Chapter Text
Aizawa Shouta is only fourteen when everything he knows is taken from him. He stares at the empty space where his father’s car sat only minutes before, as if his eyes could erase time as well as quirks. If he’d known that this would be the result, he would’ve never gotten out of that car.
But it is late afternoon now and he needs to figure out where he’s going to stay tonight. Shouta shoves the distant swells of panic down to the abyss of his mind. Giving in to his emotions isn’t going to help him right now; the most logical course of action would be to figure out a temporary plan for the night. Tomorrow, he could figure something more long-term out.
Looking around, Shouta finds that he’s not terribly far from Tatooin Station. He doesn’t have much in the way of cash, but he’s been saving up any money he’s gotten, meager checks in the guise of a monthly allowance. The ones he deposited in his bank account—Shouta fumbles for his phone, paying no mind to the dwindling battery as he pulls up the app for the bank. The numbers of his checking account appear on the screen, and Shouta lets the relief escape in a soft whoosh from his nose.
Shouta looks up the cheapest motels in the area before turning off his phone. He didn’t have a charger with him, and that remaining battery power would be precious. He picks up his schoolbag—the only thing he owned now, other than the clothes on his back, but Shouta resolutely didn’t think about that—and blends into the crowd.
It takes a few hours and some wandering into the less friendly neighborhoods to find a place that wouldn’t cause a significant dent in his funds. He steps into a sketchy, rundown motel that smells too much like smoke. The layout and decorations were probably intended to make the place warm and welcoming, but instead it only adds to the discomfiting atmosphere. Nonetheless, Shouta sets aside the way his skin crawls at the receptionist’s leering gaze, paying for his room upfront. He only pays for one night, trying not to think of the likelihood that he’ll be back tomorrow.
He immediately sets both locks when he gets inside, looking around the room. The single bed is covered with a moth-eaten red comforter that matches the heavy curtains over the window. There’s a small closet, an even smaller dresser and an armchair that sits in the corner. Shouta doesn’t hesitate to move the chair in front of the door as well.
With lodgings taken care of for the night, Shouta sits on the edge of the bed and fixes his gaze firmly on the suspicious discoloration staining the opposing wall. His hands shake with the first wisps of panic finally being allowed to rise to the surface. The reality doesn’t quite set in, so far from his idea of normality that it won’t settle into place.
Shouta was used to the distant relationship with his parents. The superficial small talk over dinner cooked by the live-in maid, the too-big, too-empty house. He never thought they cared enough about him to bother doing anything outside of the bare minimum.
When he’d come home to see those damning magazines spread out across the coffee table (and hadn’t that been a shock, to think they cared enough to go digging in his closet?), he’d expected the disgust, the cold disdain. He thought he’d spend the rest of his life in that house being resolutely ignored—even insulted and belittled—by the people who’d given birth to him. Yet somehow, Shouta had never once thought he’d be kicked out of the house, abandoned, for his sexual preference.
Shouta’s eyes burn, but he doesn’t blink, continuing to stare hard at the wall as his hands curl into fists. He presses his lips together tightly, resisting the broken sound that wants to crawl its way out of his throat. He absolutely doesn’t think about how truly alone he is, for the very first time. He had no family, not anymore, and friends had never come easily for him. Passing acquaintances, perhaps, in the form of his classmates, but no one he spoke to at lunch or spent weekends with.
As the sun set over Musutafu, Shouta had the dawning realization that there was no one that really cared. There probably never had been.
Even sleep abandoned him that night.
The motel had a meager, but complimentary breakfast, and Shouta stuffs an extra juice box and a couple tiny cereal boxes in his bag as he leaves for school. Fatigue is not a familiar companion for Shouta, and he suppresses a yawn as he shuffles to the station. His uniform is rumpled from having slept in it, exhaustion taking root in his bones.
