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The squeak of new leather follows his footsteps as Hizashi makes his way down the city street. Neon lights waver in the summer heat. He feels his tall hair wilt, but he simply puts in his earbuds, wrapping the cord around his phone just right to make the sound come through. He moves his arms to the beat, scatting and humming to the sound of the bass. He arrives at the station right on time.
It has been nearly four years since Hizashi started his radio show. It has been exactly fifteen years since he went on air for the first time. He had just twenty-four listeners by the end of that podcast. The one after that, started when he was eighteen, got up to five-thousand and something. Now, at age thirty, he grins as he dances his way through the automatic doors and hangs up his studded jacket under the bright sign that reads Put Your Hands Up Radio .
He moves through the space naturally, nodding to those he passes. They laugh when he gives them finger-guns and twirls on his heels. His smile feels lighter than ever as he stops by the bathroom to straighten out his hair. He then looks into the mirror, expression even, and slips on his dark yellow sunglasses. Taking out his earbuds and pocketing his regular specs, he heads back down the hall and runs into someone.
“Ah, Yamada!” She claps her hands together when she sees him. “On time as ever- ready to host a great show?”
“Am I ever! And how are you doing on this fine night, my dude?” His producer chuckles, shaking her head at him.
“I’ll be doing good if we can actually get some listeners. I moved you to the six o’clock slot because I’m trusting you, Yamada-”
“I know! Don’t worry, boss, I’ve got everything handled.” He sticks his hands in his pockets to stop himself from fidgeting. She puts her hands up, giving him one last look before walking away. Hizashi sighs forcefully before continuing to the sound check.
The equipment works as well as it ever does, and he finds himself staring at the musty counter top as he waits for coffee to brew in the break room. With thirty minutes until he goes on, he has plenty of time to get lost in his thoughts and drown himself in caffeine. His fingers tap against the tile to the tune of a song he still can’t get himself to forget.
Once he has his coffee in hand he downs it quickly and pours himself another. It’s more habit than need, today. He glances up at the clock and feels his chest swell. His usual slot is two to three in the morning. Not today.
“Make it loud, Mic,” he murmurs, downing the second mug and slamming it down a little too hard. He marches to the door and sticks his head into the neighboring room. Someone notices him almost immediately.
“Hey, Present Mic!” The new intern bounces in his seat a little.
“Hey, little listener! How’re you doin’ today, kid?” He projects his voice into the room, leaning against the doorframe with an arm on his hip.
The intern rambles a bit, his arms gesturing wildly. Hizashi nods along. “Right! So, we’re almost ready, yeah?”
“Oh! Yes!” He nods. “Everything is queued, just waiting for this guy to finish his set.”
“Perfect.” Hizashi gives a classic Present Mic farewell and makes his exit. He twists the rings on his fingers as he waits.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s called into the recording booth.
He adjusts in the seat. His hands flit over the board in front of him. He plugs in the headphones, puts them on. Takes them off. Puts them on again. A voice somewhere in his mind tells him to breathe. Hizashi takes a deep breath. Through the window, he sees the countdown. The light turns green. He leans in.
“Hello Listeners! Welcome to Put Your Hands Up Radio , daytime edition! Today we’ll be playing some sick beats, talking to a crew of awesome guests, and fielding some of the most intriguing questions we get! It’s gonna be a good one folks, so everyone get ready to put your hands up!”
Hizashi plays one of the many sound effects in his arsenal, and breathing suddenly feels a whole lot easier. The beginning is the tough part- the most scripted. Now, all he had to do was talk.
The hour goes by quickly. Most of it is taken by their special guest. Someone popular was needed for the big day, and his producers believed the internet sensation Pop Step fit that demand. Hizashi figured that since she wasn’t actively committing a crime, and he wasn’t actively on duty, he could get away with not arresting the vigilante during the interview. Journalistic integrity and all that. Music is interspersed, and by the time he gets to the calls there’s just twenty minutes left.
