Shota hadn't gone into his career field because he thought it would be easy. He was long past the stage in life where he looked for easy.
Not hero work—there was never anything easy about staking your life on quick decisions and sheer instinct. About stepping into the middle of chaos with no guarantee you'd step back out. It was a job where every breath had stakes, every movement was a gamble, where being half a second too slow or one degree off could mean a civilian didn't make it home, or your partner bled out at your feet. He'd made peace with that part of it a long time ago. Not comfort—never that—but a grim kind of acceptance, the kind that allowed him to keep moving forward anyway.
Teaching, though… people assumed that was easier. Cleaner. Safer. They thought it was about textbooks and grading, about telling a room full of kids to sit down and pay attention. People who believed that had never stared down a classroom full of teenagers whose quirks could level buildings, burn through steel, or punch holes in the side of a mountain. They'd never tried to corral that much raw potential, that much recklessness and fear, into something that resembled discipline. Anyone who thought the job was easy had no business in the profession.
But it wasn't the lesson plans, or the training exercises, or even the constant, grinding vigilance that wore him down. Shota could live with exhaustion. He could live with sleepless nights and too many cups of coffee. What cut into him, what left him hollow in ways hero work never had, was the responsibility. The endless weight of knowing that each of them was still a kid—still clumsy, still uncertain, still fragile in all the ways they'd never admit. And yet the world demanded they be soldiers. Prodigies. Weapons, even.
And if they didn't survive? That was his fault.
It was his job to prepare them. To sharpen them into heroes capable of enduring the battlefield, while protecting the small, stubborn pieces of them that were still children. To teach them how to fight without teaching them how to lose themselves. And some days, staring at their tired faces or listening to them joke too loudly to cover the tremor underneath, Shota wondered if such a balance was even possible. If he could really do it without breaking them—or breaking himself in the process.
But he had learned to endure. That was his trade, really—not brilliance, not charisma, not some dazzling quirk that made headlines. Endurance. He knew how to take a beating, how to get back up when logic said he shouldn't, how to keep going long after anyone else would've burned out. And over time, he'd managed to hit a success rate that left him with fewer dead students than live. That counted as something like victory.
Still—despite everything he had seen, everything he had survived, every scar carved into him that he wore like proof of lessons learned—Todoroki had managed, in the span of less than a minute, to create a situation Shota had no idea how to handle.
It wasn't the kind of crisis that could be patched up with training drills or countermeasures, the sort of disaster you could anticipate if you ran enough scenarios. It wasn't even the kind of nightmare hero protocols liked to pretend they had answers for. No—this was something else entirely. This was deeper. Messier. Something raw. Unscripted. A jagged tear in the world that refused to be forced back into shape.
One moment, he was standing in the familiar role he knew—teacher, supervisor, safety net. The next, it all slipped clean out from under him, dragged away in a flood of cold that no lesson plan had ever accounted for. Manuals didn't write chapters on what to do when one of your students loses himself so completely he becomes a danger. There were no flowcharts for how to drag children back when they'd already tumbled over the edge.
And Shota, for all his reputation, for all his carefully honed instincts, found himself standing in the middle of that with nothing to hold onto. Just the hollow knowledge that he might not be equipped for this.
It was almost too easy to hand everything over to Recovery Girl.
To let the tiny, sharp-eyed medic sweep in with her cane and her certainty, commanding the room with the kind of authority only decades of practice could buy. She didn't falter, didn't hesitate. She knew exactly how to handle chaos. It came spilling through the doors of her infirmary all the time. She knew how to stitch bodies back together, how to scold stubborn kids into staying put, how to turn panic into procedure until survival looked like routine. Shota could stand aside, fold his arms, nod once, and suddenly the weight that had been pressing into his shoulders shifted as if it had never been his to carry at all. She took it from him without question.
Too easy to let himself believe the handoff was clean, that the act of stepping back absolved him of anything more. Too easy to convince himself that Recovery Girl's presence was enough—that her certainty could fill in the gaps of his own.
And then it became too easy to step out into the hall. To claim "business" like the word itself was armor, shielding him from anyone who might look too closely at the truth. Paperwork. Reports. Police follow-ups. Any excuse that sounded official enough, bureaucratic enough, to disguise what it really was.
Running.
From the sight of Kirishima pale and crumpled against the dorm wall, his shoulders hunched but his grin stretched wide like cracked glass. Teeth clenched against pain, lips pulled into something that was supposed to be reassurance, supposed to say I'm fine, don't worry, it's nothing. Because that was who he was. That stubborn insistence on carrying other people's fear instead of his own, as if he could protect everyone by making himself the punchline.
