Work Text:
If you need anything, just ask.
Hitoshi repeats Aizawa's words to him in front of his desk like a mantra. Is late enough that he could consider going to bed, but he's done so little throughout the day he's trying to salvage at least a bit of it before the morning, yet every time his vision focuses on his homework his mind strays his thoughts.
Nothing works.
Mathematics laugh in his face. All the health principles and first aid protocols have vanished from his memory. His concentration is out the window and his handwriting is so slurred in Japanese he doesn’t even try to bother with English.
He's going to fail... something. A subject or an essay and put his teachers— his parents to shame.
He wonders if this is what will finally do it. What will make Aizawa and Yamada snap and stop being so good to him ever since they took him in. To make them raise their voices or hands at him to set him straight. To punish him for slipping and embarrass them or to lock him out or kick him out. His trial time has to end sometime before they let their masks drop and their defences rise, right?
He tugs at the sleeve of his pijamas. They're a plain set of pants that once belonged to Yamada and a grey shirt with black sleeves Aizawa claimed he didn't wear anymore, so they'd given them to him. The cotton is soft under his fingertips and Hitoshi doesn't understand why would they forgo the comfort of time-worn sleepwear for his sake.
He doesn’t understand his room, the myriad of details they've added to make it truly Hitoshi's. The almost full wardrobe he has for himself with clothes that he both likes and fits in. The new helmet for his bike, far more padded and safer than his previous plastic one. The books and the curtains and the bedside table and the cat plushie resting against his pillow that had been given to him on a whim from Yamada.
The only thing Hitoshi has received on whims have been hits and shoves.
He doesn’t understand.
If you need anything, they said.
Anything.
Hitoshi needs answers.
The warm light coming from the living room looks like an ethereal oasis from the darkness of Hitoshi's bedroom door. He feels hyper focused of the way his sock-cladded feet press on the wooden floor as he slowly makes his way through the hallway, trying not to make too much noise because Eri sleeps with her bedroom door ajar and he doesn’t want to startle her.
Turning the corner near the entrance hall, the first thing he sees is the light coming from the TV. His parents are on the couch watching the news, Aizawa sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table while Yamada sits on the sofa above him. He’s holding a wide wooden comb that he's lazily running through his husband’s dark hair, shiny enough to reflect the light from the TV.
He takes a step forward, and the strand in Yamada's hand falls as Aizawa turns his head towards him.
“Kid?”
“Hitoshi, kiddo! What's up?”
He shifts his weight from side to side, suddenly feeling like a toddler, wondering how could he ask for something when he isn't allowed to open his mouth.
The rational, older side of him knows that's no longer the case, so toddler him and teenage him finally come up with a solution.
“I have a question.”
“Ask away, little listener,” Yamada says, like he's said a hundred times on his radio show. He reaches for the remote and lowers the volume of the TV to a minimum. “You can sit, too, if you want.”
Hitoshi keeps his shoulders close to his ears and his fists closed, but he kneels at the side of the table. He locks his gaze on the jars and hair products scattered on it. He doesn’t feel brave enough to ask them directly while looking into their eyes.
“What would happen... If I didn't finish my English essay by next week, and missed the deadline?” he says, then slowly, cautiously, looks up.
Yamada tilts his head like a confused hummingbird. He blinks a couple of times, vision lost somewhere across Hitoshi's pupils.
“Well,” he ventures, “I'd remind you that there’s a second deadline for students who need extra time, either because they are struggling or dealing with problems outside of their control, that you can stick to, and I'd simply correct it around a week later.”
Hitoshi chews the inside of his cheek, disappointed.
“No, but— What if I missed that deadline as well?”
Yamada tilts his head to the opposite side. “I'd ask you if you need extra help with anything, and we'd work from there.”
Extra help. Extra work. He's always extra work.
“Why?”
“Because I want to help you succeed with everything I can, and English is something I'm quite good at,” he winks at him, all smiles and sincerity and cluelessness. That's too humane, too distant from the answer he wants. Hitoshi whines to himself. He looks down at Aizawa, sitting at eye level.
“What if I can't lay a single hit on you during our next match?”
Aizawa also tilts his head, like a cat who doesn’t understand what's being said to them.
“We'd keep trying until you laid one.”
Hitoshi scrunches one side of his nose.
“And if that never happened?”
“We'd try a different move.”
“And if nothing works?”
