I.
Shinso was accepted into his class.
Of course he was, Shota had never really had a doubt in the kid or he'd never have bothered in the first place. They'd kept up with training, though. Even with his success in the joint battles it was clear that Shinso was still behind his future classmates. It was no wonder, with the amount of real world experience they'd (unfortunately) gotten, but he knew the kid was nothing if not determined to catch up.
Only, something strange happened after the announcement. Shinso had been ecstatic at first, but as the time grew closer and closer for him to finally, properly transfer that enthusiasm disappeared, replaced with a constant frown and the sort of mistakes made by someone who was over thinking something. It must have been nerves, Shota figured, or maybe imposter syndrome, but it didn't go away no matter how many times he reassured Shinso that he'd been picked out for this for a reason. So one late afternoon, after they had finished training and were headed away from ground beta he said, "You've been out of it lately. Not having second thoughts?"
If he'd been right, Shinso would get defensive first, then confide in him, but instead he shook his head and said "No. I've been thinking."
His face was pinched in the way that meant he wanted to say something, but needed a push; Shota hadn't gotten this far with the kid without understanding how to give it. Prompting too soon would get him a half-baked, probably sarcastic answer, so instead he slowed to a stop, watched Shinso, and waited for him to gather his thoughts.
The words that eventually came were, "I need to tell you something, but I think it might jeopardize my chance at the hero course."
Not what Shota had been expecting, and as well as he controlled his expressions most of the time his eyebrows still shot up. A thousand thoughts swirled in his head to what it might be before he clamped down on that train of thought. Whatever it was, Shinso was about to tell him.
"Well, I'm listening."
Shinso bit his lip, realizing that he'd said too much to back out now. Shota watched as the kid looked around- eyes only stopping when he saw they were in range of a security camera.
(He had gathered by now that this particular nervous tic was something Shinso did for his own saftey. Video proof that he hadn't brainwashed his teacher)
"...You know how I'm in foster care, right?"
Shota nodded. Had he gotten into a fight? The ways his brain tried to link that statement with Shinso losing his spot in the hero course were bad, and he shut those down too.
"Well… If the home I was in wasn't a good one…" As he spoke, Shinso reached for his phone, methodically scrolling to something, "I know that you're - That you'd do something about it. If I told you."
Shota's heart leapt somewhere in his throat. He knew Shinso was in the system, and he'd had his worries, but Shinso had always brushed them off when he hinted at them. He'd never seen anything outright, and had done his best to make sure the kid got enough food in him when he got the chance. Still this…This was not the way he'd pictured this conversation heading.
"I would." He said as steadily as he could. "You just did."
Shinso offered him a weak smile and held out his phone for Shota to take, but all he could see was how tired the kid's eyes looked. He'd caught that expression before, in fleeting moments, when Shinso hadn't realized he’d been watching, but now, here, it was plain to see.
When he took the phone it was open to a gallery of photos labeled Nakamura house, and just the thumbnails turned his stomach. Most of them were photos of injuries- of Shinso' s injuries- dark bruises littered up and down his chest and back. Carefully placed, rarely anywhere they would have peeked out from a school uniform. Dated since before the beginning of the school year. Shinso had trained with these injuries.
(And Shota remembered the bruise he'd spotted on Shinso's arm one day after class, had asked, and the kid had just shrugged and said he must have landed harder than he thought, yesterday. He was so nonchalant about it that Shota didn't push. Maybe he should have. Maybe if he had--)
Some of the photos were of a man, presumably the foster father, passed out after a bender. Some were of mold- in the kitchen and the bathroom. The worst was one, dated the day of the sports festival, and he could spot at least one wound that certainly wasn't caused by the event.
Against his better judgement, Shota backed out of the folder. Nakamura house was neatly lined up with a set of other folders, bearing the names of other families. And they were all inside a folder named evidence. Shota sucked in a breath to try and stop himself from seeing red.
