Blink

A Boku no Hero Academia Oneshot.

Summary: The USJ stole something from everyone, whether it was the innocence of the students or the sense of heroism from their teacher. Shouta Aizawa must recover in the coming days in order to keep his resolve to protect his students; but there is something standing in his way, and it is more than just the damage to his arms.

Warning: Strong themes. This story can be read alone or as a sequel to Through A Marble.

There were lights—and then nothing. Nothing for days.

He blinked, and Recovery Girl buzzed around his head; but then she faded too, absorbed into the unconsciousness.

He knew the incident at the USJ had been resolved, but beyond that, he knew nothing.

Sometimes, he would hear the noises, more frequently than the light. Sometimes, there was talking, words slurred together on a string that he kept reeling to himself, but the end was severed off and left him with half-completed sentences.

His sense of smell was lost, somewhere between reality and the dream that lay beyond it. Nothing registered more than the uncomfortable pressure that had formed at the bridge of his nose. It felt like a nail driving into his skull.

Shouta Aizawa missed nothing more than his sense of touch though, his ability to comprehend the atmosphere around him lost when no feelings fired the synapses in his neurons. He couldn't tell if he was moving, let alone if he was breathing in his spiraling haze of strings.

The times he tried to pick them apart, to make sense out of the chaos, it was met with pain—a deep seeded pain that took root in his bones and sprouted outwards.

He blinked again. Was he awake this time? A piano drummed away in the background, his chest constricting with a breath. At least he was alive. The pain came pounding when he was least prepared for it, a player who slammed the piano keys instead of pressing them delicately.

"Aizawa?"

When he was able to process the gargle of his name, he was already adrift again, back in the place where no feeling could touch him, whether it was one of pain or happiness.

This time, however, he was sent into the merciful embrace of a dream.

Shouta Aizawa was fifteen, young and unexpecting of the events that would happen to him in the future. It was dark in the room, but the letters on the page burned bright auroras in his memory.

This year's group of students was one of the most difficult ones that have been tested thus far. The result left a lot of students perfect for our school but not enough seats to fit them all. Though brilliant in your endeavor and commitment to becoming a hero, we are afraid to inform you that we are unable to invite you to U.A. at this time.

He didn't flinch at the words on the paper, though he did reread them twice before he folded up the paper and tossed it somewhere to the lineless abyss around him.

All he could discern was his bed, the rest of the world absorbed in the darkness, so he fell back onto it and stared at the ceilingless world above him, trying to quench the fires of pessimism inside himself.

You, of course, had expected that. Your quirk played a big part in the decision. You could only physically take on so many robots on your own.

He curled up, wishing he could fade away too like the letter and dissolve into the acid of bleakness surrounding his heart.

He blinked, and there was a window near his bed, daylight bleeding through the curtains. Hours passed and he only got up to check the mail, returning from the abyss to curl up on his bed again. This letter was less bitter, but still another able rope to tie the noose on his dreams.

Congratulations! You have been accepted in U.A,'s General Department. Below you will find…

A blink, and it was his first day of school. The campus was painted in broad colored strokes on the black canvas. Only the walkway and the front entrance had any semblance of clarity and detailed as he walked through the crowds of excited first years, more than likely the new hero course. He cringed at the noise. Girls were chattering away. One blond boy kept shouting insistently, but no matter how hard he tried he couldn't fade away. His quirk, unfortunately, wasn't something as convenient for being introverted as invisibility.

General Studies was okay, for what it was worth; but it was nothing compared to the classroom experience he heard from those in the hero course at lunch.

He picked at his food, swishing around the noodles to make shapes from its overlapping waves.

Why attend U.A. at all if he wasn't in the hero course? An ordinary high school would present fewer challenges and would be more willing to just push him along if he decided to become lazy with his school work.

He had committed that day to finishing out the school year and never returning; but before the school year ended, he blinked.

U.A. Sports Festival.

The crowd's scream ruptured his eardrums, too many colors slapped against one another to be pleasing to his eyes. The hero course was making fools out of themselves, while general studies stood back and bitterly whispered to one another.

He didn't try very hard.

Their first event involved running—too much of it, in his opinion. He barely scraped into the top 42 to advance. He had barely broken a sweat while some of the others were dropping like flies, begging for water.

The second event went very much like the first—Aizawa's minimal effort barely got him into the next round, one-on-one battles.

That's where he took his broken wings and learned to fly.