But Shota wasn't fooled. He saw the tremor under the boy's jaw, the tightness around his eyes. He saw how his breath kept hitching when he thought no one was listening. And he saw, most of all, the way Kirishima's gaze kept flicking up—darting to Shota and then away again, wide and searching. Looking for answers. For certainty. For the quiet promise that it was going to be all right.
Answers Shota didn't have. Promises he couldn't make.
Those eyes—gods, those eyes—were too much like Oboro's had been. Too open. Too earnest. Too unwilling to believe that things could really end the way they did. That sometimes, no matter how hard you fought, no matter how much you smiled through the pain, it still wasn't enough.
The resemblance was cruel.
Because once—once not so long ago—Oboro's gaze had burned with the same reckless faith. That same bone-deep conviction that if they just pushed harder, if they just held the line, if they just kept believing, they'd make it through. He had looked at Shota with that fire in his eyes, as though Shota's presence alone was enough to guarantee survival. As though he couldn't imagine a world where it wasn't.
And then the world had proven him wrong.
Shota could still see it if he let himself—concrete groaning, metal shrieking as beams tore loose, the sudden roar of flame and dust swallowing the air. He could still hear the sickening crack when the weight of an entire building came crashing down. Could still remember the hollow silence that followed, and the moment he realized Oboro's light—his laughter, his stupid optimism, the faith that had burned so brightly—had been snuffed out in an instant.
And now here was Kirishima, burned and bleeding but still smiling, still looking at him with those same eyes. Eyes that begged him to prove the world wrong again.
Shota couldn't bear it.
He told himself he was making space. That Recovery Girl needed quiet to work, and his presence—tall, silent, ragged around the edges—would only clutter the air. That the students didn't need their homeroom teacher looming in the corner like some exhausted sentinel, eyes tracking every flinch and hiss of pain as though waiting for the next shoe to drop. They needed calm. They needed certainty. They needed anything but him standing there like a shadow cast too long.
He told himself a lot of things. Stacked them one on top of the other like bricks, layering excuses into a wall. She doesn't need me here. They don't need me here. I'll just get in the way. Each one fit neatly enough to give the illusion of strength, of structure. If he built it high enough, maybe he wouldn't have to see over the top. Maybe the truth could stay buried where it couldn't reach him.
Because the truth was that he couldn't stand there anymore. Couldn't watch the tiny movements of Chiyo's hands as she worked, knowing that once they stilled, once her sharp voice softened into something that meant done, the weight would shift back to him. Back to his shoulders. His classroom. His responsibility.
He couldn't face the possibility that this time, he'd failed in ways even she couldn't patch. That the neat bandages and scolding words wouldn't be enough to set things right. That the damage went deeper than flesh, into places no medic could stitch shut.
So he stepped out.
His footsteps rang too hollow against the soft carpet. The echo of each stride wasn't a pull toward responsibility, but a push away from it. Every step was just another length of distance between him and the room he couldn't bear to stand in. Another layer of denial stretched thin over guilt.
Running. Always running. And somehow, never far enough.
Still, it wasn't entirely a lie.
There was business to attend to. Always was. He had reports waiting, statements to file, protocols to follow, and now—on top of all that—the mess Todoroki had left behind.
Todoroki had caused severe injury to a classmate. Not a scrape, not a stumble—severe. Kirishima was lucky to be conscious, lucky to still be cracking his thin, pained grin. And then, before anyone could stop him, Todoroki had run. Out of the dorms, out of his peers' reach, leaving a trail of ice like a scar.
Typically, Shota would never dream of calling a student's parent like this before the student himself had been located. That wasn't how he operated. Students came first. Parents later, if at all. The idea of dragging family into it before he had a handle on the situation went against every instinct he'd honed as both hero and teacher. The fewer outsiders involved, the better. Keep the circle tight. Control what you can.
But Todoroki was no ordinary student. And Endeavor… was no ordinary parent.
The name alone carried weight. Authority. Power. Influence that could twist outcomes before Shota had even written the first line of his report. For most parents, a call like this would be notification. For Endeavor, it was… something else. A spark thrown into kindling he couldn't quite see the edges of.
His hand hovered over the phone longer than it should have, mind running through scenarios faster than he could catalogue them: Endeavor furious. Endeavor dismissive. Endeavor demanding. None of them good. All of them unavoidable.
Shota was dialing the number before he could think better of it. Muscle memory more than choice, fingers pressing the sequence like he'd already lost the argument with himself.
The line clicked.
The phone didn't even make it through one full ring before the dial tone shifted, and a voice—hard, deep, carrying that heavy gravity of command—slid through the receiver. No hesitation. No pause to wonder who was on the other end. Just the immediate presence of a man who expected the world to answer to him.
