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1.
Eri walks slowly around the outside edge of the training gym, watching with wide eyes as Aizawa’s heroes practice using their quirks. She steers clear of the noisier ones—keeps her distance from the boy firing off explosions, the one who’d grunted out that he doesn’t have a hero name yet because I’m the only one around here with any taste.
Sugarman notices her watching and pauses shovelling down a strawberry cake to smile at her. She likes Sugarman, and he has a great name—Eri would name herself after something sweet too. He’d offered her a bright pink macaron back in the classroom that morning; Eri had turned to check with Aizawa, who nodded once even though he says she has too many sweets. It tasted sharp and sweet all at once.
The next boy she sees is one whose name she can’t remember, but she recognises him as the one who’d made all the bright lights at the festival. Even though none of them are wearing their proper hero costumes, this boy is wearing the same big shiny belt he’d worn back then, bright blue light streaming out from its centre. He sees her watching and gives her a smile as dazzling as the beam.
“Your power is…a belt?” she asks softly.
“No no, mon petit chou.” He strikes a strange pose. “My power is the shining laser that emits from my belly button!”
“...But you can’t use it without a belt?” Eri asks. If her power only worked if she was wearing something else, she could take it off forever and know she was safe.
“I can use it without the belt, but doing so hurts my tummy!”
“Oh,” Eri says softly. She glances over her shoulder to check Aizawa is still close by; he’s a little ways away, his eyes scanning over the class, but he notices her turn and his eyes snap to her immediately. She waves and he nods in response. A little voice inside whispers that if Eri could stop her power by taking off a belt, Aizawa wouldn’t need to be the one who looks after her anymore. Then she might have to go live somewhere else. The thought makes her stomach hurt a little.
She turns back to the boy, who is still holding the same pose as before. “Your power hurts you?”
“If I use it too much, yes.”
The boy’s face looks different now. Eri hopes she didn’t make him sad. “But you’re a hero,” she says. “So it’s still a good power. Because you use it to save people.”
The boy’s smile wobbles a little. “Yes. It is not the power, but what you use it for.”
Deku had said that too—that Eri’s power couldn’t be bad because she’d used it to save him. But Eri also used her power to make her dad disappear forever. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d done it all the same.
“Your shoes are magnifique,” the boy says.
“Oh.” Eri looks down at her shoes. They’re see-through, but they have little spots of rainbow glitter inside that shimmer when they catch the light. Present Mic had seen her staring at them when he and Aizawa took her shopping and insisted that she have them, since he thought they were so cool but they wouldn’t fit him. “What does that mean?”
“That they are excellent!” he answers. “Shining and brilliant, like you!”
Eri feels that strange sensation where the warmth in her chest wants to show up on her face. “What’s your name?” she asks, because it’s starting to feel mean calling him ‘the boy’ in her head.
The boy spins around again and strikes an even more dramatic pose. “My name is Yuuga Aoyama, but my hero name is Can’t Stop Twinkling!”
Eri giggles. “That’s a silly name.”
“Well,” Can’t Stop Twinkling answers. “It made you smile.”
After the class is finished and Aizawa has sent them away to go get changed, he comes over to Eri. “Are you doing okay?”
Eri nods and has to stifle a yawn against her hand.
Aizawa crouches down in front of her. “You know, you don’t have to come to the next class. I have a free period—we can go home and get some sleep.”
Eri tilts from side to side, feeling her skirt swish against her knees. She likes being with Aizawa’s class—getting to see Deku, Froppy, Uravity and Red Riot, watching them all train their powers. It makes her brain quieter. But it’s getting harder to keep her eyes open.
“My class are noisy,” Aizawa says. “I get tired after dealing with them all day too.”
“Okay,” Eri says, swallowing down another yawn. “If you want to, we can go home.”
Aizawa nods, his face doing that funny thing where he doesn’t quite smile. His big smiles are silly and fake-scary, but he does these not-quite ones all the time, even when he’s pretending to be fake-scary still. “Remember when Red Riot gave you a piggyback ride earlier?”
Eri nods.
He shifts his position a little and jerks his head back. “Climb on. We’ll have more time to sleep if we get back faster.”
Eri climbs onto his back and tangles both her hands in his scarf. He puts one of his hands over hers, squeezing and making sure she’s holding on tight before he stands up. Eri has a flash of memory: wrapped in Mirio’s cape, holding tight to Deku as he leapt through the air, so safe and so frightened all at once. The pressure of Aizawa’s scarf against her face and the rhythm of his steps helps her heart get quieter.
“Can I come visit class again sometime?”
