Chapter Text
Shouta wouldn’t say he’s a particularly heavy sleeper. It's an unfortunate sacrifice that comes with his line of work, both for scheduling reasons and personal ones. It’s not like it doesn’t come in handy though, as he’s certain he would have lost ten years off his life minimum if he hadn’t stirred to the sound of his bedroom door creaking open and instead awoke to a figure standing over his bed. Said figure was currently standing in the doorway, shifting foot to foot anxiously, and it’s both relieving and deeply exasperating that Shouta recognised that unruly mop of hair immediately.
“Midoriya,” he began hesitantly, like he almost didn't want to know, shifting to sit up in bed. Unfortunately for him, he’s not only the kid’s homeroom teacher but also the adult in this situation, which means he had to bite the bullet and ask anyway. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be asleep, kid.”
His voice came out sleep-thick and groggy as he rubbed his eye with his fist in an attempt to wake himself up. It's only half successful, but Shouta will take what he can get.
The kid still hadn’t moved, and while Shouta knew logically that his students wouldn’t wake him up at an ungodly hour if it wasn’t crucially important, he still felt a familiar pang of frustration at the continued silence. Or maybe that was concern. It's hard to tell them apart when he’s still half asleep.
“Midoriya,” he tried again, a little firmer this time as he dipped his head down a little lower, making an attempt to meet the kid’s averted eyes. Obviously it didn’t work since Midoriya was way over there while Shouta was way over here and therefore did not have the tactical advantage in this situation, but he felt disappointed all the same when Midoriya only seemed to freeze up further.
Grumbling, Shouta accepted that he is in fact gonna have to be the rational adult and deal with this, which also meant getting out of his incredibly comfortable bed. It's a shame, but he can lament after he’s sure his student isn’t in any immediate danger. He peeled back the duvet and shuffled out the bed, scrubbing an exhausted hand through some serious bed-head as he tried to think of a logical explanation as to why his problem child is currently standing stock-still in his doorway like a spooked kid. The baby goat, not a tiny human.
He approached cautiously. Only Midoriya’s silhouette was visible due to the room being shrouded in darkness, and Shouta kind of wished he’d had the foresight to turn on a lamp or something before he was already halfway across the room. The kid might have been having an intense staring match with the floor at the moment, but even if he wasn’t, it would have been difficult to make out what expression he wore from the lack of light.
In the time it took him to pad over to Midoriya, the kid hadn't budged at all. Instead, his head was hung to his chest and his shoulders were bunched up to his ears with tension. He looked ashamed and Shouta couldn't for the life of him figure out why.
A quick once-over confirmed the kid wasn’t actively bleeding out from a hidden training injury— or injured at all, actually— but that didn’t really tell him much. Especially not when it comes to Midoriya.
“Kid? Did something happen?” Shouta pressed once he was in front of his student, tone softening slightly now that they’re face to face. It felt wrong to talk any louder in the quiet, even if he was currently smothering the urge to take Midoriya by the shoulders and give him a good shake.
No, instead he slowly placed a palm on the kid’s upper arm and tilted his head downwards again to try and get another look at his expression. Shouta’s own was twisted into a frown from a mix of concern and hesitant confusion. It softened slightly when some of the tension bled out of his student after the hand made contact. It wasn’t like Midoriya to freeze up like this nor was it like him to just stop responding despite clearly having heard his teacher. At least, Shouta assumed he was being heard if the pinched brows and uncomfortable expression on Midoriya’s face was anything to go by.
Now that he’s closer, he could begin to make out a thin sheet of sweat coating his student’s face and arms as his eyes adjusted to the dark. Shouta frowned harder. Midoriya’s sudden appearance paired with what looked a lot like some kind of emotional distress wasn’t something he felt equipped to deal with, but he knew he didn’t have much choice in the matter right now. The kid was here, so this was Shouta’s problem to deal with. He felt more alert now, anyway.
Squeezing Midoriya’s upper arm, Shouta exhaled in mild frustration, not entirely sure what to say.
“Midoriya,” he tried again quietly, purposefully making his infliction softer around the edges instead of the no-nonsense tone he typically strayed towards when dealing with teenagers. He was sure putting Midoriya any further on edge would be a mistake on his part.