"Eraserhead? What is it? Why are you calling so late?"
The voice on the other end was unmistakable—sharp, impatient, already threaded with suspicion. Endeavor didn't waste time with pleasantries. He never did. His tone landed like a blow, all heat and weight, and Shota felt the old familiar resistance coil in his gut.
He had spent plenty of time on calls like this before—consoling families, informing them of injuries, deaths, the kind of news that never softened no matter how carefully he shaped the words. Over the years, he had more or less built a script. Start with the apology. Give the facts plainly. Offer reassurance where he could, silence where he couldn't. Deliver it like triage: controlled, clinical, efficient.
But this wasn't just any family, and this wasn't just any call. For all his practiced detachment, Shota found himself almost at a loss for words. His throat felt tight, as though every sentence had to be dragged past barbed wire.
"I apologize for the late hour," he began, voice flat but steady. "I actually have something I need to discuss with you about Shouto. I'm sorry to say, it can't wait."
The line went sharp and still. He could almost hear Endeavor lean forward, every ounce of that massive focus narrowing in.
"Is he okay?"
The question landed like a demand, not a plea. No father's worry—at least not in any form Shota recognized. Just the brutal, clipped hunger for a report. For control.
Shota hesitated, choosing words with careful precision. "…I'm actually not sure. He left campus about twenty minutes ago."
Silence. Then a flare of heat in the man's voice, contained but unmistakable. "What? What the hell are you talking about?"
Shota pressed on, forcing himself to keep the words stripped of judgment, though bile rose in his throat. "There was… an incident… between him and another classmate. Shouto participated in unauthorized quirk use and left the other student with a bad burn. He disappeared shortly after."
He let the words settle, heavy and irrevocable, into the line. Already he could picture Endeavor's expression: fire rising, jaw set, the kind of fury that had never made him flinch but had always made him weary.
And beneath it, Shota braced himself—for what would come next.
"What happened?"
The words came out sharp, clipped—each one ground between teeth as though it cost something to force them into the open. It wasn't a question so much as a demand, the kind of brittle edge that left no room for evasion.
Shota shifted the phone against his ear, gaze fixed on the far wall of the corridor as though the blank plaster might steady him. "We're… really not sure," he said, the measured cadence of his voice at odds with the knot tightening in his chest.
"Shouto dropped another student's birthday cake. Seemingly, that same student came over to help him clean it up. The moment the other got close, Shouto activated his quirk. We're still trying to determine why. But right now, our main priority is finding him."
He let the statement end there, stripped down to the essential facts. No speculation. No condemnation. He didn't fill the air with unnecessary explanations the way younger teachers sometimes did, fumbling to soften the edges of hard truths. Shota knew better. In his experience, it was better to give silence a chance to do its work.
So he paused. Allowed the words to settle, heavy and immovable, on the other end of the line.
For once, Endeavor didn't seize the gap. Didn't cut in with accusations, or demands for efficiency, or the usual blunt insistence that Shouto be handled a certain way. The silence stretched, taut as wire, and in it Shota could hear the man's breathing—uneven, jagged, rasping through clenched teeth. A sound almost too human for the persona Endeavor usually projected.
The seconds dragged. Shota waited, arms crossed, spine pressed against the cool wall behind him, holding steady. Letting the man sit in the weight of what had been said.
Finally, he broke the quiet himself, low and deliberate. "Do you know of any places Shouto might have gone?" he asked. His voice didn't waver, though he felt the ground shifting beneath him. "Is there any chance he may come home?"
The question hung in the air, fragile and dangerous both. And on the other end, the silence deepened.
For a long moment, there was nothing. Just that harsh drag of breath, rough enough that Shota could almost picture the man's chest heaving, heat simmering under his skin.
Then Endeavor spoke, voice low but vibrating with barely restrained force.
"Home?" A short, incredulous laugh broke from him—humorless, bitter. "No. He wouldn't come here. Not Shouto."
The words landed like iron, each one heavy, final. Yet beneath the certainty was something else, a crack Shota caught immediately—because Endeavor's certainty didn't sound like knowledge. It sounded like guilt.
"If he left you, it's because he doesn't want to be found. And if he used his quirk like that…" Endeavor's tone dropped lower still, roughened by something closer to unease than fury. "…then you'll have to decide whether you're chasing a student or containing a threat."
The line went quiet again, the weight of the statement hanging thick between them. When he finally spoke again, it was clipped, businesslike, as if snapping the mask back into place.
"I don't know where he's gone. I don't know what set him off. But I can tell you this—he won't come here. Not to me. And Shouto… Shouto wasn't exactly allowed to go out on his own as a child. I don't think there's a single place in this city that he would know to go…"
The migraine throbbing at his temples begged that to be a statement saved for later. Right now, there are more pressing issues at hand. Still, Shota couldn't help but file it away. Remember it. Because what did he mean by not allowed?