“Alright!” Hizashi announces as the last song dies down. “Now, my dudes, it’s time to take some of your thoughts into account! Ask me about my day, for some advice, or just tell me how great I am! It’s your turn to take the mic, ya’ll!” Another sound effect is played, and he waits until the staff give him a nod to start talking again.
“Hey there, Listener! Why don’t you tell me your name?”
There’s a beat of silence, and then, “Shinsou.” The voice is rough and monotone. He sounds young, and almost like he’s whispering. Hizashi plows on.
“Well, it’s great to be talking to ya’, Shinsou! What question do you have for ol’ Present Mic?”
Another pause. “What- um…” The voice trails off for a minute, and Hizashi’s bright grin softens.
“Don’t be nervous, Shinsou. This time, it’s my turn to listen to you, and do so I shall! Let me in on what’s bothering you.”
“Present Mic… What- what would you say is your greatest regret?” The boy, Shinsou, asks. Hizashi feels his expression drop. He stares at his lap, only for a moment, but long enough. “Uh, sorry, that might’ve been too-”
Hizashi winces.
“Worry not, Shinsou, I was just considering the query!” He shakes his head a bit. This kid really went for it , he thinks. “Well… that’s certainly a tough one. If I had to choose my biggest regret as a hero-”
“No, no, I meant in general. Regrets just as… a person.”
Oh.
Well then.
Hizashi takes a deep breath. His eyes stray to the binder laid out on the desk next to him. He opens it, then pushes past the heaps of paper to the back where the old photograph is clipped to the inside of the cover. His hand ghosts over the vestiges of his past.
“My biggest regret… is probably when I gave up.” He clears his throat. “Things got tough, and I walked away. We both did, but I shouldn’t have let us. I wish I’d fought harder.” He fights to keep his voice loud enough for the microphone.
Shinsou’s voice crackles through again. “Do you miss them?”
“Every day,” he says. His throat constricts, and he swallows harshly. “But,” he continues, mustering pep into his tone, “I’ve learned from it that-”
“He misses you too,” Shinsou interjects.
Hizashi’s jaw drops.
“Wait, what do you-” Hizashi says, his persona dropped. That’s when a new voice intervenes, from the other side of the call. This one is deeper, gruff, but just as monotone.
“Shinsou, who are you talking to? You said you came here to do homework-”
“Go back to sleep!” Shinsou yells to the voice. Hizashi hears him swear under his breath before he redirects his attention back to the show. “I should go-”
“Wait-” Hizashi counters, “Who is that-” The call ends.
When he doesn’t move, someone on the other side of the glass puts in a song for the radio. The light above the window turns red. He reaches up and mechanically pulls his headphones off. His head falls into his hands, glasses pushed up into his hair.
That was him. It’s been ten years, but Present Mic doesn’t forget a voice. He doesn’t forget that voice. He doesn’t forget the sound of it, quiet and reserved and only warm for him. He doesn’t forget it’s laugh or it’s soothing whispers when he couldn’t handle loud anymore. He doesn’t forget the feel of it, soft against his neck and buried into his soul.
He doesn’t forget Shouta. He hasn’t, not once, stopped missing him.
He misses you too .
Hizashi clenches his fists in his hair. He needs to figure out what’s happening.
He plays a new song, and breathes in and out to that beat he can’t quite forget.
The remaining minutes of the show pass by smoothly. Hizashi does what he can. As he exits the booth a few of his coworkers try to talk to him, but he makes a beeline for the door. His chin is tucked into his chest and hands shoved into his pockets. For the first time, he wishes his hair didn’t stand out quite so much.
It takes thirty minutes to walk to his apartment. It’s a walk he doesn’t usually take, but today was different. It still is, but now it’s the kind that has Hizashi wishing he’d taken his car. He fumbles with his keys as he walks up to his door. A cat yowls somewhere outside, and Hizashi ignores the pang in his chest in favor of stumbling into the room.
He leans on the door once it shuts behind him, letting his head tip back onto the wood. There’s a long silence, every creak of the building like a clap of thunder. The air waits, stiff and heavy. It chokes him, tasting of sawdust and copper, until he coughs to clear it out. He runs his hands through his hair and down to his neck, frantic. His knees ache when they hit the floor, and he’s still coughing and choking and-
He wants to scream .