The kid only shuffled on his feet nervously like he had something on his mind but wasn’t sure how to express it— if he was allowed to express it— and Shouta bit back a sigh. He gave Midoriya’s arm another squeeze, craning his neck lower to try and enter his student’s limited field of vision.
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, kid. You aren’t in any trouble and I’d like to help you, but I can’t do that if you won’t let me.”
Shouta let the words sit in the air for longer than he felt comfortable with, giving Midoriya an opportunity to gather his bearings and likely his nerve too. The frown on Shouta’s face was still very much prevalent, but he waited patiently for the response he could see his student trying to formulate.
See, most people would describe him as a hard-ass teacher that was all work and no play, which is true. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t privy to how his students worked either. It was only logical he was in tune to their non-verbal cues after all, because if he’d learned anything in his years being a teacher, it was that teenagers are stupid. Reckless, too. There seemed to be this universal agreement between all of them that stated they were to neglect their health in favour of overworking themselves, put themselves in harm’s way in the name of “justice” and “being a hero” (“self-sacrificial idiocy” was a better term in Shouta’s opinion) and hiding serious injuries from both him and Recovery Girl because they had somehow got it in their heads that they had to lick their own wounds privately if they didn’t want to be seen as weak. It never failed to baffle him, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t get it. He was 17 once too. That’s why it was his job to drill that right out of them as soon as he could. The results were varied, much to his utter frustration.
Not to mention these kids had some serious tells. All teenagers did, in one way or another. When Shouta had Mirio in his first year heroics class, he’d always been able to tell when the kid was feeling unsure of himself or confused about the material in front of him. He tended to overcompensate, almost. Smile just a little wider and laugh just a bit too often between the natural pauses in conversation, while also managing to deflect the topic of said conversation away from himself until he’d regained his bearings again. It was interesting, to say the least.
His current first years were no better, if not worse. Uraraka tended to ramble on and on when she was nervous, and Bakugou’s temper would be on a hair’s trigger when something was bothering him, snapping at anything and everything. He’d nearly gotten into a physical altercation with Midoriya once because the boy’s shirt was “too white” and it was “fucking irritating”.
Shouta was not ashamed to admit he poured a shot into his coffee that day.
Asui exhibited more frog-like behaviours when caught off guard or under intense pressure she wasn’t prepared for, like a mission or training exercise going disastrously wrong. Todoroki had a habit of covering anything held in his right hand or even touching the right side of his body in a thin layer of frost if he was feeling particularly angry or anxious. Momo second-guessed herself more often and was more eager to follow the crowd when something shook her confidence. Sero avoided eye contact when nervous and Mina couldn’t control her facial expressions to save her life. If she was put out by something her teacher said, he’d know about it.
The list went on. Point is, Shouta knew when something was eating at his students. Like now, for example. Midoriya’s tells were a little harder to spot as they could easily be written off as simply the awkwardness that comes with being a teenager, but Shouta got the feeling that was entirely on purpose instead of the wacky coincidence Midoriya played it off as.
Disguising any traces of discomfort with charisma— or in this case, avoidance altogether— was a learned behaviour, and Shouta was incredibly curious as to why Midoriya of all people almost seemed to be a master at it.
Almost.
The wringing of his hands, the pinch in his brow, the way his lips seemed to part every few seconds until he swallowed back his words for the 4th time — Midoriya was thinking.
Shouta learned the hard way that this kid’s brain never actually stopped moving. It was constantly working, always turning ideas over even if it’s background noise.
To anybody else, it would look like he wasn’t going to say anything and was just too embarrassed to speak up now that he’d woken his teacher up. Shouta knew better; his student was just trying to find the right words.
It took longer than he was expecting but Midoriya eventually found his voice. Shouta had been squeezing his arm every now and then in the meantime.
“Sensei, I just—” Midoriya choked out, and wow, Shouta was not prepared for how wrecked this kid sounded. His voice wavered and was utterly hoarse, like he’d been screaming himself raw.
Dread settled in Shouta’s stomach at the mere thought. He really hoped it was just a figure of speech and not an accurate description.
It appeared Midoriya hadn’t actually planned this far ahead though, because he cut himself off with a sigh and deflated just enough to make Shouta’s chest pang with an emotion he didn’t recognise and didn’t care to identify. When Midoriya spoke again, his voice was significantly more defeated than before.