"So you have no idea then."
Shota didn't mean for it to come out so clipped. Almost cruel. But the statement rang true nonetheless. This was useless. A waste of time.
And just like that, Endeavor's breathing steadied, iron shutters slamming down over whatever had flickered through. What remained was only command.
"You're his teacher. Handle it."
Shota sighed, already beginning to lower the phone. The urge to hang up thrummed through his fingers—clean, decisive, final. He was more than ready to be done with this conversation, to put an end to the stale taste of it in his mouth. Nothing good ever came from talking to Endeavor longer than strictly necessary.
But before he could disconnect, the man's voice flickered through the speaker again—lower this time, stripped of its usual bark. Graver.
"You need to get him back," Endeavor said. The words weren't barked orders now, but something closer to warning. "If he takes his dose in the morning, he'll start to go into withdrawal before long."
The irritation bloomed hot and immediate in Shota's chest, impossible to hold back. Of all the angles Endeavor could have chosen, of all the things to bring up in the aftermath of what had just happened, this was what interested him? Medication schedules? Withdrawal?
The priorities of a man who could stare past scorched skin and a vanished child in favor of pills and protocol.
"Is that really what you're concerned about right now?" Shota's tone sharpened, iron pressed flat.
"You don't understand," Endeavor snapped, quick and defensive, like a man lashing out at a wound no one else could see. The heat in his voice flared brighter for a heartbeat, a sudden burst of fire threatening to scorch through the receiver—before guttering out, ragged around the edges. "Those meds—those were the same ones Rei took. The same ones she stopped taking. The withdrawal from them was—"
He broke off abruptly. The silence on the line was heavy, jagged, as though he'd bitten clean through the words before they could escape. Shota could almost hear the weight of memory dragging him under, the sound of a man choking back something he didn't want to name. The words he had forced out hung raw between them, ground down to gravel by the time they reached Shota's ear.
Rei.
The name flickered across Shota's mind with dissonant clarity. Shouto's mother, if he remembered correctly. He had never met the woman—hadn't even caught more than a passing glimpse of her in any record or photograph. She was a ghost at the edge of Shouto's file, little more than a name on paper. Shota had never thought to question it much. Plenty of his students came from fractured homes, raised by one parent, by grandparents, by guardians who had stepped in to fill the gaps. It wasn't unusual. He hadn't seen a reason to pry.
Now, though, he couldn't help but wonder. Where had she ended up? What had become of her? Was she gone entirely, or simply… erased from the boy's day-to-day life? And why?
Before Shota could frame the question, Endeavor's voice came again—lower, strained, as though the admission had cost him something he could never take back.
"It made her do something she wouldn't have done," he said at last. The fire that had blazed so hot in his tone just moments ago had dulled to cinders now, fragile and brittle, threatening to crumble into ash with every syllable. "Something she never would've done."
The words fell into the line like stones dropped into deep water, vanishing before Shota could catch them. And for the first time in the conversation, Shota wasn't hearing the Pro Hero. He wasn't hearing the booming command of Endeavor. He was hearing something smaller. Someone cornered by his own past.
And he didn't like where that realization led.
Shota stilled, jaw tightening until the muscle ached. The air in the hallway seemed to shift around him—grow thicker, heavier—pressing close as though it too was waiting on the answer Endeavor refused to give. He hated the instinctive tug of curiosity that pulled at him, hated that he felt himself leaning toward the fracture in the man's voice. Hated, most of all, that the raw edge of it threatened—just for a second—to sound like something human.
"What the hell are you talking about?" The words left him sharper than he intended, clipped steel, suspicion flaring like claws unsheathed.
On the other end of the line, there was the sound of breath catching—too quick, too jagged—before it broke into something harsher, rough as gravel in the throat. "That…" Endeavor faltered, then forced the words out like iron dragged across stone. "That is none of your business."
And just like that, the wall slammed back into place. The crack sealed over in an instant, as though it had never been there. The same voice that had sounded close to shattering just moments ago hardened into armor, cold and unyielding. "Just… we have to find him before he does something else."
Shota's lip curled before he could stop it. The shift grated against him, that sudden, convenient invocation of we. Now, of all times—now that the situation had grown sharp enough to cut and Endeavor couldn't distance himself without bleeding.
"Oh, so now it's we?" His voice carried a dry bite, every syllable honed to a tired, merciless edge. He wasn't in the mood for shared burdens spoken as afterthoughts.
