Chapter Text
It started, as most chaos usually does, with Midoriya. Aizawa had just declined to join their class-wide sleep-over for the third time in a row—not unusual, but they could usually haggle him into watching a movie or four.
“It’s like he doesn’t even care about my Instagram followers,” Kaminari sniffled from where he, Jirou, and Kirishima were squashed into a too-small bean bag. “You know a management student told me 90% of my appeal was the photos of our cryptid teacher! I’m gonna lose all my clout…”
“Skill issue,” said Jirou, who was playing Subway Surfers on his head.
Tsuyu, in the middle of a hair-braiding circle on the floor that included Uraraka, Sero, and Todoroki, observed, “I don’t care about Kaminari’s Instagram, but Aizawa-sensei has been pretty flaky recently.”
“It’s perfectly within his rights, considering how two of our class disrespected him in a vulnerable moment!” Iida could only chop with one arm, since the other was methodically stroking Midoriya’s head, laid in his lap.
“Are you telling me that we were supposed to see Aizawa-sensei dead asleep and not draw on his face?” Kaminari protested. Sero nodded as vigorously as his hair-braiding would allow.
Ignoring their squabbling, Tsuyu said, “No, it started before that. Maybe it’s because of our graduation.”
Half the class moaned at the reminder. Midoriya, however, sat up, almost knocking off Iida’s glasses. “Oh, you’re probably right! Do you think he’s trying to distance himself from us?”
“Like hell!” Bakugou harrumphed, slapping the floor.
“Stop that, you’re going to smudge your nail polish,” Yaoyorozu told him. Scowling, Bakugou complied, scooching back on a pillow to continue receiving his manicure.
“Yeah, Aizawa-sensei can’t get away from us that easy!” Mina exclaimed, waving her hands around.
Bakugou hissed, “You’re gonna smudge your nail polish!”
She stuck out her tongue in response. Yaoyorozu pursed her lips in a suppression of a smile, and made no move to scold Mina. In her impromptu common-room nail salon, she definitely played favorites.
“Aizawa-sensei just has a hard time processing his feelings,” Midoriya said. “He tends to rationalize things instead of admitting he has attachments to people, you know?” He almost hit Iida with his rapid gestures—fortunately after years of practice, Iida was quite good at dodging.
“So… we have to force him to admit he loves us,” Mina finished.
“I mean, does he even love us?” asked Jirou. “Like, we’re kind of annoying.”
There were some vague sounds of protest, but nobody really argued. They had gotten several class-wide detentions for ‘disturbing the peace,’ many of which were assigned by Aizawa himself. One time they’d gotten a noise complaint from Hatsume. There was no coming back from that.
“I think… he likes us at least a little bit,” Yaoyorozu ventured. “Otherwise he wouldn’t trust us with Eri sometimes.”
“He trusts you with Eri,” Jirou corrected.
“He let Dark Shadow play with her one time. Does that count for anything?” Tokoyami asked.
“Seriously? He won’t let her near me when I’m hard!” Kirishima said.
“Maybe it’s because you keep saying it like that!” Bakugou snapped.
“What’s wrong with the way I say it?”
“See, this is our whole problem!” Uraraka cried. “We don’t know what Aizawa-sensei thinks about us because he won’t say it. So all we do is speculate and argue and go nowhere.”
“He’d have to say it, if we made him do the speech at graduation,” Midoriya suggested.
Silence descended on the room. Each side conversation died down, each head turned to look at him, and even the movie was paused.
“But…” Kaminari whispered. “…Isn’t All Might doing the speech?” Technically speaking, the graduating class was supposed to vote for which teacher to make the speech, but everyone knew it was going to be All Might. It was All Might. And now Midoriya, the biggest All Might fanboy the world had ever known, was suggesting someone else?
“Look, I think everyone here knows how much I appreciate All Might. He’s the most bestest hero of all time, he cares so much about all of his students, and he’s really great at speeches!” Midoriya visibly stopped himself from continuing to gush. “But… um… he’s not that good of a teacher…”
“He’s gotten much better!” protested Iida, with a sharp chop of his arm. Midoriya ducked away with ease, also having years of dodging experience.
“I’m not saying All Might isn’t amazing! He is!” he interjected at lightning speed, as if anyone doubted his fanboy loyalty.
“Actually, Midoriya has a point,” said Yaoyorozu hesitantly. “Aizawa-sensei’s done way more teaching than All Might. He’d make more sense.”
“He’d write a good speech!” added Iida, who greatly admired Aizawa’s ability to lecture.
