Chapter Text
The mother down the hall has started screaming again. It rises above the loud chaos of the ER waiting room, and then there’s a sudden hush of silence from the room’s occupants. Midoriya knew exactly what that meant, and sure enough, a door just to the right is opened, and two exhausted nurses exit. Just through the doorway, if Midoriya bothered to look, there would be a still body in a hospital bed, one wristband on their right hand, and another on their left leg. The mother should be heading down the hallway soon, but Midoriya doesn’t stay long enough to see. It’s 5:34 in the morning, he has an hour and a half until his shift ends, and there’s a croissant with his name on it in the staff room. A few words to the physician next to him, and a nod of understanding from one of the break relief nurses running around the ER, and he turns and walks right.
As he makes his way down the hallway, he exchanges brief nods with other nurses, and heads off an impeding conversation with Ashido by miming eating a sandwich. She laughs, and turns into an open doorway. Midoriya can hear her soothing voice reading over a patient’s chart, and a couple of wet coughs in response. He waves at Shouto, who’s standing outside the unit coordination desk holding a plate of slightly squished cookies, clearly heading to his volunteer rounds in the pediatric ward two floors up.
Midoriya takes a left, left, right, left to reach the staff room. Funding for staff room furnishings had gone to the Main OR last year, and Pulmonary the year before, and the space before him reflected that. He takes his croissant from the fridge, a large and blocky version of his name plastered across the cling wrap, and hooks a foot in a faded folding chair. It screeches as he draws it to the well-loved round table, and he as slumps into something that resembles a seated position, he tears into his croissant with gusto. He has 12 minutes until he heads back to the manic energy of the ER ward, and he wants to have time to sit and digest. After the croissant is gone, he heads to his locker the next door over and rummages through his backpack for his Tylenol stash.
Midoriya swallows two dry, and recaps the bottle with jittery hands. He hopes that the dull pounding in the back of his head will be gone when he gets out of work, and that the ER waiting room will magically empty itself. Both of these things will most likely not happen. Still, he hopes. The rest of his 15 minutes are spent staring at the scuff marks on his tennis shoes. He tries to not think about much else.
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The mid morning sun blinds Midoriya as he passes through the hospital’s front doors. He feels as disorientated as he usually did after a night shift, and he honestly wanted nothing more than to collapse into day and sleep the day away. It would be easier than going to the gym by any means, but he knows he won’t leave his bed for the rest of the day if he went home now (the unfortunate reality of working night shifts in a hospital).
He spends the 15 minute walk to the gym in a daze, street signs and traffic lights blurring with the constant flow of people in downtown Tokyo. His feet know the way by heart at this point, and he works on dispelled the exhaustion and resignation lingering from the last twelve hours. It does him no good to reminisce anyways.
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“Hey, Izuku-kun!” A cheerful voice calls out when he opens the door to the gym. Shimura-sensei’s grinning face appears from around a corner, her messily put up hair flopping in her face. “How’s the morning going?”
For the first time in about 12 hours, Izuku didn’t have to force a smile.
“Better now that I’m here,” He says as he walks over to where Shimura-sensei is standing, “Work was way too long.”
Nana Shimura huffs slightly, and reaches out a hand to ruffle Midoriya’s hair. Midoriya hid a wince. Shimura-Sensei’s well-renowned strength has lasted her well into her sixties, and unlike most of her gym patrons and students, she thought that Midoriya could handle her “100% tough love”.
“You need to stop working so much! I’ve seen zombies that are more lively than you,” Shimura-sensei chuckled at her comparison, “Also, your mother asked me to tell you that you need to come to dinner more often. Yagi-kun misses you as well, and he’s in town this weekend!”
The oddity of hearing the current holder of the MMA heavyweight title being called Yagi-kun is something Izuku thinks he’ll never get used to. He resolutely ignores the twinge of guilt at the mention of his mother, and forces a sheepish grin.
“So rude, Shimura-senses,” He jokes lightly, and Shimura grins in response.
“I’ve told you to call me Nana-Obaasan kid! I want to hear it at least once before I die,” Izuku flinches involuntarily, and Nana winces, “Sorry kid, didn’t think that one through.”