"Don't take that tone with me, Eraserhead," Endeavor shot back, the flare of heat returning with vicious precision, like a fire stoked too fast. "And don't presume to know me. Or my family. You don't know a goddamned thing."
The words rang through the receiver, heavy as physical blows, each one calculated to drive Shota back. They weren't an answer so much as a barricade, a wall thrown up against intrusion, built out of anger and desperation alike.
And Shota—silent, listening, pulse steady despite the flame—couldn't decide if he was hearing fury there, or fear. Couldn't decide which would be worse.
The sound of silence flooded his ears, sharp and final, a nothingness that seemed to stretch longer than it should have.
Endeavor had hung up.
Shota let the phone fall from his ear, arm dropping limply to his side. He exhaled hard through his nose, a low, guttural sound that was more groan than sigh. The familiar, pounding ache of a migraine had already begun to bloom behind his eyes, burrowing deep, pressing at his skull with a merciless rhythm. He dragged two fingers across his brow, as if he could pinch the pain into submission, but it clung stubbornly, hot and insistent.
That had been no help. None at all.
If anything, the conversation had only churned the water darker, leaving him with more questions than he had started with. Questions about Rei. About the medication. About what, exactly, Endeavor was so desperate to bury that even a man like him—who thrived on control, who wielded power like a weapon—had sounded, for the briefest second, as though the ground beneath him might give way.
Shota hated that the uncertainty lodged itself in his chest like shrapnel. Hated that instead of clarity, he had been handed fragments—names, half-truths, hints sharpened into barbs. Things that made no sense in isolation but refused to let go once heard.
The hallway felt colder when he finally slipped the phone back into his pocket. The silence was somehow heavier than the other man's voice had been, pressing at his temples, suffocating in its weight. He leaned back against the wall, shoulders bowing for the first time since he'd stepped out of that infirmary, and closed his eyes against the dull, relentless pounding in his skull.
More questions than answers. Always more questions.
And not nearly enough time.
Sharp footsteps echoed behind him—quick, hard, unrestrained. They struck the floor like a challenge, each one reverberating through the hall, too loud in the hush of the dorms. Shota's head snapped up, muscles taut with instinct, just in time to catch a flicker of movement at the far end. A wild shock of blond spikes, a blur of restless energy barreling forward without hesitation.
Bakugou.
The kid didn't slow. Didn't so much as glance back. The only glimpse Shota caught was the stiff set of his shoulders, the aggressive lean of his body as though sheer momentum alone might carry him through the walls if he needed it to. Then he was gone—vanished around the corner in a storm of motion and fury.
Shota opened his mouth, ready to call out, but the words snagged useless in his throat. His voice would never carry fast enough to catch that boy once he'd decided to move.
A beat later, the sound came: the heavy, shuddering slam of the front door reverberating through the building, rattling faintly against the walls. Final. Irrevocable.
Shota didn't have to look. He didn't need to.
Bakugou was gone.
And judging by the pace he'd set, by the unflinching drive in those steps, the boy wasn't planning on coming back any time soon.
Another problem child to chase down. Another blaze of stubborn will and raw power already slipping beyond his reach.
And suddenly, all Shota could feel was exhausted. Not the kind of exhaustion a nap could fix, but the marrow-deep weariness that settled into him like stone, heavy and immovable. Every limb dragged as though gravity had doubled. His head throbbed, not only from the migraine grinding behind his eyes, but from the strain of trying to hold together too many breaking points at once.
He stayed there in the hallway longer than he should have, long enough for the silence to feel thick and accusing. Too scared to go back into the common room, where he'd be forced to meet their eyes—forced to be steady when every part of him was threatening to come undone. Too exhausted to run after Bakugou. Or Todoroki. The thought alone of chasing either of them twisted something sharp in his chest, a reminder that he was only one man, and the world seemed determined to remind him of the limits of that fact.
So he lingered. He stood like a fixture against the wall, staring at the scuffed wood grain, counting his own breaths until they no longer came too fast. The voices from the common room leaked faintly down the hall—quiet at first, subdued, then slowly rising as students found their courage, their chatter returning in tentative fragments. It was the sound of life creeping back into the room, of shock receding enough to let routine fill in its place.
Only when the noise reached something close to normal, and the pounding in his heart had dulled from a hammer to a muted drum, did Shota finally move. His feet carried him forward with deliberate slowness, each step weighed down by reluctance he couldn't quite smother.
He slipped back into the doorway without a word, his presence muted, his body folding into shadow as if he could pass for a spectator instead of the teacher responsible for all of this. He stood there, silent, eyes scanning the room, watching his students as if from a distance. Watching—because stepping closer meant claiming a responsibility he wasn't sure he could shoulder in this moment.