“I can’t sleep.”
It wasn’t Shouta’s proudest moment when he stood there and just… blinked owlishly at the kid. Can’t sleep? A part of him wanted to ask if that was it, but that sounded demeaning to even his own ears. Instead, he nodded slowly, as if digesting and processing the information presented to him.
“Okay,” he murmured back slowly, keeping his tone placetory and calm despite his steadily growing alarm. “Okay, so you can’t sleep. Thank you for telling me.”
Is he doing this right? He had no idea. How was he even supposed to help in this situation? The bags under his eyes weren’t for decorative purposes, after all.
He began to rub up and down Midoriya’s arm in a way he hoped was soothing and tried not to stumble through this. He was just so unsure as to why the kid felt the need to go to him of all people instead of one of his classmates who’d probably be way better suited to handle this. Shouta usually left the mushy part of teaching teenagers to people like Hizashi or Inui. He was never all that good with emotions, tending to be blunt where it often wasn’t necessary. Brutally so, at times.
“You can’t sleep,” he repeated as Midoriya had gone quiet again. The kid still won’t look at him. “Did something happen?”
Midoriya just shrugged noncommittally and did some more awkward shuffling. Shouta had to repeatedly remind himself to be patient because this was a teenager and teenagers were stupid when it came to anything remotely important. It was a level of self control he was unaware he even possessed.
Thankfully, his student seemed to be warming up to him a bit more— or maybe he, too, was wanting to get this over with as fast as possible due to the sheer awkwardness of their interaction— and eventually mumbled back in a tone much softer but still drenched with defeat and apprehension, like he was unsure if he was doing something wrong.
“It’s stupid, sensei. I, uh, had a nightmare.”
Oh.
Midoriya finally lifted his head to gauge his teacher’s reaction, but Shouta must have been silent for a split second too long because the kid started to ramble. “And since moving into the dorms, you’ve always said to come get you if we need help or something happens no matter what time it is and I just woke up so scared and I didn’t know what to do so I came here but I promise I really didn’t mean to disturb you, sir! It’s not a big deal and it was silly to bother you, I’m sorry to cause a fuss over nothing—”
Shouta felt like an idiot. Now that the answer was in front of him, it was glaringly obvious what the problem was and he didn’t know how he didn’t put it together to begin with. Midoriya was still rambling sheepishly, eyes flicking to and from Shouta’s face as his hands wrung together so tight it couldn’t have been anything short of painful.
The word-vomit was so quick Shouta almost didn’t catch it, and his brows furrowed when it clicked that Midoriya was anxious because he was expecting to be scolded. Ah. Time to nip that in the bud.
“Okay, okay— stop. Stop, kid.”
His hand came up in front of the kid to silence him and Midoriya’s mouth snapped shut with a squeak, eyes wide and glazed with something terrified and not-quite there. Shouta had seen it too many times in himself after particularly gruelling nightmares, so it’s not like he was unfamiliar. He just never thought he’d see that look on one of his students.
“I’m not going to punish you. You did the right thing coming to get me,” he murmured, resting the hand hovering idly between them on the boy’s shoulder. It seemed to help by the way Midoriya relaxed slightly. “I’m sorry to hear you had a nightmare. Are you feeling alright?” His tone was gentle in a way that surprised him but he didn’t let it show on his face. Checking in with his student felt like a good place to start, right?
Midoriya nodded much too quickly, a strained smile on his lips despite the fact that the dried tear tracks on his splotchy face was glaringly obvious now that his head wasn’t hung so low his chin was practically inside his ribcage.
Strangely, Midoriya seemed to be under the impression that if he sounded enthusiastic enough then his teacher wouldn’t notice it. It might have been ungodly late but Shouta was no fool, and he knew damn well the kid was aware of that.
“Oh, uh, yeah! I’m alright, sensei, you don’t have to worry about me—”
Shouta squeezed his shoulder firmly, tone taking on a warning tone. “Midoriya.”
The poorly fabricated optimism slid right off his student’s face, something more subdued taking its vacancy. His eyes looked vaguely haunted as he started to fidget again and averted his eyes away.
