Work Text:
It didn't take an idiot to see that something was up with Problem Child.
Shouta had made a career of being abnormally observant of others for Underground work, but really, it was incredibly obvious that the kid was not in his right mind the last few days.
Of course, his face was always buried in that notebook of his, but somehow it seemed different. Shouta had heard from other teachers during his lunch break that Midoriya would barely even look up if he was called on, and minus his usual anxiety over being put suddenly on the spot.
Which, odd, but maybe he was working on some project for another class that had taken up his focus.
Wrong.
And now Shouta was awake at four in the morning, three days after the weirdness had started, because his phone had pinged with an alert right after his patrol had ended telling him there was a student up and roaming around the dorms at the ungodly fucking hour for some reason, and Shouta had a bit more than a feeling that it was no doubt, the resident Problem Child up to some bullshit.
Shouta hated being right, sometimes.
He'd wandered the halls of the common floor, finding nothing to show that someone had been wandering about, and had gone up to the second floor to find Midoriya's door slightly cracked open instead of shut, very faint music reaching his ears from inside.
Pushing the door open, Shouta now more than ever questioned his decision to become a teacher to teenagers. Why had he listened to Nemuri and Hizashi, he would never know.
Shouta leaned against the doorway with arms crossed, watching blankly as Midoriya danced around his oddly empty room (bare walls, hero merch tucked away in the boxes he'd brought when moving in) with his eyes closed, mouthing words to metal screaming music absolutely blasting in his earbuds, twirling a spoon around in a jar of mayonnaise and shoving an entire spoonful in his mouth with a grin.
What in the ever-loving fuck was wrong with teenagers?
Problem Child had a questionable fashion sense at best (like Shouta was one to judge), but red plaid pajama pants paired with a striped neon green and yellow over-sized sweater was just outrageous.
He sighed through his nose and waited for Midoriya to realize he was standing there, unwilling to startle him too badly from whatever headspace he was in.
It took another four bites━of fucking mayonnaise, gods help this child━for him to be noticed.
Midoriya blinked at him, ate another gigantic spoonful, and took his earbuds out, waving casually to Shouta as if this wasn't the most obscene thing to witness at four in the goddamn morning. "Hi, sensei."
"Problem Child, you do realize what time it is right now, right?"
"It's four A.M.," Midoriya nodded sagely. "It's perfect mental breakdown hours. I've been planning on rearranging my room for days. Drew out blueprints of my dorm in my notebook several times to calculate where was best to put everything to leave enough floor space to have guests over and for other nights exactly like this."
Ah, so the kid was manic. Made sense. Shouta would have to get him tested for the possibility of being bipolar sometime in the near future. Nothing in his medical files say anything about bipolar disorder, but it was certainly looking like the kid was non-diagnosed in Shouta's eyes.
"I'm thinking about painting the walls, too," Midoriya added. "Is that allowed?"
Shouta stared tiredly at the kid before sighing again. "Oh, hell, why not. What color are you thinking?"
No hesitation, Problem Child said, "Three black walls, one red. Not sure which the accent wall will be yet, but I'm working on figuring that out, too. If it's the one with the door, no one will notice unless they come inside, but if it's the one directly opposing the door, it's too flashy. The left wall is where all my shelves are for my merch, and the right is where I hang all my posters. No matter which wall it is, it's a challenge."
"You're really going for a whole makeover here, huh."
Midoriya nodded, shoving more mayonnaise in his mouth. "Yup. Wanna help?"
Shouta thought about it. "You have a mini-fridge in here."
"...Yeah?" Problem Child blinked.
"Tell me there's a jar of pickles in there, and you've got yourself a partner for the weekend."
The kid just grinned at him and set his... snack down on his empty desk before opening his small fridge in the corner and pulling out a giant jar of spicy dill pickles, holding it out to Shouta. The jar had to have taken up at least half the space in that tiny thing.
He handed it to Shouta and offered his own big ass jar to him. "Vanilla pudding?"
