SSD III: Silver

62. First

Yamada invited her for a celebratory dinner a few days later when Hecate Aurum was found guilty of a number of crimes— not the crimes they'd been hoping to get her on, but enough to keep her locked up long enough to build a good case on the rest.

Silver wasn't living with them anymore, but she had spent a lot of time around theirs. It had come to a point where she would spend her evenings and a fair amount of her weekends with them only to go to her apartment overnight. And if she spent a few nights with them here and there too, well, Aizawa and Yamada didn't mind. Someday, they hoped she'd choose to stay with them for good, but they wanted the decision to be hers this time. She had free will, they were making sure she got the opportunity to exercise it.

The hero couple had also been the ones to appeal to Nezu not to force her to stay in the dorms. He'd found no issue with it as long as she turned up every morning for school and he and the couple had the address of where she was staying in case, for whatever reason, she didn't.

Plus, her spending so much time in Aizawa and Yamada's new apartment— one Nezu had mysteriously 'found' for them that looked suspiciously (exactly) like their old place in the most terrifyingly eerie way— meant she had eyes on her often enough not to be causing trouble. And the fact that Nezu was the landlord of the entire apartment block, well that hadn't escaped Silver's notice at the very least.

Yamada smiled as he let his head fall against his husband's in a curved booth near the back corner of a small restaurant, seeing Silver talking about the menu with his young daughter. A TV flicked silently between channels over a wooden bar that ran down the entire far side of the room, a plethora of different alcohols lined up along the shelves behind it.

The two girls giggled over something small, Silver smirking up at a sleeping Aizawa leaning on his shoulder who was left completely unaware of the quiet jokes made at his expense. It was a much more pleasant atmosphere than any of the moments in the apartment where Silver had been forced to be there, back then, everything had been bitter— unless Eri happened to be involved— but now, she was here because she wanted to be and just that made Hizashi's heart swell.

Silver had some interesting habits, small behavioural ticks that emerged out of years of tactics being beaten into her, plus all that time surviving alone. For example, the seat Silver had chosen gave her the easiest exit (nobody to get past) and the angle she was at gave her clear view of all entrances into the main dining area. Being in between Eri and anyone who might be dangerous was only a plus.

Aizawa was directly opposite her, granting him exactly the same advantages if things went sour, though Yamada didn't particularly feel he needed his husband to protect him from a bad guy. But it didn't matter, none of that was going to happen today.

"So how was school today?"

Silver shrugged, her silver jacket— worn and ragged as it was— glimmering in the warm lights overhead. "I'm still trying to convince Nezu I could have frees instead of all the normal lessons, most of the work takes me less than half the class so he may as well give me the other half too."

"It's important bonding time with your class," Yamada weakly tried to defend. Being completely honest, he knew if he'd had the kind of knowledge and smarts Silver did at her age, he'd have done everything possible not to do a single lesson ever again. And really, he kind of agreed she didn't need them. With no effort whatsoever, she got full marks for everything, lacking even one little silly mistake which normally caused so much trouble for others. He once asked her how she avoided those little incorrect copyings or misreadings, she'd responded with confusion. Nobody on WMD made 'silly mistakes'.

Almost musingly, he'd questioned how many times she checked an answer before writing it down. The answer seemed ridiculously high to him, to expend so much effort checking something over so many times when the worst-case scenario was only getting it wrong. It was laughable. And then he thought about what getting things wrong meant in her childhood, and suddenly that number was scarily small.