Hidden Regrets

Tears and Giggles Aren't Welcomed Here

Aizawa Shouta regretted many things. 

He regretted not working out before starting at Yuuei. He regretted pushing everyone away. He regretted not being able to save Oboro. He regretted pushing back his confession to Hizashi. He regretted wallowing too deep in his own self-pity, to save his best friend from his. He regretted not being able to help Tensei when he was attacked. He regretted taking so long to adopt Hitoshi.

To reiterate, he regretted a lot of things.

But, most of them had to do with his newest batch of students.

Class 1-A

Shouta would give just about anything to stop those kids from experiencing the horrors of the world. 

They didn’t need to feel the hysteria that was the USJ, or the panic of having a possible traitor. No one deserved to fight the Hero Killer (Shouta was an underground hero, he knew what a cover up looked like.), much less to be cornered by fucking Shigaraki Tomura in the mall.

They were just children… Children who were training to be heroes, yes, but still just children. Terrified kids fighting in the pitch black darkness, or holding the dying body of a seasoned hero as their classmate fought a monster meters away.

If anyone asked, Shouta would say he didn’t know which one of the incidents kept him awake at night. But privately, he would admit to the cream-coloured ceiling that what caused horrible nightmares, the type that he would remember for years to come, were about what his kids could do to stop their own terrors.

Shouta knew that better than anyone else after all, he was the one holding the razor in his Third-Year.

And maybe that’s why he was so scared. He didn’t know how to approach the subject without having to face his own memories and still unhealthy lifestyle. The underground hero was pretty sure that sleeping 3 hours a night, drinking coffee like it was his lifeblood and living on basically jelly pouches wasn’t good for his health. 

At least ‘Zashi couldn’t get too angry, the man worked himself to the bone and somehow didn’t need afternoon naps.

The problem children understood, the fucking empathetic brats understood why he worked them so hard. It didn’t matter how much Kaminari whined or Ashido huffed, they took every advice to heart and worked twice as hard. 

Somehow, they could see past his glares and hear the mantra that the wind whispered in his ears. The same mantra that stopped him from teaching the mental health lesson marked neatly in his notebook.

How can he help someone if they’re dead?

How can he save their mind if their body is already cold?

Nevertheless, Shouta waited too long. Maybe it was his hesitance, maybe there really was some logic to his thoughts or maybe the world just had something against his hellspawn. Either way, the day had come and everything he had been planning had to be scrapped. 
_______________________________________

It was a normal Monday morning, and honestly, that should have been a sign in itself. 

Shouta had been slumped down in the corner, curled up in the yellow abomination that was his sleeping bag as he watched his class chatter. Normally, he would already be asleep, a short nap is better than nothing after all, but he woke up that morning with a dark feeling coiled in his gut, a cold touch that only grew as the morning drawled by.  So, he drifted at the edge of consciousness, leaving one eye open as he could vaguely make out a raven-head talking to a tall figure with multiple arms and a random frost-covered desk.