For a moment, Shouta studied the kid in his doorway. Splotchy face, tear tracks, shaking hands and a general aura of anxiety. He sighed, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose as he softened his tone and dropped his hands from Midoriya’s upper body to cross his arms over his chest.
“You don’t have to lie to me, kid. I get it.”
Midoriya’s expression did something funny where it filtered through several emotions in the span of only a few seconds. Shouta could only read frustration and anxiety before the boy’s expression became unreadable, which was alarming for someone like Shouta who’d spent years learning to read people for his hero work. The fact that Midoriya was wearing such a strange expression almost made him want to lift his student’s chin so he could get a proper read on the kid, but thankfully he didn’t have to.
It must have only been a handful of seconds but to Shouta it felt like much longer before Midoriya lifted his head again and met his teacher’s eye once more, looking equal parts nervous as he does rueful.
“I’m okay, sensei,” he repeated much quieter, and there’s a conviction in his tone that Shouta can’t quite place but found himself believing anyway. At least to some degree. “Really. After everything we’ve been through this year, I guess it’s to be expected.”
There was this god-awful pull to his student’s lips that might have been a smile if his eyes weren’t so terribly haunted by whatever he’d seen, and Shouta wanted nothing more than to scoop the kid up and wrap him in a blanket. Midoriya looked resigned to the situation, mirthful in a way that was leaning more towards gallow’s humour than genuine amusement.
Shouta made an active effort to keep his expression schooled into something calm, but there was nothing he could do about the frown pulling at his lips.
“I suppose so,” he murmured softly in response. There was a mutual understanding that there was nothing Shouta could say right now that would fix the situation or make the burden of this kid’s experiences any less heavy.
Or at least, that’s the impression he was under until Midoriya began to fidget like he had something to say again.
Shouta beat him to it this time.
“Is there a reason you’re at my door specifically, kid?” he asked carefully, gaze scrutinising as he picked apart his student’s every move with his eyes. Midoriya swallowed nervously. His lips parted as if to speak before closing again, and it took him several beats to find the right words.
Rubbing the back of his neck, Midoriya’s words come out hushed and sheepish. “I keep getting them. The nightmares, that is. And, um, usually when I wake up, my quirk’s activated and it just makes the anxiety worse. I can feel it thrumming in my veins and I don’t know how to turn it off. But- but you can cancel out quirks, so I guess I was just wondering if maybeIcouldsleepinyourbed?”
The end of his sentence came out rushed and in an octave higher, but Shouta caught it all the same. The kid wanted to spend the remainder of the night in his bed. The idea made him feel a nauseating mix of apprehension and warmth in his chest.
“You don’t have to agree, obviously!” Midoriya barrels on nervously, waving his hands in front of him. “But, um! I just figured that it was a logical solution! Because I really don’t want to accidentally break something or myself by moving wrong or getting up to pee and I might not have another one tonight but I’m really tired so I just thought—”
“Okay.”
Midoriya blinked, once then twice. “What?” he said eloquently.
“I said okay.” Shouta stepped back to make enough room to swing his door open invitingly. “You can stay here tonight.”
The kid seemed to be utterly baffled at how quickly Shouta caved to his request, but he was quick about shaking it off and taking a hesitant step over the threshold into his teacher’s dorm.
“I, uh— thank you, sensei.”
Shouta merely nodded and shut the door quietly once the kid was inside, padding over to his abandoned bed and patting the empty side. This entire situation was so far out of his comfort zone it was practically in another continent entirely, but Shouta would never fault Midoriya or turn him away when he was finally, finally looking out for his own well-being. Maybe encouraging good behaviour would harbour better results in the future.
He crawled under the covers, quietly lamenting over how his spot was no longer warm. “Come on then. Climb in, kid.”
For the seemingly hundredth time tonight, Midoriya hesitated.
“Are you sure this is okay?” he questioned in a tentative whisper. As if Shouta was about to sit up with a party popper and yell “Just kidding!” in his face, completed with jazz hands.
“Midoriya—” Shouta huffed, sitting back up. “I said it’s fine, kid. I don’t want you hurting yourself in your sleep, so I’d much rather you stay in here where I can cancel out your quirk if you feel that’s going to be a possibility.” Then, much quieter, he added. “It’s alright. You’re safe here with me.”
