came to see you and asked you to come, you always did. Every time.” Shadows drift through Midoriya’s eyes, but they do not linger. “So thanks. For… For trusting me.”
“Of course,” Shouta replies, before pointedly drinking more coffee. Midoriya doesn’t move, and Shouta’s eyes drift away from him. His window is starting to look like an excellent exit option — or it would, if Midoriya wasn’t able to fly.
Midoriya must catch on — that, or he’s developed yet another quirk letting him read Shouta’s thoughts (which would objectively be terrifying) — because he lets out a snort.
“I’ll… leave you be then, sensei. Have a nice day.”
“Mh,” Shouta grunts back, sipping at the dregs of his coffee. “Don’t forget to tell somebody else what happened.”
Midoriya snorts out another laugh. His eyes grow wide and a little distant, but mostly fond. “I don’t think they’d give me much of a choice anyway, sensei,” he says, and this time, Shouta is the one snorting out a laugh.
“Just go,” he grumbles, waving a hand through the air.
Midoriya’s smile is lighter than the one he came in with, and Shouta hides his own grin into his coffee cup again.
Which is, of course, when the reminder for him to start getting to UA rings on his phone.
Well, no day’s perfect. Not really, anyway.
But, Shouta thinks as he finishes his coffee and recalls the engineered happy ending of the previous day, sometimes, they can get pretty close.