Shinso had done this before. Shinso had done this more than once.
He turned off the screen and offered the phone back, hoping his expression conveyed how horrified he felt. Shinso took it back with worry in his eyes.
"This shouldn't have happened to you, Hitoshi. And I will be doing something about it." The boy blinked at the use of his given name. "But it also in no way reflects your ability to become a hero. I'm glad you spoke up."
Shinso nodded, his shoulders untensing just a bit. But not much, and not in the way Shota wanted.
"I should hope not, or I would have been out of luck from the start" said Shinso, eyes drifting down to the phone in his hand, "That's not what I'm worried about."
And Shinso sighed, free hand coming up to rub at his tired, tired eyes.
"The reason I'm doing it now... Well, hero kids live in the dorms, right?"
Shota nodded. The dorms would mean Shinso would be away from the bastard who'd done this. Revealing this now, when he was so close to being out, was strange.
"And If I'm in the hero course I live in the dorms too, which is great, but..." Shinso took a deep breath, "There are other kids. As long as I was there I could keep everything focused on me, but if I'm gone…" A sad smile, "They'll just find a new scapegoat."
A sick feeling wound its way straight into Shota's gut.
"Why wait this long, when you were getting hurt?"
"Ah that's..." Shinso's shoulders fell, but his eyes stayed fixed on Shota's "I'm sort of on my last legs in terms of places to go. If I lose this placement I'll probably get sent back to this one group home that-- well they're probably not gonna let me stay at UA. But letting other kids get hurt just so I could stay isn't... It doesn't feel like a very hero-like thing to do."
Shota's heart ached.
Shinso, put between a rock and a hard place, was choosing to put his dream on the line to make sure other kids wouldn't get hurt like he had.
…He had known before that Shinso would make a good hero, but the set to his jaw as he explained himself made the realization hurt.
He reached out and put a hand on Shinso's shoulder, and squeezed. He hoped it was comforting. He hoped it was something.
"You made the right choice by speaking up. I'm going to fix this." He drew in a breath, "and I'm going to do whatever it takes to make sure you stay at UA and become a hero."
--
("It would be easiest if a teacher from UA fostered you. There are a few options, but I figured I'd offer myself first."
"Wait, really? I- is that okay?"
"It is.
"Then yeah. Yeah. Sure." )
II.
Really, if Shota considered it, he probably started getting grey hairs right about the time Hitoshi got his provisional license. That also happened to be around the same time that he'd started to come to terms with the fact that he was starting to think of him as his kid.
He certainly should have known better than to let him and damn Problem Child go out on 2-A's grocery run together. To be honest, he should probably just ban Midoriya from leaving campus all-together, because it seemed like he managed to get into trouble every single goddamn time.
Which was to say that he really should have been expecting the text he got from Shinso fifteen minutes before curfew that read:
We're probably gonna be late, robbery at the store, everyone's fine.
Police are already here, we just have to give statements but it's taking a bit.
Because of course they couldn't be out of his sight for more than an hour before getting involved with something. He sent back a text indicating that he was going to meet them and escort them back to campus and tore out of the teacher's dorm ready for a fight. It would have been totally in character for him to find the city block devastated when he arrived, but things were surprisingly tame -- everything appeared to be business as usual with the exception of Midoriya and Shinso waiting on the sidewalk outside, next to a police cruiser. Not that he let that relax him at all.
His first assumption, based on the sheepish look on the kid's face, was that Midoriya jumped in and caught the guy, but not before knocking over a few store displays or maybe breaking some glass.
"So." He said by way of a greeting, "What's the damage?"
Both kids blinked up at him, but it was Midoriya who responded, "Uh. None. Sir?"
He sent back a long stare that he knew would make him look unimpressed, but which also served the dual purpose of letting him look Midoriya and Shinso over more carefully. Neither of them looked hurt, or even like they'd been doing anything strenuous. It was then that Midoriya clarified, back to looking sheepish, "We didn't fight or anything. Or, well, Shinso stopped me, actually."