School is surprisingly routine, and no one seems to notice anything amiss, not even the teachers. The routine and sense of normalcy should be comforting, but instead Shouta finds himself hiding in a corner of the stairwell during lunch, hands shaking as he fumbles with the juice box. The juice washes down the bland cereal, though Shouta hardly notices the taste in the first place, his gut twisting and roiling. The school feels like a prison, and sitting at his desk is like sitting at death row. His classmates surround him, waiting for the inevitable execution.
Shouta hyperventilates in the stairwell and reminds himself that tomorrow is Saturday.
Shouta eats an old energy bar he’d found in the depths of his school bag for dinner that night. He returns to the same hotel, and the clerk must’ve recognized him, for he gets the same room as before. Shouta pulls back the covers, intending to get some shuteye this time. The duvet is moth-eaten, and suspicious stains and pubic hair can be seen between the sheets. He decides to sleep atop the duvet instead.
He doesn’t bother to announce his presence as he gets home, seeing as there wouldn’t be a response anyway. Shouta fully intends to steal a snack from the kitchen before escaping to his room, as per usual, but as he passes the living room, he pauses.
Aizawa Seiji sits in his favorite armchair, dark piercing eyes watching Shouta vigilantly. His face is stern, but ultimately emotionless. Shouta can’t tell what he’s thinking.
His gaze moves to the coffee table at Seiji’s feet, and Shouta can feel the blood draining from his face. His hand clenches around the strap of his schoolbag in a white-knuckled grip, and Shouta takes a slow breath. He had to remain calm; he could still potentially fix this.
“What’s that?” Shouta asks, praying to whatever power was out there that he didn’t sound guilty or defiant. If there was one thing Seiji hated above all else, it was disrespect.
Seiji’s face doesn’t change; it doesn’t even twitch. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Shouta looks down at the magazines, mouth dry. With every minute that passed, the panic swelling in his gut grew more and more wild. “Looks like a bunch of magazines.”
Seiji’s eyebrow twitches, but before things can get worse, Aizawa Hisako enters the room. The pretense of the trophy wife has been abandoned; her lips are pursed, eyebrows drawn disapprovingly. She looks like she wants to sneer.
“Don’t you even think about lying, Shouta. Where in the world did you get that garbage?” She perches herself right behind her husband’s right side, one hand resting atop the back of his armchair.
Shouta’s eyes drift back down to the magazines, still lying innocuously on the table. A model poses on the front cover of the topmost one, unbuttoned shirt and low-riding jeans doing nothing to hide his physique. Almost unbidden, Shouta wonders what would’ve happened if there had been a woman on the cover instead.
“Answer your mother.”
Shit, he’d been silent for too long. Shouta wets his chapped lips, tries to come up with something that will satisfy them.
“A friend asked me to hold onto some stuff for them.”
He doesn’t even register the movement, only feels the throbbing pain in his cheek. His father never hit him, not once. At least, he hadn’t…
Shouta wakes up well before noon the next morning. The sun doesn’t quite make it through the heavy drapes, but nonetheless the teen finds himself blinking up at the cracked ceiling. He can still feel the phantom sensation of pain in his face. Only a couple days ago, he wouldn’t have been able to fathom waking up before 3PM on a Saturday. Yet, now he finds himself unable to get comfortable, mind too restless and joints aching.
Dragging himself off the creaking bed, Shouta makes his way into the bathroom. Lacking any toothpaste, he scrubs at his teeth with a finger, using the hotel-provided soap and shampoo when he showered. He put his school uniform back on, lacking anything else to wear. For the sake of some semblance of change, Shouta ties the jacket around his waist, rolling the sleeves of his dress shirt up to his elbows. He doesn’t bother brushing his hair as he trudges out of the building.
Without school to worry about for the moment, Shouta sets his mind on figuring out what bare necessities he needed. (It also serves to keep him from thinking about other things. He needed to remain logical right now; emotions would only serve to hurt.) He turns on his phone, wasting no time logging into the bank app and checking on his funds. The battery has dropped further; he’d need to buy a charger. The deficit caused by staying in the motel isn’t as bad as he thought it would be, and Shouta makes note of the number in his account as he turns his phone off again.
