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The first time Aizawa hears the flatline, he thinks it’s a villain’s quirk.
It’s too clean, too sharp, too on-the-nose to be real. Just a single shrill note cutting through the antiseptic quiet of the ICU, like a feedback squeal from a microphone held too close to the speaker.
He’s up before his brain catches up, capture weapon sliding uselessly around his shoulders as he lunges for the hospital bed.
“Yamada,” he says, voice low, dangerously calm. “Hizashi. Hey.”
The body on the bed doesn’t move.
The monitor screams.
Aizawa’s quirk flares on instinct, red eyes snapping open, hair lifting in that invisible wind as he stares down the machine like he could erase the sound into nothing. The world tightens at the edges of his vision. For one stupid, bright second he fully expects the line to dip, for the heart rate numbers to stutter back to life.
They don’t.
The nurse is already there, hitting a button, silencing the alarm. There’s another line on another monitor, steady and stubborn and infuriatingly slow — not flat, not gone, just… constant.
“False lead,” the nurse says, and they’re annoyingly calm about it. “Just the oxygen saturation dropping for a moment. His heart’s still beating.”
Still.
The word lodges in Aizawa’s throat like a stone.
He lets his eyes go dark. His hair falls back down. The capture weapon pools at his feet like something dead.
He only realizes his hands are shaking when the nurse adjusts Hizashi’s mask and their fingers accidentally brush his.
“Sorry, Eraserhead,” they say, softening their voice like he’s a child. “The alarms are… dramatic. Go sit down, okay? You look like you’re about to faceplant.”
“I’m fine,” Aizawa says automatically.
They don’t argue, but they give him that look that says they don’t believe him. He ignores it. He’s been ignoring looks like that since he was fifteen.
He sinks back into the awful vinyl chair by the bed, the one he’s worn a permanent depression into over the last… weeks? Months? Time has become a stretchy, useless thing. He only knows he’s spent too long staring at the rise and fall of Hizashi’s chest, counting breaths like tally marks in his head.
Inhale, exhale.
Still.
The doctors call it a miracle that he survived at all.
“Massive blast damage,” one of them tells him, voice drifting in and out like a faulty radio. “Ruptured eardrums, pulmonary contusions, multiple fractures. The debris… look, honestly? It’s astonishing his heart kept beating long enough for the paramedics to get him here.”
As if that’s the part that matters.
As if keeping someone barely alive in a bed, tubes wired into every available vein, is a victory.
Aizawa remembers the blast, in snapshots.
The villains had targeted the media tower — of course they had. High visibility, lots of structural glass, live broadcast capability. Hizashi had been in his element, mic in hand, costume immaculate, hair perfectly styled under the studio lights. “Good morning, listeners! It’s your favorite Voice Hero Present Mic coming to you straight from—”
The explosion had cut him off mid-sentence.
One second he was grinning into the camera; the next he was a smear of color vanishing behind a collapsing wall of glass and steel.
The sound had been wrong. Too big. Too sudden. Aizawa’s brain had gone perfectly, horribly quiet, except for one thought:
Not again.
He doesn’t remember hitting the ground running. He doesn’t remember how he clawed through the rubble, fingers bloodied, vision blurred with dust and smoke. Only the moment he found Hizashi — crumpled in a twisted cage of rebar and concrete, half his hero costume shredded, blood in his hair. Eyes closed.
Too still.
There’d been a roaring in Aizawa’s ears that had nothing to do with the chaos around them.
“Oi,” he’d said, voice breaking in a way he pretended later was just the dust. “Yamada. Wake up. This isn’t funny.”
No answer.
(This is a joke, right? Some stupid stunt for the cameras? Any second now you’re going to leap up and scream into their faces about safety protocols and ratings and—)
No answer.
When the paramedics finally pulled Hizashi out, he wasn’t breathing.
They brought him back in the ambulance, they say. Three times.
“Miracle,” they tell Aizawa, over and over, as if repetition will make it true.
He looks at the body in the bed with its moving chest and its motionless eyes and thinks: This isn’t a miracle. This is punishment.
UA tries to be understanding, in its own bureaucratic, half-hearted way.
Nezu signs off on extended leave almost immediately. “Please, take as much time as you need,” he says, paws folded, those sharp little eyes far too perceptive. “Your mental health is important, Aizawa-kun.”
Mental health.
As though that’s a thing he has ever prioritized in his life.
He lasts four days.