Shouta snorted and pulled his hair up into a bun, closing the door behind him. "We have ourselves a deal, Problem Child. Tell anyone about this and I'll expel you without hesitation."
"Not a word of it, sensei!"
"Good," Shouta nodded. "Now show me these plans so I can see what we're working with."
"Does that mean you'll take me paint shopping? I have allowance money saved up to buy it, I just need supervision off campus."
"Not now, the hardware and home design stores are all closed, considering it's four in the morning. Ask me again later."
"Got it, got it," Midoriya grabbed his notebook and opened it to a page somewhere in the middle. "So here's what I was thinking furniture rearrangement-wise..."
Hours later, Shouta and the Problem Child could hear the other students start waking up, going through their mornings however they did on weekends. Shouta wasn't always around to find out their schedules, so he didn't know what they all did.
They were both sweaty but surprisingly not very tired. Surprising, since neither of them had slept, and had been eating nothing but junk food for several hours. Midoriya had pulled out a couple energy drinks for them not long after Shouta had joined him in his mad little quest, but he could really go for a coffee.
He checked his phone, noting it was late enough that some hardware stores would be open.
"Go shower and put some less embarrassing clothes on, meet me in the commons in a half hour. We'll go shopping for your stuff."
Midoriya nodded and chugged the last few gulps of his energy drink, making Shouta cringe. Who even drank the Mango Loco flavor Monster? Shit was absolutely fucking disgusting. He himself was more of a Java Monster kind of guy.
"Got it, sensei!" he crushed the can in his palm and gave Shouta a blinding grin. "See you in thirty!"
Shouta shook his head as the kid raced out the door and left Shouta to himself, glancing around the bare room with a sigh. Five hours to finish taking down all the kid's hero merch and move all his stuff into boxes, shoving it into the empty dorm next door that in a few months' time would be Shinsou's new room.
He made his way back to the teachers' building and finished the last of his own energy drink, tossing it into the trash can and walking past his coworkers to go up to his apartment and shower off all the sweat.
"Hey, Shouta, you never came back from patrol last night! Where've you been?"
Shouta gave Hizashi a wave. "Encouraging chaos. Indulging lunacy. Whatever you wanna call it."
"What?"
"I'm going to shower," he dismissed the question, which had undoubtedly been a prompting for explanation. "Nedzu, I'm taking a student off campus for a few hours to shop for some stuff."
"Of course, Aizawa-kun! Thank you for letting me know!"
"Ryou, remind me in a few days to send my Problem Child your way."
"Noted."
He slunk off to the elevator with a shrug, yawning to himself.
Thirty minutes later, he arrived back in his students' building and checked his phone for the time. "Midoriya, let's go," he semi-shouted into the commons, getting all of the present students' attention.
Before any of them could question it, though, Problem Child came barreling through the kitchen doorway carrying two to-go coffees in hand. "Coming, Aizawa-sensei! I got coffee for the road!"
You're not supposed to pick favorite students, Shouta, he reminded himself in his head, taking the outstretched coffee from Midoriya. At least his clothes were somewhat normal now; a t-shirt that said socks on the front in bold kanji and a pair of sweatpants.
"Wallet?"
"In my pocket!"
"Student ID?"
"In my wallet!"
"Good. Let's go."
They walked out, leaving behind the rest of his confused class with tons of questions he'd leave Midoriya to answer later. He stifled a grin into his coffee.
Sometimes chaos was nice.
Shouta had no idea how he'd gone from trailing behind Midoriya to pushing the cart for him, but there he was, holding a coffee in one hand, paint sample cards in the other, and pushing the cart behind the Problem Child as he bounced from color to color and plucked paper cards from the stands to shove into Shouta's grasp.
"Don't you think you've looked at enough reds."
Midoriya didn't even glance his way. "None of them are the right red, though. It has to be perfect, sensei."
"Maybe, I don't know, the red that matches the curtains you threw in the cart? Or the rug? The bedsheets?"
