Chapter Text
Denki sighed, feeling worn out.
This was too hard.
He couldn't do this.
It was so simple at first.
Get accepted into UA, kill Eraserhead, leave before anyone can understand what just happened.
Why did his emotions have to get in the way of everything?
It was easy in the beginning. Denki just put up his usual persona of an overly happy and dumb character and no one questioned it. Then he made friends with the class pervert so no one would think anything of him. He carefully put his grades below average, just enough to keep him in the okay books so he wasn't expelled. He made sure to short-circuit his brain every other day, even though he knew how to get around his limit by fighting with hand to hand combat and using minimal electricity to shock his opponents.
He'd already mapped out Eraserhead's weird habits by the time the USJ happened and knocked the plans off course.
But that should have been okay; that wasn't the first time Denki had to change plans on a whim and work entirely on impulse.
But his target usually wasn't a pro hero.
And after the whole USJ incident, everyone was on edge. Denki had to choose between lying low and staying safe or attacking his target while he was quite literally all bandaged up and with a broken arm.
For some reason, he chose the former option.
Denki didn't realize how much harder the job would get after this.
Somehow he found himself being pulled into a friend group. With real friends. Or as real as they could be, considering they didn't know the real him.
He found himself dreading the day that he'd do as he was told and he'd have to leave.
He shouldn't be doing that. Emotions get in the way of kills and gets you in trouble.
And then as if things couldn't get even worse, Denki started getting close to Aizawa too, and not in the way that an assassin was supposed to.
He couldn't help it. Was it really his fault he just wanted a father figure and the only good one he'd found in the last fifteen years of his life just so happened to be the target he was supposed to kill?
Funny how life works, huh?
But Aizawa... he was just so nice. Even if he hid it under his grumpy temperament, Denki was used to peeling the layers off of people to see who they really were. And he could tell that Aizawa really cared about everyone in his class, whether or not he admitted it.
And wasn't that something because Denki could tell that quite a lot of his classmates considered him as a father figure.
And Denki was starting to think that he was too.
When the whole training camp thing happened, Denki was seriously worried for everyone. He shouldn't be. He wasn't supposed to care.
But by the time everyone had their provisional hero licenses and were living peacefully in the dorms, Denki had to accept the bitter truth.
He couldn't do this job.
He sat curled up in his bed, feeling irrationally angry at everything. He hated the people who raised him to be a living weapon. He hated how everyone in UA was just so impossibly nice. He hated how he was starting to want to be a hero instead of an assassin.
But life wasn't going to let him ever get what he wanted, was it?
Frustrated, he punched the wall, not caring how much his hand hurt. It made him feel a little better, so he did it again.
And again.
And again.
Somewhere in the middle, he started shouting and crying and he didn't know when he started or if he was ever going to stop.
"Kaminari?" Denki's head snapped up at the sound of his name.
Aizawa came into his dorm room, looking concerned.
He looked at Denki, all tearstained and angry, with a cut-up hand from punching the wall.
"Hey." Aizawa said softly. "What's wrong?"
"Everything." Denki grumbled. "I'm just sick of all of this, sensei. It's unfair."
"What's unfair?" Aizawa sat down next to him and carefully took his bleeding hand. Then he surprisingly took a first aid kit and started patching it up. The wounds stung, but Denki still didn't really care.
"You won't get it." Denki huffed. Aizawa didn't say anything, just cleaned his hand, but Denki could tell he was listening. "I mean it's not like you ever had to kill someone."
There was the briefest pause from his teacher before he said, "I have killed a few times before."
"Not because you wanted to." Denki muttered. "Not because you were paid to. Not because you're secretly an assassin who's sent to kill a pro hero and that pro hero happens to be you and the assassin happens to be- happens to be-"
Denki angrily jerked his hand back from his teacher and it stung even more and he still didn't care because everything was just so messed up he couldn't tell what he was supposed to do anymore.
He looked up at Aizawa, amber eyes meeting onyx, and he wondered what his teacher was thinking. For someone who'd just been told his student was an assassin sent to kill him, he was taking it pretty well.
"Did you really want to?" Aizawa's expression was practically unreadable.
"...I mean I guess I probably wouldn't have if they didn't make me." Denki said. Why was sensei still talking to him normally like it was a normal conversation in class?
"I can't do this." The tears finally started rolling down his face and even when Denki brushed them away, they just kept coming. "I can't do this job I can't- I can't kill you."
"I know."
"I just- why is life so unfair? Why can't anything ever go the way it's supposed to for once?!"
Denki's voice was slightly cut off as Aizawa reached over and pulled him into a hug. Not so fast that Denki couldn't get out of it if he didn't want to be there, but he was surprised enough to just lean into it.
Why did sensei still trust him after everything?
"It's okay." Aizawa's voice was soft, calming. "It's going to be okay."
By the time they walked to Recovery Girl's office to get his hand healed, Denki had started to feel that maybe it actually would be.