Shinso rolled his eyes, "We didn't need to. Isn't this the exact sort of situation you've been trying to tell me that my quirk is perfect for?"
That earned a furious nod from Midoriya, who started gushing about how it'd been a textbook non-violent take-down. Shota was only able to get him to quiet down by saying he'd get the details from them when they were back at the dorms.
He kept a careful eye on them on the walk back. This was, as far as he knew, not only Shinso's first villain attack, but his first capture as well. He wouldn't begrudge the kid for feeling jittery after the fact, but there was a tilt to Shinso's chin and a light in his eyes that he associated more with one of Midoriya's crazy plans than a scared kid.
"Don't start getting over-confident." He warned. It was one of the traits he liked to make absolutely sure no one in his class graduated with. "Things won't always be as simple as they were tonight."
"I won't." Shinso said back, but the look in his eyes didn't change a bit. In fact, that look lasted through the night, into the next day, through a training exercise that Shinso's team lost horribly. It took all that for Shota to realize that what he was seeing wasn't overconfidence at all, just a kid who finally, finally believed that he was capable of being a hero, and only because he'd actually been allowed to do it.
(When he got the chance to review the tapes later, he would find that Hitoshi had done pretty much everything right -- he'd asked his question from out of line of sight, didn't get the villain riled up, had indeed stopped Midoriya from jumping in and making things messy, and had managed to do it all with a pretty cool head, considering. He was, dare he say it, proud of the kid. His kid.)
III.
Earlier that morning, Hitoshi had accidentally called him dad, and then panicked and fled from the room, leaving Shota to examine just how much he liked the title. Maybe even enough to make it official -- he'd have to talk with the kid first, of course, but hopefully the slip up had meant he'd been thinking about it himself.
Right now, those thoughts were far from his mind, because he was currently dealing with the fact that his class had managed to get themselves caught up in another villain attack.
It was the charity fundraiser project that the kids did in their second year -- the sort of thing that Shota kept well away from if he could help it because it involved galas and dinners and he preferred activism of a much different variety. His class, being both mildly famous and incredible overachievers, had managed to turn their assignment into an actual event, which meant that there were a bunch of rich assholes at the thing, and that meant that someone was going to take the opportunity to underestimate UA and try and take a hostage or two. Shota had made the bad decision to just stand back and observe, which meant he was as blindsided as anyone else when the windows shattered inwards and groups of villains came rushing in.
It was frankly upsetting exactly how prepared his students were for this, just because of how much they'd been through before now. But no plan survived contact with the enemy, and so Shota got separated from his class, and his class got separated from each other. He fought tooth and nail, like he always did, especially when his students were involved, until he could get to a vantage point to observe the chaos.
In situations like these, he had certain expectations of who would take charge. Iida and Yaoyorozu were the obvious options, they had the personality and skills for it, and most of the other students naturally deferred to them because of their positions as class representatives. Midoriya could command a whole room, if he had the mind to do it, but he rarely did, instead opting to jump right into trouble without sharing what he was thinking. Bakugo was the same way, as was Todoroki. There were a quite few kids that he figured had a good head for leadership that he just hadn't had the chance to foster yet -- Asui, Sero, Kirishima -- and, apparently, Hitoshi.
Iida was fighting someone across the room, Yaoyorozu was pinned in her position, defending the civilians behind her. His more impulsive students were nowhere to be seen, which meant that Shota would be going after them. But the thing was, he could, because right in front of him Hitoshi was directing the rest of his classmates around them like a beacon in a storm. Names were called out, groups formed and sent to secure exits, to evacuate, to engage. He'd been watching his classmates very closely since transferring -- anything to get a leg up on his perceived completion -- and as a result seemed to have a pretty good handle of who would go well were.