The kid shook his head. "No, the accent wall can't be the same shade of red as everything else, that clashes too much. They have to be just slightly off of one another, not too much brighter or darker than each other, but not the same color altogether."
"You've given me twenty-six different shades of red to hold for you."
"Not right."
Shouta groaned. "Fine. Let's check out and swing by another store, then. Grab a tarp from the aisle over for the floor, I'll meet you at the front registers."
"Oh, thank gods, this place doesn't have what I want but I didn't want to ask you to take me to another place because I'm being so picky about━"
"Problem Child. The tarp."
"Going!"
Midoriya was truly a worrying child sometimes.
At the checkout counter at the first store they went to, he'd seen a little fridge with drinks and bought four cold coffees in glass bottles with the rest of his things, and given one of them to Shouta.
He was now downing his second one as they trudged through the fourth store of the day.
"Problem Child, how long has it been since you've slept."
"82 hours, sensei," Midoriya gulped his coffee and frowned down at the rapidly emptying bottle, shrugging at it and looking back at the paint samples.
Shouta's eye twitched. "You're going to sleep as soon as we get back to U.A., and then we can continue your little project. Got it?"
Midoriya nodded. "Probably for the best. Like, rationally, I know there's not a nightmare-inducing goth version of Pro Hero Uwabami standing behind you, but I swear to you she looks like she could star in The Ring and win an Oscar on costume design alone. Her hair snakes are wiggling at me."
"That is... a terrifying thought."
"Yeah. Anyway, I think this one looks nice, don't you, sensei? It doesn't clash too much with the other stuff, I think."
Shouta glanced at the four paint cards in Midoriya's hands. "...Yeah. It looks fine."
Midoriya grinned and held them up over Shouta's shoulder. "What do you think, Scarybami-san? This currant color will be perfect with the garnet curtains and sheets!"
The kid was not even holding currant, he was holding four very bright shades of red. Not dark.
Shouta sighed.
It was going to be a long day.
They didn't even make it back to campus before Problem Child was passed out cold, head dangling over his seat belt and drool dripping onto his own sweatpants.
Shouta parked his car and made his way around to the other side with a sigh, resigning himself to the fact that there was likely no waking the kid up until he was ready.
He unbuckled Midoriya's seat belt and shoved an arm under his knees, the other around his back, shifting him over his shoulder in a fireman's carry and shutting the passenger door with a kick of his foot. The stuff in the trunk could wait until later. A kid was one thing, but carrying three cans of paint, two packs of floor-length curtains, an entire rug, a whole bedspread set, a bag of spray paint cans, and a box containing a disassembled desk chair inside, by himself? Absolutely not.
This was Problem Child's project. He would be carrying most of it in, Shouta was not doing it alone. He'd help, sure, but the kid could lift a refrigerator with three fingers without breaking a sweat, Shouta had seen it. He would carry the packs of curtains. The rest was all Midoriya's problem.
Shouta bumped the front door open with his hip, making sure it wouldn't swing back and smack the kid in the head and slipping his shoes off by the doorway, reaching down and throwing Midoriya's off, too.
He carried Midoriya into the commons, where some of the other hellions were sitting around, studying.
"Make room. I'm not carrying him upstairs."
Iida sat up straight. "Sensei! Is Midoriya alright?!"
Shouta grunted. "He's fine, just sleeping. And he's going to stay asleep until he decides to wake up. Is that understood?"
Uraraka nodded, scooting to the other end of the couch and letting Shouta lay the kid down with his feet draped over her lap.
He huffed once he stood back upright, rubbing his shoulder. Kid was heavy as hell.
"Tell Problem Child to call me when he's awake. I'm going to go take a nap. Stay out of trouble."
"Yes, sensei!"
Shouta left them at that, putting his shoes back on and heading back to the teachers' building like he had that morning.