Young heroes in the making, their only identity their quirk—his dark eyes dissolved like acid to the red, eliminating students who's shock at being suddenly quirkless gave him his opening. He coasted into the quarterfinals with a blink.

His second opponent caught on, but the result was just the same: unable to determine the exact nature of his quirk, he fell into the trap of relying on his own to save him, only to find it was not there in its most crucial moments.

When his hair flopped into his face, he was almost surprised to see the crowd cheering for him. A kid rejected from the hero course, going to the finals. The announcers couldn't get enough of it.

Blink.

The finalist was the blond who didn't have a reset button on the first day of school, Yama-obnoxious or whatever the announcer had said. Aizawa found the off switch instead, leaving him helpless when his eyes bled with red. They got into a physical scuffle if you could call it that before he had managed to maneuver him out of bounds.

General Studies Student wins at Sports Festival!

The headline circulated everywhere he walked, to the point he almost considered never coming out of his room again to avoid the bothersome behavior of others when a third letter arrived.

Shouta Aizawa, I would like to personally invite you to transfer to the hero class in classroom 1-A, effective immediately!

In those moments, the darkness in his heart receded a little, allowing a fragment of light to appear.

A blink, and he was at his first day of hero course. It went better than his first in general studies. He sat out of alphabetical order, next to the loud mouth he beat in the finals. Though he never stopped talking, he never expected Aizawa to respond. He couldn't help but feel a little thankful that he filled his own gaps in the conversation.

"Shouta. Come on. You've been sleeping for awhile…"

He blinked, and there was light—so much of it that it burned, and he almost wished for the darkness again when a shadow fell across his eyes and dispersed the balls of light bouncing in his vision.

"Shouta, you can't sleep forever. You have to go back to teaching eventually."

The boy who never learned to shut up. He didn't know whether to laugh or stay silent.

He was in Recovery Girl's office, that much he could discern, the colors more palpable and less violent in shade. The air was stiff and sterile, but other than the scratching of a pen, it was all too silent for Hizashi to be present.

But with the environment came the pain, a sudden clang that rattled throughout his body and left him tense.

His arms were bound to his chest, but still, they coursed like live wires. He couldn't feel the bandages, not even when his fingers twitched, and the fabric shifted. He couldn't tell whether it was coarse or soft, if it was tightened too tight or plastered like a second skin. There was no response other than the pain that flickered whenever he moved.

It kept him distracted and faded out Hizashi's voice.

But Present Mic could not be ignored for long.

"Shouta," he repeated again. Something shut off in Aizawa.

"Why do you keep saying my name like that," he replied, trying to maneuver himself to sit up without moving his arms too much, but every jostle crackled with agony. He couldn't avoid it, no matter how careful he was.

"Because I'm worried!"

"You shouldn't be."

"You almost died Shouta!"

"Volume, please, Hizashi. My ears aren't used to it yet." Hizashi looked ready to shout in addition to what he said already, but thought against it, whether it was out of pity or consideration.

Aizawa searched for the clock. It was late, whatever day in this century he decided to wake up in.

"You should go home," Aizawa said, closing his eyes for a moment. "How long have I've been asleep?"

"A few hours since the accident. And I couldn't go home even if I tried. I wanted to make sure you were okay."

Aizawa's eyes opened again, adapting the drear that had plagued his heart in his memories.

"Hizashi."

The way he said his name made Hizashi pause, but Aizawa would never reveal anything through his expressions; only through his words, as bitter as they were when he spit them up as he said the words he never dared utter before.

"I don't think I can be a hero."

He swallowed his grunt when Present Mic sat next to him on the bed.

"What are you talking about?" He asked, "You're already a hero. What brought this on suddenly?"

Aizawa glanced down at his arms, hidden beneath thick rolls of cotton. He knew what they looked like before Recovery Girl's help.

"My arms."

Hizashi shook his head. "Recovery Girl said with time both your arms will heal. You just have to be patient about it—"

"I can't feel anything other than the pain Hizashi. The bandages, my own skin, I can't feel any of it."

He judged the length of his scarf by how much had traveled over his palm. In the dark, where he performed most of his vigilante work outside of school, he depended on his sense of touch when apprehending villains in dark alleyways. He judged the power behind his attacks by this sense—he couldn't imagine being Eraserhead without touch; it was almost as critical as his sight.

"Surely that will come back. It probably just one of those things that needs to heal too," Hizashi explained, always the optimist.

Aizawa countered, always the pessimist, "And if it doesn't heal?"