He would need a phone charger, at least one change of clothes, food, and water. He should probably buy a toothbrush and toothpaste as well. With his mental grocery list set for the time being, Shouta begins to wander through the streets, looking for the nearest convenience store.
The first one he finds is only a couple blocks away from the motel, and it’s relatively empty when Shouta enters. It’s a little on the shabby side, not that he minds, and Shouta makes a beeline for the phone charger. His phone is one of the latest models, and Shouta frowns at the price for the equivalent charger, but nonetheless dumps it in the small handbasket he’d picked up at the front. The toothbrush and toothpaste are the next items to join the charger, and Shouta heads for the clothes next.
Once he gets to the meager selection of clothes they have, however, Shouta grimaces. Most of the shirts are obnoxious enough without taking price into consideration. He tries to mentally calculate how much one of the less obnoxious shirts, a pair of jeans and underwear would cost altogether, only to give up on the thought almost immediately. Shouta grabs some extra underwear and resolutely ignores the rest.
Shouta is tempted to grab a bunch of onigiri and call it a day—as it is, he still grabs a few in response to his stomach attempting to devour the rest of his organs—when he spies a brightly colored sign advertising some half off prices. The ad appears to be trying to promote some kind of new sustenance packet. Shouta picks one up, raising an eyebrow as he read the nutritional information on the back. They were essentially energy drinks, but in a slightly more solidified form in an attempt to pass of as food. Not as nutritious as energy bars or even the onigiri, but—Shouta pauses, looks at the colorful sign again. They might not be as nutritious, but they were cheap.
Later, Shouta tries one of the jelly packets for the first time in place of dinner. It’s not until the energy returns to him that he realizes how fatigued he was. The jelly packets become a near constant substitute for meals.
That night, when Shouta returns to the motel and tries to pay for his room, the clerk gives him a look of pity and says his card was rejected. Shouta pushes against the well of panic surging up inside him—he was sure there was still enough for a few more nights, at least, even after buying his food.
He steps outside, ducking into the entryway of an alley behind the hotel, and turns on his phone—thankfully with some life to it now that he’d bought that charger—and logs into his bank account. Or rather, he tries. A notification flashes up onto the screen and his parents closed his account. They kicked him out of the house—abandoned him—and they didn’t even have the decency to leave him some money to fend for himself.
Shouta’s eyes burn and his hands shake, and he doesn’t have the energy or will to fight it this time. He drops to the ground, using his knees to hide his face as he wrapped his arms around them, shoulders trembling as he fought the despair that seemed to overwhelm him.
He didn’t know what to do.
“Are you alright, son?” A young woman’s soft voice drifts down from above him, and Shouta twitches as he looks up. She’s pretty, with long blue hair and big eyes, wearing a long coat. His eyes meet hers and she smiles encouragingly. Shouta shivers. There is something empty about that expression on her face. “Oh, are you cold? Here, let me help you up.”
She reaches out for him, but Shouta jumps to his feet, backing away. Her smile falters at the reaction.
“It’s alright, really. I can help you. I’m sure you need a place to stay, right? I know someone who’d be perfectly happy to take you in.” The woman’s smile grows wider, brighter, but her eyes are sharp and cold.
Shouta adjusts his backpack on his shoulders, one hand surreptitiously checking to make sure his school bag is still tied to it. “I’m fine, thanks.”
He steps towards the end of the alley, and when the woman doesn’t attempt to make another move towards him, Shouta turns and runs.
He doesn’t get very far, feeling his bag being jerked back, pulling him along with it. Shouta tries to wiggle out of it, twisting his arms, but as he frees himself a sharp-nailed hand grabs his hair and yanks. Shouta gasps, turning into the fall to try to fight her but only succeeding in landing painfully on his wrist. It doesn’t snap, but pain bursts out around the joint when he tries to move it.
The blue-haired woman leans down over him; any trace of kindness has been wiped from her face, leaving only an ugly sneer. “Damn kid,” She bites out, “If you’d just followed me from the start I wouldn’t have to do this.”