Shouta hasn’t spoken to him since- neither of them have interacted, Hizashi has been so good with it too, hasn’t looked for him, hasn’t looked into where he’s been or what he’s been doing in- in years . His thoughts spiral deeper and deeper, a headache building behind his eyes as the pressure within him grasps for somewhere to go.
He can’t scream. Shouldn’t.
If Shouta has missed- fucking missed him this entire time- Hizashi clenches his fists to keep from clawing at his skin. He tears off his leather jacket, his glasses clattering to the floor with the abrupt motion. He grits his teeth, runs his hands up and down his arms, hears the shifting and grating of every movement and rips out his hearing aids next, throwing them onto the couch.
He can’t .
Hizashi takes a deep breath. It’s quiet. He puts his hands flat against the ground. His head hangs, his ruined hair brushing the floor. The whirlwind of his mental state calms to a breeze soon enough, one which carries the only thought still circulating his battered mind. Why?
He sits for a long while, mind blank. He drags his feet to the couch eventually, shoving his things to the side and dropping down onto it with a heavy sigh. His jaw aches, his throat still constricting too tight. Distantly, he notes that his phone goes off. He doesn’t move.
Hizashi takes a deep, shuddering breath, then lays down to sleep.
-
There are regrets the next morning. The first comes when Hizashi cracks open his eyes and immediately wishes he hadn’t woken up to begin with. He sits up, groaning as his back aches, and finds that his next regret is having passed out on the couch. Especially without showering first. His nose wrinkles as he runs a hand through his stiff, unkempt hair.
He crawls off the couch and stumbles his way into the bathroom, casting a longing glance to his bedroom as he passes it. It takes twenty minutes in the shower to actually fix the mess that is his hair, then another five to just stand in the water and ruminate. Hopefully he doesn’t get fired for last night, or he definitely won’t be able to afford the water bill.
Wait, shit .
Hizashi scrambles, slipping as gets out of the shower. He rushes back out to the living room, yanking on shorts and a faded band t-shirt, grabbing his laptop from the coffee table and opening it. Last night is going to need some damage control. His chest tightens as he remembers everything, the mess he’d made, and ends up humming frantically to drown out the sound of his spiraling mind.
That had been his chance . If his producer didn’t like it- Hizashi wheezes at the thought. He pulls open his email, whining when it’s empty of news. The website shows a fair amount of views, and he doesn’t let himself look at the comments. What if I really fucked this up-? He picks up his phone, gearing up to call the station, to- oh.
A text from his producer.
Yamada, babes, you’re a genius. That time slot is yours. Good work.
Oh.
Hizashi’s eyes are wide as he reads the line over a few more times. He turns back to his laptop and opens the comments. As he skims through them, he feels laughter bubble in his chest.
That was insane
Uhhhh Present Mic’s secret love affair who ???
I’ve never heard Mic that serious holy shit-
Okay okay, now I’ve gotta keep tuning in. This is too good to miss!
Apparently, stirring up drama was just the thing to secure his job. Especially when his boss thinks he orchestrated it. A slow smile spreads across Hizashi’s face. He sets the laptop to the side as he leans back against the couch. He stays like that as long as he can.
It lasts two minutes.
Then, he’s sitting up, biting the inside of his cheek and feeling only slightly nauseous as the rest of his panic returns to him. Right, he has more than his job to be worried about.
He misses you too.
Why had he said that? Who had said that? It sounded like a kid, a teenager. Why was Shouta doing homework with a teenager? The laptop gets picked up again.
Hizashi shakes out his wet hair, blowing it from his face as he opens a new browser. He pushes his glasses up. When he types in Shouta’s name, nothing useful comes up. He adds some keywords, but doesn’t get more than some old high school yearbook pictures. He always had said he wanted to be an underground hero. Hizashi furrows his brow. Maybe…
He types in “Eraserhead.”