Four days of sitting in Hizashi’s hospital room, watching the flicker and jump of heart monitor lines, listening to the soft puff of the ventilator. Four days of trying to talk to him because the doctors keep insisting stimulation is good, that familiar voices might help, that comatose brains sometimes respond to routine.
So Aizawa reads.
He reads license regulations and villain case files aloud. He reads students’ essays, reciting their half-baked theories about hero ethics while red-penning them in his head. He reads the morning news and the weather and a stack of terrible pop magazines Hizashi once left on their kitchen table.
He plays old recordings of “Put Your Hands Up Radio!!!” on his phone and lets Hizashi hear his own voice chattering through the static.
“—and don’t forget, dear listeners, even if you feel like you’re failing, as long as you get up again, that’s still a win! Let’s shout it out together—!”
The real Hizashi doesn’t move.
Four days, and then Nezu calls him in, tiny hands folded, tail curling.
“Your students need you,” Nezu says. “And I don’t think Hizashi-kun would want you to just… sit. And watch. Waiting.”
Aizawa wants to say, You don’t know what Hizashi would want.
But Nezu does know. Because Hizashi had said it often enough, laughing, leaning over the staffroom table with his coffee and his ridiculous sunglasses.
“If I ever end up like, you know, vegetable-ville,” he’d said once, flapping a hand, “I give you full permission to drag Shouta out of the hospital by his capture weapon. I do not want my legacy to be him turning into a plant too.”
They’d all laughed.
It hadn’t been funny then, either.
In the end, Aizawa goes back to work, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
He teaches homeroom with half his brain still in that sterile white room. He watches 1-A spar and pretends he doesn’t see Hizashi in every student who refuses to shut up. He patrols at night and comes back smelling of smoke and alleyways and wraps himself in his sleeping bag on the couch they used to share.
After school, he goes straight to the hospital.
Every day. Without fail.
He doesn’t remember when the nurses stopped asking for his name.
The first real fight is with Recovery Girl.
Not about Hizashi’s injuries — those she can’t fix, not when the brain is the problem and not just the body.
“Too much trauma, too little oxygen,” she says, lips pressed in a grim line. “We can heal flesh, but consciousness isn’t something I can patch up like a scraped knee.”
Aizawa takes it, because what else is there to do?
The fight comes later, over something that should be small.
“His muscles are atrophying,” she tells him one evening, looking over Hizashi’s chart. “We’re doing passive physiotherapy, of course, but… we’re reaching the point where we need to discuss long-term outcomes.”
“Outcomes,” Aizawa repeats. The word feels like a villain name.
She sighs. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but we need to consider what happens if he doesn’t wake up.”
He doesn’t.
He gets up, leaves, walks down the corridor until the fluorescent lights blur into a long, meaningless smear. He leans into the cool painted wall and closes his eyes.
He can still feel Recovery Girl’s gaze on him, even from here. That steady, tired, experienced look of someone who has watched too many heroes die to sugarcoat the process anymore.
“He’s not gone,” Aizawa says, to the wall. To himself. To nobody. “His heart’s still beating.”
For now, something in him adds.
He forces it away.
When he goes back into the room, Hizashi is exactly where he left him. The machines beeping, the slow rise and fall of his chest, the smell of disinfectant and too-clean sheets.
Aizawa drags the chair closer and sits.
“Don’t listen to her,” he says quietly, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “She’s all talk. Tough love or some crap like that.”
Hizashi, as always, says nothing.
“Long-term outcomes,” Aizawa mutters. “As if I wouldn’t drag you back myself if I had to.”
He wants to believe the words. He doesn’t.
He dreams of Oboro again.
It’s not rare. Hasn’t been, since the day they buried a closed casket and called it a hero’s funeral. But the dreams had faded with time, smoothed out around the edges, turning from jagged nightmares into dull, aching echoes.
Now they’re sharp again.
In the dream, Oboro is standing on the sports field at UA, wind tugging at his hair, sun in his eyes. Hizashi is on the sidelines, yelling something supportive into a megaphone that isn’t turned on. They are both alive in the way only memories can be.
Oboro grins, hands on his hips. “You gonna catch up, Shouta?”
Aizawa tries to speak. No sound comes out.
“Thought so,” Oboro laughs. “Still slow.”
Hizashi throws his head back and cackles, too loud, too bright. “He’s trying, man! Be nice!”
“Trying’s not enough,” Oboro says, and his voice warps, twisting into something deeper, older. “Not when they’re counting on you. You should know that by now.”
Aizawa opens his mouth to argue, but his quirk activates. His hair lifts. His vision glows red. The world drains of color.
Oboro flickers.