Kirishima lay sprawled face-down on the sofa, his cheek mashed into the cushion, his breathing slow and heavy with the kind of sleep that came only from sheer exhaustion. His right arm was swaddled in a thick sheath of white bandages, layered carefully from wrist to shoulder, the faint antiseptic scent clinging to the air around him. One of his legs dangled limply off the edge of the sofa, the heel of his sock twitching every so often as if some leftover dream still tugged at him. A dark, unbroken line of drool had slipped from the corner of his slack mouth, soaking into the fabric below.
Out cold.
The rest of the class wasn't so fortunate. They were scattered across the common room like wreckage after a storm, clustered into tight knots of two or three. Conversations whispered just beneath the threshold of hearing, threads of speculation and worry, half-formed questions that died the moment anyone's eyes landed on Shota. Every few seconds, glances flicked toward the couch where Kirishima lay, then away again, as though even looking at him too long might disturb the fragile balance Recovery Girl had carved out of chaos.
A few pairs of eyes slid toward Shota as he crossed the threshold, wary, searching, measuring. Others turned to Recovery Girl, who stood planted like the room's true center of gravity. The cane in her hand seemed less a crutch and more a scepter, the quiet authority she carried radiating outward in the steadiness of her presence.
Her gaze found him immediately. Sharp, unflinching, as if she had been tracking the door for his inevitable return. Shota felt the weight of it before he even fully crossed the threshold. He wouldn't have been surprised if she had been waiting—if she had counted on him needing space but had known, all along, that he'd have to circle back.
The moment their eyes met, she moved. For anyone else, the hobble of her gait and the cane in her grip might have spelled fragility. But with Recovery Girl, the effect was the opposite. She cut across the room with uncanny speed, each click of her cane on the floor brisk, deliberate, commanding. She moved like someone who had never wasted time in her life—and certainly wasn't about to start now.
"The boy will be just fine." Recovery Girl's voice carried easily across the low hum of the common room, firm enough that every nearby whisper went still. "The burn looked bad, but it was mostly surface-level. Painful, yes, but not catastrophic." Her tone softened only slightly as her eyes flicked back toward Kirishima, still drooling into the sofa cushion. "I healed him as much as his stamina would allow. The rest will take time. A few weeks, perhaps—but he should make a full recovery."
The murmurs in the room shifted, the subtle ripple of collective relief passing through the class. Someone let out a shaky exhale, another whispered something Shota didn't catch, but the tension in the air loosened by a fraction. Still taut, but not strangling.
Recovery Girl turned back to him then, and the soft edge in her voice evaporated. The look she gave him was sharper than any scalpel, her gaze pinning him in place with surgical precision. She let the pause stretch, deliberate, as though to remind him that the reprieve she had given Kirishima was only temporary, and that healing one boy didn't erase the absence of another.
"So," she said at last, her voice lower, weightier. Clearly meant for his ears only. "What are you going to do now?"
She didn't have to clarify. She didn't have to say the name. They both knew who she meant. They both knew what the real wound in the room was.
Shota dragged a hand down his face, fingers scraping over the rough stubble at his jaw. He pressed harder than he meant to, knuckles grinding against the corner of one eye until white sparks burst across his vision. The ache that followed was sharp, a reminder of how little rest he'd had and how far he was from getting any now.
"I'm… not sure," he admitted at last, voice low, the words dragging like stones out of his throat. "I already called Endeavor. He was… unhelpful, to say the least."
A noncommittal hum was her only response, but it carried more weight than half the speeches he'd ever heard from Pro Heroes. She didn't look away, didn't blink, just studied him with that unflinching gaze that had seen far more than he would ever want to. The kind of look that stripped through layers without asking permission, like she was seeing not just the circles under his eyes or the set of his shoulders, but the cracks in the bones beneath.
"Bakugou is gone too," Shota continued after a pause, voice rougher now, pulled thin by the sheer effort of keeping it steady. "He left just a few minutes ago. My thought is, for now, to focus on finding him. I think…" he let the hesitation linger, the words heavy on his tongue, "…I think Bakugou may just be the easier one to track down in this moment."
"Oh?" The single word cut in sharp, carrying both challenge and skepticism. Recovery Girl cocked her head slightly, one brow lifting in a way that might have passed for amusement under different circumstances. But here, in the wake of bandages and panic and vanished students, it landed closer to incredulity.
Her eyes narrowed as she leaned on her cane. "And how do you plan to go about that?"
Shota grimaced, the line of his mouth tightening into something that wasn't quite frustration, wasn't quite resignation. He knew how thin the idea sounded, but it was all he had.
"Right now…" he said slowly, dragging the words out like he was pulling them from mud, "…the only way I can think to. Ask his classmates. Bakugou has friends, right? One of them has to know places he might go. Midoriya… maybe."
