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Shouta walks into Bosta Coffee more asleep than awake, strict monitoring of student footage having strained him after a night of extended patrol. The cheery line of defrosted pastries greets him, along with one of his favourite people in the world due to her dispensing of caffiene, these past few years.
“Quadruple shot vanilla flat white?” she asks, the reader already showing the total as she flips her braid over her shoulder.
Shouta makes an unintelligible groan of assent, waves his card in the general direction of the reader, and staggers off to the slightly wobbly table with the mismatched chair next to the white noise machine and a truly unfortunate plant- uncomfortable enough to keep him awake with a full view of all the windows and exits. Perfect for a man looking to unwind without any students or colleagues noticing him.
“Your coffee is done,” Kinokawa chirps as she makes her way over to him, “And I want to hear about what your poor students did to you today!”
Shouta snorts. “Those brats didn’t do anything wrong today, and yet I still have a headache from worrying about them.” He takes a gulp of the too hot coffee, taking the offered crumbled and slightly charred biscuit.
“There’s more where that comes from, if you need it, Aizawa-sensei,” Kinokawa calls as she returns behind the counter, “Maki-senpai on the opening shift burnt a whole tray.”
—
Eraserhead flies along the top of buildings, mapping out trajectories. For vigilantes leaning into villainy, Antumbra was rapidly becoming one of the more worrying ones, despite their relative lack of flair. While most would ignore the theft of equipment from labs, obervatories and research centers across the country as the work of a villain with a teleportation quirk, Eraserhead knew otherwise. Those thefts all had the small hallmarks of the drug and human trafficking busts of Antumbra: small traces of smudged ink, oddly dark shadows in whatever video footage could be discovered, and too-convienient leads that convinced daylight heroes or police to look elsewhere instead of chasing the culprit. Eraserhead was also aware that for all their great stealth, Antumbra did their best to be efficient while carrying burdens, whether human or otherwise.
An electric pole appears, and he uses his capture weapon to avoid a bloody nose, piling himself onto a pole in thought. Antumbra seemed good intentioned, but was almost unable to be caught. A woman they saved described their escape as carrying her out past two heroes and a squad of police cars enforcing a roadblock for a villain flight a block over. No one noticed them at all except-
Eraserhead’s eyes go red, and at once Antumbra is there, the emission part of their quirk canceled, a shadow carrying a crate almost cartoonishly on its shoulder. Antumbra freezes, and the shadow twists unnerringly to see him, on an electric pole overlooking the most efficient exit from the laboratory if one was a shadow capable of slipping through cracks. Antumbra begins to reach a long tendril of shadow down to open the manhole cover that was their exit, unable to dissolve into shadow while their quirk is being partially suppressed.
“You’re good, Antumbra,” Eraserhead whispers, “But you’re not good enough that no one can catch you.”
Eraserhead’s eyes burn. The nearby lamp flickers. When he blinks the tears from his eyes, Antumbra and the crate marked radioactive are both gone. He doesn’t bother trying to pursue Antumbra through the sewers- long experience tells him the askew manhole is a dead end.
—--
imbatman: wow!!!! and the vigilante escaped again???? that’s almost four years they’ve evaded you!!!!
pencilfoot: other people are going to connect antumbra’s thefts to their busts and its going to throw all of their previous help into doubt
imbatman: but they’ve left so many leads!!! didn’t one of their last busts expose a trigger den!!
pencilfoot: doesn’t matter. higher ups don’t like vigilantes they can’t control, and no matches on the quirk registry means they can’t pressure them out of costume to expose the crimes they want them to expose.
imbatman: unlike me im just an innocent little concerned digital citizen
pencilfoot: as far as i need to know you’re a concerned foreign citizen sending me things you happened upon on the darkweb because you’re a fan
imbatman: i will accept payment in autographs and the permanent destruction of trigger so it can never be used again!!!!!!!
pencilfoot: that i can do
imbatman: i await the autograph in the dead drop!!!!!
pencilfoot: wait on the files you sent me
pencilfoot: the robberies antumbra’s done
pencilfoot: they’ve been targeting the workplaces of scientists rumoered to have been involved in the development of trigger
pencilfoot: dr hamada works at the space observatory i should have realised there was no reason for a biologist to work there, even if she was nearing retirement
pencilfoot: hey
pencilfoot: where are you? It’s been nine days and you haven’t sent me a new secure chat link
pencilfoot: batman
pencilfoot: batman you’re not opening the dead drop
pencilfoot: i’m sorry for dragging you into this. i knew you were a kid when you came to me with that story of being affected by the quirk of someone on trigger years ago. i should have gotten you help, not turned a blind eye on you breaking the law to get me information
pencilfoot: that's not what a hero does
pencilfoot: i’ll drag the trigger gang and all their politician cronies out into the open
pencilfoot: no matter what happens
—-
Shouta walks into Bosta Coffee, too awake for his fiftieth hour without sleep. The line of pastries look more destroyed than usual. He pauses a few seconds too long, and looks up to see Kinokawa almost dozing off.