Shouta doesn’t get the chance to reply before she kicks him. He coughs, curling forward around the new source of pain, and the woman’s face lights up. Shouta screws his eyes shut, taking another shuddering breath. ‘A hero will come,’ he thinks, desperately. ‘They will.’ Another minute passes and a heeled boot aims for his chest, this time. Shouta wheezes and holds onto his hope. ‘They’ll come.’ No one does.
“That’s what happens when you piss me off, brat. Now, are you going to come with me quietly?” Shouta stumbles to his feet, keeping his face shrouded by his tangled hair. No one’s coming. He remains alone in this alley with his assailant. The woman’s smile widens. “Good boy.” If no one was going to save him, well, he’d just have to do what he’s always done. Shouta saves himself.
She steps towards him, and just as her stance moves into something a little more off-balance, Shouta darts forward, shoving his shoulder into her stomach. The woman lurches back with a grunt, but she’s not entirely surprised as she grabs him by the hair (what was her obsession with his hair?) and pulls. Off-balance, Shouta has no choice but to brace himself as his face smacks into the brick wall of the alleyway. The blue-haired woman scrapes his face along it until he drops to the ground again.
“Now,” she hisses, “Why don’t we do this the hard way then?” She raises her sharp-nailed hand, and it’s only out of sheer desperation that Shouta activates his quirk. His eyes burn and itch with the rest of his face, but it’s worth it for the woman’s shock as she looks to her hands. “W-Why isn’t my quirk working?” She’s easily flustered, it seems, and Shouta uses this chance to push himself up—and oh god his wrist—grabbing his bag and making a run for it.
The woman doesn’t recover fast enough, and Shouta darts out of the alley, thankful he’d taken the time to try and remember the area as he darts through alleys and buildings, making his way for the busiest street. He doesn’t stop until he reaches his destination, glancing around him. The woman is nowhere to be found, and no one had come.
Even now, the few people in the street eye Shouta warily and give him a wide berth as they walk by.
With the adrenaline spike beginning to fade, the lingering pain in his stomach and chest return. His face stings and aches when he moves his mouth, and he can taste blood. But the worst of it by far is his wrist. Shouta holds it close to his body as he begins walking, trying to ignore the way his breathing comes in shuddery little gasps.
He can’t go to the hospital—there’s no way he’d be able to pay those bills—and with that woman still back there he couldn’t return to the motel anymore. The last of his money are the bills in his wallet, and he still has to think about food and water and shelter in the long-term.
Shouta tries not to dwell on it, but unless he can find someplace willing to hire a middle-schooler, no questions asked, he might have to resort to stealing.
The cashier at the convenience store he walks into gives him a strange look, but doesn’t say anything as Shouta grabs bandages, bandaids, and rubbing alcohol and dumps them on the counter. He sets his bag on the ground, digging through it to find his wallet, but the cashier waves him off.
“Don’t worry about it.” Shouta looks up, bewildered, and the cashier gives him a sad smile. She puts the items in a plastic bag and hands it to him. “This one’s on me. Take care of yourself, alright?” Shouta suddenly can’t speak around the emotion lodged in his throat, so he nods and grabs the bag, dashing off with a muttered thanks.
He finds a public restroom, blissfully empty, locking the door behind himself. Shouta leans heavily against the door and cries. The sobs shake his body from the force, a lifetime’s worth of pent up emotion coming up all at once. It’s funny, how after everything that happened, it was the kindness of a stranger that broke his will. The trembling of his shoulders jostles his wrist and exacerbates the pain in his torso, but he can’t quite bring his emotions under control.
It’s a long time before Shouta regains some semblance of rationality, and even that’s tempered by utter exhaustion. He has just enough presence of mind to wrap up his wrist—using a couple unsharpened pencils and the bandages he got from the store as a makeshift splint—before passing out on the bathroom floor.
Somehow, Shouta wakes up even more exhausted than before, his body sore and aching from both his injuries and the tile he’d slept on. He pushes himself slowly to his feet, mindful of the throbbing in his wrist, making his way to the mirror and sink with bag in tow.
