Chapter Text
Eraser tells him about training with the hero courses less than one week in advance. And not even of his own initiative. It was Hitoshi’s math teacher who’d told his class about an upcoming test and off-handedly mentioned that Hitoshi would take it later, “because of his training”.
Cue texting Eraser what the hell that meant as soon as class ended.
Cue Eraser downplaying it, like it’s just the logical next step in training for something further down the line, but Hitoshi isn’t stupid. Has been hanging onto every miniscule change in how Eraser talks about the idea of transferring; has noticed the gradual transition from if to when.
So of course he knows that this is it.
And that if this goes the way they’re hoping, he’ll end up with underground pro hero Eraserhead as his homeroom teacher. It’s the most sensible placement – considering all the disadvantages of being a transfer student – to put Hitoshi with a teacher who already knows him.
It’s… incredible news. That he’ll get a chance to prove himself this soon, that he won’t have to spend the rest of the school year wondering, stressing, that he’ll just know.
Whether he gets in. Or doesn’t.
It’s great. Amazing.
Hitoshi kind of spirals.
Two hours later finds him frozen on the asphalt walkway that wraps around Heights Alliance, at the T leading to the 1-A dormitory. He’d given up on the notion of dinner before his classmates even started gathering in 1-C’s common area, opting to pace around the school grounds until his thoughts maybe solidified into something that isn’t just white noise, but… here he is. Thoughts sliding and tripping and looping all around like a hamster losing the race with its own wheel.
Eraser’s class is still spread out across the dining tables even after finishing their meal, chatting and laughing and thankfully not looking out of any windows to see Hitoshi looking like an indecisive creep at the end of their path.
He’s trying to tell himself he’s just here to scope out his competition, that that was all he came for, his feet somehow carrying him towards a tactically reasonable objective. But Hitoshi knows part of himself wants to rock up and do another stupid declaration of war. No matter how pitiful it might come across, after how he ended up eating shit in the sports tournament.
Looking inside at all the hero course students chumming it up with one another, he feels not terribly unlike the villain people have tried to paint him as in the past. ‘I’ll get you next time, lousy kids!’
But Hitoshi has grown, he really has, and he doesn’t want a past failure to keep him from doing anything he otherwise would have – which is marching right up there and challenging the whole entitled horde of them, as a promise to himself, one that he has to live up to this time. Can’t fall back on the idea that he’ll get more chances, can’t let Eraser down after the hours and hours the man (the myth, the legend) has poured into him already.
Here the spiral once again circles by that point where it gets a little hard to breathe.
Hitoshi forces himself to unfreeze just enough to make his way towards the nearest cluster of trees, looking for one that might be big enough to hide the sight of him smoking some nerves away.
His legs aren’t feeling very cooperative and he tugs at his capture weapon, pulling strips of fabric over the place where his chest is all achy and unpleasantly tight. Like a fucking baby, he thinks, like it’s some comfort object to help him self-soothe rather than a support item he worked his ass off to even be allowed to train with. Forcing himself to let go, he shoves a hand in his pocket to dig around for a lighter instead, rolling his eyes at himself. He’s gonna be fine, Eraser–
Oh, shit. Eraser.
Because there he is. Up there, crouched on the branch of an oak tree. Holding–
“Is that a cigarette in your hand, Shinsou?”
“Yeah,” Shinsou calls back, totally casually, as if he admits to smoking in front of teachers all the time and isn’t about to piss himself. “Got a light? Thought I brought mine, but…”
Eraser is too far up for Hitoshi to really be sure of his expression, but he looks at him for long enough that Hitoshi really thinks he might fucking piss his pants, and then– Hitoshi can’t hear it from down where he is, but Eraser’s shoulders move in a way that looks like he’s doing one of those deep sighs.
Then the man gives up on very badly hiding his own cig under a cupped (and smoking) palm, taking a resigned drag on the thing.
Hitoshi grins, feels his heart beating fast and hard with something that blissfully isn’t anxiety, and swings himself up beside the underground hero with more enthusiasm than grace.
Eraser spends a moment narrowing his eyes at him, now that he can actually appreciate the disapproval up close, and then hands him a bic featuring two snuggling kittens.
What a day.
“I knew that it’s against school rules for students to smoke on the grounds,” Hitoshi says after lighting up, handing the kittens back to their owner. “But I didn’t know that teachers are allowed to.”
His toes curl in his sneakers from the force of the glare that gets him. It tides him over for a full minute, after which he still can’t stop himself from adding, “Didn’t know you smoked at all.”