It seemed to do the trick, because Midoriya was creeping around the bed in the dark to the empty side (albeit still rather tentative) in record time. The bed barely even creaked with his movements when Shouta knew that it should have.
Once his student was curled up under the covers, Shouta shuffled back down again to get comfortable himself.
“Wake me up if you need me,” he murmured to Midoriya firmly in the quiet and only rolled over once the kid nodded.
“Goodnight, sensei.”
“Go to sleep, kid.”
Midoriya was silent after that. He shifted every now and again, but eventually fell still and stayed that way. Shouta would have assumed the kid had fallen asleep as instructed if he himself were able to drift off like he normally would. Instead, he found himself lying awake and wired by the sudden tension that had infiltrated the air.
He hadn’t been expecting it but he had a feeling he knew what was causing it.
Rolling over, Shouta found his suspicions were correct. Midoriya was lying on his side facing his teacher with a pensive expression. If it were anybody else, it might have been creepy. But the eyes he’d felt boring into the back of his neck were more concerning than they were disturbing, so Shouta was willing to let it slide.
Midoriya met his eye head on, frowning. His hands started to fidget again, wringing together tightly in barely noticeable movements. Like he was trying to be subtle about it, or perhaps absentminded. A habit ingrained so deeply into his subconscious that he didn’t even realise he was doing it.
“It’s rude to stare, you know,” commented Shouta after it was clear the kid wasn’t going to say anything, tone low and surprisingly soft in the quiet.
Midoriya had the sense to look sheepish. “I’m nervous,” he murmured back. “That I’ll hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you, sensei.”
Shouta took a moment to truly observe his student, or to the best of his ability in the darkness that enveloped them. Pinched brows and tired eyes stared back, several emotions reflected in the glaze coating them. He glanced down towards the white-knuckled grip Midoriya had his fingers twisted into and made a choice.
His tone was decisive, leaving no room for argument. “You won’t.”
It took a bit of shuffling to adjust himself. Midoriya peered at his teacher with a guarded curiosity.
Which then faltered into a stunned, wide-eyed expression when Shouta presented his hand in the space between them on the bed, palm up.
“Here,” he encouraged gently, motioning to Midoriya’s twisted and entangled fingers with his eyes. “You’re hurting yourself, kiddo. Thought I told you I wouldn’t let that happen.”
The kid looked completely awe-struck as he stared at Shouta’s palm like it was some magnificent, fantastical concept. He can’t really make out Midoriya’s expression as clear as he’d like to in the darkness of the room, but he didn’t miss the way his student’s features softened as he very cautiously placed his palm into Shouta’s. Like it was something precious.
Shouta decided he wasn’t going to read too much into that for his own sanity.
“There you go,” he murmured once he had Midoriya’s hand clasped his own. “Now was that so hard?”
Shouta gave the hand a gentle squeeze, barely any pressure at all as to not further aggravate the pain Shouta knew was probably throbbing throughout every muscle and tendon of it. He allowed himself a soft smile when Midoriya immediately squeezed back twice in quick succession. The darkness would disguise it anyway. Even if it didn’t, Shouta found he didn’t mind all that much when the kid was staring at him like he hung the moon and stars himself.
It’s not like Shouta was under the impression that stopping Midoriya’s anxious fidgeting would immediately knock him out, but concern still creeped into the cavity that was his chest (No, Hizashi, he did not have a heart nor did he feel any softness in his non-exist heart for his class) when Midoriya remained silent. But Shouta didn’t push. Instead, he busied himself with taking in the obscured look of distance on the kid’s face. Now that he’d actually relaxed a bit, the glaze film covering his eyes was a lot more noticeable to Shouta. And all the more worrying. To see that look on a face so young struck an uncomfortable chord in Shouta, the dissonance making his brows furrow slightly. It wasn’t how Midoriya was supposed to look.
He was pulled abruptly from his worrying when Midoriya mumbled something haunted into the silence. “It was about you.”
“What?”
“The nightmare. You—” Midoriya cut himself off with a faint, frustrated huff and averted his eyes towards a loose thread on the edge of his pillow like it was even remotely interesting. Shouta knew an avoidance technique when he saw one.
But he let the kid have it for now and squeezed the hand in his grasp (small, so much smaller than Shouta’s that he felt nauseous knowing they had been stained with more blood than they ever should have been) again.