Aizawa shrugs. “We'd stretch and call it a day.”
Hitoshi takes a defeated breath. He wonders if he's making the wrong questions.
“What if I wrote the worst exams you've ever seen in your life?”
Yamada throws his head back and barks a laugh.
“You have no idea how low that bar is,” Aizawa points out, apparently finding his memories far more gruelling than Yamada.
Hitoshi internally reels at the answer. Yamada, apparently caught on with his distress, relaxes his expression as he leans a bit over his husband's head.
“Hitoshi...”
But Hitoshi doesn't need relaxed expressions and soft voices. He needs answers.
“What if I throw away all the work you've done for me and completely change my goals?”
“I've had some students who've gotten into different universities,” Yamada replies. “I could contact them, see if they could have any advice for you.”
“Change them to what?” Aizawa asks, frow burrowed suspiciously and Hitoshi is somehow relieved that he's understood this isn't how he wants the conversation to go.
So he shrugs and almost robotically replies with the most ambiguous response he's capable of. “Whatever. I don't know.”
Aizawa tilts his head and squints his eyelids. Hitoshi is almost glad for the mistrust.
“That's fine, too. It's okay if you try different career paths and it's okay to get them wrong in the first place,” Yamada says, leaving the comb on the table and running his fingers through his husband's hair. “Your father here never thought teaching was for him and look at him now,” he teases, and Aizawa huffs.
“Hitoshi,” he cuts in, then. It's the gentleness in his voice what catches Hitoshi by surprise. “What is this about?”
The anger Hitoshi had brought forward to dam his fears dissolves and bursts out of him, taking with it Hitoshi's mask. He's tired, he realises.
“What if I fail?” Hitoshi murmurs before he can stop himself. “Not like a test or an exam, but like, in the future, and there’s no solution and I don't make you proud and you don't want me anymore and kick me out—”
“Hitoshi, kiddo, no,” Yamada says, and he sounds... sad.
“That won't happen.” Aizawa's tone is so firm Hitoshi’s jaw clamps on his tongue. “Ever.”
“This is your home, too. That is your bedroom,” Yamada nods towards the hallway. “It's not 'your bedroom until you turn eighteen' or twenty or twenty-five or 'your bedroom until you move out.'“ He lifts his hands to emphasize the quotations, then drops them again to his husband's hair. “It's your bedroom. Forever.”
Hitoshi flinches at the last few syllables. 'Forever' isn't something he understands. Forever is reserved for good children with cute quirks and for their loving parents. Forever is for Eri and the rest of her childhood away from pain and torture. Forever is for the golden rings that shine in Yamada's finger and the chain around Aizawa's neck.
Hitoshi doesn't belong in 'forever.'
“Why?” It all boils down to why, doesn't it? “Why do you put it so easily? Why are you so convinced that I'm going to succeed when everyone else thinks I'm not?”
“Because we know you.”
“Only for like a year,” he can't help but -regretfully- point out.
“So?”
They're right. They're the ones he's opened to the most out of all the adults he's ever met, but their opinion is weak against fifteen years of distrust and bad, bad luck. Maybe he is just meant to founder.
“That maybe people are right and I'm... not destined to be a hero. I mean, what would you do if they're right and, um...”
He doesn't say the name out loud, the title that's been thrown at him ever since before he knew its meaning, perhaps out of fear of making the omens true. Maybe getting used to the word will make his fate finally catch up to him and drag him to his true calling.
“That's impossible,” Aizawa says, with the security of someone reciting the law of gravity.
“How?”
“You're already a hero,” Yamada shrugs.
“Am I?”
He isn't, he doesn't feel heroic in the slightest.
But Yamada still nods oh so certainly. “Because you've fought to save yourself. When you accepted to train with Shouta, when you took your hero entrance exam and when you reached out for us tonight, this is you refusing to give up even if you don't know how to continue.”
Hitoshi swallows, but not even that helps him find his words. Is as if his papa's certitude has scared them and they're huddled in a corner of his throat.
“Your pa is right,” is all Aizawa adds, and Yamada simply smiles and returns to section Aizawa's hair in three separate strands.
“But,” Aizawa continues, “if you still want a hypothetical answer to your hypothetical question...” he concedes, and Hitoshi nods, lips pursed into a thin, thin line.
“I think I'd retire,” his dad says matter-o-factly, seemingly focused on the TV.
Hitoshi's eyes widen. He suddenly feels angry, but he doesn’t know why.