“You weren’t meant to,” Eraser snaps, and Hitoshi feels it in his chest, that spark, the one he used to feel so guilty about but doesn’t anymore. Because he knows, trusts – in a way he thought he did before, but not at all compared to now – himself. Knows he won’t use his quirk for evil, not ever, no matter what he’d been halfway convinced by the people around him until he’d come here. Until Eraser trusted him.
So he lets himself enjoy that primal, electrifying joy of gouging out a response like this, because the ability to do so is an extension of his quirk, and his quirk is definitely, definitively for good.
It’s… still something he forgets. Sometimes. That surety. But it’s always there when he’s with the man sitting next to him.
“What’s your plan, once you finish that?” asks the man in question, pulling Hitoshi out of his thoughts.
“What?”
“Stare at my class for an unspecified amount of time,” Eraser lists, immediately making Hitoshi’s cheeks colour, “Slink away to partake in illicit tobacco. And then..?”
It’s Hitoshi’s turn to sigh. He looks towards the dorm in front of them forlornly.
“I think I wanted to talk to them. But I also didn’t.”
There’s another silence, which is pretty much the norm with Eraser. But when Hitoshi finds the balls to look at him again, his expression is uncharacteristically sympathetic. Not that the man himself isn’t – Hitoshi isn’t stupid – but more in the way that he rarely lets it show on his face. Hitoshi wouldn’t welcome sympathy during their sessions anyway. Would be frustrated by it. Here, now, it’s… nicer than he cares to admit.
“I encourage you to get to know them,” Eraser says, almost gently, “But I highly discourage you from informing them of the training we have planned. The hero courses are meant to involve dealing with the unexpected; that’s what we expect of them. You’re not in yet, so it wouldn’t have been fair to spring this on you.”
Hitoshi’s stomach does a little swoop at the yet, as if he just swung from one branch to another instead of sitting perched perfectly still.
“More importantly, the results of the training will be more reliable if you face them while they’re giving it their regular amount of Plus Ultra, rather than operating with some sort of bias.”
“How do you mean?”
Eraser gives him a considering look, like he knows Hitoshi has figured out the stakes of the coming week and is deliberating whether to carry on the charade.
“I could imagine a few of the students going easier on you, if they knew. Not much, but still. Just enough, in order to help you achieve your dreams. You don’t want the other teachers noticing that.”
Alright, charade out the fucking window, damn. Hitoshi will freely admit (inside the privacy of his own head) that he likes to feel clever, but yeah. It’s not really surprising that the hero course kids would work out the point of Hitoshi joining him if he told them in advance.
He spends the rest of his cigarette mulling that one over.
“Think there’s anyone that’d go the other way, like, harder than usual? Try to keep me out?”
“If I’ve done my job right, everyone should be going as hard as they can by default,” Eraser responds, so dryly that Hitoshi winces. “There shouldn’t be room for anyone to put in more effort than they would have otherwise.”
He tries to go through their faces, both A and B, to figure out which ones might feasibly go easy on him, if what Eraser says is true. (It usually is.) And which ones might single him out.
Three students come to mind, all blond. The one who ceded from the sports tournament after Hitoshi used his quirk on him, and then went on to rat him out to Midoriya. That loud one from B, so intent on proving his own class’ superiority over all others. And… the first person from the hero course Hitoshi ever had the pleasure of seeing up close and in person, the first time he went to challenge class 1-A. The one who called him (and everyone outside his own class, for that matter) cannon fodder.
And then went on to win the tournament.
Yeah, that one might prove the biggest problem.
Hitoshi finds himself digging through his pocket again, without even thinking of the company he’s in.
“Chainsmoking at sixteen, Shinsou?” Eraser says, with enough genuine disapproval that Hitoshi actually feels it churning in his gut.
“Chainsmoking at fourteen,” he corrects brazenly.
Eraser does another one of those sighs. Hitoshi knows. Obviously. Should be cutting down, now more than ever, get his lung capacity back up in time for… judgement.
Just thinking about it, Hitoshi feels a guilty resignation over his own impending increase in smoking. He knows himself. As an apparent fellow smoker, Eraser probably knows too, and isn’t so big of a hypocrite as to say anything about it.
He passes the cute kitty lighter along without a word.
Hitoshi isn’t sure how long they sit there. Long enough that the street lamps light up, that Hitoshi’s fingers go pink with cold. Eraser lights another smoke for himself after a couple more sighs, and then says,
"Regardless of how it goes, I’ll still be here.”
Hitoshi’s head turns away from 1-A’s dormitory to stare at him.
