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Aizawa Shouta wouldn’t say he hated his life, but he would say that it gets close, especially when he’s lying on the pavement with what’s maybe (most definitely) a bruised rib or two and a bleeding gash on his side.
He sighed because of course, of course, he had to run into an overzealous criminal with a mutant quirk on a school night. The picture of a small stack of essays sitting forlornly on his kitchen table appears in his mind. He nearly sighs again, but it only sends a fiery lick of pain coursing through his chest.
The sole consolation of the night is that the criminal in question is softly grumbling on the ground a foot away from him, hands and feet bound with Aizawa’s capture weapon.
Shouta sits up with bated breath, ribs twinging all the while, and pressed one hand to his side and the other up his ear piece. He lightly tapped it and waited for an officer on the line to confirm his hero ID.
It never came. Annoyance shot through him, red hot and all-consuming. He growled and pushed the annoyance down, peering around to look for a telephone booth or literally anything else he could use to contact the police department because he had a captured criminal and a throbbing side to take care of. His earlier frisk of the criminal came up with thirty yen and an empty gum wrapper, but no phone, and after three too many phones Shouta definitely couldn’t afford, he doesn’t bring his phone on patrols anymore, so now with a broken ear piece, he's left stranded.
His eyes search for anything of use, but the moon’s light is hidden by clouds, and the dim, flickering street lights are lacking at best and absolutely useless at worst.
A foot scuffles on the ground somewhere to his left and he’s halfway to pulling out his knife when he spots green eyes, brilliant as emeralds, staring at him from the shadows. It’s a kid. He’s just able to make out a little kid wearing thin pajamas that would barely surpass Shouta’s belly button if he was standing.
“Kid?” he calls out into the darkness. The kid doesn’t move from his spot and somewhere in the back of his mind, Shouta respects it. The kid’s got a little bit of brains at least—stranger danger and all that. Nonetheless, it’s not perfect for the situation at hand, so Shouta raises the hand that’s not on his side in a reassuring gesture, palm facing out, and says, “Look, it’s okay, I’m a hero. If I toss you my license, can I trust you to give it back after you check it out?”
The kid bites his lip and furrows his brows, still looking skeptical, but eventually nods, so Shouta takes out his license and throws it at the kid’s feet.
Green eyes scan over the license and hold it scrupulously up to the light of a street lamp. If he didn’t know any better, Shouta would say this kid knew exactly how to tell the difference between a legitimate hero license and a forgery. Ugh, is this how all probably-eight-year-olds act these days?
The kid lowers the license from his face with twinkling eyes, and before Shouta can get a word in edgewise, comes barreling forward, nearly knocking Shouta over.
“Wow! You’re really a hero! What’s your quirk? I’ve never heard of Eraserhead before, so you must either be really new or an underground hero. Well, it is night time, so that would point to an underground hero and his license was issued,” the kid gradually lowers his voice until his words are barely mumbles.
“Kid,” Shouta says. The kid keeps mumbling and Shouta rolls his eyes up to the sky, wishing that something could be normal for once in his life.
“Hey, kid,” he says a little louder. The kid’s head snaps up, green hair bouncing just a little and giving Shouta his first clear look at him.
Ugh. The kid’s cute, too. Absolutely goddamn adorable with his chubby, squishy, freckled cheeks and his tiny little fingers wringing and twisting around each other in nervousness.
“Sorry, Mr. Eraserhead sir, I guess I got too excited.” He tilts his head and, oh no, are those tears in his eyes? Shouta’s a monster.
“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m just on a time crunch. Do you have a phone I could borrow? I need to get this guy called in.” Shouta jerks his thumb to the criminal.
“Oh, um, I have my mom’s. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
It takes two rings for the station to pick up and fifteen minutes longer for a patrol car to make its way over to the apartment complex. The kid chatters away questions about Shouta’s job, quirk, everything the whole time, barely taking breaths or leaving space for Shouta to answer.
When the patrol car’s backseat door finally slams shut, Shouta is beyond exhausted. The officers leave with Shouta’s promise to come in the next day to fill out the paperwork. Shouta heaves a sigh, regrets it when his ribs scream back in retaliation and turns around to lug his battered body back to his apartment. He makes a step before nearly tripping over the green-haired kid.
“Mr. Eraserhead sir—”
“Just Eraserhead is fine, kid.”
“—do you need help? You didn’t go with the police even though you’re bleeding. I have a pretty good first-aid kit at home.”