Hizashi flickers.
The field is empty.
Only a bed remains, white and endless, stretching across the horizon. On it lies a body that is neither Oboro nor Hizashi, or maybe both, face obscured by an oxygen mask, chest rising and falling.
Still.
Aizawa walks forward. His capture weapon drags behind him, heavy as chains.
“You lost me once,” Oboro’s voice says, coming from nowhere and everywhere. “You gonna do it again?”
“I didn’t—” Aizawa starts, but the words dissolve on his tongue.
On the bed, a hand twitches.
His heart stops.
“Hizashi?” he breathes, and for a moment it’s just them, just now, just this.
Except it’s not.
Because the hand curls into a fist.
Because it strains weakly against invisible restraints.
Because the voice that answers is not Oboro’s and not Hizashi’s, but a dozen screaming villains, furious and victorious.
“You can’t erase this,” they say, laughing. “You can’t erase what you are.”
He wakes up with his quirk already flaring, hair floating in cold, stale apartment air, breath ragged, heart hammering.
There’s no one next to him.
There hasn’t been, for a long time.
He stares at the empty dent in the couch cushion where Hizashi used to sleep, surrounded by tossed exam papers and half-empty coffee cups, and feels something in his chest crack soundlessly.
The hospital calls him in for a “care conference.”
He hates the term immediately.
Nezu is there, perched on a chair too big for him. Recovery Girl. A neurologist he doesn’t recognize. A social worker who keeps offering him tissues he doesn’t take.
On the table are several thick folders, neatly labeled.
“Aizawa-kun,” the neurologist begins, folding their hands. “Thank you for coming.”
“As if I had a choice,” he mutters.
Nezu’s ears flick, but he doesn’t comment.
“We’ve been monitoring Yamada Hizashi’s condition closely,” the neurologist says, voice clinical, precise. “It has been six months since the incident.”
Six months.
Aizawa knew that. He did. He just didn’t like putting the number into words.
“In that time,” they continue, “there has been no significant neurological improvement. His reflex responses are minimal. We see no evidence of purposeful movement, response to commands, or awareness of surroundings.”
Aizawa stares at the edge of the table.
“He squeezes my hand,” he says, because he’s sure of it, because he’s felt it. “Sometimes, when I talk to him.”
The neurologist looks at him with quiet sympathy that feels like condescension. “Muscle spasms can feel intentional,” they say. “But objectively—”
“I know what I feel,” he snaps.
Nezu clears his throat gently. “We’re not here to deny your experience, Aizawa-kun. Only to discuss the… options. For ongoing care.”
Options.
There’s that word again. Outcomes. Options. All these neat, polite words that try to wrap a noose in silk.
“With his current level of brain activity,” the neurologist says, “the likelihood of meaningful recovery diminishes with each passing month. We are now at a point where continuing full life support indefinitely may not be in his best interests.”
Aizawa looks up sharply. “His best interests.”
“Yes. Prolonging his current state indefinitely would mean—”
“—that he’s alive,” Aizawa cuts in, flatly. “That his heart is still beating. That I can still talk to him. That he might still hear me.”
The social worker slides the tissue box a little closer. He pushes it back.
Recovery Girl sighs, rubbing her temples. “Aizawa, no one’s saying we pull the plug tomorrow. But we have to consider quality of life. For him. And… for you.”
“I’m not the one in the bed,” he says.
“No,” she agrees. “But you’re still bleeding, even if no one can see it.”
He doesn’t answer.
“We also have to consider resource allocation,” the neurologist adds, wincing as if they know how it sounds.
“There are only so many long-term intensive care beds,” Nezu says quietly. “We’re not a country without limits. There are other heroes, other civilians, who may need that level of care. We cannot give it to everyone forever.”
“So we’re… what?” Aizawa’s voice is dangerously soft. “We’re triaging him? Like he’s a nameless extra in a disaster?”
“Yamada Hizashi is not nameless,” Nezu says sharply. “We all know that. Which is why we would like your input. As his designated emergency contact and partner, your wishes are important here.”
Partner.
The word hangs in the air like a verdict.
They want him to choose.
Keep Hizashi like this — a breathing statue, a body that exists only as a vessel for past tense — or sign a paper that will quietly, efficiently, mercifully stop the machines keeping his lungs moving, his heart beating.
“Heroics is full of impossible choices,” Nezu says, and it’s the wrong thing to say because this isn’t a hostage scenario, it’s not a split-second moral puzzle on a collapsing bridge. This is Hizashi. This is his life, his future, his laugh, his awful puns at breakfast. “But doing nothing,” Nezu continues, “is also a choice.”