“I won’t tell you not to worry, because I know it'd be about as effective as telling Yamada to be quiet. But you have what it takes, kid. Your current training plan is fine, so don’t stray from it. I don’t want you spending the next week overworking yourself. Got that?”
He’s pretty sure his mouth is hanging open even as he nods.
“Good,” Eraser says, punctuating with a nodding drag on his cigarette. He holds it in as he looks over his class’ dorm and then turns back to Hitoshi, as if remembering some pointer he’d been meaning to give about his technique. But what he says is;
“I want to be your teacher.”
Smoke billows out of his mouth alongside those completely fucking unexpected words and that’s when it clicks.
Hitoshi doesn’t know if it’s the words on their own, or the mind-breaking earnestness in Eraser’s face as he delivers them, looking straight into Hitoshi’s eyes. It’s not the smoking. Hitoshi doesn’t have a thing for smoking, all the magic has long since faded from that, in time with the nicotine stains growing onto his own fingers, but.
Something about sitting in a fucking tree together so they won’t get busted. Sharing a lighter. It makes Eraser less of an object of hero worship and more of… just a guy.
Just a really cool, capable, attentive, attractive dude.
It brings him down to a level that seems suddenly and shockingly attainable. There’s that sparking in Hitoshi’s chest again, and it really does feel akin to the zing of pleasure he feels when getting a response from someone after having to work for it. Except this is approximately a million times more intense, because Eraser is fucking verbally expressing a want that only Hitoshi can give him. Hitoshi is used to wanting to impress Eraser, but being given the ability to give him something he wants? To be Hitoshi’s teacher. Hitoshi’s.
“Go get some rest, Shinsou,” Eraser says, looking away once more when Hitoshi doesn’t stop staring. He just doesn’t know how to, at first. Between one breath and the next, Eraser’s jawline has gone from man I hope I look like that once I get rid of this fucking baby fat to something Hitoshi wants to chew on for dinner. Just the thought zaps him back into his body, which feels the furthest thing from tired now.
His cig is all but burnt out when he remembers he’s still holding onto it; not much left but a wobbly cylinder of ash anyway, but he taps it with a finger and takes a stubborn puff just to get the last dregs of nicotine. Stubs it against the rough bark of the tree and pauses momentarily, deciding not to push his luck by littering right in front of a teacher as well, and so goes to put–
“Not your pocket, kid, geez.”
“What, I’m not gonna tuck it behind my hair or something, people will smell that as soon as…”
He trails off when Eraser pulls a small nondescript tin out from one of the dozen pockets of his utility belt. He pops it open with a muted metallic clack and deposits his own cigarette butt inside.
Eraser then wordlessly holds it out to Hitoshi. Who can’t help but laugh, partly because there’s something so gentlemanly about the gesture – despite the fact that Eraser is wordlessly judging the hell out of his trashy habits – that it makes his stupid head buzz and his newly overworked heart sore.
“That’s so fancy, Eraser, what the–”
“Language.”
“Sir yessir.” Hitoshi bites down on a grin and deposits his forbidden cigarette butt in Eraser’s nice little tin.
What a day.
The day is followed by a night during which Hitoshi doesn’t sleep more than an hour or two at best, making it all the more dreamlike.
There was a period of going back to his room at some point, definitely, and a good bit of staring at the ceiling and seeing nothing but Eraser’s calloused hands, handing things to Hitoshi out of his own pockets. Holding a cigarette that actually came pre-made and neatly packaged, as opposed to the asymmetric gremlin sticks that Hitoshi rolls himself because it’s cheaper that way. Just that perfect white cylinder is enough to be a symbol of luxury and excess when you’re sixteen and broke.
Hitoshi has never before wanted to be a cigarette, but, well. First time for everything.
Then there’s some sneaking down to the kitchen for instant ramen after lights out, which must be closer to the millionth time than the first.
After that he goes out.
He’s not allowed to use the hero training facilities no matter what time of day, but the forest has never cared about time, nor what course Hitoshi is in. And so he swings through the trees in a haze, not really practicing any of the stuff he’s supposed to work on – different ways to make harnesses with the capture weapon, different ways to efficiently reverse his trajectory mid-air during hypothetical fights. Hitoshi doesn’t want to do 180s, he just wants to move forward, can’t be bothered with anything more complicated than a few flips along the way.
It’s getting light again by the time he’s tired himself out enough for a nap, slumped against some old, broad trunk. Not against The Tree, as the oak in which he smoked with Eraser has already been designated in Hitoshi’s mind.
He dreams of him.