While initially he’d planned to brush his teeth, all thoughts of hygiene leave his mind as Shouta gets a good look at himself in the mirror—or rather, a good look at the source of pain on his face. Scratches and scrapes mar the right side of his face, from a rather notable gash across the edge of his eyebrow to the split upper lip. The blood has long since dried, but Shouta can see the bits of dirt and brick still embedded in the cuts from when the woman shoved his face along the wall. He grimaces; the pull from the change in facial expression hurts.
Washing all the cuts and scrapes out one-handed is a long process, especially when Shouta keeps having to stop due to the pain. The rubbing alcohol is even worse, but the lack of hygienic environment means that if he doesn’t, things will only be worse in the long run. He pushes through the pain before he’s finally able to cover the worst of the cuts with Band-Aids.
Shouta sighs, but he also knows things aren’t quite finished. He lifts up his shirt last, revealing the smattering of bruises across his torso. Shouta ignores the fact that he’s definitely lost weight, choosing instead to focus on the biggest and darkest bruises; particularly the ones around his chest. They hurt to press on, naturally, and when he tries to breathe in too deeply, his chest twinges in pain. Shouta doesn’t think he has any internal bleeding, at the very least, though maybe some bruised ribs. It’s hard to say, when the most he’s done is skim over some of his father’s medical books. He’ll have to be more careful from now on, however.
Shouta packs away his makeshift first aid in his bag and sucks on a jelly packet, taking a couple of shallow breaths before unlocking the bathroom door and ducking outside. He had his breakdown, and ultimately it cost him. Emotions were illogical. They did more to hinder than to serve, and so Shouta carefully packed away those illogical thoughts, shoving down the knot of emotion in his chest.
The first thing he’d have to do is figure out new sleeping arrangements, now that the motel was out of the question (now that any motel was out of the question, given his limited funds). Maybe he could find a park to go camping in. Dirt would be softer than tile, at the very least.
He’s in a somewhat nicer part of town, and Shouta finds himself wandering through a shopping center. He can’t buy anything really, but it’s nice to just window shop, looking through various stores and seeing if there’s any job openings.
Of course, that’s assuming someone would want to hire a kid who looks like he just got out of some gang fight.
Shouta’s nearing the other end of the street, where the last few shops dwindle, when he spots something else. Big signs are pasted around some outdoor store, advertising their closing-out sale. The place sold a variety of camping gear, and Shouta finds himself gravitating inside. Something within may end up being useful, after all.
There’s a particularly notable sign that says, “75% off!!!” and Shouta immediately finds himself captivated by the items displayed behind it. A large yellow sleeping bag is laid out on display, and he tentatively presses down on it with his good hand. The material is soft and squishy, the outside rainproof. He’s slight enough that he can fit both himself and his bag inside comfortably. With a sleeping bag, he wouldn’t have to worry about finding a motel or mattress.
The prospect of sleeping just about anywhere outweighs the hideous shade it sports, and almost before he realizes it, Shouta has a large bag in his hands and a significantly smaller stack of bills in his wallet. He can’t quite bring himself to regret it though; this takes care of shelter, in a sense.
Shouta decides he’ll test it out later, and searches for a good (safe) place to do his homework before tomorrow.
He ends up settling on Tatooin Station. It’s the closest and biggest train station in Musutafu, and Shouta makes himself comfortable on a bench. He ignores the occasional glances he gets from others, and the homework is a good distraction from everything else. In particular, his hunger. With everything that happened yesterday, Shouta hadn’t really paid attention to his stomach, but it returns with a vengeance now, unused to eating so little. He regrets having snacked so much when he was younger, but there’s not much he can do about it now.
Shouta manages to make it through his math homework before it becomes too much, and he resigns himself to taking out another jelly packet, sucking on it as he trades out his math homework for English. English was hard enough on a good day—add in recent stress and everything just went over his head. Shouta tries to mark down a few things that seem right, but it really does seem to be hopeless.