“Rough day of research?” he manages to get out of his throat, cataloguing the bags under her eyes and the faint tremors in her hands.
“Rough nights, Aizawa-sensei,” she retorts, beginning to make his coffee slowly, the ceramic clattering slightly.
He doesn’t move to his usual spot, doesn’t start talking about what trouble his class has caused him in a way that doesn’t out him as a teacher at UA. He stands, and waits, and thinks about batman and the way they used to chatter in the voice recordings she’d leave of her reading out classified transcripts in one of their dead drops. Shouta had already bought her a gift to celebrate four years of working together, a little cutesy bat keychain, had been looking forward to whatever hero-shaped eraser she would have left him (red riot, all might and recovery girl, so far).
His drink is pushed into his hands, and he holds it simply for something to do, thinking of the dead drop stuffed with notes, all unanswered or taken,
“Aizawa-sensei,” Kinokawa breaks the silence, “I’ve been having some rough days because it looks like I might be finally moving on.”
“Moving on?” Shouta asks, the unusual metaphor from Kinokawa jolting him out of his stupor.
“From Bosta Coffee, of course!” Kinokawa laughs, a frenetic edge to it. “I’ve had to work hard to get this opportunity and I’m not sure how much notice I can give, so i suppose this could be considered a heads up! I’ll miss our chats, and I hope you and your students live well in the future.”
“Best of luck to you,” Aizawa says, downing the drink in one and ignoring the burn, “Four years in the same coffee shop must have been hard on you.”
He goes to pay, but Kinokawa shakes her head. “This one is on me, sensei. I have to buy you a drink in thanks at least once!”
----
Eraserhead had miscalculated badly. The stockpile had had far more villains than he anticipated, leading to the relatively bare task force acquired from the police and the few connections he had through his UA colleagues being occupied on the other side of the warehouse with some villain whose quirk teleported beasts to protect him while he had to subdue three people on a trigger rampage, one showing signs of forced injection, their strength quirk rippling the air around them as Eraserhead dodged the blows as best he could with a busted knee and mild concussion, until the blow that caught him across the cheek and punted him across the warehouse and into the wall, several of his ribs crocking or breaking outright with the impact.
His goggles crack, and Eraserhead no longer has the strength to remove them, his vision dimming. Or perhaps there was in issue with the lighting, Shouta mused to himself, ever since he’d hit the wall it had seemed to be flickering…
Shouta comes to in an alleyway several blocks away next to three cats and . There is a shadow holding him, and despite his best instincts, he doesn’t activate his quirk immediately. Someone who is clearly fleeing the fight rushes down the alley, and right past him, as if he wasn’t there at all. Shouta squints at the shadow holding him, and realises, with particular concussive brilliance, that it’s not just a metaphorical shadow, it's Antumbra. With that realisation, he grits through the pain of his ribs and removes his broken goggles for better vision. Antumbra knows he’s limited by blinks, after all, and their robberies have become more and more frequent in the last few nights.
He feels Antumbra go still- or more still than they already were “Aizawa-sensei?” asks the growling voice of Antumbra. Shouta’s identity as Eraserhead is kept very quiet and he has no publicity, so no one except a former student should know who he is.
Aizawa Shouta is waiting in horror for whichever poor former General Education UA alumni is going to reveal they undersold their quirk, when the shadow of Antumbra melds into Kinokawa Shikako, who’d recently quit the coffee shop without notice, wearing an armoured costume slightly too small for her, and staring back at him with equal incomprehension.
Good thing they both seem to have been equally clueless, he considers, otherwise the fact he had been tricked by his secret vigilante barista would have made him the laughingstock of all of UA.
“Take me somewhere safe and we’ll talk.” He demands of her, and feels her start to move and jump with the unnatural agility of Antumbra as she runs onto the rooftops, passing the warehouse, pausing for a moment to watch the beastmaster villain escape by summoning some sort of arachne, then running through the fight, dodging debris and attacks, no one paying attention to either of them.
And for a single glorious moment, Aizawa Shouta feels just as safe as if he was being carried by one of his colleagues to safety, and passes out wondering if Kinokawa has any vanilla syrup in her vigilante hideaway, or if he’ll have pick some up.