Work Text:
It began with a question posed to Lancelot. He was one of the Hellions just as much as any of the others, for all that he was technically a sidekick at the agency. He had been with the infamous Class 1-A in their original 1-A years, and he had only been gone from the Hero scene for a few years after the war.
It was after the fight was over and Refract and Lancelot had finished the arrests and processing. The media swarmed forward, and Refract left Lancelot to deal with them, coming to an agreement with a single exchanged glance.
Though less directly experienced than the other Hellions, Lancelot had already established himself as a camera hog and a mastermind with the media. Even despite his dubious history as traitor and mole in the infamous Class 1-A, Lancelot was a media darling.
It was inevitable, though, that eventually someone would ask and Lancelot would answer.
There was nothing special about the day or the fight or even the poser of the question. Just a nondescript journalist with a microphone and a story to hunt, a member of the infamous Hellions agency set in her sights. She half-shouted the question at him, barely decipherable over the half-dozen other questions about the fight and the agency, and Lancelot paused.
“Why did I decide to become a Hero, even after dropping out of the course after the war?” He repeated the question, and all the reporters went silent, straining their microphones and waving hurriedly at their cameramen. Like they could sense that something very, very important was going to be said.
“In High School – both times, actually – I had a teacher who told me something very important,” Lancelot graced the crowd with his trademark glittering smile, “You do not need to give up on your goals until the potential success is at zero percent. So long as there is even a fraction of a percent of success, any goal can still be sought. I wanted to be a Hero, not just for myself, but for the people I had failed. My potential was not zero, and here I am.” Lancelot spread his arms and flared his indigo half-cape in a glittering, dramatic pose. “A Hero, for all the world to see!”
It was not the first time a Hellion had brought up a teacher or two, even specifying one of their High School teachers. But it was the first time that, no matter who pressed or how hard, Lancelot wouldn’t answer any questions about the teacher who had motivated him.
What teacher was he talking about? Well, Lancelot had actually heard a different question someone else was shouting at him, sorry.
Who was the teacher from his story? Oh, you mean the one with Chargebolt and his frankly horrendous spelling? Well, you see, Present Mic was actually a genius with the English language…
Which teacher was it who had told him that about potential? Of course, Ectoplasm had been their math teacher, but physics was actually covered by Power Loader, and he’d told them all this great trick for dealing with potential energy in tense situations…
Eventually, people slowly became more aware of this void in the Hellions’ interviews. Some were more difficult to catch and hold down, preferring to vanish back to their agency as soon as the fight was over or loudly cuss out reporters who got in their way, but the ones who did talk could certainly talk. More than one reporter had caught a Dekiru mutterstorm on mic, and more often than not he was snapped out of it by another Hellion who had figured out that he’d trapped a poor reporter with his barely intelligible lightning-fast monologue.
But no matter how much they talked, they always neatly steered around one tiny little part of their training. They would talk endlessly about Cementoss’s brutal book reports and Present Mic’s assignments to watch movies and read American comic strips, about All Might’s first clumsy attempts at teaching and how Midnight’s art class had always focused on accentuating how art demonstrated a given society’s standards and opinions about various minorities, even before her own injuries during the war. There was one teacher that they never referred to by name, though. A teacher who was arguably the most important for the class, who had broken tradition and for some reason stuck with them through all three years of their schooling.
Their homeroom teacher.
The Hellions never mentioned his name. They never said anything about his appearance or Quirk. Even Dekiru, obsessed as he was with Quirks and Quirk theory, never mentioned his homeroom teacher in his rants. Nobody even knew if the teacher was actually male. Sure, they sometimes used male pronouns to refer to their teacher, but ‘kare’ was still often used as gender neutral by many people.
Some people brought up the press conference they remembered from early in Class 1-A’s notoriety. The homeroom teacher had appeared in that, hadn’t he?
The recordings were easily available from a dozen different news sources, but only Nezu and Vlad King were present in them.
Further research into UA’s public files revealed just as little information. Other teachers had profiles on UA’s website, files introducing their Hero name and their teaching qualifications, what parents could expect from them and what students should look forward to in their classes. Their images were all up to date. There was a note on Recovery Girl’s availability to assist with external threats that updated hourly.
There was nothing even remotely noteworthy about the 1-A homeroom teacher’s profile. He had some qualifications listed in neat bullet points, notes about his teaching style and expectations marked in crisp, efficient wording, but nothing else. No name. No picture. No personal touch to his profile, like he’d written it himself or even submitted any information that couldn’t be pulled out of other databases. Nothing.
Once the people were aware of it, the mysterious Class 1-A homeroom teacher took the world by storm. He became a cryptid like no other, theorized and postulated about, and people proposed more and more outlandish theories for exactly who this teacher could be.