He’s just about to give up when someone plops down beside him on the bench, narrowly missing his feet from where he’d propped them up. He looks up irritably, only to find the grinning face of a blond kid around his age.
“Hey, what happened to your face?”
Shouta’s brow twitches; the blonde’s voice was loud, even amidst the clamor of trains and people moving about.
“What do you want?” He growls out, determinedly not thinking about what exactly had happened to his face. His response only seems to make the guy’s face grow wider.
“Just thought you could use a friendly face!” He chirps, and Shouta huffs, turning away. So the kid was one of those do-gooder types then.
“Well, you accomplished what you set out to do. Now leave me alone.” Shouta mutters, turning back to his English homework and hoping that’ll be the end of that.
The blond isn’t so easily deterred it seems, however, and he leans into Shouta’s space. Shouta stiffens at the sudden invasion, fighting the itch under his skin to just punch the guy and run. He watches the other kid through the fringes of his hair, seeing how concentric green eyes decipher his handwriting from behind the bright red frames of his glasses.
This close, Shouta thinks he can see what looks to be hearing aids, and the surprise is almost enough to make him relax again when the blond says, “You’re not very good at English, are you?” Shouta tries to snatch his homework back, inching away, but the blond jumps, grabbing a corner of the worksheet to keep Shouta from running. “No, no, no, I didn’t mean it like that!” When Shouta stops trying to get up and leave, the blond relaxes, smiling almost uncertainly at him. “If you want, I can give you a few pointers?”
There’s a pause as Shouta thinks it over. The other kid doesn’t seem to mean any harm, and if he’s actually decent at English, it would only help Shouta out. If he thought about it logically, it would be in his best interest to agree. He does.
The other kid’s face practically lights up, and he steals the pencil from Shouta’s hand to write down notes in the margins of the page, underlining certain words and crossing out others, chattering all the while. The blond is actually a decent teacher and Shouta—
Shouta relaxes. Something about the sheer normalcy of talking about homework with a kid his age—even better than his normal, because he’d barely spoken three words to any of the kids at his junior high—after the last several days grounds him. He even almost finds himself smiling as the blond laughs, explaining some English idiom that Shouta had failed to grasp.
Their time gets cut short, however, as the blond perks up, head swiveling as the overhead speakers drones on about a train. He jumps up, startling Shouta, who looks up with realization sinking in his gut.
Green eyes turn back to him, torn. “I’m sorry, that’s my train, I really have to go.” The blond grins apologetically. “But we’ll see each other around, yeah?” He runs off before Shouta can reply.
It’s not until he’s long gone from sight that Shouta realizes the other kid left with his pencil and without so much as a name.
Shouta ends up testing the sleeping bag in a corner of the train station, hidden behind a barren newsstand. It may be a garish color, but his initial estimate was right; he could lay comfortably inside with his bag tucked safely in the bag at the end of his feet. Shouta zipped it up and found that it was far more comfortable than he’d expected, and more importantly, it was warm. It’d been warmer outside than was usual this time of year, but Shouta hadn’t realized how cold it still was until he was curled up in the sleeping bag.
After checking once more to ensure he was relatively well-hidden, Shouta makes himself comfortable, tucking his head inside. He could start sleeping in the school tomorrow—he’d found a few hidden nooks and crannies the staff rarely checked—and after that, things would get better.
He doesn’t quite expect to fall asleep as soon as he does.
Shouta wakes up far more rested that day than he’d been since his parents kicked him out. He also wakes up to find the sun a lot higher than it should’ve been.
With a muttered curse, Shouta struggles to get out of the sleeping bag, not bothering to check to see if his phone had enough battery left to tell him the time. He didn’t need to know how late he was to school; if he got there early enough he could make up some excuse about sleeping in and missing the train. It wouldn’t be that far off the mark.
He pulls his jacket on over his rumpled shirt, only now realizing the dress shirt of his uniform was covered in red stains. Hopefully no one would notice. He pulls his backpack and school bag out, and then spends several precious minutes struggling to roll the sleeping bag up tight enough to stuff at least most of it in of his bags. (Things were much harder one-handed than he’d thought they’d be.)