“Because you'd consider myself that much of a failure?”
Say yes, Hitoshi thinks. Prove all these thoughts I have right and let me stop fighting them.
“Because then I'd have to fight you.”
“So? We fight every week.”
“We train every week,” Aizawa corrects. “We spar, we learn, we work.”
Hitoshi swallows.
“But we don't fight.”
Hitoshi's lip trembles when he hisses while inhaling. It's too much. Way too much faith in someone who's done nothing to deserve it and who could mess it up at any second. He's been talking, asking questions non-stop since he opened his mouth tonight and he could slip at any moment. What if it's now? What if he's careless?
“But my quir—”
Before he can finish the word, his hands slap over his mouth and he curves into the table. He doesn't have a plan, he doesn’t know what to do, he didn't mean, he doesn’t want—
He needs help and he needs it now because he can't breathe.
“Hitoshi.”
His frantic eyes jerk towards the sound, and Hitoshi finds himself looking at the face of the man— the teacher who he can now call his father. He doesn't even look angry, and that's just too compassionate coming from Aizawa. Yamada only looks visibly worried, and not precisely because the braid he'd been working on has just come undone at the use of Erasure.
Hitoshi's hand falls from his mouth right as his father blinks. Bitter tears burn at the corners of his eyes.
“See?!” he half-whispers, partly because he's afraid of his voice, partly because doesn't want to scare Eri. “What if I'm just meant to become a villain?! What then? What if you're wrong about me and I'm just a horrible person?”
“You're not,” his dad states.
“You don't know that,” Hitoshi shoots back, feeling petty.
“We do.” Is his pa the one who answers, this time.
”How?”
“Because the worst things you've said you could do are change career paths and search for independence.” The way his dad summarises his fears is too kind. Too gentle. It somehow makes Hitoshi conscious of being human, and he frowns at his absurdity.
“You haven't mentioned any of this stuff we see in the news every other day.” His pa waves at the TV screen.
“Or intentionally hurting anyone,” Aizawa picks on. “Us. Or yourself. Amongst the most evil things you could do, and you've never considered harming your sister, which, from your expression, I can see it's something you're horrified by.”
Hitoshi closes his mouth and lowers his eyebrows. “But my quirk—”
“Is an ability you've never used maliciously.”
“I just—”
“What?” his father continues, unfazed. “Did you do something bad?”
“I almost...”
“But you didn't.” Hitoshi is starting to feel like his father's use of logic is not the most rational one. “And you stopped yourself even before anything happened. Everyone loses control of their quirks when they're under strong emotions.” Or maybe he is actually the most logical man on earth.
“And that is heroic?”
“Improving is.”
A self-deprecating laugh escapes him. “I don't think I am.”
“That's why you need second opinions,” his pa winks again and Hitoshi sniffs. He's never meet people as persistent in proving him wrong as his fathers. Not even Midoriya, about whom his class all but sings praises can compare. He's starting to think he knows from whom that boy got his insistence from.
“Rather than give in to others' thoughtless opinions of you, you've decided to turn their rejections into motivation to become a hero and prove them wrong.”
“Those people are no longer in my life.”
“You want to prove the memory of those people wrong.”
He does. Deep down, the truth is that he really does, even if he won't ever see them again, even if they've forgotten all about him, his younger self searches for the most harmless revenge he can take against them.
Maybe is his younger self the version of Hitoshi that's making him cry right now. He sniffles, rubs at his face with his sleeves.
“All of those worries are valid and normal, and we'll face them when the time comes,” his pa concludes, voice so soft, like the one he uses with Eri in her worst nights.
When his father leans forward, Yamada is prepared to follow him, careful not to pull at his hair but also unwilling to let go of his almost completed braid. Aizawa reaches for a tissue box and pulls out a couple of them for Hitoshi to take to rub at his cheeks.
“Growing up is really hard,” he whimpers, then sobs again, because it hurts.
“And yet you're doing such a good job.”
Had the words come from Yamada, Hitoshi is sure he could have handled them better, with how easily he speaks his mind and shares praise. But they hadn't; and that only makes Hitoshi cry harder, because praise from Aizawa is as sincere as it's rare and he's done nothing to deserve it.
“You really are,” his pa echoes.