The name felt strange on his tongue in the context—more question than answer. Midoriya, who always seemed to keep his hands too full with the weight of other people's business. Midoriya… who Bakugou seemed to hate. But also seemed to know better than anyone else.
Maybe out of trust, or more likely out of mercy, Recovery Girl didn't press him further. She only gave a quiet hum, the kind that seemed to say everything and nothing at once, before nodding with that deliberate, unhurried gravity of hers. A moment later, she was already hobbling away, cane tapping sharply against the floor as she muttered something about keeping an eye on Kirishima. The words trailed behind her like smoke—thin, practical, and absolute.
And then she was gone.
The silence she left in her wake pressed down heavier than her presence ever had. Suddenly it was all on him again. The weight of the room, of the injured boy on the couch, of the restless cluster of teenagers who kept flicking glances his way like he might have the answers to all of this—like he was built to hold them steady.
The only responsible adult in the room.
The thought lodged like a stone in his chest. He'd worn the title long enough that it should've sat comfortably by now, but it never did. Not on nights like this. Not when the seams of his authority felt stretched to breaking. Not when the truth gnawed at the edges of him: he didn't know what he was doing any more than they did. He wasn't some unshakable pillar of certainty. He wasn't a guiding light. He was just a tired man in a dark room, trying to hold back a tide with his bare hands.
And still they looked at him. With those eyes—bright and sharp and desperately young. Hopeful in ways that made his stomach twist. Like he could fix this, like he wasn't just scrambling to keep up, to contain one crisis before the next inevitably broke loose.
Unbidden, Todoroki's words from the other day surfaced in his mind, uncoiling like smoke. They threaded through his thoughts with the persistence of a song you couldn't shut off, the kind that dug in its teeth and refused to fade no matter how badly you wanted silence.
"Do you think some people are just… made to hurt others?"
The question replayed again and again, Todoroki's flat tone overlaying itself on Shota's present exhaustion, until he could almost convince himself the boy was standing in front of him, waiting for an answer he'd never given properly.
He couldn't stop dissecting it. The way Todoroki's eyes hadn't quite met his. The pause that had stretched too long before the words left his mouth. His own curt response, the kind of brusque dismissal he leaned on too easily when students prodded too close to the bone. Had Todoroki known something like this was coming? Had he planned it? Forced to say it out loud before it swallowed him whole?
The idea seemed ridiculous—planning to harm a classmate, choosing it with cold intention. That wasn't Todoroki. That wasn't the boy he knew, the boy who always held himself rigid, locked down, as though every movement might betray something fragile underneath. But then again, it had seemed ridiculous to imagine him hurting anyone here at all. Until he had.
And so the questions tangled tighter. Had it been a confession? A warning? Worse—had it been a cry for help? One he had brushed off, convinced himself wasn't urgent enough, hadn't wanted to believe was urgent enough?
That truth whispered at him like a draft through a cracked window, constant, inescapable, colder than any ice Todoroki could summon. Somehow, it was sharper, more suffocating, than the alternative.
This wasn't the boy's malice. Not his apathy. Not some inborn flaw stamped into his blood.
This was his. Shota's. His negligence. His refusal to look long enough, deep enough. His instinct to give space when he should have pressed harder.
He dragged a hand down his face, nails scraping against stubble, but it didn't quiet the echo of that voice, that question. It didn't ease the ache in his chest that told him the damage done tonight wasn't just Todoroki's burden to carry.
It was his.
Not for the first time, he felt like a fraud. An imposter in his own skin. A man caught playing a part too large for him, terrified of the moment someone might see through the mask.
But fraud or not, there was no one else. No substitute waiting in the wings. He could collapse later, when the room was empty and the children were safe. For now, there was nowhere to go but forward.
So he drew in a slow breath, heavy in his lungs, and turned toward the students gathered before him. His class. His responsibility.
And whether he was ready for it or not, they needed him.
"Aizawa-sensei!"
Iida's voice cut through the low hum of whispers almost the second Shota stepped farther into the room. Always the first to stand, to shoulder responsibility, to bring order when the rest of the class faltered. His polished shoes clicked against the floor in brisk strides, and he intercepted Shota before he could even close the distance to the couches.
The boy's posture was as rigid as ever, shoulders squared, hand chopping the air in sharp, emphatic gestures. "Sir, I feel I must stress how imperative it is that we go after Todoroki! He was clearly in distress, his mental state unstable. Allowing him to remain unaccounted for could be dangerous—not only to himself, but to others. Please, sir, we'd like to go look for him, I feel that—"
Shota cut him off with a single, flat blade of his voice. "No one else is leaving."