Not sitting next to Hitoshi in the oak tree, but sitting next to a whole panel of other hero course teachers. Looking disappointed. Giving him some reluctantly but honestly scathing feedback after his attempt to train with the kids who’d made the cut at entrance exams. Guess the school had made all the right choices then after all.
But Eraser still has to say it out loud. Whether Hitoshi passes or fails.
The man opens his mouth to do so. Opens with Hitoshi’s name, and is promptly caught in his quirk.
Hitoshi wakes up.
The first rays of sunlight have filtered through the canopy, just low enough to flash straight into his eyes when he opens them. And then away, and back again, as the leaves and branches sway with the chilly morning breeze, shifting between shading and blinding him.
His pants are damp with dew drops, limbs stiff with cold, but his mind is painfully awake, so there’s nothing to do but stand up and bend down into the first stretches of his warm up routine.
He goes over the harness wraps this time. Practices his aerial maneuvers.
And tears. The fucking. Capture weapon.
This is what sleep is meant to prevent, Hitoshi thinks sullenly, trudging towards the teacher’s dormitory with the mess of bundled carbon fiber in his arms like he’s hugging an oversized portion of tagliatelle.
He knows exactly what Eraser will say, that’s the worst part. But what, pray tell, is a dude to do when he has to train, and can’t train properly without sleep, and can’t fucking sleep.
Just as he’s walking up the steps to Eraser’s building, deliberating what the hell he's gonna say into the intercom by the front door, it opens up on its own. Or rather, thanks to the person exiting, which turns out to be none other than All Might in the flesh.
“Oh,” says the unnervingly thin man, staring down at Hitoshi from his frankly ridiculous height. “Is that Aizawa’s? Seems unlike him to leave it laying around.”
Hitoshi matches All Might’s frown with his own.
“It’s mine.” The words feel good, to the point where he can’t bring himself to ruin it by explaining he fucking broke the hero support item in his arms.
“Oh,” says All Might once again, making room for Hitoshi to pass him when he steps towards the building once more.
Hitoshi thanks him belatedly and more than a little awkwardly, after he’s already past the former number one hero. It’s hard to know what to say to a guy you’ve seen on TV a million times, especially when he no longer looks remotely like 999,999 of those times. And when he also might be your teacher next year.
Though apparently the other hero course staff haven’t been informed of that yet.
He wonders if that’s another thing he should ask about, but pushes it aside for now, focuses on gathering up the fucking balls to tell Eraser that he tore his hard earned–
And there’s his door. Alright.
Hitoshi has never actually been inside Eraser’s apartment before.
He knocks.
And then waits so long that he starts hesitantly knocking a second time, at which point the door opens just enough for Eraser to poke his head out and tiredly ask what the person outside wants– cutting himself off mid-sentence when he recognizes the person as Hitoshi.
And recognizes what he’s holding.
“It tore,” Hitoshi blurts shamefully. “I mean, I tore it. Not all the way, but I don’t know how to–” He makes himself shut up.
“How did you even..?” Eraser starts, his frown a mixture of impressed and exasperated as he looks down at the bundle in Hitoshi’s arms. Looking back up, he pulls a face. And says, with a weird tone of voice that Hitoshi has never heard him use before,
“Now isn’t a good time.”
… No further explanation is offered.
Which he doesn’t have to, of course, Eraser’s logically a very busy man. Hitoshi wants to be mature about that fact. And clearly fails, because his expression makes Eraser sigh and say, “Wait here a minute. You can borrow mine while I mend yours.”
The man goes to duck back behind his door, but Hitoshi still can’t stop himself from arguing,
“I should learn how to mend it myself.”
Eraser sighs. “Yeah, you should, but not right now. Sorry, kid, I’ll teach you another time.”
And then he’s gone, disappeared beyond the invisible barrier of his still slightly open door.
Hitoshi waits with extraordinary patience for less than a minute, when he hears the telltale angry bubble-and-hiss of a pot boiling over. And no sound of anyone rushing to take it off the hotplate.
With no small amount of trepidation, Hitoshi pushes Eraser’s front door open just enough to slip through, still closed enough to hide whatever private matters his mentor doesn’t want the world to see – including Hitoshi, but, well. He probably doesn’t want his food burnt either?
Something something boundaries that really ought to be respected – cats being killed by something proverbial –
The smell hits him as soon as he crosses over the threshold, toeing off his sneakers and cringing at how blackened that rice must be already. Three long strides and he’s standing in the middle of Eraser’s small open plan apartment, opting out of saving Eraser’s breakfast in favour of stumbling into a standstill.
Because there, on Eraser’s couch, lies 1-A’s Bakugou fucking Katsuki. Fast asleep and drooling into his teacher’s duvet.