Huh, maybe that kid wasn’t as smart as Shouta thought—again, stranger danger and all that—regardless, “It’s mostly stopped bleeding by now. It’s fine—you shouldn’t be inviting strangers into your home. Go back up and get some sleep, kid, you have school tomorrow.”
The kid laughs and rubs his hand on the back of his neck, “I wasn’t sleeping anyway and the first-aid kit is already out, so it’d be a waste to put everything back, I promise!”
Shouta furrows his brows and looks down at the kid. Other than the obvious awkward body language, the kid’s arms have a spattering of bruises, the biggest of which is in the shape of a handprint complete with parallel scrapes. The same kind of scrapes fingernails make when victims try to pull themselves away from their abusers. His skin is blistered and raw, little burn marks peek out from underneath his shirt collar and sleeves.
The exhaustion seeps away all at once, leaving Shouta’s body tense and eyes alert. Not another second passes before he grunts an affirmative much gentler than he means to.
The kid’s apartment is clean, but not too clean. It has the same kind of feel Shouta had always imagined in storybooks as a kid, full of light, warmth, and worn couches.
But Shouta, like any other respectable hero, knows that looks can be deceiving. His career depends on the quick glances and subsequent dismissals from the general public. It’s why he hasn’t gotten himself killed yet. No one truly knows what goes on behind closed doors, and Shouta will be damned if he leaves this kid in the hands of someone who hurts him, not when he had the power to stop it.
The kid leaves to get the first-aid kit, so Shouta takes a closer look around, perusing the lightly scuffed floors and threadbare pillows.
The picture frames hanging on the wall feature the kid and someone too similar looking to be anyone other than his mom. There’s one picture, hanging alone at the end of the short hallway. In it, some blond kid and the green-haired kid sit side by side.
Shouta scoffs. He honestly surprised it’s still on the wall. In the rest of the pictures, the green-haired kid smiles, small, but genuine, a bright flush coloring his cheeks and brighter eyes that seem to sparkle with the flash of the camera, but in this one, his grin is stretched so wide into a grimace it looks painful. The blond boy beside him looks constipated, his face screwed up and little hands formed into fists, smoke rolling off of them in wispy tendrils. The whole scene is blatantly negative—that kid looks five seconds away from punching someone in the gut—and yet this picture is the grand finale, the outlier.
Before Shouta can think any more about it, the kid stumbles out of the bathroom, shyly waving a first-aid kit before setting it on the kitchen table.
The inside is surprisingly (or maybe not so surprisingly, all things considered) well-stocked with basic supplies, band-aids (all of them All Might themed, he notes), alcohol wipes, and tweezers. Two small tubes of burn cream lay nestled underneath a package of gauze, one already three-quarters of the way used up. Shouta thinks backs to the kid’s blisters. He must have been waiting until his mom went to sleep before tending to his wounds, considering they still looked fresh and untreated—anywhere between six to twelve hours old by Shouta’s estimation—when he took notice of Shouta’s fight and came down to investigate it.
“So,” Shouta prods, picking out a bottle of saline solution, “You like heroes?” It’s awkward, but it gets the job done. No kid would trust some random homeless-looking guy, even if he is a hero. In the limited time they have, Shouta has to ensure the boy’s safety while not scaring him away. Shouta’s only been in a few situations like this, and he’s no expert. After all, it’s hard to break past an entire lifetime of avoiding conversations.
“Yeah! How’d you know?”
Shouta thinks back to the endless quirk questions, the plastic Ectoplasm cup sitting on the drying rack, and the pair of All Might shoes in the cubby. “Wild guess.”
“All Might’s my favorite. He’s so cool! Have you seen the video of him rescuing over a hundred people? Someday, I wanna be just like him!” The kid looks like he’s about to fly out of his seat, legs wiggling and arms flying uncomfortably close to Shouta’s face as he gesticulates in his excitement.
Shouta sighs (internally this time—he’s learned his lesson) and is reminded why he avoids kids. They’re always way too energetic at the most inopportune times.
“Guess what, Mr. Eraserhead, my mom got me his new action figure! It’s got a speaker that plays ‘I am here!’ on it too! It’s not a collectible or anything, but it’s still pretty awesome.”
Shouta’s ears perk. “Your mom, huh? You should wake her up. It’d be rude if I just used your first-aid kit without saying thank you.”
The kid pales and Shouta scours his face for the details he’ll need for his report against the kid’s mother. Shouta waits for him to respond. People tend to talk to fill the silence when it drips between them like sludge.