“Sure,” Aizawa says. “One of the interesting ones. I don’t think you want to watch them do math.”
Eri screws up her face. Everyone is very insistent that it’s good for her to be doing schoolwork, even if she doesn’t feel ready to go to a real school with kids her own age yet, but no one has been able to explain why doing things with numbers is important. “No,” she agrees.
They’re outside now and the sun is warm on Eri’s back. Her head is turning pleasantly fuzzy. “They’re all working really hard,” she murmurs, “to get better with their powers.”
“They are,” Aizawa agrees.
Eri thinks about Can’t Stop Twinkling, with his strange words and poses. His wobbly smile that he’d held onto anyway. “They’re nice.”
Aizawa squeezes her hand where it’s tangled in his scarf. “Good,” he says. “Tell me if any of them aren’t and I’ll give them detention.”
Eri giggles. She’d asked him what detention was before and he’d said it was having to spend extra time at school. But they live at school, she’d said. Like we do. They’re already here all the time? Aizawa had shrugged. Try telling them that.
Eri lets the rhythm of his steps lull her into dreamless sleep.
2.
Eri wakes up with her heart going thump-thump-thump. She doesn’t remember her dream, but she feels cold all over even under her blanket. She lies there breathing fast but quiet, hands twisting in the blanket, before she registers its softness. She sees the little glowing moon light on her bedside table and remembers the room it belongs to. Her room. She’s allowed to make noise here. She’s allowed to get up and go find Aizawa when she’s scared.
Eri scrambles out of bed, pulling the blanket around her shoulders and taking it with her. She pretends it’s a cape like Lemillion’s as she pads her way to Aizawa’s room. She stands outside for a moment, heart still beating fast. Aizawa is always tired—what if this time he gets mad when she wakes him up? If she were brave like Lemillion and Deku, she could go back to bed and make herself calm without him.
She clutches the blanket tight in her hands. You know what I think’s really brave, Eri? Lemillion had said to her once. Asking for help when you need it! Like right now, I need you to help me eat all this candy! The memory of his warm sparkling eyes calmed the thumping in her chest a little.
Aizawa isn’t smiley or bright the way Lemillion is, but he’s never gotten mad at her for anything before. She knocked over one of his cups once and shattered it on the ground, and when she cried he’d broken another one himself just to show her he didn’t mind. He peels her tangerines for her, and helps her with her schoolwork, and even when he pretends to be scary, he does it to the heroes in his class and never to her.
Eri takes a deep breath and pushes the door open to find…nothing. The bed is empty. Like she’s…like he’s disappeared. The blanket drops to the floor as she reaches up to grasp at her horn. It’s—it's not any smaller, it can’t be. Her heart goes thump thump thump. She can’t really have—
Eri hears a faint rustle and a sigh from behind her. She runs into the living room—and there he is. Fast asleep on the couch, sprawled out with one hand hanging down off of the edge. Some papers are lying half-crumpled on his chest. He’s breathing slow and even.
Eri’s heart slows again, and with it comes a wave of exhaustion. She doesn’t want to think anymore. She doesn’t even want to wake Aizawa up and talk, she just…
Eri grabs a pillow from the armchair and puts it on the floor next to the couch. She sits down on it and gently takes hold of Aizawa’s hand with both of hers, pulling it into her chest. He keeps breathing the same.
The scars on Aizawa’s hand aren’t like hers, or like the moon-shaped one below his eye. They’re so little you couldn’t really tell they were there until you touched them. There are places where the skin has gone tough too, and tiny little hairs that aren’t scratchy like the ones on his face.
For just a moment Eri imagines that warm brown skin peeling back, giving way to red underneath, twisting and reshaping—but no. Aizawa makes quirks stop. He stopped her quirk from hurting Deku, and she’s here with him because he can stop it from hurting anyone else too. She doesn’t have to be afraid of quirks as long as Aizawa is nearby, even…even his. Even hers.
His hand is warm and heavy against her chest. She listens to the rhythm of his breathing until her brain goes quiet.
The next thing she knows, there’s a gentle hand resting on top of her head. The other is still lying on her chest. “Come on, Eri,” Aizawa murmurs. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
She shakes her head. “I’m comfy here.”
Aizawa sighs and she feels his breath against her hair. “I’m giving you bad habits.”
“No,” she insists. “Sleeping—” She pauses to yawn. “Sleeping wherever you can sleep is logical.”
“What idiot said that,” he mutters. “Okay, how about you get back in bed and I’ll sit beside you?” His little finger taps against her chest. “You can keep the hand, too.”