The words landed with enough force to halt Iida mid-sentence. His jaw snapped shut, teeth clicking audibly in the sudden quiet. But his eyes—sharp, burning with urgency—didn't waver. For Iida, whose commitment to rules was usually absolute, the look was startling. There was defiance there, faint but unmistakable.
Shota felt it like pressure behind his ribs. He couldn't blame the boy—not when everything about this mess tugged at their instincts to help, to chase after their friend. It was what made them heroes-in-training. But heroes or not, they were still kids. His kids. He wasn't about to risk more of them scattering into the night.
"As well as Todoroki," Shota went on, voice even but firm, "Bakugou is gone. That's two already. I won't let any more of my students go missing." His gaze slid deliberately across the room, catching the wide eyes of every face turned toward him—Yaoyorozu's hands twisting against each other in her lap, Ashido's restless fidgeting, Kaminari's nervous darting glances, Midoriya practically vibrating with unspoken words. "I will find Todoroki. And Bakugou. But…" He exhaled slowly, dragging a hand through his hair. "I need some help from all of you. Anything you can offer."
His eyes swept them again, softer this time, though no less heavy. "Do you know of any places either one of them might go? Somewhere they've mentioned before. Somewhere important. Anything at all."
The question settled in the room like a stone dropped into water, rippling outward. For the first time since the chaos had begun, the students seemed to realize that their knowledge—their closeness with each other—was not just valuable, but necessary.
"Um… sorry to say it, but… I don't think anyone really knows Todoroki at all. Definitely not where he'd go after… that."
Jirou's voice was flat, almost too casual, but the way her eyes avoided his gave it away. It wasn't indifference—it was armor. The truth sat heavy beneath the veneer, and she didn't want to hold it any more than anyone else did.
Shota could see the ripple her words caused. Seventeen pairs of eyes that had been watching him with an almost desperate focus dropped in unison, scattering across the room like startled birds. Some fixed themselves on the floorboards. Some glued themselves to Kirishima's sleeping form. Others just stared past him, anywhere but his face. The silence that followed was telling in itself, a hollow confirmation of what Jirou had said.
And then, unbidden, his own voice came back to him—sharp, remembered, and cruel in hindsight. "I know there are people you care about."
He choked on it. The echo scraped raw against his throat like sandpaper. He had said that to Todoroki. Had believed it enough to lay it down like a promise, a thread for the boy to hold onto. He'd meant it. But what if he'd been wrong? What if that thread had been nothing more than smoke, and when Todoroki reached for it, there had been nothing there to keep him from falling?
The possibility twisted in his gut. Had Todoroki even managed to make a single connection here? The boy sat with them, trained beside them—but had any of that ever crossed the invisible wall he carried on his shoulders? Did he let anyone close enough to call him friend? To tether him to the ground when everything else cracked?
He couldn't picture anyone standing up and saying yes. Not right now. Not in the wake of this.
It was a hard thought, bitter and unrelenting, but Shota forced it down anyway. He didn't have the luxury of dwelling, not while two of his students were unaccounted for. He had to swallow it, let it lodge in his chest like a stone, because there was no other choice. Because he had to keep moving.
"Okay… okay."
The first word scraped out of him like air pressed from a punctured lung—thin, shaky, pathetic. The second landed heavier, just enough of a tether to keep him upright, to snap his scattered thoughts back into something resembling focus. He latched onto it, forcing his brain to fall back into rhythm. He didn't have time to be useless. Not now.
"What about Bakugou? Does anyone know of any places he may have gone?"
A pause followed. Students shifted in their seats, the silence heavy with a kind of searching that told him they were combing their memories but coming up empty. Finally, Kaminari spoke up, scratching at the back of his head.
"Uh… the campus gym? I don't know, he likes to work out. Maybe he went to release some tension? Maybe he's mad. I mean… Kirishima's kind of his best friend."
The words were reasonable enough, but Kaminari's delivery undercut them—uncertain, hesitant, the way a student answers a question he doesn't fully understand. Shota could tell the boy didn't believe his own suggestion. Still, it was worth checking. The UA security bots ran all night, programmed to sweep the campus in rotating intervals. Sending one to scan the gym wouldn't take much effort, and more importantly, it meant Shota himself didn't have to leave the building—not yet.
"I think he went after Todoroki. I bet he was worried about him."
The voice that spoke next was unexpected—flat, cutting into the room's murmur like a blade. Shota's gaze slid across the group and landed on Shinsou.
The boy stared straight back at him, posture loose but eyes unwavering, unblinking. Certain. He didn't hedge his words the way Kaminari had; he didn't tack on a maybe or a probably. He just said it, simple and direct, as if it were fact.