There’s not much more than a few fuzzy videos and forum posts, but he’s there. That’s Aizawa Shouta, still fighting with that unwieldy scarf and wearing what looks like an adult onesie. Good to know he’s still being rational. Hizashi rolls his eyes, but can’t stop the smile that creeps back onto his face. He bites his lip. He’s still using that name…
-
You haven’t decided on a code name yet!?
It doesn’t matter what I choose, I don’t want to be in the spotlight anyway.
Bro, I got it! How about Eraserhead!
Sure. Whatever.
-
Shouta wasn’t enthusiastic about the name even back then, and yet… he’d kept it. Maybe the kid was right. Hizashi scrolls further down in the search results. More videos, most of them taken at night. Some theories across a few sites, none of them right, but intriguing nonetheless. Some less than kind comments about Eraser’s quirk that make Hizashi’s jaw tighten. Nothing particularly recent- or helpful.
He goes back to looking at what comes up for ‘Aizawa, Shouta’ and scrolls a bit farther. Nothing new in the past five minutes. This time, he stops at the old photos. U.A. doesn’t tend to advertise much about their students given the line of work most of them enter, but yearbook photos aren’t especially revealing of character. Hizashi opens the tab.
It takes less than a minute for him to navigate to the right page, and two minutes for him to scroll through the pictures- Aizawa’s being one of the first- but he finds himself not lingering as long as he thought he would. He keeps going. It takes Hizashi far too long to realize why that’s a mistake.
He freezes when he sees it.
It’s been fourteen years since he’s heard his voice. Ten since he stopped letting himself look at the pictures. Hizashi doesn’t think the year will ever come when it stops hurting.
His hair floats like a cloud above his aviator goggles. There’s a bright smile on his face- there always was. His eyes are a shocking cobalt, the very sea the sky reflects into his clouds.
Shirakumo Oboro.
It’s been so long since he’s heard that name. Hizashi stares and stares and only blinks when he’s startled by tears dripping down his face. He takes a sharp, shuddering breath, wiping at his face frantically. He closes the tab. Hizashi stares at the U.A. homepage, and comes to a resolution. Never again .
When they were sixteen, Oboro said something to Hizashi. Something about how if he was the clouds, then Hizashi must be the sun and Shouta was clearly a grumpy storm. They were the sky. Hizashi, at the time, found it hard to see what the sun had to do with the clouds. He let it stop him from doing something, every time he saw them laughing together.
When Hizashi and Shouta were twenty, something cracked. Something that felt like a crumbling building and heavy debris and blood washed away by rain. Hizashi realized, eventually, that Shouta was the night. He was dark and grumpy but he never stayed angry so how could he possibly be a storm? With that, though, Hizashi couldn’t help but think- how could the day and night be together without the clouds to connect them?
That was when Hizashi found himself pacing in a storm, clothes soaked through and headphones broken and waterlogged. He couldn’t tell his tears from the rain and the only thing in his mind, then, was that they couldn’t do it without him. They shouldn’t have tried .
For the ten years following that, every time he picked up the phone he’d feel the breeze in his hair and guilt churn in his gut. He always set it down.
But now. Now, the tears are back and a storm is brewing, now he’s thirty fucking years old and some kid just had to tell him to get his shit together. Hizashi will never forget Oboro. But he also won’t let his memory hold him back.
The laptop makes a sad whirring noise as it’s powered down and before Hizashi entirely knows what he’s doing he’s walking to the door. He pulls on his shoes and grabs the keys, gripping them hard enough that it hurts. He leaves the apartment and closes the door on the past ten years of his life.
Shouta buries his chin deeper into his scarf as he trudges through the heat of the afternoon sun. He sighs when he comes upon the address, staring up at the sign’s simplistic logo. If she’s brought him here, of all places, she definitely wants something.
A bell rings above his head as he steps into the cafe. The familiar smell of coffee and wood floods his senses, and Shouta can’t help when his steps falter while he takes everything in. It hasn’t changed. The platforms lining the walls are the same ugly, carpeted things they were ten years ago, and the small wooden sign that reads ‘Please remove your shoes!’ painted in loopy pink lettering still hangs next to the door. The same head of blonde hair sits beyond the window into the next room, and-
Shouta freezes where he’s slipping off his shoes.