Nemuri sat on the couch watching some crime show Shouta wasn't interested in, and he didn't even bother slipping his shoes off at the door, just doing it on the way to the couch, before flopping onto the cushions and laying the back of his head on Nemuri's lap.
She let out a soft oomph before laughing, pulling his hair tie out of his hair and running her fingers through it. "This is rare. Rough day, Shouta?"
"Shut up."
"Ah, that kind of day," she nodded. "We didn't even have classes today, either. Hizashi said you took a kid shopping."
"Never. Again."
"Yeah, right. You're a softie for your kids. I heard Ashido and Kirishima calling you Dadzawa the other day."
"They're grounded."
Nemuri chuckled. "Of course. Sleep, Shouta, you look like you need it."
"I can move if you want."
"You're fine," she rolled her eyes. "I wasn't planning on getting up anytime soon, anyway. It's my turn with the TV."
Shouta grunted. "If my phone rings and I don't hear it, wake me up. Probably be a few hours, though."
"Sure, for what?"
"A confidential mission."
To rearrange a teenager's entire dorm room listening to BABYMETAL and eating a horrible combination of spicy pickles and sweet pudding. Very confidential.
"Got it," Nemuri nodded. "Now sleep, you grump."
"Already ahead of you."
It was four hours before he got said call and Nemuri woke him up. Midoriya, over the phone, sounded completely rested despite probably needing at least a full 24-hour period of nothing but sleep to catch his body up with the rest of the world. A four-hour nap after nearly 90 hours of straight consciousness? Shouta wouldn't even be functioning.
Teenagers. Amazing.
He showed up at Midoriya's dorm like he had before, with the exception of the room only containing the mini-fridge and a Bluetooth speaker on the floor since they'd moved everything else temporarily. Midoriya had opened yet another Mango Loco Monster, and was thankfully just sipping at it this time. He still had one coffee bottle left from their earlier trip, but he was probably saving it. Smart kid.
"Sensei!" Problem Child grinned when Shouta opened the door. "Are we ready? Can we go get the stuff from your car? I think I figured out which wall I want to paint for the accent, so I'm ready to start whenever you are! If... you're still helping?"
Shouta huffed, tying his hair up again since Nemuri had seen fit to take it down earlier. "Yes, Problem Child, I'm still helping. You're carrying most of it in, though."
"Of course!"
If anyone would've asked Shouta at the beginning of his teaching career if he would be in a student's dorm room in the middle of the day, humming to BABYMETAL songs with a pickle hanging out of his mouth and rolling paint onto a wall?
He would've checked them for a concussion and taken them to the nearest hospital for brain surgery.
But, here he was.
Shouta took the pickle from his mouth with one hand, taking a bite, and holding his black paint roller in the other hand. "Going up, going down,"
Midoriya spun in a circle, Monster can and his own red paint roller in his hands and hair pushed out of his face with the most horrendous headband Shouta had ever seen in his life, and he was best friends with Nemuri. "Going up, going down, hell yeah! Hey lady, are you going up━"
Just because the situation was already really fucking odd, Shouta snorted to himself at the intrusive thought in his brain and for once, let himself follow it, reaching out and rolling black paint down Midoriya's arm.
His student glanced up at him with an almost feral grin, still singing, and swiped red across Shouta's face to retaliate.
If it were any other student in any other circumstance, Shouta would've likely given them detention and one of those apology assignments everyone hated, along the lines of Write: 'I will never paint on my teacher again, it is disrespectful and stupid' a hundred times.
But Midoriya had given him coffee without prompting that morning, offered his own snacks, paid for everything bought while shopping, and Shouta would begrudgingly admit he was having fun with the Problem Child. So, he let it slide. He had started it, after all.
And it was a good thing he'd worn short sleeves, because he could already tell that it was only the beginning of a war.
Hopefully, they wouldn't have to go out and buy more paint. Shouta did not remember which of the four stores they'd visited they found that specific red color at, and they only bought one can, stupid enough.