For a while, all Hitoshi can do is curl into himself and weep into the empty space below his head. Is quiet, apart from the low sound of the TV. He can hear himself wheezing, can see the tremors in his chest from gasping for air. He doesn't remember the last time he had the opportunity to have a good cry without being scolded for doing so. He'd always managed to suppress his tears.
Apart from the time he'd grabbed a heavy pen to sign some papers with the word 'adoption' written on the top. From then on it had been getting harder and harder to hide until the point where he'd wondered if there was the need to keep doing so.
It feels so cleansing.
Being so lost in his memories, it takes Hitoshi a few moments to discover that his pa is calling for him.
“Hey, Hitoshi? Baby? Hey, do you need a hug? Can we hug you?” His eyes are so big they're reflecting the light from the TV and he's leaning towards him quite a bit. He looks worryingly ready to stomp over his husband to get to him at Hitoshi's word, quirked or not, and the thought makes Hitoshi smile for the first time in a while.
But he shakes his head. The comfort his crossed arms bring him is familiar enough and he doesn’t want to overwhelm himself again, even if it's in a different way.
His pa nods in understanding and his dad, as if he was an extension of his papa's body, leans forward to warmly squeeze his shoulder.
“You’re okay,” he whispers, and Hitoshi manages to nod through a sniff.
“I think...” Hitoshi tries, then trails off. Their words still ring in his head like the aftermath of a firework show, so it takes him a while to formulate a sentence. “I'll stick to that second deadline for the English assignment.”
His pa blinks, lips curving into a grin, and his shadow retracts from looming over his dad as he leans into the backrest of the couch. “Take all the time you need, sweetheart.”
“And if you need anything,” his dad adds, nodding knowingly, “just ask.”
Hitoshi hums, drying his lashes with his sleeves.
“Alright, mister!” Yamada sing-songs with a kiss and a flourish around Aizawa's head. “You're all set and done! Go switch places with your son so I can take care of our kiddo's head.”
“Why?” Hitoshi asks, yet again, while his dad sighs and straightens up. It’s only then that Hitoshi realises that the shadow between his dad’s crossed legs wasn’t caused by the lack of light, but by their black cat, Coffee, having taken advantage of the warm spot. His dad just scoops him into his arms as he leaves the small cushion on the floor available for his son.
“I've got the entire hair parlour set up." Yamada motions at the dozen items, combs and jars scattered in front of him. “Might as well make the most of it!”
Hitoshi sighs, but begins to shuffle across the floor. He sits on the cushion resting between the couch and the table and his papa cages him in between his knees, squeezing his shoulders just slightly.
“Gotcha,” he grins, and Hitoshi leans further into the backrest. His dad pours the black cat into his lap, and Coffee gets comfortable kneading the fabric of Yamada’s- Hitoshi’s pijama pants. It's exactly what he needed.
Yamada's hands bury in his hair and he begins to press around his scalp.
”Jeez, you're burning up, kiddo. Do you feel sick?” A hand travels to his forehead while Hitoshi shakes his head lightly.
“'s just been a long night.”
“That's alright, baby. We can fix that.” While his pa speaks, he extends an arm across the table to reach for a glass jar with a mint leaf printed on the label.
Aizawa makes himself comfortable at their side, resting his head on his forearms. He glances at the TV, then turns to look at him and finally at Yamada.
They share a look over his head Hitoshi can't quite decipher. He's still getting used to his dad's quiet smiles, soft and content. He looks like a cat, slowly blinking up at his pa with his cheek mushed against his forearm, and Hitoshi suddenly fears he's being the punchline of a joke he's hopelessly missing.
“What?”
“Gotcha,” Aizawa repeats, like it's a promise.
Hitoshi's vision sways, and he lowers his head.
“Ah, ah, ah,” his pa corrects, gently tipping him upwards from under his jaw. “Let me see what I'm doing,” he says, parting Hitoshi’s hair through the middle of his head with the comb handle.
His dad smiles from under his arm, then turns his head with a flick of his braid to focus on the news and give Hitoshi some much needed privacy.
In his spontaneous hideout unseen by his fathers' eyes, Hitoshi allows himself to smile. He feels the residual lingering tension drop off his shoulders when a comb begins to meticulously brush through his hair, untangling all his knots in its wake.
“Thank you,” he speaks into the collar of the well-worn t-shirt.
His papa's fingers across his scalp don't cease their movements and his dad doesn't turn around. Hitoshi suspects he's asleep already, but it doesn’t matter if he's been unheard.
He knows he's been understood.