“Plus it’ll show him that we appreciate him!” Mina chimed in. “More than doodling on his face, Sero and Kaminari.”
“Still not sorry!” the two accused yelled in unison.
“And it means that Aizawa-sensei can never abandon us!” Midoriya cried.
Uraraka slapped a hand over Tsuyu’s mouth so she couldn’t make the connection to Midoriya’s absentee father. Then she slapped her other hand over Todoroki’s mouth so that he couldn't make any other connections. Sero gave Uraraka a weird look, but continued braiding her hair.
“So what’s the plan, Deku?” she asked.
“Well, we need to get people to vote for Aizawa-sensei,” he said. “Um, I think our class will. I mean, does everyone agree?”
“Of course we all agree.” Uraraka gave a good intimidation glare to every single student in the room, who all nodded—Ojiro, who’d been napping, even awoke and gave a hasty thumbs-up. Last heroics class, Uraraka had brought down a building just by applying her quirk in strategic places, and in her last sparring session she’d given Tokoyami a concussion from slamming him into the ground too hard. Uravity was not one to be messed with.
“But the other classes don’t know anything about him, because Aizawa-sensei is really good at avoiding attention,” said Midoriya. “So we need to launch a marketing campaign!”
Aizawa woke up with a strange feeling of dread. He clawed out of his sleeping bag and ripped off his eye mask, but all that met his gaze was the regular bustle of the staff room. No villain attack.
“Are you alright?” asked All Might. “Do you want a coffee?”
After three years of knowing each other, All Might’s automatic reaction whenever he saw Aizawa in a bad mood was to offer him coffee. It was an extremely effective strategy, if an enabler of the man’s caffeine addiction.
Aizawa took the proffered mug and chugged it. It was good enough that he decided to answer the question. “I’m fine. Just a bad feeling.”
“A bad feeling?” All Might’s brow furrowed. Pro-heroes tended to put more stock in bad feelings than the average civilian. He called it trusting his gut, but his therapist called it hypervigilance.
“Aw, is empty-nest syndrome kicking in already?” Mic cooed.
“What?” said All Might.
“Ignore him, he’s delusional.” To Mic, Aizawa ordered, “Shut up. I don’t have any children, therefore that term cannot apply to me.”
“Oh, this is about Class 3-A’s graduation, isn’t it?” said All Might.
Aizawa would have continued to deny the allegations, however any sentence containing the words ‘Class 3-A’ and ‘graduation’ did not compute in his brain. As such, he decided to return to his nap.
All Might stared at the man, fully knocked-out and snoring, but still sitting with his mug in his hand. “Does caffeine… just not work on him anymore?”
Mic, who had endured fifteen years of this, simply grabbed the mug before it could fall.
A single lightbulb shone down on the Head Marketing Committee: Iida, Midoriya, and Yaoyorozu. They all had very serious expressions on to make it clear that they were the official committee. A bare few feet away, the students exiled from the official committee—Mina (kicked out for being too off-topic), Uraraka (kicked out for increasingly violent suggestions), and Bakugou (kicked out for being Bakugou), sulked.
Midoriya carefully drew out a piece of paper from a folder, sliding it into the center of the official table of the official committee. Officially.
They all leaned in to look at it, including the exiled members. It was a pencil drawing of Eraserhead in flight: his body was artfully smudged to blend into the background, making the precise lines of the capture weapon stand out in sharp relief. Across the bottom was written Eraserhead.
“This is really good, Midoriya!” said Iida, picking it up to peer over his glasses. “We could even put it on the fridge.”
Midoriya snatched it out of Iida’s hands and laid it back down on the table. “Ha! Ha! Thanks!” He surreptitiously checked for wrinkles. “But this is supposed to be a poster design.”
“I don’t know if we should be making posters of Aizawa-sensei, since he’s an underground hero,” Iida said.
“But we could get it laminated,” Midoriya pleaded.
“I still don’t think…” But Iida was already crumpling under the full force of Midoriya’s puppy eyes. “Maybe we can make just a few?”
“Works for me!” Midoriya brightened up immediately. In a mutter, he added, “Shinsou’s gonna be so jealous… it’s basically Eraserhead merch…”
“I know it’s against your instincts, but don’t be a hoarder, Midoriya,” Yaoyorozu said sympathetically. “If Shinsou asks for a poster, we should give him one. The whole point of this is to raise awareness about Aizawa-sensei.”
“Don’t say it like that, he’s not an STD!”