Izuku knows, he knows that Nana-sensei is healthy now. But he remembers a phone call coming in at 3 in the morning, a sharp feeling of panic and fear, and feverishly driving himself to the hospital where Nana Shimura, age 55, was checked in for blunt force trauma to nearly every part of her body. He remembers holding her hand in his, unnaturally small without its usual forceful movements. He remembers Toshinori-sensei slumped in a visitor chair, deep lines furrowed into his face as he watched sentinel over the person who first believed in him. He remembers his mother’s quiet sobs as they stood in the waiting room that first night, her hand gripping his own tightly. He remembers the doctors whispering in a huddle, blank faces telling Izuku that Nana-sensei might not survive the night.
Izuku wants to grab Nana-sensei by her frail shoulders and shake them viciously, turn around and walk away without saying anything, bury himself inside the safety of Nana-sensei’s arms and cry himself hoarse. He wants to do all of these things, and get it through Nana’s thick skull that she’s not invulnerable. Instead, he smiles tightly.
“It’s okay Nana-sensei, I know what you meant,” Nana-sensei gives him a concerned look, but thankfully drops the subject. Her strengths lie in her perpetual optimism, but Toshinori-sensei got his obliviousness from somewhere. Izuku can’t be anything but glad for it now.
“Okay, I’m gonna let you go in. Try not to get into any fights!” With that, Shimura-sensei walks away, and Izuku puzzles over her last sentence. With this being a boxing gym, fighting was unavoidable if you wanted to improve. He shrugged to himself. Well, he’ll find out what she means soon enough.
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Izuku didn’t throw the first punch. He did throw the second one, and the first kick, but that asshole started it. That means nothing in the face of Shimura-sensei’s disappointed but unsurprised expression. He feels a little guilty, but the white flood of anger still pulses through him, and that overrides everything else.
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The first fifteen minutes of Izuku’s workout went wonderfully. He stretched out his aching muscles with twenty second holds for the first five minutes, and cranks out a dozen laps on the track clinging to the edges of the gym for the next ten minutes. His nerves are singing pleasantly as he lopes over to the free weights. As he’s reaching for a 40-pounder, a pale hand darts in and wrenches it out of his reach. Izuku turns around, already pasting on a forced smile, and looks into bored red eyes.
“I’m sorry, but I was about to use that-” Izuku hasn’t even finished his sentence before the blond-haired man is scoffing at him.
“There’s only two 40-pound weights dumbass,” Izuku bristled at the man’s bored drawl, hands clenching instinctively, “and I was here first. Grab some 20-pounds, maybe your weakass-looking arms will actually be able to lift them.”
Izuku grasps desperately for the goodwill that is leaving him rapidly, and holds back the slow magma of anger rising in its stead.
“I’m sorry, I’m sure that we can switch off using these weights,” Izuku sucked in a quick breath as the guy loomed closer, repressing his instincts to adopt a fighting position, “There’s no need to fight.”
As soon as the words leave Izuku’s lips, he knows he’s fucked as the guy’s mouth twists into an ugly snarl.
“Hah?” He says, hands already rising up to chest level and posture tightening like a snare ready to snap closed, “What’s that supposed to mean extra?”
Izuku sees the punch coming, and instinctively ducks and wraps his arm under and up across the blonde’s arm. Using the guy’s momentum against him, Izuku turns and throws him over his shoulder. He hits the floor with a harsh exhalation of air, and bounces upwards with a snarl, eyes bright like wildfire. Izuku lets the last of his restraint go, grabs his frustration and anger with both hands, and flows.
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In the end, it takes five people to break the two of them apart. Izuku winces at the quickly forming bruise over the gym regular Kirishima’s eyebrow. The fireman catches Izuku’s eye and grins reassuredly, making sure the blond is glaring away from Izuku before circling his pointer finger around his eye. Izuku snorts, and meets the blond’s incessed glare with a mulish stare and a stubborn tilt to his chin. The blond is looking worse than Izuku, blood crusting over his split lip and a large rip in his tank top. His eyes, which ae almost the exact shade of the poppies in Toshinori-sensei and his mother’s garden when they’re in full bloom, are defiant and unapologetic.
The thing is, Izuku can recognize the relative hotness of this man. In a club, with low lighting that disguised the crooked turn of the blond’s facial expressions, he might even consider taking the man home. Here, in the bright fluorescence of gym lighting, squatting with blood splattered over his knuckles like a Pollock painting, the man reminded him of the worst of his bullies before he grew bigger and got smarter. As Izuku refused to look away, a barrier gives way in the other man’s expression. Something hot dances in the sharp creases of the man’s eyelids, and his smirk changes to something approaching predatory.