Aizawa gets to his feet.
He looks at each of them in turn. Recovery Girl, eyes tired. The neurologist, a little too detached. The social worker, sad. Nezu, sharp and small and unbearably sincere.
“Then my choice,” he says, very calmly, “is that he stays alive.”
He walks out before they can reply.
He doesn’t sign anything.
Days go by. Then weeks.
The hospital doesn’t cut Hizashi off. Of course they don’t. Not yet. Papers take time. Ethics committees need to meet. Hero agencies weigh in. Public image considerations are discussed behind closed doors where cameras can’t reach.
Aizawa keeps coming every day.
He works. He visits. He sleeps. He dreams. He repeats.
The kids notice, of course.
“Eraserhead-sensei,” Midoriya says once, hesitant, cornering him in the hallway after class. “Um. I heard about… Present Mic. From the news. Is he…?”
He doesn’t finish the sentence.
“He’s alive,” Aizawa says.
Midoriya’s eyes brim with that painful, honest empathy that makes him both infuriating and impossible to hate. “I’m glad,” he says. “If— if you ever need—”
“I don’t,” Aizawa says, and walks away.
He does.
He just doesn’t know how to.
The second real fight is with Hizashi’s parents.
They live in another prefecture, small town, quiet house, simple lives. They were always faintly dazzled by their son’s career, half-proud, half-terrified. When he brought Aizawa home one New Year, they treated him with careful courtesy, as if he were another unfamiliar appliance Hizashi had bought: expensive, complex, liable to break.
They visit the hospital once a month.
His mother sits by the bed and talks to him about weather and neighbors and the cat that keeps breaking into their garden. His father stands awkwardly in the doorway and pretends not to cry.
On the fourth month, they ask to talk to Aizawa alone.
“We heard about the meeting,” his mother says, wringing her hands. “Nezu-san called us.”
Aizawa’s stomach sinks. “He shouldn’t have—”
“He should have,” his father interrupts, unusually firm. “We’re his parents.”
“And I’m his partner,” Aizawa says. “I live with him. I know what he wants.”
His mother flinches. “Shouta-kun, we’re not… we’re not trying to push you away. But you have to understand, this isn’t easy for us either.”
“You think it’s easy for me?”
“No,” she says, and her eyes are wet and furious. “I think you’re so in love with the idea of him that you’re willing to let him stay like this forever.”
The words hit harder than any villain’s blow.
“You weren’t there when he was dragged out of that rubble,” Aizawa says. His voice is flat, but his hands are fists in his pockets. “You didn’t see them revive him three times in the ambulance. You didn’t see the way his fingers twitched when I played him old broadcasts. You didn’t hear—”
“What I hear,” his father cuts in, “is a young man suffering. Our son. If he could see himself like this, do you really think he’d want it?”
“He wanted to live,” Aizawa snaps.
“Yes,” his father says quietly. “But this… is he living? Or are you just afraid to lose him?”
The hallway seems to tilt.
It’s a cheap shot. It’s unfair. It’s also, he realizes with a cold, clinical clarity that feels like someone else’s thought, not entirely wrong.
He doesn’t answer.
His mother wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, then reaches into her bag and pulls out a folded envelope.
“We found this,” she says, holding it out. “In his old room. It’s silly— he wrote it when he was twenty, I think. We thought it was just one of his dramatic phases. But it’s… it’s a directive. For if he ever got seriously hurt in the field.”
The world narrows to the white rectangle of paper between them.
Aizawa doesn’t take it.
“I don’t need to read—”
“Please,” she says. “If you love him, at least read what he wrote.”
She presses it into his hand and walks away, shoulders shaking. His father follows, turning only once to look back at him, eyes old and full of something that might be anger or might be pity.
Aizawa stands alone in the corridor, envelope heavy in his palm.
He knows what Hizashi would’ve written. Has no doubt. Something loud and dramatic, some over-the-top declaration about not wanting to be a burden, about going out with a bang, about not letting his ratings drop because he couldn’t crack a joke anymore.
He also knows how he’ll justify ignoring it.
He was twenty. People write stupid things when they’re twenty. They’re flippant about death until it’s standing right in front of them.
Still.
His fingers tear the flap before he’s even fully decided to open it.
The letter is short. Handwritten, big, looping characters. Hizashi’s.
If I ever get messed up too bad to shout, pull the plug.
Aizawa’s vision blurs. The words swim.
For real, Shouta. That’s no way to live. I’m all or nothing, baby. No half-volume versions.