Eri hums in thought the way she sees grownups do, even though she’s too sleepy to be thinking much of anything. “Okay then.”
“Okay,” Aizawa says, and scoops her up into his arms.
3.
“What are you doing?” Eri asks.
Aizawa pulls another stack of papers out of his bag. “I have to grade essays,” he says, then explains more without her having to ask. “My students have each written the answer to a question. I have to decide how well they did and write them feedback.”
“Can I help?”
He tilts his head, considering. “They're kind of long for you to read. And it'll be boring reading the same thing over and over again.”
Eri fiddles with her sleeve, looking down at the ground. “Okay,” she says softly.
Aizawa hums in thought. “You could draw a picture after where I write comments?”
Eri lights up. She’s not in the mood to draw—sometimes her hands don't play fair and she doesn't want to find out if today is one of those days—but: ”I have an idea!”
“Be careful,” Aizawa warns as she sprints off towards her room.
She reaches into the drawer of her bedside table and pulls out her sticker sheets, then runs back into the living room and holds them up to Aizawa. The corner of his mouth quirks up a little.
She sits beside him on the couch and he hands her each paper after he’s finished, telling her who it belongs to; there are still so many names to try and remember. Eri knows their hero names best and those aren’t on these papers, which seems silly when this is hero school.
“Tsuyu Asui,” Aizawa says, dropping the paper in her lap. “Froppy.”
Eri claps her hands together and searches her sticker sheets carefully. Disappointingly, she doesn’t have any frog stickers. She chooses a lizard with a long curly tongue and hopes that will do instead.
A little while later: “And this is Izuku Midoriya's.” Aizawa hands her the paper, and Eri lights up because she knows that one.
“Deku!” Eri looks over the messy scribble, lines going a little crooked sometimes the same way Eri’s do. “Did he do a good job?”
“He did.”
“He's smart?”
“Sure, but he also works hard. That's more important.”
Eri frowns at her stickers for a while. “Do you think it's okay to give some people more stickers than others?”
Aizawa shrugs. “They're your stickers. If any of them complain, I'll give them extra homework.”
Eri giggles. “No!” Eri does all of her work from home so she doesn’t know why homework is supposed to be scarier than regular schoolwork, but she can tell it is from Aizawa’s fake-scary voice.
After so much deliberation that Aizawa has almost finished the next paper by the time she’s done, Eri chooses a lion sticker, because a book they read the other night had a brave lion in it, a fish the same green as Deku’s costume, and a pegasus because it's her favourite one, and she thinks she should give her favourite things to her favourite people. “Can I write something too?”
Aizawa hands her the pen. Well done Deku, Eri writes in her best handwriting. Aizawa checks that she’s done before putting Deku’s paper away with the others and carrying on writing. Eri considers for a moment, watching his hand move across the page, then takes a kitty sticker and sticks it gently to the back of Aizawa’s hand.
Aizawa pauses. “Are you sure you want to spend your stickers on me?”
“Yes!” Eri says. “You're working hard. It's important.”
Aizawa’s pen stays still for a moment and Eri wonders if she’s done something wrong. “Thank you, Eri,” he says quietly, then carries on writing.
Eri’s eyes start to get heavy. She thinks she might not be awake long enough to do all the papers but she can finish the rest in the morning, to make sure no one is left out. She realises the arm she’s leaning against has gone still and starts to worry that she’s interrupting Aizawa’s work—but she blinks her eyes open and sees he’s swapped the pen to the other hand and carried on writing, just as neat as before.
“How come you can write with both hands?” Eri can hardly do it well with her good hand sometimes.
“I'm ambidextrous. It means both hands work as well as each other.”
Eri considers this for a moment. She sits back up, chooses another pegasus sticker—her second to last one—and sticks it carefully to the back of Aizawa’s other hand. His free hand comes to rest on top of her head, a warm comforting weight. Eri falls asleep leant into his side, feeling the rhythm of his breath and listening to the sound of the pen scratching across the paper.
“Sensei!” Iida cries. “There appear to be some strange adornments attached to our work?”
“Eri helped me out with grading,” Shouta answers.
Ashido clutches her paper to her chest. “I've never been so happy to get a 58!”
The class begins comparing stickers. Uraraka leans over a pink-faced Midoriya’s desk and gasps. “Deku got three stickers. And a note!”
People lean over to look. “The pegasus ones are her favourites,” Midoriya says softly, staring at the stickers in wonder.
Shouta hides a smile in his scarf. And if anyone notices the stickers still stuck to the backs of his hands—well. Some things were more important than reputation.