Mina took advantage of the brief uproar to snatch up the drawing. “This needs a color scheme!” she announced, brandishing a trifecta of eye-searing yellow, pink, and orange markers in her other hand.
“You can’t use neon for every color on the poster, you’re going to give people eye strain!” Bakugou snapped, snatching the yellow marker from Mina’s fingers when it strayed too close to the paper.
“Should we…?” Yaoyorozu murmured to Iida.
“All we can do is try to minimize collateral damage,” he uttered gravely, plucking the other two markers and the slightly wrinkled drawing from Mina’s grip. Midoriya took the paper and immediately started smoothing it down on the table, a tear glistening in his eye. Harm to any hero merch, even bootleg merch, hurt his soul.
“We should do pastels,” Uraraka said. “Everybody likes pastels!”
“Pastels have no place in an Eraserhead poster.” Bakugou rolled his eyes. “He’s not the Wild Wild Pussycats.”
“And what do you suggest? Mustard yellow?” Uraraka retorted. “We’re not advertising a farmers’ market!”
“I know that. It’s ‘cause of color theory, dipshit,” he growled.
“Hey, don’t talk to her like that!” Mina jumped in.
“Shut up!”
“You shut up,” said Uraraka, “or I’m putting you in time-out.”
“What the fuck does that even mean?”
Uraraka slapped him, and he bobbed up into the air. Iida had a moment of deep regret for giving Uraraka the authority to put people in time-out. Yaoyorozu felt amused, and then disappointed in herself for feeling amused. Midoriya was just glad it wasn’t him in time-out for a change.
“And don’t try using your quirk to get back down, or Aizawa-sensei will hear,” she added.
Bakugou, whose hands had automatically drawn out in front of him, experienced a number of violent face contortions as he considered his priorities: blow his lid, or doom their marketing campaign before it had even begun?
Mina cried, “And gimme my marker back!”
She lunged for the marker, but could only pull off the cap as Bakugou shoved her away. The motion propelled him upward—he pulled into a crouch, and kicked off the ceiling. Dust rained down from the drywall as Bakugou zoomed towards Uraraka. He caught her off-guard in a flying tackle, and they spun into the air.
“I’m not letting an ignoramus decide the color scheme,” he snarled.
“Color theory sucks!” Mina shrieked, and jumped onto Bakugou’s back, clinging like a koala.
There were several thuds: the sound of heavy boots heading towards them. The writhing ball of wrestling hero students tried to separate, only succeeding in getting Uraraka’s feet and one of Bakugou’s hands on the floor. The other students in the common room huddled around the table to look innocent.
The door slammed open, revealing Present Mic. He immediately honed in on Uraraka, Mina, and Bakugou, and sighed heavily. With the expertise of a man who had seen through Aizawa’s learning curve with the capture weapon, he disentangled them from each other.
Mic put a hand on Uraraka’s shoulder, partly to steady her after over-using her quirk, and partly to intimidate. “Now, tell me what in fresh hell is going on here.”
“Sir,” Uraraka said, widening her eyes and summoning the barest of tears, “we’re so sorry. We didn’t mean to!” Strategically, she added, “We were just trying to make a present for Aizawa-sensei…”
“Cute!” said Mic. “You’re still getting detention.”
“Damn. That always works with All Might,” she murmured.
“Sounds like I’m gonna have to have a talk with Yagi!” Mic leaned down and stage-whispered, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Aizawa about the present. I know how it sounds coming from me, but you kids could use a little more subtlety.”
“Yes sir!”
He straightened. “Yo, mister class president!” Iida jumped up as if he was electrocuted, extra-zealous after his classmates’ disobedience. “Isn’t it your job to rein in these maniacs?”
“I thought it was best to let them work out their energy, sir,” he said, with the air of a man who had been class president for far too long.
Mic considered this answer for a moment.
“Hey, you know what? In a month, you won’t be my problem anymore!” he declared with a little too much enthusiasm. “But if you slam into any more walls, I’m making you pay for Cementoss’ bonus.”
He left the room with a flourish, and silence reigned as they all absorbed how close they had been to having their operation shut down. Then Midoriya said, “The colors we use for the poster of Aizawa-sensei won’t matter anyway. The photocopier can only do black-and-white.”
Aizawa was seriously considering bashing his head against the wall until he passed out.
He had spent a nightmare of a day tearing down the Eraserhead posters that had inexplicably popped up all over campus. Worse still, students in his classes had been asking him about them, as if he would ever commission something so self-sabotaging. The occasional bouts of praise, something that Aizawa found annoying at the best of times, felt akin to psychological warfare.