There’s a little doodle of a microphone in the corner.
He folds the letter very carefully, once, twice, three times, until it’s small enough to fit in the smallest pocket inside his capture weapon wrap.
He does not put it there.
He tears it in half.
Again.
Again.
Tiny white shreds drift to the sterile floor, mixing with dust and shoe-scratches.
He stands there until a passing nurse quietly hands him a wastebasket.
The hospital schedules another care conference.
He doesn’t go.
They reschedule.
He doesn’t go.
Nezu visits him in his staffroom at UA, hopping lightly onto a chair.
“I know this is difficult,” Nezu says. “But avoiding the conversation won’t make it disappear.”
Aizawa stares at his mark sheets. “I’m busy.”
“With work,” Nezu agrees. “With the children. With saving strangers every night. You have dedicated your entire life to keeping other people alive, Aizawa-kun. You are very good at it.”
There’s no compliment in the words, only observation.
“But this situation,” Nezu continues, “is different. This isn’t a villain you can out-think or out-fight. This is time. And time doesn’t care how stubborn we are.”
“I thought you stood on the side of hero society,” Aizawa says. It comes out harsher than he means. “Of us.”
“I stand,” Nezu says softly, “on the side of people. Hizashi-kun is a person. You are a person. His parents are people. And I am asking you to consider: at what point does holding on become hurting more than it helps?”
Aizawa doesn’t answer.
Nezu hops down.
“I won’t force you,” he says. “No one will. But eventually, the system will decide for you. And I think, deep down, that would hurt you more.”
When he’s gone, the room feels too big.
Aizawa looks at his phone.
He doesn’t call the hospital.
He goes to class instead.
The thing that finally cracks him is stupid and small.
It’s the way Hizashi’s hair has been cut.
The nurses have been doing it, of course. Little trims, here and there, to keep it from tangling, from matting into a permanent nest. Practical and unsentimental.
He doesn’t notice until one day he walks in, tired and half-burned from a close call in an alleyway, and the first thing he sees is the clean, short line of Hizashi’s bangs.
Too neat. Too quiet.
“Who did this,” he hears himself ask, and his voice sounds almost conversational.
The day nurse startles. “Oh— I did,” she says. “He was getting a bit shaggy. It can be uncomfortable for patients if—”
“Don’t,” he says.
She blinks. “Don’t…?”
“Don’t change him.” The words are ridiculous and he knows it, but they feel clawed out of his ribs. “Don’t make decisions like that without— without asking.”
“Mr. Aizawa, it’s just—”
“It’s not ‘just’ anything.”
He shouldn’t be angry. He knows that. They’re doing their jobs. They’ve kept Hizashi clean and comfortable and alive. They’ve been patient with his moods. They’ve let him stay past visiting hours when his quirk-frayed nerves couldn’t bear to leave.
And yet.
He stares at the too-tidy hair. At the way Hizashi’s face looks younger now, almost like a student again. Vulnerable. Soft.
He wants to run his fingers through it and feel the jelled spikes, the ridiculous volume. He wants to complain about product residue on his pillow. He wants to wake up with a mouthful of yellow strands because Hizashi never learned how to share a bed like a normal human being.
He wants him messy.
Messy and loud and alive.
For the first time since the explosion, the truth slams into him with terrible, specific clarity.
That version of Hizashi is gone.
What remains is… this.
Still.
He sinks into the chair and puts his head in his hands. He doesn’t cry, because he doesn’t do that, but his chest feels like it’s collapsing inward.
“Shouta?” Hizashi says.
He jerks his head up.
For a wild second, he almost expects to see those green-tinted eyes open, crinkled with a grin. But they’re shut, lashes still, face slack.
The voice came from his phone, screen lit up with an old message he never deleted.
[Voice message from: Yamada Hizashi, 1 year ago]
“Shouta! You left your bento on the counter again, you gremlin! Don’t worry, I’m bringing it to UA; your hero of nutrition is on the way! Hope you’re not dead in a ditch! Love you, bye!”
The recorded cheerfulness cuts off.
In the silence, the ventilator huffs.
The monitors beep.
Something in him breaks in a way that feels final.
He calls the hospital administrator the next day.
“I’ll sign,” he says. His voice feels like it belongs to someone else. “Tell me when.”
The doctor on the other end is quiet for a long moment.
“Are you sure?” they ask gently.
No.
“Yes,” he says.
They schedule it three days from now.
“Do you want anyone else there?” the doctor asks. “Family, colleagues, friends—”
“No,” he says. “Just me.”