“That was a good fight, Bambi,” Kirishima looks close to bursting into laughter at the blond’s nickname for Izuku, that bastard, “Let’s do it again.”
Izuku’s eyebrows rise incredulously, and with an unexpected wave of courage says:
“How about no, asshole?”
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“Izuku, why are you wearing concealer?”
Izuku startles at Todoroki’s blunt question, the nib of his pen scratching wildly against his last patient’s charge sheet.
“Geez, Shouto,” Izuku says, trying to calm his racing heart rate, “Warn a guy next time will you?”
“I apologize. Hello Izuku, how is your night going, why are you wearing concealer?”
“Can’t I wear makeup without being judged?” Izuku feels a bit guilty for snapping, but Shouto’s deadpan humour was rubbing him the wrong way tonight.
“Yes, but you hate personally having ‘stuff clogging up your skin’, your words.”
Izuku deflates from his puffed-up indignation, and starts to absent mindedly rub his hands together.
“It’s not a big deal. Some guy at the gym started a fight with me, and I decided to end it. He managed to get my face pretty well.”
Shouto’s calm demeanor, which makes him perfectly suited to pediatric care, gains a protective edge as Izuku finishes.
“I thought that bad luck was left in our teenage years,”
Izuku snorts at this. In the summer between the last year of middle school and first year of high school, Izuku grew 4 inches and gained about 15 pounds of muscle. The combination of newfound strength and Izuku’s martyr complex lead to more broken bones than humanly acceptable, and no one would let him live it down.
“Believe me, I thought so too. This guy was really a piece of wor-” Out of the corner of his eye Izuku sees Dr. Shuzenji wave. He turns around to her smuggly holding up a new charge sheet, and tamps down on the sudden surge of weariness. “Okay, sorry Shouto gotta go!”
“Stay safe Izuku. Your bones aren’t as young as they were,” Izuku’s response was to hold up a middle finger defiantly in Shouto’s direction, and make his way over to Dr. Shuzenji. She was one of the oldest doctors working in the hospital, and had just received recognition for 40 years of service. She also had the most aggressive bedside manner in a doctor that Izuku had ever seen. Not that he would ever say anything, as he wants to continue living.
“Midoriya, stop getting lost in your own head,” Midoriya rubs his arm where she whacked him with the charge sheets. He’s sure if he was shorter she would have aimed for his head.
“Sorry Dr. Shuzenji. My head’s an interesting place.”
“Stop being so sassy! And stop saying sorry. You don’t owe everyone an apology,” Dr. Shuzenji huffed slightly, and turned to walk briskly towards the waiting room. Izuku jogs after her, still not sure how the doctor can walk so fast while being shorter than most middle schoolers. She starts talking again, this time with the well-worn professionalism of a patient briefing.
“You’re going to be seeing a younger man this evening who doesn’t possess a lick of sense. His…. friend is also in there with him, and is a bit smarter than the injured individual. I’ve already sent in one of Dr. Tamaki’s residents, who is also a piece of work. I just need you to go in, supervise, take and record the usual information, and make sure that the resident doesn’t start a fight,” Dr. Shuzenji clucked at Izuku’s drooping shoulder, but there’s an air of apology in her last words,
“I know that this isn’t in your job description, and I can always ask another nurse, but this goddamn resident has no idea how to interact with patients. Or how to interact with people in general. Dr. Hakamata, the poor man, has his hands full dealing with the brat. I need someone who’s calm enough to reassure the patient, and who has a strong enough spine to deal with the resident.”
Izuku pretends to think about it for a minute, ignoring Dr. Shuzenji’s huff and the urge to refuse and sit in the break room until his mind was numb. He can’t rest now, not when there are people depending on him..
“I can do it,” Dr. Shuzenji hums approvingly, and stops in front of a pulled back curtain.
“Here’s your stop. Page if you need any help, alright?” Izuku grins in what he hopes is a reassuring manner.
“Will do Recovery Girl!” This time he dodges the women’s irritated swat at the department-wide nickname, grabs the charge sheets when she hands them to him, and slips behind the curtain.
“Hello, my name is Midoriya! I’m the nurse that will be charting today, please-” Before Izuku can finish his sentence he’s interrupted by a horrifyingly familiar voice.
“Bambi?”
“Oh hell no.”