“Well...it’s just that Mom is so tired all the time I don’t want to wake her up. You know, I don’t think she knows I notice, but she’s been working more to pay for the apartment. We got a new landlord, I think. I snuck out to get a glass of water the other night and she was crying looking over the bills,” the kid looks up at Shouta with not-quite dry eyes and a not-quite steady voice that made Shouta’s insides clench. His theory cracks, just a little.
“So, you want to be a hero someday?”
“Yeah, of course! Kacchan and I are going to be the best heroes someday, Mr. Eraserhead! We’re going to save a bunch of people and become number one!”
“Kacchan?”
“Yeah, he’s got the coolest explosion quirk! Darn, I wish I could show you. He sweats out this nitroglycerin chemical that can explode! You should see it. He’s gotten so much better over the years. He lets me help him practice sometimes, too.”
The starburst burns, the blisters, the handprint bruise that’s much too small to be a grown woman’s.
The dated appliances, the sparse shelves, and everything else that points towards an overworked mother single-handedly caring for her son by living paycheck to paycheck.
The vicious, little kid in the photograph, the smoking hands, and the green-haired kid’s grimace.
A soft “Oh” leaves Shouta’s lips unbidden. He looks at the kid, so happy compared to just moments before when remembering his mother’s pain, so bright talking about “helping” a bully practice his quirk. The moon breaks through the clouds outside and shines in through the patio doors, lighting his face and making his eyes shine brighter than the stars.
“So, kid, what’s your quirk then, if this ‘Kacchan’ has such a cool one?” he asks, but he already knows the answer. His quirk must be weak, unsuitable for hero work if he has one at all.
He already knows the answer, but when the kid responds, “Oh...I don’t have one,” he’s still left a bit surprised.
The kid tilts his head down until his hair is a curtain covering his features, but Shouta can still see a tear drop down onto the boy’s wrinkled pant leg.
He sniffles and makes a useless effort to hide it, but a second later, he’s raising his head and clenching his fists like he’s readying himself for battle. “Mr. Eraserhead,” he looks Shouta directly in his eyes and Shouta can see the unshed tears, “Could I be a hero even though I’m quirkless?”
Shouta thinks.
He thinks about all of the top ten heroes with their flashy quirks and even flashier media presence, about the race the kid’s already falling behind in, even when no one’s told him it’s already begun. It would be near impossible for the kid to catch up. He’s already so far behind and even a weak quirk could still help in the right scenario. With no quirk to commercialize, he would never make it far as a daylight hero and, to make matters worse, it would be a gamble just for companies to take him on as a sidekick. Nobody wants a “liability” in the field, not when there are so many others born with better means to survive.
Shouta knows how quirkless people are treated, he’s seen the statistics, and even if this kid managed to become a hero, the public would have it out for him. Life would be hell day in and day out because he’d be fighting not only villains in the streets, but ones that are just as bloodthirsty on the TV and newspapers and every other piece of media readily made and prepackaged for the consumption of hungry vultures masquerading themselves as people.
But.
But, if the kid doesn’t want to be a daylight hero. If he sticks to the background and the shadows where hungry eyes aren’t waiting for him to slip up, he just might be able to make it.
The kid must take his silence as rejection because the light drains from his eyes, and he curls in on himself, shoulders shaking.
“Listen, hero work is tough and you know that the world isn’t fair to quirkless people. If you want to be a hero in the spotlight, you’ll never make it. People think that the spotlight isn’t made for people like you and they won’t ever let you forget it.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The only way I can think of that you could become a hero is if you go into underground work. With guys like you saw out there, I fight completely quirkless. It’ll be hell, but if you work for it, then yes, kid, I do think you could become a hero.”
The boy starts crying even harder, and for a split second, Shouta thinks he said the wrong thing, but then the kid is meeting his eyes again, the moon still shining and the boy’s eyes still gleaming. The kid’s face breaks into a smile so wide and so utterly endearing that it almost makes Shouta’s lips quirk up too, but just almost.
“I’ve got to go, but I’ve got something for you before I leave.” Shouta reaches into a pocket and pulls out a card. It’s plain and the only words on it are Eraserhead and just beneath that, Aizawa Shouta. A phone number printed in a smaller size rests at the very bottom. “If you need me—just...be careful, alright?”
“Will do, Mr. Eraserhead sir!”
Shouta drags a hand down his face and groans, “Don’t let any more strangers into your house, kid. It’s dangerous. You’re going to get killed before you even make it to hero school.”
Shouta turns around and makes his way back to his apartment, his heart just the tiniest bit lighter now, with the sound of giggles lingering behind him.