Hitoshi doesn’t even recognize him right away. Just registers that it’s a student, a kid, blond and easily half Eraser’s age. Bakugou had barely ever registered as a fellow first year in the first place. The confidence he’d displayed in the sports festival – not even conceit, because he’d won the thing just like he said he would, and then been pissed it wasn’t, what, hard enough? – the build, the reflexes, the tactical ability, the skill– Hitoshi has seen his fucking aerial control. Knows enough basic physics to understand that Bakugou’s maneuverability is no simple skill with the quirk the guy has.
All of that put him at a level where it barely made sense that they were the same age. And yet there he lay, face relaxed and young with sleep, shirt rucked up and limbs splayed wide like a toddler.
Hitoshi hears his mentor’s speed shuffle approach and then taper off abruptly. Turns his head towards the man in a movement that feels like it should make a creaking noise.
He says, rather faintly, “Your rice was burning.”
Is still burning, in fact.
His mentor glances towards it, then to Hitoshi, then– to the door and back to Hitoshi, as if he’s considering the likelihood of Hitoshi fucking booking it. He tells Hitoshi, in a voice that is carefully neutral,
“It’s not what it looks like.”
“Eraser, that is literally the most sus thing you could possibly say right now.”
Eraser makes a noise halfway between a sigh and a groan, and then he does go to the charred remnants of his rice. For a minute or two, Hitoshi simply watches him, takes in the duet of Bakugou Katsuki snoring and Eraser scraping the bits into the trash that aren’t now welded permanently to the pot.
That’s as long as he can keep his stupid mouth shut in an atmosphere as bizarre as this.
“So, what it looks like is that you’re, like, thirty-eight and don’t own a rice cooker.”
“I’m thirty,” Eraser corrects immediately, the response fast and affronted enough that Hitoshi does a quick calibration of which topics might be useful routes to one day successfully catching Eraser in his quirk during training.
“Ah, just fourteen years then.”
It’s mean, even if the way Eraser’s face falls is darkly satisfying somehow. Something about the usual stoicism, or a reversed power dynamic. It’s not like Hitoshi even really figures anything untoward has happened here – he believes his mentor when the man says,
“It isn’t like that, Shinsou.”
“What is it then?”
Because that he honestly can’t figure out. He knows he’s prying, that he wasn’t invited in, but– It’s not like Eraser lives far away from his students, in a way that his apartment might serve as some sort of emergency shelter for someone unable to make it home for the night. It’s literally the opposite of that. Bakugou’s own room is less than five minutes away so why would the boy need to sleep here?
Eraser looks towards the blond in question and takes a while to settle on his words, frowning harder than Hitoshi usually sees him emote.
“Bakugou… struggles to sleep, sometimes. In the dorms. He sleeps better here. That’s all.”
Okay.
Except that’s not really all, because what the fuck?
Hitoshi had kept an eye on Bakugou after the sports festival, yes. As had pretty much everyone else, seeing as the guy had won the damn thing and behaved like a complete lunatic while doing so. And as far as Hitoshi could tell, the first impression he formed while standing outside class 1-A seems pretty solid; huge talent, giant dickhead. He’d kept his eye on all of them anyway, not just Bakugou, after Eraser had approached him – right there at the festival as he was licking his wounds, handing him an offer he could still barely believe was real.
And while certain students in 1-A seem fairly open to taking and giving comfort, Bakugou Katsuki certainly isn’t fucking one of them. Nor has Eraser at any point seemed like the type to cross that sort of distance with any of his students, much less– Wait, “sometimes”?
“So this is like a regular thing?”
“This like a fuckin’ interrogation or something?” rasps one Bakugou Katsuki, after who knows how many minutes of pretending to be asleep. “’f it is, I can start – who the hell’re you?”
Hitoshi takes a moment to just. Stare at the guy. Tries to figure out if he’s being genuine or trying to psych Hitoshi out somehow. He’s leaning more towards the former.
The amount of hostility present on Bakugou’s face less than five minutes after waking up is honestly impressive; as is the fact that he can pull it off with his face still cut across by several creases from Eraser’s rumpled pillow case.
“I led one of the four advancing teams in the cavalry battle.”
Hitoshi goes for the driest delivery possible and hears Eraser sigh. Can practically see Bakugou internally counting all the way up to four on his dumb, sweaty fingers. Midoriya, Todoroki, Bakugou – duh, that’s me! – …
“Oh. You’re the hero course wannabe that got beat out by fuckin’ Deku.”