They were, in fact, going to need more paint, he concluded. Mentally sighing over the fact that he was gonna have to take the Problem Child shopping again in the same day for more paint, he forewent the roller entirely and picked up the tray of black paint from the floor and threw it in the kid's general vicinity, holding up his arms to shield his face when he got the same treatment with the red.
Fuck, that was gonna suck to get out of his hair.
His class could be smart sometimes, it seemed, since they stayed quiet as mice when he walked past them to go back to his apartment and shower for the second time that day and ask Hizashi to help him get matte-finish wall paint out of his hair.
Once again, he was leaving the inevitable questions to Problem Child. His idea, his problem.
Hizashi laughed at him the entire time, predictably, but still helped. And thankfully, they managed to somehow get it out thanks to the fact that it wasn't completely dried in most places and Hizashi owned probably the most expensive hair products in the goddamn country. He did have to shave his facial hair, though. There was no saving that.
He and Midoriya ended up having to visit three of the four stores they'd searched through earlier in the day, since neither of them were paying attention to the stores' names and forgot which one they got that particular red paint from.
Then, it was back to work.
The walls didn't end up taking too long to paint, thankfully, so Shouta helped Midoriya drag some of his furniture back into the room, since the Problem Child had also decided to sand and spray-paint all of his wooden furniture and his detached shelves to match his new aesthetic, and Shouta had committed to helping, so he borrowed a mask from the kid and got to shaking up the cans for him to use.
By the time they were done, the entire second floor smelled like paint fumes and chemicals.
Shouta had also eaten all the pickles, so he and Problem Child had taken to splitting what was left of the mayonnaise-jar-vanilla-pudding and using two different colored plastic spoons to differentiate between whose was whose. Shouta's was yellow, Midoriya's was green.
Over the hours, the music had changed from a multitude of BABYMETAL songs, which Problem Child had just the right amount of to be nearly worrying, to a mix of Crossfaith and Blood Stain Child, which was also sort of worrying, but Shouta was kind of vibing with it. Not what he expected the kid's music taste to be, but never judge a book by its cover.
Shouta lazily eyed the painted walls and newly-black furniture. "Any regrets yet, Problem Child?"
Midoriya blinked. "No. I'm not going to put all of my All Might paraphernalia back up. I packed my stuff of other heroes, too, just didn't have room for it all. The blue and yellow won't match all the dark red in here, so I'm just gonna stick with a few action figures on the shelves to go with others."
"So," Shouta slowly said, "a general Pro Hero shrine in lieu of an All Might shrine."
"...Essentially."
"What other heroes do you have?"
"Some popular, some not. A couple older heroes from past generations I like. Crust, Fat Gum, Edgeshot. I used to have Death Arms and Backdraft, but there was an incident and now I don't... really care for them anymore. Mr. Brave is so cool, though! He's more of a twilight hero, between limelight and underground, so it's a little hard to find his stuff and a little more expensive, but so worth it."
"And those older heroes?" Shouta raised an eyebrow.
"Well, after I did my internship with Gran Torino, I found some of his old merch and got some from his prime years. He's awesome. Crimson Riot, because chivalry is not dead, I don't care what anyone says. Kirishima's got the right idea. Oh, and Pro Hero Soar, I wish I could've met her in her time, she was an amazing hero. Also Pro Hero Lariat. Super cool dude. Totally had big burly funny uncle vibes."
Shouta chuckled. "That's a lot of heroes, kid."
Midoriya grinned. "I love heroes."
"I know," Shouta snorted. "Everyone knows that, kid."
"Heroes are the best."
"Mhm."
"The best, sensei."
"Whatever you say, Problem Child."
"Wanna help me hang my shelves and posters after the furniture dries?"
"Might as well," Shouta shrugged. "In the meantime?"
Midoriya flops back onto the tarp and folds his hands behind his head. "I'm gonna look for shapes in the popcorn ceiling."
Shouta stared for a second and sighed. "Yeah, alright. Scoot over."