Finally, Shouta manages wrangles together everything, stumbling to his feet with train pass in hand.
He gets to school, and the teachers accept his excuses far more easily than they should have. His homeroom teacher eyes his face disapprovingly, but doesn’t mention it. Shouta’s classmates don’t even seem to notice. He leaves thinking maybe he should’ve just skipped after all.
After school, Shouta returns to the same bench he’d sat at the previous day, half-heartedly hoping the blond kid might return to the spot as well. Instead, a young woman marches up to him, crouching down and gingerly taking his face in both hands.
Shouta blinks, but doesn’t move as she tilts his face this way and that, eyebrows drawn down in concern. (He can’t quite help the way his eyes stray to her nails; not sharp at all, but dulled down and rough, like she had a habit of biting them.)
“Oh dear,” she murmurs, glancing down at a watch on her wrist. “Where do you live, young man? I imagine your parents are worried—” Shouta flinches, almost involuntarily, and the woman stops herself. Her concerned frown deepens, and she stares at him with soft green eyes for several long moments. “When did you last eat?”
Shouta can’t quite meet her eyes. “Last night.”
The woman sighs. “Let me rephrase that; when did you last eat a proper meal?”
Shouta mutters an unintelligible response, (honestly, he can’t really remember) but that seems to be answer enough, for the woman stands up, gathering his stuff in her arms.
“Come on; we’re going to get you some food.” Her tone leads no room for argument, and Shouta figures he doesn’t really have much other choice as he gets up and follows this short woman out of the train station. She turns and smiles at him as they walk, seemingly pleased that he’s following. (Of course, she doesn’t know that the moment they start leaving public areas he’s booking it, stuff in hand or not.) “My name is Midoriya Inko.”
Shouta pauses, but seeing the woman ignore several perfectly good secluded alleys, ends up giving in to the manners still ingrained in him. “Aizawa Shouta.”
“Aizawa-kun, then,” he doesn’t bother to respond, so she carries on, “What would you like to eat, Aizawa-kun? It’s on me.”
The teen falters for a moment, eyes wide as he stares at Midoriya-san’s back. Hope itches at his mind, but he remembers another woman offering help and shoves it back down. Still… unlike that woman, her smile was warm, her eyes bright.
Midoriya-san turns back to him questioningly, and Shouta realizes she’s still waiting on an answer, so he points to the first restaurant he sees. It’s a small café, and the woman nods approvingly as she changes direction.
Shouta, rather bewilderingly, finds himself sitting across from Midoriya Inko, two large plates of food on the table between them. Shouta’s stomach rages at the smell, but he holds off, waiting for her to take the first bite. She seems to realize this, as she starts eating without preamble, though she watches him just as carefully as Shouta finally starts to eat himself.
He inhales his food, mourning the empty plate only momentarily before Midoriya-san switches it out with her own. Shouta eats that too, before looking up at this woman with the soft smile. This time, he allows the hope to crawl its way out of the dark.
“Better?” She asks, voice teasing, amused, and Shouta finds the tension in his shoulders easing some as he nods in reply. There was just something about this woman that put him at ease. But that—that was dangerous, and Shouta has to forcefully remind himself that this comfort can be taken away as quickly as it’s given.
“Aizawa-kun,” Midoriya-san starts, and Shouta sits up at the somber change in her voice, “Why were you at the train station instead of at school?” She doesn’t mention his home or his parents, and that speaks volumes. But still, Shouta doesn’t know how to respond. He looks away, and Midoriya-san sighs. “Do you have anywhere that you can stay? A friend’s or a relative’s, perhaps? I can give you the money to get there, if you need.”
Shouta curls forward, gripping his sprained wrist and decidedly not thinking about school yesterday, about the disapproving of his teachers and the disinterest of his classmates. He doesn’t think about a cold and quiet house, about colder alleyways. Instead, he thinks of this woman with her bitten-down nails and warm smile.
Shouta takes a chance and shakes his head.