“And you’re that amazing winner of the sports festival that got tied up and muzzled on national television. And then flunked your provisional license exam.”
Bakugou’s eye twitches beautifully. Eraser scrubs a hand across his face in Hitoshi’s peripheral.
As contested as the hero course is by certain groups within UA, news about them always travels extremely fast, and the fact that both the 1st and 2nd place winners of the sports festival had failed where all their classmates succeeded? Oh yeah, everyone knew within 24 hours.
“Did Midoriya flunk that too? No, I don’t think he did.”
Ah, so that’s what those sparks look like up close. Effective.
“Got a death wish, gen ed?”
Straightening out his clothes would waste precious seconds that the guy could spend on murderous posturing, Hitoshi supposes, and so Bakugou stands before him with his wrinkly T-shirt trying its hardest to fit his body sideways and his sweats pushed up under his knees, presumably by kicking the shit out of inferior beings in his dreams. It really adds to the whole vibe, brings out an unhinged energy that wouldn’t have been the same if they’d done this in the hall outside class, fully uniformed.
Of course, there is no “this”. The sparks in Bakugou’s palm sputter out like a sparkler burning up the last of its fuel.
“Now that you two have gotten off on the right foot,” Eraser deadpans, eyes glowing, hair floating, bone structure just– on display, god, it’s not like Hitoshi’s never seen him with his quirk activated before, how did he not fucking notice what the guy looks like–
“Bakugou. How are you doing?”
There’s a striking difference between the stern way Eraser speaks Bakugou’s surname and the tone he uses right after. Hitoshi can’t think of any other word to describe it than intimate.
Bakugou looks at his teacher incredulously and– shoots an angry glance in Hitoshi’s direction. Too brief to even really see him. Just enough to make a point.
“Great,” the boy spits, and then Eraser’s eyes flick over Hitoshi as well and he abruptly feels so unwelcome it makes his stomach muscles clench.
“Well, you’re about to feel even better,” Eraser says dryly. Without another word, he turns his back on both of them, opening a cabinet and pulling out a bag of rice.
Hitoshi opens his mouth, unsure of what to say but feeling as though Eraser somehow just forgot about him still being present. The possibility that the man might be ignoring him for Bakugou’s sake burns, in a way that has nothing to do with fire, more like bubbling acid corroding away his soft tissue from the inside – mixing with the unexpected guilt over intruding and clearly making the boy in front of him lie through his teeth.
“Who said I wanted your shitty breakfast?” asks the boy in question, stepping away from Hitoshi like he’s some little thing on the side of the street that looked interesting but turned out to be just trash. He has his head leaned way back in order to literally look down his nose at Eraser’s cooking abilities.
Or rather, lack thereof.
The man is now retrieving a clean pot from a cupboard. Its size is so unnecessarily large for its current task that Hitoshi gets the feeling Eraser may only own two pots total.
“How about you, Shinsou?” Eraser asks then, completely ignoring Bakugou while haphazardly shaking rice straight from the bag into the pot, no measuring cup in sight.
“Huh?”
“Have you eaten today?”
Hitoshi does a dazed mental estimation of what time he had his insomnia instant ramen.
“Yes,” he replies, because he’s quite certain the ramen was consumed after midnight and thus on the current calendar date.
Eraser gives him a look that says maybe he took too long to think about it.
“Not since I woke up,” he amends.
The underground hero makes a disapproving little sound, and shakes another small avalanche of rice into the overly large pot.
Watching him do so sends a swirl of pleasure into Hitoshi’s gut, but there’s already so many emotions mixed up in there that the result is vaguely nauseating. He isn’t entirely sure he’s up for eating any sort of breakfast, shitty or not.
“Are you sure you’re qualified to be eyeballing that?” he asks, because he has to let some of that unsettled energy out somehow, and Eraser seems a safer target than Bakugou — albeit less deserving.
“Kept myself alive for this long, haven’t I?”
“I’m sure Lunch Rush helped.”
Hitoshi can feel Bakugou’s eyes on him, making him all the more aware that he’s being worse than usual, talking to a teacher like that. Though of course, Eraser isn’t Hitoshi’s teacher, that’s kind of the whole point. The reason why Eraser doesn’t want to be addressed as sensei. (Not yet.)
He is Bakugou’s though, in addition to letting the kid stay over at his fucking apartment apparently. Does he do that for all his students?
Will Hitoshi get to do that if he does well in the training next week?
That nebulous haze of questions and flaring possessiveness hangs over Hitoshi for the entirety of the frankly surreal meal. It’s probably what gets him through it in one piece – too distracted to spout anything inflammatory and set off Bakugou’s sweaty palms.
