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Shouto knocked on the edge of the door, then pulled it open without waiting for a response. Aizawa sat on the other side of his desk, half hidden behind a mound of papers. He looked up as Shouto slipped in and pulled the door closed.
"Come in," Aizawa said, face blank.
Shouto grabbed one of the chairs set against the wall and dragged it across the floor. The legs made a quiet sort of screech, like four markers pressed together to draw a rainbow across a whiteboard. When he sat down, his knees almost brushed the other side of the desk.
Aizawa didn't say anything, but there was something at the edges of his mouth that Shouto had learned to recognize. He was trying very hard not to smile.
"What would have happened," Shouto started, like a finger tracing across a map, trying to plan the best course for a dangerous approach, "If I'd come—last year maybe—and told you about my father."
The almost smirk dropped from Aizawa's face. Slowly, he set down the pen he was holding, leaned forward with his forearms at the edge of the desk. "Do you need me to do something now?"
"No," Shouto blurted, and he meant it. There was a subsection of reporters, of civilians who spent too much time on their phones, who had got it into their heads that all the terrible things that happened to him had earned him a free pass. They wanted Shouto to be a destroyer in just this one case, to rekindle the fire and watch as his family tore apart.
Shouto would rather watch the ashes, the empty dirt where a forest had been, and see if something could still grow.
"This is hypothetical," Shouto continued, because he knew he had sat staring for too long. "I just want to know what might have happened. I think it would be—cathartic."
Aizawa sat back in his chair and drew a hand down his face. "Alright. Let me think for a moment."
Reaching down into his shoulder bag, Shouto drew out a thin notebook—one of the cheap ones from the grocery store. A mechanical pencil was clipped to the cover.
"You're taking notes?" Aizawa said. It was hard to tell if this had really surprised him, or if he was still collecting himself.
"I've heard it's a good way to process your emotions," Shouto said, hoping his expression matched the words.
Last week, one of the new first years had cornered him in the hall and started asking questions. "You're Todoroki, right? It was your brother who posted that video? And your face—was that—did your father—"
The girl was young enough that Shouto couldn't quite bring himself to snap at her. He had turned abruptly to walk away.
She caught his sleeve in her hand. "Don't leave," she'd said, "I'm sorry—I'm sorry—there's nobody else. There's nobody else for me."
And then she'd told him everything.
Walking across the Yuuei courtyard, Shouto found himself thinking back to the sports festival all those months ago, to the way Midoriya's expression had turned when he pinned him in that alcove with different words in the same pattern. He didn't know the weight he'd been handing over. He'd spent his whole life carrying it.
Aizawa was a teacher and a pro hero—a mandated reporter twice over. But even after everything, Shouto's class only had their provisional licenses.
One time he'd pulled a stray cat from an alley behind a crumbling building. Kaminari had yelled after him, then laughed when he emerged in mostly one piece. The cat had been safe. It had also tried to claw his face off, and when he dropped it, it took off across the street, vanishing around a corner. It was because they had only just met—there hadn't been enough trust built up between them for Shouto to grab it like that. As he stood there in the blocked off street, Kaminari giving most of the debrief, Shouto had turned over and over in his mind the hope that the cat would only hate him going forward, and not every other person who tried to help.
Kouda could have done it better. It was easier to watch your world crumble around you, to let someone bodily haul you away, when you understood that they were bringing you out into the light.
The girl was sitting on a bench under a tree, just where he'd told her to meet him. She looked up as he approached and waved limply.
"Hi," Shouto said, unsure how else to greet her. In all their talking the week before, he had forgotten to ask her name.
"Hi," the girl said, moving her backpack down onto the ground.
Shouta unbuckled his shoulder bag, the one with the cat face stitched into the corner, and pulled out the grocery store notebook. As he held it out to the girl, Shouto belatedly realized that she had moved her bag to make room for him. He hesitated, stuck for a moment between a thousand possible correct ways to act. Then he slipped his bag off his shoulder and sat down on the empty half of the bench.
He'd tried to trace back how Midoriya had handled it when this had happened, and instantly hit a complete dead end. He wasn't going to start a fistfight with a girl he barely knew. But somehow, that train of thought had been enough to land him here, opening the bright cardboard cover of the mostly empty notebook.
"What's that?" the girl asked, leaning forward a little to keep her shadow from falling on the page.
Shouto set the notebook on the bench between them, then turned to snap shut the flap of his bag so he wouldn't have to watch her face as the realization dawned. "It's just something hypothetical," he said.