It was not psychological warfare. Without a doubt, Aizawa knew this originated from his chronically well-intentioned problem class.
The obvious suspects were Uraraka, Mina and Bakugou, who Mic had reported had had a scuffle involving markers the day before. However, despite the amateur quality of the posters, Aizawa highly doubted those three could work together long enough to make a cohesive product. They had at least one accomplice, if not more.
“It’s not so bad,” said All Might, AKA the worst person that could’ve possibly accompanied Aizawa in that particular instance. Even Mic would’ve been better—at least he was irritating on purpose. “I like to think of it as flattering, you know? Those three must look up to you quite a bit.”
“It’s not just them,” Aizawa replied. “This is a far bigger operation. Trust me.”
“Operation—you make it sound like some kind of villainous scheme.”
“Isn’t it? Villains sabotage heroes. My career depends on being unknown. Interfering with that is sabotaging my efficacy as a hero. Ergo, villainy.” A sound chain of logic, if a little catastrophizing.
There was a pause, which Aizawa couldn’t help but be grateful for. It was a nice change to have All Might thinking before he spoke.
“I don’t have the same sway over the media that I used to, but I know that industry very well,” said All Might. “I can make sure nothing comes of it. For your peace of mind.”
“… I appreciate that,” said Aizawa.
Meanwhile, inside the classroom/interrogation room, the three accused were arguing. To the surprise of no one.
“We’re telling you, it’s the only way,” insisted Mina. She and Uraraka had boxed in Bakugou’s desk on either side. Uraraka had even made them both float in order to be taller and therefore more intimidating.
“I’m not doing it,” Bakugou said.
“Yes you are! Don’t be the weak link, Bakugou,” Uraraka said.
“Weak link?!” he repeated, enraged. “This wouldn’t have happened if you two had just listened to me!”
“Boo-hoo baby,” Uraraka mocked.
“Besides, it’s like basically the truth,” Mina added. “It’s why you insisted on joining the marketing committee, isn’t it?”
This was the wrong thing to say. Bakugou’s expression turned murderous. The only thing that kept him from launching at her was the knowledge that Aizawa was only a few steps away. As necessity, all the troublemakers in class 3-A had developed a sixth sense for when their teacher was near.
The door swung open to reveal Aizawa’s glowering figure. All three students migrated into the nearest desk seats on automatic.
“Ashido. Bakugou. Uraraka.” He called the names by order of most likely to crack to least, transferring his glare to each one of them in turn.
“Yessir!”
Aizawa let the silence go on just long enough to be uncomfortable, then continued. “Around the school have been hung,” he grimaced, “posters of Eraserhead. You know that as an underground hero, I do not, and in fact cannot have, merchandising. I’m sure you know why you’re in detention today, and why that makes you three the prime suspects for—”
“We did it because we love you!” Mina wailed, and scrambled over to try and hug her teacher. Aizawa’s reflexes were however superior to the strength of Mina’s affection, and she ended up hanging from a loop of capture weapon.
“Is that a confession?” Aizawa asked coolly.
Uraraka and Bakugou made eye contact. Then they both rushed Aizawa at the same time, yelling about how they loved him and appreciated him so much . Their increasingly vexed teacher bound them up mercilessly, while All Might pressed a hand to his heart in emotion.
“I’ll take that as a—All Might, are you crying?” Aizawa blurted out incredulously, his facade finally cracking.
There was in fact a single tear running down All Might’s face. “It’s just so sweet.”
Mentally, Aizawa bemoaned the fact that he could not give detention to his coworkers.
Mina and Uraraka joined in with All Might, crying crocodile tears. Mina elbowed Bakugou—but, as he couldn’t cry on command, he simply reached into Aizawa’s pocket for his eye-drops and placed them on his face.
“I can literally see you doing that,” Aizawa said, snatching the eye-drops back.
“Wah wah,” Bakugou said in monotone.
Aizawa sentenced them to detention for so long that All Might had to point out there weren’t enough days left in the school year. At the mention of graduation, Aizawa’s mind once again underwent cognitive dissonance so severe that, after instructing All Might to punish the kids properly, he decided to pass out on the floor.
All Might crumbled the moment Uraraka started sniffling, and after she had discreetly punched Bakugou in the stomach to make him whimper. Like so many times before, and undoubtedly many times in the future, the troublemakers of Class 3-A walked out scot-free.