He looks again, but the image doesn’t change. It… It really is the same hair, pulled into a messy bun and curling around the same very familiar face. There’s a soft smile pulling on his lips as he pets a small tabby laying in his lap. This scene suddenly feels even more familiar.
He can imagine where Oboro would be sitting. Next to Hizashi, as they wait for Shouta to slowly make his way to their usual spot. They’d be laughing, leaning against each other. They’d cheer when Shouta finally arrived because he’d attract the cats that were usually afraid of their own boisterous nature.
He can remember how they avoided that seat only a year later. How wrong it felt even being here, knowing that he couldn’t be.
He can remember how they stopped coming at all, and how Shouta avoided this place for years for fear of the very situation he’s found himself in. He knows it isn’t rational- avoiding something because of something as trivial as fear . And yet.
Now, however, he’s here.
It was Nemuri that contacted him. She’d texted him around noon, insisting he meet her to discuss something important. He’d figured if she was arranging it, and would be there before him, there’d be nothing to worry about. He should really know not to trust her with these matters by now.
Shouta scans the room one more time to see if she’s even here, and is unsurprised to see that she isn’t. He debates leaving for only a moment. He can’t, though. He’s already here, and Hizashi is here, and it really wouldn’t be very rational for him to leave now.
He walks into the inner room and doesn’t stop until he’s at their old table. Hizashi looks up at him, and Shouta suddenly regrets every decision he made that led to not having seen those eyes for so damn long.
They say nothing for a long moment, just staring and remembering and feeling the shifts in the air with every breath and movement and emotion.
Hizashi is the first to speak, and his voice comes out rough. He says Shouta’s name, and the sound of it brings Shouta down into the chair next to him as his knees nearly give out.
“‘Zashi.” His response is soft. “What… what are we doing here?” Hizashi swallows audibly before looking Shouta right in the eyes.
“We’re being fucking stupid.”
He says it with a strange amount of conviction. Shouta decides to keep an open mind.
“How so?”
Hizashi takes a deep breath before continuing.
“You know this is stupid. What we did-”
“Right, that’s why we stopped-”
“ No .” He clenches his fists under the table. “That’s what I mean. The stopping. We… we shouldn’t have.”
That’s when a cat decides to jump right into Shouta’s lap, and even when it starts swatting at his hair he can’t bring himself to look away from Hizashi. To breathe. To tear his mind from an ever circling what?
“What?”
“Look,” he starts, his eyes darting to the tabletop, “I know why we did it. I know we thought it was best.” He looks back up. “I also know we’ve avoided each other as an excuse to avoid him .”
“That’s-”
“We built walls, Shouta. I talk too much, you barely talk at all, and it’s all to pretend there isn’t glass separating us from anyone trying to get close. Don’t pretend you don’t know that.”
And Shouta… doesn’t know what to say to that. He tries to think but finds himself unable to find the answer. What’s right here? What’s rational?
“It took some kid yelling at me on air to break what I built, Shou,” Hizashi continues. His shoulders are tense and his lips are pressed tight together. His eyes just look so, so earnest. “If what he said is true… then we’ve been idiots.”
“What did he say?”
“That… that you miss me, yo.” He falters only slightly. Shouta’s eyebrows crease as his confusion grows.
“Wh- wait. Who said this?” Hizashi gives a small shrug.
“A teenager, it sounded like. When I was doing my radio show. I would’ve thought it was fake, but… I heard your voice.”
“My…”
“Yeah, man.” Hizashi snickers. “You were yelling something about homework?”
Shouta’s eyes narrow. Ah . Someone is going to be running laps when he gets home.
“Right. Well…”
“Is it true?”
Shouta can’t lie. Not to him, not about this. He nods.
Hizashi sighs. “I miss you too.”
He misses you too.
“Just…” Shouta looks at where Hizashi is snuggling a cat. His heart laughs at how far gone he still is. “Just give us a chance?” Hizashi smiles, nervous but determined. “A trial run- it’s only rational, right?”
And, well. Shouta can’t argue with that.