He hangs up before they can tell him he doesn’t have to do it alone.
He knows.
He also knows he will.
The world doesn’t stop just because his has a deadline now.
He teaches. He patrols. He breaks up a fight between Bakugou and Kaminari that ends with his scarf wrapped around both their ankles, dangling them from the training field lights as he fills out paperwork below.
Life goes on.
That’s the worst part.
On the second night, he can’t sleep. He lies on the couch, staring at the ceiling, listening for a voice that doesn’t come.
He gets up.
The apartment is full of ghosts. Hizashi’s headphones on the back of a chair. A chipped mug with “WORLD’S LOUDEST TEACHER” on the rim. A stack of CDs no one has played in months.
On the kitchen counter, an old notebook lies half-open.
It’s one of Hizashi’s — his station planning books, filled with scribbles about segment ideas and song lists and potential guests. Aizawa picks it up, flips through.
Halfway through, the music notes and exclamation marks give way to something else.
Lists.
Things Shouta Does That Are Cute (Don’t Tell Him)
falls asleep grading papers with pen still in hand
pretends not to like my radio show but always quotes it back to me
feeds my stray cats when he thinks I’m not looking
checks my hero costume gear twice before patrol
lets me put my cold feet on his legs in winter (!!)
Aizawa stops.
Things I Want To Do With Shouta (!!!)
go on an actual vacation
not a mission
somewhere quiet so he can sleep
somewhere loud so I can shout & not bother anyone
maybe a beach?? he’d hate the sand, it’d be adorable
get old together, complain about kids, be crusty
The handwriting trails off into some doodle of them as wrinkled stick figures, arguing: his caricature with permanent eyebags, Hizashi’s with a cane shaped like a microphone.
He closes the notebook.
He puts it back on the counter exactly where he found it.
He goes to the hospital.
The third day is clear and cold.
He signs in at the reception desk at 6 a.m., even though the appointment isn’t until eight. They don’t question it. He’s the first visitor on the list.
Hizashi’s room is dim, curtains half-drawn. The monitors glow softly in the half-light.
“Morning,” Aizawa says, like any other day. It feels important to pretend a little longer. “You’re missing a hell of a sunrise.”
He sits down. He takes Hizashi’s hand.
It’s warm.
Stupid, he thinks. Of course it’s warm. He’s alive.
Still.
He talks, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
He tells Hizashi about the kids — about Midoriya’s latest idiotic injury, about Asui’s quiet competence, about how Bakugou accidentally said “please” yesterday and everyone in class froze like they’d heard an explosion.
He tells him about staffroom gossip. About how All Might still hasn’t figured out how to work the new coffee machine. About how Cementoss has started writing poetry again.
He doesn’t tell him what’s coming.
He wants to. God, he wants to. He wants to believe in some last-moment miracle where Hizashi rises up and rips the tubes out and calls him a moron for even thinking about it.
He doesn’t.
Because he knows, somehow, that this would only be for his own conscience. For the illusion that he’d given Hizashi a choice.
Six months ago, maybe. Now?
Now is too late.
The clock nudges closer to eight.
Steps in the hallway. Soft voices.
He tightens his grip on Hizashi’s hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, and the words nearly choke him. “I should have kept you further back from the blast zone. I should have checked the structural integrity of the tower. I should have… I should have done something.”
Silence.
“I keep thinking,” he continues, voice barely above a whisper, “that if I’d moved half a second earlier, you would’ve been behind me instead of in front. That it should’ve been me on this bed.”
He laughs, a sound that isn’t amusement at all. “But you’d never have let that happen, would you? You’d have thrown yourself in the way anyway, because that’s what you do. You jump. You shout. You burn.”
He leans forward, forehead resting lightly against Hizashi’s.
“I don’t know if this is what you want,” he admits. “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing. I just know I… I can’t keep you here like this. Trapped. It feels cruel.”
It feels like killing you.
He doesn’t say that part out loud.
The door opens.
“Eraserhead,” the doctor says quietly. “It’s time.”
He straightens, slowly.
He doesn’t let go of Hizashi’s hand.
They explain the procedure as if he hasn’t already read it a dozen times.
Withdrawal of mechanical ventilation. Increased pain medication. Monitoring. Comfort care.
It’s merciful, they say. Gentle.
There is no way to do this gently.
“Would you like us to step out?” the nurse asks.
“No,” Aizawa says. “Stay.”
He wants witnesses.
He wants someone else to remember this, so he doesn’t have to be the only one.