Shouta hated the idea that his students were having nightmares not even a full school year into their hero training. They were teenagers, basically children! He hated even more than they were having them about him. It wasn’t news to Shouta that he’d failed to protect his students time and time again, but it still stung and struck a very sensitive nerve to know they knew it too. That they dreamt about it and were apparently just as haunted by it as Shouta was himself.
He swallowed and it felt suspiciously thick but he forced himself to speak anyway. If anyone asked, he’d blame the lump in his throat for how soft his voice came out. “It’s okay. You can tell me, if you want to. It’s alright.”
Midoriya huffed again, brows furrowing like he couldn’t quite pick something apart in his head no matter how many times he turned it over. But it was when the apple of Midoriya’s throat bobbed as he, too, swallowed thickly that it dawned on Shouta that maybe the kid just couldn’t get the words out. He found that highly relatable at the moment.
Shouta smoothed his thumb over his student’s knuckles while he waited. Whatever it was seemed pretty significant to Midoriya, so he had no qualms about biding his time even if he couldn’t yet decide whether the distinct lack of muttering was a relief or a major worry.
“It was you,” Midoriya eventually whispered like he was telling a grave secret. “I don’t— It wasn’t anything specific, not anything that’s actually happened but—” He cut himself off, taking a shaking breath. Shouta smoothed his thumb over the kid’s knuckles again. He could only hope it was soothing. “You were there and we were there and there were villains, and— and you got hurt trying to protect us.”
Midoriya's voice was particularly strangled and suddenly Shouta understood. Somehow, it never really occurred to him that the images of him beaten and bloody after giving all of himself to protect his students would stick with them. It should’ve, he lamented, but it didn’t. And now he was paying the price for his lack of insight.
“Oh,” Shouta breathed eloquently. “Oh, kid.”
The kid continued. Shouta almost wished he wouldn’t. “You got yourself killed and I couldn’t—” a deep, shuddering inhale, then, “I couldn’t save you, sensei. I watched you die and I couldn’t save you.” Midoriya curled into himself, squeezing Shouta’s hand with much more force than necessary. It kind of hurt, in all honesty, but Shouta would rather saw the appendage off with a shoelace than dislodge it from his student’s grip.
For a moment, Shouta let himself lie there and listen to Midoriya’s hitching breaths. He didn’t know how to proceed, he’d never expected himself to be in such a situation so he never bothered preparing for it, but here he was— holding the hand of his student that had crawled into his bed at an ungodly hour of the night. Said student was currently in tears over what sounded like a particularly horrific nightmare.
Shouta was a capable hero. He could protect his students from most things, but he couldn’t protect them from themselves. No matter how much he wanted to.
But… maybe he could do something else instead. It was a gamble and felt like the ballsiest move of Shouta’s entire life, but it was odds he’d take if it meant he could make one of his kids feel better. (Shut up, Hizashi.)
Carefully, Shouta’s free arm shifted until it, too, was free from under the duvet. He brought it up to the space between Midoriya and himself and kept going, until it very gently landed on the side of Midoriya’s head. Shouta felt a pang of guilt when the kid startled regardless of how gentle he’d been, but it was easy to ignore in favour of brushing unruly locks of dark green hair out of Midoriya’s face.
“Hey,” he crooned softly. Nevermind, forget about the ‘pang’ of guilt. Shouta’s chest felt like it had caved in completely when he got a clearer view of Midoriya’s face, which was quite frankly miserable. Tears slid down the bridge of his nose and down his temple to soak into the fabric of the pillow. At that moment, his student looked frighteningly young. “Hey, look at me, kiddo. I need you to take a deep breath. Alright?”
Shouta’s tone was patient and soft, but Midoriya either didn’t hear him or blatantly ignored him as he did neither of those things. He bit back what felt like his thousandth sigh of the evening as he brushed more hair out of his student’s face. What to do, what to do. He might have been used to the sight of Midoriya crying (as was everybody who attended UA), but this was noticeably different and Shouta was a bit lost on how to proceed. Quelling the tears and emotional outburst was a given, but actually doing so was proving to be harder than he’d thought. The fact that Midoriya was openly leaning into the hand brushing through his hair wasn’t lost on Shouta, however, so maybe he could just settle for that.