He watches Eraser crack an egg over each bowl of rice, watches him frown under Bakugou’s judgemental gaze. Feels that gaze on himself when he tells Eraser that the breakfast looks good, and glances over to see Bakugou looking absolutely disgusted, as if Hitoshi personally betrayed him somehow.
He feels his heart start racing when Eraser takes the seat beside himself, and wonders… Hitoshi’s rampant heartbeat isn’t anything new, because Eraser has been making him nervous in that nauseating, exhilarated way ever since their first meeting. But Hitoshi wonders exactly when the reason changed from professional opportunity, to… just him. Just proximity to Eraser. Or even just the thought of impressing Eraser. Or disappointing him.
Yesterday was the first time he noticed, but he’s fairly sure it must have started way before.
He finishes his food before he finds any answers. Maybe Hitoshi really isn’t that clever after all.
Although – feeling Bakugou’s eyes on himself intermittently throughout the meal – the opposite might be true for the boy next to him. And Hitoshi doesn’t like it.
A few days later, Hitoshi watches Bakugou blast his way to total domination over class 1-B. He enjoys a less decisive victory himself, followed by something that feels like the opposite of victory.
He finds out that he passed the test. That he has – truly, impossibly, finally, incomprehensibly – secured himself a transfer into the hero course. Into Eraser’s class.
And a few more days after that, he finds out why Eraser was all but impossible to get a hold of following that bizarre morning in his apartment.
Now, over the past few months, Hitoshi has gotten used to the man being increasingly less available. When Eraser first took him on, he’d personally trained Hitoshi most days of the week. That had changed after summer break, when the man suddenly had two unnamed “lousy students” to accompany to remedial lessons – though Hitoshi had figured out, of course, that the students in question were the famed Bakugou and Todoroki.
(Only after meeting Bakugou in Eraser’s apartment is Hitoshi able to admit that part of the animosity had started already then. It seemed less unfair once he’d thoroughly confirmed in person that Bakugou really is a whole bag of dicks.)
Over the course of september, his mentor had gotten even busier. Hitoshi later pieced together that this was because of the operation that took down the Shie Hassaikai, except… It hadn’t gotten better after the mission was completed. If anything, Eraser seemed to have even less time for him.
In the days before and after the joint training, Hitoshi begins to harbour a fear that Eraser has been gradually pushing him out of the nest, so to speak. That the man has decided Hitoshi is ready to prove his worth to the hero course and that. That’s it.
And Hitoshi does feel every inch like a yeeted fucking baby bird because he is not ready to be on his own.
Which is stupid, because he’s been on his own, had gotten into UA on his own, prepared for the sports festival on his own, he just. Can’t go back to that anymore.
After it’s declared to class A and B that Hitoshi will be joining their course, he’d been foolishly hopeful that Eraser might take him out to eat, like he’d done the day he decided that Hitoshi was ready for the capture weapon. And the day he brought the first version of Hitoshi’s voice modulator from the support lab. If the dinner were to end in some temporary parting of ways, then… well, nothing to do about that. But there’s nothing, except a firm pat on the shoulder and a “you did good, kid” that makes Hitoshi’s mouth wobble and isn’t it insane that that isn’t enough?
Hitoshi knows he should be over the moon, overflowing with gratitude, and he is and that’s definitely at least ninety percent of why he ends up crying over the phone when he gives his mom the news, but it’s just.
The thought of spending all of next term continuing his training by himself, without seeing Eraser, is…
Insurmountable.
… And part of him wonders if part of this is because Eraser already clocked his fucking crush.
By the time tuesday rolls around – which has remained a constant Eraser training day, one that Eraser has always notified Hitoshi about the very few times anything came up to interfere – Hitoshi doesn’t know what to think. The man has always encouraged Hitoshi to figure things out for himself; is a man of few words to begin with, but still.
He wakes up at 4 am, unable to go back to sleep, and from there takes 8 hours and a wasted lunch break to work up the courage to type out, ‘hi, are we still on for this afternoon?’
To which Eraser replies simply, ‘Yes.’
God.
Hitoshi can’t bring himself to care about the childish way he clutches his capture weapon as he approaches their usual spot. Runs his thumb over the mended spot again and again, thinking of how close Eraser had been to Hitoshi when he showed him how to patch carbon fiber, less than a week prior.
"The first step is lightly sanding the frayed fibers," he’d told him.
"Sanding a scarf?"
"It’s support gear, kid, not a fashion accessory."