They turn off one machine. Then another.
The ventilator hisses once, twice, then falls silent.
Hizashi’s chest stutters.
For a moment, there’s nothing.
Then he breathes.
On his own.
It’s shallow and slow and terrifying, but it’s there.
The doctor watches the monitors carefully. “He may continue breathing independently for some time,” they say. “Hours, even. We can’t predict—”
The heart rate skips.
Aizawa feels it under his fingers, that tiny stutter in the beat he’s been counting for half a year.
“You can talk to him,” the nurse says softly. “Hearing is one of the last senses to go.”
As if he hasn’t been talking this whole time.
He leans close.
“Hizashi,” he murmurs. “Hey. You always said you wanted to go out with a bang.”
It’s a shitty joke. Hizashi would’ve loved it.
“I can’t give you that,” Aizawa continues. “No blaze of glory, no big finale on live TV. Just… this. Me. You. A room that smells like bleach. I’m sorry.”
His thumb strokes absently over Hizashi’s knuckles.
“I love you,” he says. He’s said it before, countless times, but never with this looming over it. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without you annoying the hell out of me every day.”
His throat tightens.
“So if you’re holding on for me,” he whispers, “you don’t have to. You can… you can rest. For once in your life, you loud idiot, you’re allowed to be quiet.”
The heart rate slows.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Each one further apart.
He counts them, because that’s what he does. Counting villains, counting threats, counting risks. Now he counts the seconds between the sounds that mark the distance between him and the rest of his life.
Eventually, the space between beeps is so wide it feels like an ocean.
The last one is almost a sigh.
The monitor line goes flat.
Aizawa doesn’t move.
He waits for the false alarm. For the nurse to rush in and hit a button and make it stop screaming.
No one does.
Because this isn’t a glitch.
This is it.
Someone turns the sound off.
The silence is worse.
A hand touches his shoulder. Gentle. Respectful.
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor says.
He hears the words. He understands them. They don’t land.
He leans forward, presses his forehead to Hizashi’s again.
The skin is still warm.
It won’t be, soon.
Aizawa thinks: I did this.
He thinks: If I had refused, they would have done it anyway, later.
He thinks: Does that matter?
He doesn’t cry.
He stays until they gently, carefully ask him to leave so they can “prepare the body.”
The body.
As if Hizashi is no longer something that can share the same categories as “patient” and “partner” and “person.”
He walks out of the hospital into a bright, sunny day that has no right to be so cheerful.
Cars pass. People laugh. Somewhere, someone is playing Present Mic’s radio show at a corner store.
“Yo, listeners! Did you miss me?!”
He doesn’t look back.
The funeral is tasteful.
Hero funerals always are.
There are speeches and wreaths and cameras. The media calls him a “fallen icon,” a “beloved personality,” “the Voice of the People.” They play montages of him on screen, shouting encouragements, laughing, hair perfect under stage lights.
No one shows the hospital bed.
No one shows the way his chest rose and fell on borrowed air.
No one shows the signature on the line.
Aizawa stands in the back, in black, hair tied low, capture weapon wrapped tight around his shoulders like armor. The students cluster near the front, eyes red. All Might speaks, voice booming even in his weakened form.
“He was a hero to the end,” he says, and everyone claps.
Everyone except Aizawa.
He claps, because that’s what’s expected. Because Hizashi would have elbowed him in the side and hissed, “Clap, you gremlin, it’s polite,” if he were here.
He is not here.
Afterwards, people come up to him, one after another.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” they say.
“He was a great man.”
“If you need anything…”
He nods. He thanks them. He says all the right things.
No one asks how he’s sleeping.
No one asks if he regrets it.
He wonders what he would say if they did.
Life goes on.
It has to. That’s the rule.
He still wakes up at 5 a.m. without an alarm. Habit.
He still makes two cups of coffee by accident, some mornings, and then pours one down the sink before it gets cold.
He still catches himself saying “we” when he means “I.”
The apartment is quiet.
He doesn’t play the radio anymore.
UA fills the silence.
The kids are loud. No one is as loud as Hizashi, but they try. They argue and whine and laugh and ask stupid questions and throw themselves into danger with the same terrifying lack of self-preservation he recognizes all too well.
He grades papers at his desk in the staffroom, eyes blurring over neat and messy scripts.
“You know,” Midnight says one afternoon, leaning on the back of his chair. “You don’t have to drown yourself in work.”
He doesn’t look up. “I’m not drowning.”
“You are,” she says bluntly. “You just don’t know it because you never learned how to breathe in the first place.”