His hand smoothed through the hair behind Midoriya’s ear as the boy cried quietly. From what Shouta could see, it was almost as if the kid didn’t want to be seen like this. Shouta knew that wasn’t an option though. The physical sensation was proving to be soothing if the way the sobs wracking Midoriya’s shoulders lessened, but it wasn’t a fix-all. Shouta would have to try something else.
“Hey,” he tried again quietly. “You don’t have to look at me if you don’t want to, but I just need to know you’re listening, kid. Can you give me a nod if you are?”
It took several seconds before Midoriya forced himself to nod. It was more of a head twitch than anything else, but Shouta took it in stride and rewarded the kid with a light scratch behind his ear.
“Good. Just listen to my voice,” Shouta murmured. “I need you to know that I understand how scary nightmares can be, how real they can feel. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what’s happened and what hasn’t, or it’s impossible to convince yourself that what you’ve seen won’t happen further down the line.” If Midoriya’s sharp inhale was anything to go by, he’d hit the nail on the head. He continued to brush digits through the sea of green atop the kid’s head and noted with pride how the tears were starting to dry. “And I wish I could tell you that one day they’ll be easier to deal with, but kid, I’m 31 and still have no idea how to handle things that happened over a decade ago sometimes.” He thinks of blue hair and cloudy skies. He thinks of blood splattered concrete, the red contrasting the grey. “However, it’s important to know you aren’t alone. You have me and you always will. I’ve got you for as long as you need. And that’s enough. Let that be enough, just for tonight. Okay?”
Shouta’s impromptu speech was a lot… sappier than he was going for in all honesty, but he was relieved to see Midoriya nod at him all the same with an exhausted expression.
“Okay,” the kid whispered. He sniffled and finally let his eyes droop shut. “It’s enough and I’m not alone. Not for tonight.”
Shouta was glad Midoriya’s eyes were shut when his expression softened into something impossibly fond. He squeezed his student's hand and felt proud when he got a squeeze back.
“Not for tonight,” he repeated as his fingers continued to run through green hair. “Not ever. It’s gonna be okay, kiddo.”
Despite his arm beginning to burn with exertion, Shouta didn’t stop with his ministrations until Midoriya relaxed entirely, limp against the pillows with deep, even breaths. He was asleep.
There was so much Shouta wanted to talk about with this kid. Midoriya carried himself like an open book, but an aura of mystery followed him wherever he went. It was palpable in everything he did, at least to his teacher, and Shouta got the feeling the world only saw what the kid wanted it to. He couldn’t say he didn’t know the feeling.
He continued to softly brush his fingers through Midoriya’s hair for quite some time after the kid fell asleep. Longer than Shouta would ever admit to. It still didn’t feel like long enough when sleep started doing its best to pull him under. Shouta’s wrist slowed, heavy and lethargic, and the thumb that was still stroking Midoriya’s knuckles did the same.
He very gently pulled his palm away from the kid’s hair and was left with a strange pang of longing in his chest. At least that’s what he thinks it was, considering how much he didn’t really want to move away at all. It’s hard to tell when half asleep and if Shouta’s honest, he didn’t really want to know what the feeling was. Didn’t care to. All that mattered to him at the moment was the student in his bed feeling soothed and safe, which he was pretty certain he accomplished. After all, it wouldn’t do well for Midoriya to be exhausted in class tomorrow. That’s all.
Eyes drooping, Shouta squeezed Midoriya’s hand softly, lips curling into a tiny smile when he got no response. The kid was out, and for that he was relieved. Despite his generally cold and stoic demeanour, he really didn’t like it when his students were in pain or distress. It made him almost frantic with this strange urge to soothe and protect, and the only reason he’d managed to keep it under wraps was because he had excellent self-restraint and was very familiar with shoving his feelings into a box and shoving so far down out of sight it’s like it was never there to begin with.
Shouta wasn’t exactly sure when he fell asleep. No one was ever really certain, he supposed. But he slept the best he had in months and woke up fucking refreshed the next morning (which was somehow the weirdest part about this whole thing), feigning sleep and pretending not to hear Midoriya very carefully rolling out the bed and sneaking out of the room early. He didn’t dwell on it, and instead rolled over in bed. Might as well get some extra sleep before he had to drag himself up for work.