"Then… we'll figure it out."

There was no confidence in his words, not that Aizawa would have felt any to begin with. He had resolved to be happy only being a teacher, but the facts of the matter were small and easy to swallow: to be a teacher at U.A., he had to be a hero. If he wasn't a hero, then he wasn't a teacher. It was like a letter, a third-party force preventing him from reaching his goals, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

The first chance he got, he went back to class.

If there was even a fragment of a possibility that losing his ability to feel in his arms and hands would prohibit him from being a teacher, then he would let the information out only when the bandages were off, and he couldn't hide it any longer. Until then, he would work as many days as he could before he let the cat out of the bag.

Too bad it wasn't a nice cat.

His students didn't know any different. As shocked as they were from his appearance, they quickly adapted, and they all fell back into their usual routine—as normal as it could get, after something like the USJ incident; and every day when he went to work, he was reminded of his arms.

He would never regret his decision to protect those kids. They were always his first priority; but now he was alive and working at half capacity, that estimation being a generous one.

He could hardly believe he could blink through the next days, wishing there had been more substance to them if they were his last.

The day came for the U.A.'s Sports Festival, and his class was the most anticipated to watch. If he was like Hizashi, he would have gone around rubbing it in all the teachers' faces; instead, he reserved to smugly thinking about it.

He helped Hizashi with announcements; there needed to be more intelligent commentary overlapping the garble of his words. However, he slacked on his duty for a good part of the obstacle race (too busy critiquing Bakugo and Todoroki's rivalry that lost them first contenders spot) and the cavalry battle (critiquing Midoriya for randomly guessing for his old number instead of going for the band on Todoroki's head himself, a guaranteed high enough number to advance), only inputting one or two comments for the sake of the crowd.

"Look at these matchups for the head to head battle," Hizashi commented. "This is going to be interesting."

"I'm hoping someone will upset the obvious winners." Aizawa scanned the list of participants. "It might be worth listening to Bakugo scream all night."

Blink.

In the first battle of the one-to-one match-ups, Aizawa found his contender. Hitoshi Shinso, from the general studies department—the name that really meant the department that accepted the quirks thwarted by a test with robots.

He expected the battle to be over as soon as it started; brainwashing was a serious quirk, but a useful one if used by a hero. He could predict his area of expertise would be hostage situations, and he hoped he would get far enough that he too would receive a letter like he did all those years ago to transfer to the hero course.

And then, in a blink, he lost, tossed out of bounds when Midoriya came to and countered. He understood everything he was saying, of someone born with a perfect quirk while others are sidelined because of one test that couldn't really judge all the types of heroes U.A. was capable of creating.

But he didn't give up.

"I'm going to be a better hero then all of you in the hero course."

Hitoshi Shinso, a boy with every reason to give up, every obstacle possible standing between him and his dream; yet, his resolve doesn't waver, doesn't crumble and fall. Aizawa couldn't help but look down at his arms, the feeling in them still lost, but the resolve to move past it building slowly.

"Hizashi," he said softly during a pause, as new fighters prepared for their chance in the spotlight.

"Yeah?" Hizashi turned to look at him.

"Forget what I said."

"Forget… what?"

The other students from general studies accepted Shinso back into the crowd excitedly. They were giving him more attention then he was probably used to, but to them, he was a person worth looking up to. Aizawa couldn't help but admire his resolve and vowed to make his own.

A blink, and everything fell into place.

"Forget what I said, about being a hero," he explained, but the context was still lost to Present Mic as he quirked an eyebrow.

"I may not be able to feel anymore, but that's just an obstacle. I'll still be a hero. Nothing can stop that."

And nothing can stop you either, Hitoshi Shinso. He thought. No obstacle, whether it is yourself or others, can keep your dream out of your reach.

It was his new resolve; a resolve they both could keep.

Shouta Aizawa, first a student, then a hero, and now a teacher; close to death before almost falling to the calamity of loss. He had survived many trials in life and would go through many more, suffer more tragedy and pain and loss then a human could bare and yet—

Blink.

It would be okay, because to Aizawa, everything felt just right.

Hope you enjoyed. I took some creative liberty from some headcannons I saw on tumblr. One suggested that Aizawa transferred to the hero class. Because of where Aizawa and Yamada fall into the Japanese alphabet, they wouldn't be sitting next to each other otherwise.

I appreciate everyone's support from my first BNHA fanfic. Thanks to everyone who stuck around!

-Soul Spirit-