He doesn’t answer.
She sighs. “Aizawa—”
“I signed the papers,” he says, still not looking at her. “They turned off the machines. He died. That’s the end of the story. Everything else is… epilogue.”
“Epilogue’s still a story,” she says. “And you’re still in it.”
He underlines a sentence too hard. The pen tears the paper.
He doesn’t apologize.
Months later, he finds the letter again.
Not the real one — he destroyed that, scattered it in a hospital wastebasket because he couldn’t bear to let the words exist anymore.
But Hizashi was Hizashi. Of course he’d written more than one.
The copy is tucked in the back of the same notebook he found in the kitchen.
If I ever get messed up too bad to shout, pull the plug.
He stares at the line for a long time.
Then he laughs.
It’s a broken, ugly sound, halfway to a sob he refuses to let out.
“You dramatic idiot,” he mutters. “You got what you wanted.”
He sits down at the table.
He takes out a pen.
On the other side of the page, he writes, in small, cramped letters:
You should’ve been more specific.
He closes the notebook and leaves it there.
He doesn’t throw it away.
Some nights, he dreams differently.
Not of Oboro. Not of rubble. Not of hospital beds stretching into infinity.
He dreams of a small, quiet house somewhere with bad reception and worse coffee. There are two mugs on the table, both chipped. There is a cat on the windowsill, old and fat. There is a radio in the corner that occasionally hisses into life, even though no one is broadcasting.
In the dream, Hizashi is there, hair streaked with gray, glasses perched crookedly on his nose. He’s wearing a sweater Aizawa told him was ugly twenty years ago.
“You took your time,” Hizashi says, like Aizawa’s just come back from patrol, like it’s any other night. “Where’ve you been?”
“Stuck,” Aizawa says. His voice doesn’t echo here. It’s just a voice. Just a sound. “Couldn’t find the way.”
“Well,” Hizashi says, and grins that familiar grin, bright and careless and infuriating. “You’re here now, yeah? ’S what matters.”
He reaches out.
In the dream, Aizawa takes his hand.
It’s warm.
Still.
He always wakes up before anything else can happen.
He lies there in the dark, heart racing, breathing too fast, hand clenched in the blanket like it’s holding onto something that isn’t there.
He doesn’t sleep again, those nights.
He gets up. He feeds the strays that still come to the fire escape, some habits outliving the person who started them.
He watches the sky lighten over the city.
He goes to work.
He doesn’t talk about the dreams.
On the anniversary of Hizashi’s death, UA organizes a memorial.
They hang a banner in the courtyard. They play clips of his radio show over the PA. Students leave notes and little gifts — homemade mixtapes, doodles, bad puns, thank-you cards.
Someone makes a cardboard cutout of him with a speech bubble that says, “PLUS VOLUME!!!”
It’s obnoxious.
Hizashi would have adored it.
Aizawa lingers at the edge of the crowd, hands in his pockets. He watches his students laugh and cry and shout along with old recordings.
“He really was something, huh?” Kirishima says, sidling up to him. His eyes are red but bright. “Present Mic, I mean. Even if he never taught me, like, officially, he still… I dunno. Made things feel less scary.”
“He was good at that,” Aizawa says.
“Yeah.” Kirishima hesitates. “Um. Sensei? Are… you okay?”
The question is so earnest it almost hurts.
“No,” Aizawa says. It’s the first time he’s said it out loud. “But I’m… here.”
Kirishima nods, like that makes sense to him. “He’d be happy about that,” he says. “You know. That you’re still… here.”
He claps Aizawa on the shoulder and runs off to join the others, yelling something about volume levels.
Aizawa stands there a moment longer.
He looks up, at nothing in particular.
The PA crackles.
For a split second, between the ending of one clip and the beginning of another, there’s pure static.
Then a voice comes through.
“—shout it out, listeners!!!”
He doesn’t know which episode it’s from. It doesn’t matter.
He closes his eyes.
“I’m listening,” he says, under his breath.
The wind whips the banner overhead. The kids shout. The city hums.
Hizashi doesn’t answer.
He never will again.
That’s the part that keeps catching him off guard — the permanence of it. There’s no amount of erasing that can undo this. No quirk that can blink away the scene of a hospital room, a signature, a final beep swallowed by silence.
But in the spaces between the noise, in the moments when the world is almost quiet enough, Aizawa thinks he can still hear something.
Not words.
Not a voice.
Just… an echo.
Still.
He takes a breath that hurts a little less than the last one.
He turns away from the speakers.
He goes back to work.