He’d been blushing already from there. It only got worse as Eraser moved closer, teaching him how to bond new carbon to the damaged area with an epoxy resin, his toneless voice as soothing as it was exciting to Hitoshi.
"You remember, of course, that the fiber itself will not flare up even if ignited by flame."
"Of course,” Hitoshi had said, trying to match Eraser’s tone and not think about how easy it would be to skirt his hands along the cloth until they brushed his mentors. Was being attracted to calluses a thing? Is Hitoshi a revolutionary?
“That’s part of why you chose this material, right? Even if it’s heated up with some fuel, it’ll stop burning as soon as the fuel is removed."
"Correct. But that’s not true for this epoxy. On the contrary, the vaporized resin will feed the flames. In that one spot. But because I didn’t have any fiber rolls in the same colour as your capture weapon, this patch will stand out like a sore thumb until you get some fiber in the right shade from the support company. Right now it’s practically advertising a weak spot.”
Eraser had looked at Hitoshi then, face still tilted down towards the table, and so close Hitoshi could count his individual eyelashes. Strikingly dark. Fuck.
“Consider that part of the lesson, Shinsou."
“Yes, Eraser.”
He’d probably been obvious. The blood rushing to his cheeks audible even outside his body or something. Even then, he’d had no intention of redoing that patch later. And later, once he’d gotten in, he wouldn’t dream of it. A narrow rectangle made from the same weave as Eraser’s own weapon, bonded onto Hitoshi’s by their combined efforts.
He remembers how he’d made the man laugh, cracking some joke about how he’d thought he was finally gonna make his mother proud by learning to mend his own knitwear. Their heads had been close enough together that Hitoshi’d felt that laugh, the warm puff of air against his ear.
Pathetic.
Presently, he steps into the clearing they use for warm-ups, bracing for the worst, though he’s not sure if the worst is being ghosted, or–
Well, it’s.
“Uh, hi.”
He’s pretty sure the little girl he startles isn’t part of a worst possible outcome.
“I told you he was coming,” Eraser says in her general direction, though she darts behind him whenever he tries to turn around to face her. He’s frowning softly, looking more confused by her behaviour than actually bothered by it.
“Do you want to tell him your name?” he asks her, though Hitoshi suspects the option is mostly given in a demonstration of good manners, “Or would you like me to do it?”
Hitoshi can barely see the girl now from where he stands, much less make out whether she nods or shakes her head, and so he simply waits for Eraser to straighten back up from his hunched over twist and inform Hitoshi,
“This is Eri.”
“Hi Eri. I’m Hitoshi.”
She peeks out from behind Eraser’s thigh to glance between the two of them sceptically.
“Shinsou is his surname,” Eraser explains.
“Yeah, you can call me Shinsou too, that’s fine,” Hitoshi tells her, wondering what Eraser has already said about him.
“Eri is my neighbour,” his mentor offers, after giving Eri a few moments to do anything other than stare at Hitoshi. Who takes a moment to make sense of that sentence, because he didn’t think there were children living in the teachers’ dormitory.
“Oh. Uh, nice. Whose kid is she?” Because for a second Hitoshi figured Eraser must mean his neighbour wherever he lives when he isn’t teaching, but that would make even less sense–
“Ours. That is, UA’s.”
– than this.
“She’s the reason I’ve been so busy lately,” Eraser explains, in a way that sounds almost apologetic towards Hitoshi. Except then his pant leg visibly goes tight from Eri’s little fists clenching in the fabric and his mentor suddenly looks like he wants to kick himself.
“Part of it, anyway. Eri’s been staying at the hospital for a while, so I’ve spent a lot of time visiting her. I was lucky, because the nurses didn’t let many others visit while she was getting better. But now I get to share her company with everyone. I think Deku was quite jealous.”
The last part is directed at Eri, who has now released Eraser’s pants and is nodding, wide-eyed, at the notion of her company being something to inspire jealousy.
“I can see why,” Hitoshi agrees, crouching down to her level because he knows that much at least. “So are you gonna be training with us from now on?”
“Uh-huh,” she says shyly, looking to Eraser for confirmation.
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” she parrots. Her voice is high and hoarse like she doesn’t use it very often.
“Lucky me,” Hitoshi tries a smile. “Eraser’s had you all to himself for long enough.”
He makes eye contact with the man in question and feels vindicated to spot a bit of ruefulness in there.
Less than half an hour later, they’re far enough from Eri for Eraser to explain the meagre details that he’s legally allowed to tell Hitoshi. They look down at her as he speaks, both dangling from the canopy while Eri collects branches and twigs on the forest floor below.
And unlike Bakugou, Hitoshi takes to this one completely.
