A Slight Emotional Manipulation of Peers

Death, Destruction, And Disgusting Vanilla Chocolate

(a/n: Whattt look at me doing an author's note. Wacky. Anyway thanks for all the reads, comments, and votes on this fic and the prequel! This chapter is about 21k words so hopefully that makes up for a three month break haha. Also disclaimer: Sensoji was in MHA vigilantes manga, he was canonically Aizawa's bully in high school, he thought Aizawa couldn't be a hero with his quirk, yada yada)

What was the saying again? You'll always find your way back home ?

Shota honestly didn't know if it was a real saying or just the surprisingly meaningful title of a Hannah Montana song that Hizashi played too many times in the car- mostly because the guy conveniently forgets that both he and Nemuri suck at the English language and don't watch century-old kid shows-, but either way it applies to this situation. Only in this case, the home is the den of traumatic memories that is Nezu's office, and he's not going because of a family crisis, he's going because Hizashi had a random memory from 14 years ago and started having his own crisis.

Said memory from 14 years ago was the day Hizashi got caught filming his 'documentary of UA student life' by a teacher during calculus and had his video camera confiscated. Shota doesn't blame the teacher for taking it, though. After all, Hizashi was planning on interviewing Sensoji next and everyone knew that was gonna be a disaster. All that guy ever did was accuse people of copyrighting goggles and say weirdly deep statements at the most unnecessary times, and Shota knows the entire school would have rather ripped their eardrums out than listen to a thirty-minute cameo of that.

In any case, what he does blame him for, however, is tossing it in Nezu's confiscation box and forgetting to give it back. And as everyone knows, whenever Nezu notices that one specific item has been left in the box too long, he assumes the use of it was so terrible that it immediately gets sent to an off-site location and never to be seen again. Which okay, yeah, was not that far off from the truth. But still.

Extreme, he knows. But when is Nezu not extreme?

And after a bit of panicked screaming in the hallway 30 minutes before lunch ended, Shota was finally sent to find out where the off-site location was, that way Hizashi could break into it and recover the stolen footage from the past. It'd almost be poetic if the underground hero didn't hate the mission so much. And that's what this was, a mission, because he knows for a fact there's a 70% percent chance of him getting murdered if Nezu catches him.

The murder part is actually the reason he suggested none of them should go, and just buy a new video camera instead of spending the rest of their lives in fear. And maybe his over-informed suggestion was the reason he got voted out by literally everyone else. It's strange, but as time passes Shota is beginning to see how accurate Midoriya's murdering game theory really is.

And that's what brings him to Nezu's office, sitting in the desk chair with the computer cracked open and trying to decide which of the 300 files with no titles other than numbers is the file that carries the location. It was going okay for a little while, especially after he determined that Nezu probably hid it in a triple-digit file with only even numbers that way it was hard to find but not 'this is the secret of the universe' hard to find, until he once again was given a heart attack by Midoriya who decided that now was the perfect time to also break into Nezu's office .

He's not gonna lie, it was definitely one of the more awkward situations he'd ever ended up in. With him once again being caught stealing items from one of the greatest security threats in Japan, and the problem child rambling excuses being caught holding a shady duffle bag and one of his notebooks, which never means anything good.

In fact, Shota can remember the exact conversation they had right after he got Midoriya to stop rambling:

"This office door actually looks very similar to the bathroom door in the teachers' lounge and I know you may be thinking 'why were you in the teachers' lounge in the first place' and that can easily be explained if- Wait why are you on Principal Nezu's computer?"