(By now Shota was fully aware of why, exactly, Hitoshi was so calm in a crisis. He was used to being the oldest, the one who made sure the other kids stayed safe. The one who said 'fuck it, if no one else is going to do anything it might as well be me.' It looked like that applied to heroics, too.)
He wasn't perfect, but no one was, and the kids were handling it well enough that he had the option to leave them, to make sure none of his more hot headed students got themselves hurt or worse. Later, when he would think about it, he'd realize that he'd trusted Hitoshi's decisions -- his mostly untrained, second year decisions -- enough to let him handle the situation on his own, and he'd go find his kid and tell him that he'd done a good job. After all, no one had ended up in the hospital at the end of the night but the villains.
IV.
Hitoshi had done the paperwork for his internship across from the table where Shota had the paperwork for his adoption.
Hitoshi had spent his late nights doing a hell of a lot of research and made a pretty odd choice in the end. The agency he'd picked wasn't technically underground, but had a very good track-record when it came to what information about the heroes they employed made it to the public. Shota had done his own research, and figured out that the place avoided too much media scrutiny by reporting their activities through a series of paper agencies. Their resolution rate on cases was much higher than it actually appeared to be: it was a spotlight agency that acted an awful lot like an underground one. Plus, he was pretty sure that someone on their team either stopped photos from being taken, or prevented them from being posted. Probably the perfect compromise for someone like Hitoshi who needed secrecy, but wanted so badly to be seen.
As for the adoption? Well, It was a work in progress, but certainly, before the year was done, Shota would be able to call Hitoshi his son legally and not just in his own head. There may have been some tears shed, though neither Shota or Hitoshi would ever admit whose they were.
Internships always put him on edge, but especially with this class. These days were supposed to be something of a break for him, but instead he spent them waiting for the call that one of his students had done something stupid, or gotten themselves hurt or killed, or kidnapped.
At least they all had their provisional licenses this time around.
When he saw the trouble, it wasn't because someone had called him after the fact. No, it was on the news. Not in the way Hosu had been on the news -- back then he didn't know how his students were involved until later. In this case when he saw the report flash up on his TV it took only a few seconds to realize that whatever quirk disaster was happening was not only in the prefecture where Hitoshi was interning, but in the neighborhood where the agency building was. So there was no way his son wasn't involved in that mess somehow.
The news cameras couldn't get close, didn't have callouts for the heroes that were going into the danger to try and stop it -- there was some sort of localized wind storm tearing up trees and sending debris flying -- but Shota was more than capable of recognizing that shock of purple hair from kilometers away. He was stuck on his couch, getting a birds eye view as Hitoshi and a group of others walked into the storm, unable to do anything but sit and watch as he went out of sight.
The worst part was that he couldn't go running to help. He wanted to, desperately, but the internship was so far away that logically whatever was going on would be resolved before he could get anywhere close. To say nothing of the other issues him showing up could cause. No, instead he sat there, eyes fixed to the screen, fingers gripping the couch cushion as a queasy feeling wormed its way through him. This was the one of the worst parts of knowing a hero, by far.
At one point the camera feed cut out, and that almost did have him running out the door, until a few moments later when they switched to another, and the anchor reported that things appeared to be dying down. Curse the agency Shinso had chosen, because somehow the aftermath was even worse. The only person who talked to the media was the hero who ran the thing -- they thanked the sidekicks for helping but didn't mention anyone by name. Shota's phone remained dreadfully silent, and he couldn't decide whether that was a good or bad. Certainly, if Hitoshi had been hurt he would have heard by now, but then again his son hadn't messaged him either.
He took a carefully measured breath, turned up the volume for the ringer, and went to go make himself a pot of coffee. When the notification of a text finally did arrive he wound up jumping badly enough to spill hot water all over his hands. He didn't really care about that at the moment -- no, he had a message from an unknown number that read:
I assume you saw the news, your boy is fine. He did good, I'll get him to call you later
In the meantime, here's a photo one of my girls snatched!
There was a photo attachment that, after confirming the number as belonging to that same hero who'd been on TV, he opened. It was a slight birds eye view, heroes climbing out of the wreckage that had been caused, and in the middle of it all, Hitoshi was holding a kid that was clinging around to neck like a lifeline.
(Later he'd come to find that the kid was the cause of the storm in the first place, and that Hitoshi had been the one to talk him down).
If Hitoshi had been planning on making a proper debut as a limelight hero, it would have been the perfect image to do it with. For now, Shota saved it to his phone.
Later that night, he finally got a call from one very exhausted sounding Hitoshi. When he commented on just how dangerous things had looked, his son replied, "Well yeah, it was. But that's just how hero work is, isn't it?"
"Yes." said Shota, closing his tired eyes "it is."
V.
Late in his third year, and Hitoshi was on the internship that was probably going to turn into a job once he graduated. He was also, in a round-about way, working with Shota as Eraserhead. The operation they were on wasn't quite at the level of the Shie Hassaikai raid, but it felt close; no less than four different agencies and a smattering of underground heroes working together to stop a growing gang of trigger dealers from getting too out of control. Shota was hardwired to prepare for things to go wrong in situations like this, because they always did. And yet he was still blindsided by just how wrong it went.
Two teams were supposed to go in and flush the villains out, everyone else was supposed to wait outside and apprehend them. Shota was waiting on the outside, and Hitoshi was too, in a building opposite the street from him. When things starting moving, they started moving quickly, villains spilling out, a fair number of them dosed up on the quirk enhancing drug as they started to rampage out of control. Before Shota could descend into the fight there was a horrible loud crack and --
And the building Hitoshi was in collapsed. Because of course it did.
Heroes were fleeing the scene, but Shota couldn't tell if Hitoshi was one of them, and there was an ocean of villains between them anyway.
Breath. Compartmentalize. You're good at that. Ignore the fact that it feels like your veins are filled with ice water and get on with the mission .
Shota did not remember… Much of what happened after that. He knew that it involved taking down villains with force that, were trigger not involved, might be considered a bit excessive, but all of the fine details were lost on him. He fought until he was covered in blood and dust and grime, until there was simply nothing left in front of him to fight.
He turned to look at the remains of the building but he could only stomach looking at it for a moment before turning away, bile rising in his throat.
(It was Oboro all over again. As long as he didn't look at it, it didn't become real. As long as he didn't know then he was as good as alive.)
Rubble shifted and fell as heroes worked to clear it away, to save anyone who had been buried inside. Shota forced himself to breathe, though he couldn't manage it very deeply.
Right. Be logical about this. If he's alive down there then he needs help as soon as possible, and you're going to give it .
Shota took a deep breath, steeled himself as best he could, and turned on his heel to start walking towards the remains of the building. Every muscle was clenched so tight that it hurt, but it didn't matter. He got closer. Someone was saying "Well it's not my finest work, but it did work."
The response was, "You lost two fingers ." But the words didn't really matter at all, because the voice was Hitoshi's and suddenly Shota was running. He hadn't gotten buried, or if he had, he was already out. When Shota found him Hitoshi was on top of the collapse, helping someone else down the slope who appeared to have a rather serous head wound. Was he covered in as much dust and grime as Shota was? Yes. Injured? Probably. But he was alive and currently helping a hero to an ambulance as they argued, "I didn't lose them, I have them right here!"
"And hopefully you'll get to keep them if you get to the hospital. Now come on."
It was at that moment that Hitoshi spotted him, eyes widening a fraction before he reached out and grabbed the front of Shota's shirt
"Looks like you need to go too, Eraser."
And well, he probably did look like shit. He let himself get dragged along to the ambulance, too dizzy with relief (and pain, if he was being totally honest) to fight it.
Hitoshi was alive. He was a hero. He was Shota's god damn son. And he'd stay that way.