And still, the Hellions said nothing at all about him.
Well, nothing helpful.
It turned out that every single one of them – from cold, aloof Forfeit to perpetually irritated and private Dynamight to almost painfully shy Anima – could talk for hours about their mysterious Sensei. Long, unending rambles about how impressive and inspiring he was, about how he helped them when they needed it most and showed them what a true Hero really should be, about how he believed in them when they couldn’t even believe in themselves. Every one of them, without fail, agreed that they wouldn’t be where they were today – who they were today – without their Sensei.
They just wouldn’t say who their Sensei was.
Even other Heroes, UA teachers and those who had worked closely with the Hellions while they were in school, wouldn’t give a straight answer about the Hellions’ homeroom teacher.
“Oh, yeah, of course he did!” Present Mic chirped when someone brought up the fact that the Hellions’ homeroom teacher had stayed their homeroom teacher for all their time at UA, “nobody else would be able to put up with those Hellions.” He shot a wink at the camera and emphasized the last word just enough for everyone to know that he meant it far more literally than most would say the name of their agency. “I’m sure you’ve all noticed; they don’t really listen to anyone else.”
The people – citizens, reporters, even other Heroes – had noticed that so much that they sincerely doubted that even the Hellions’ mysterious homeroom teacher could have had any sort of control over them.
“Oh, he’s always been quite the queer character,” Midnight purred in an interview that was ostensibly about Heroism with disabilities but had still managed to slide to other topics, “very… private. Those kids, though, they’d do anything for their Sensei.” It was delivered with all of Midnight’s typical seductive persona, twisted into something almost – almost, but not quite, even she would never go that far – vulgar. But those wise enough to listen saw what she really meant.
The Hellions would do anything for their Sensei. The Hellions, most of whom were completely shameless and immune to embarrassment and all of whom danced to their own tune and did only and always exactly what they wanted to. They made agreements with each other, and they were often more inclined than usual to listen to others when on the battlefield, but controlling a Hellion who didn’t want to listen to you was an action akin to halting the flow of time. You might do it briefly in a localized area with a powerful Quirk, but beyond that, there wasn’t a chance.
Some Hellions listened to some Heroes. Tsukoyomi had a begrudging soft spot for Hawks, Red Riot adored Fat Gum, Froppy and Uravity genuinely admired Ryukyu, and all nineteen – twenty if you counted the mysterious member they referred to as Shin-chan or sometimes just ‘Purple’ who was never caught on camera and was always only vaguely referenced – of the Hellions were more inclined to listen to their old teachers than to other Heroes. But the closest they came to having one solitary leader was when Dekiru whipped out a black notebook and everyone with half a braincell in the vicinity got the heck out of dodge because the Hellions were serious.
Except for when it came to their Sensei.
Because every single one, no matter their role or current status, always responded to just the mention of their unanimous Sensei.
Once people started noticing it, they couldn’t stop.
Mid-battle, mid-threat, mid-interrogation, a Hellion would be stopped in their tracks by another hissing something about Sensei. Battle tactics would change on the fly based only on a vague reference containing the word ‘Sensei’ and various other, usually unrelated words like ‘scarf’ and ‘matryoshka dolls’ and ‘blink’. At his most furious, when even Red Riot and the rest of the DynaSquad couldn’t pull him away from his rampage, Dynamight would come screeching to a halt at a reprimand that mixed the words ‘potential’, ‘disappoint’, and, of course, ‘Sensei’.
He was everywhere. In every interview, there was some mention of him. Even in past interviews, dug up and rewatched, there were glaring references to this mysterious Sensei that everyone had simply brushed off at the time, assuming it was some other UA teacher.
Someone brought up the fact that the Hellions had formed their agency immediately after graduation. Even though two years of active Hero work was required to create a Hero agency.
There were no public traces of the agency’s founder. Even government records were locked down tight beneath Underground Hero protection guidelines.
An enterprising journalist tried to interview current UA students and was immediately shut down. Others went for previous graduates, ones that hadn’t already proven themselves to be impossibly tight-lipped. They were more or less skilled at subtly deflecting, but none of them would say a word on Class 1-A’s homeroom teacher.
Desperate for stories, some people began tracking down former students who had been expelled or otherwise left on less than friendly terms. Even they wouldn’t say anything. Any information that did weasel out of the ironclad secrecy was instantly shut down before it could spread, sometimes by UA’s legal team, sometimes by the Hellions’, sometimes by Pro-Hero Nezu himself.
By that point, the Hellion Homeroom had solidly become a thing. Akin to a melding of Mothman and the Zodiac Killer, part cryptid part one hundred percent real person, and despite the constant universal awareness of the age of the internet, still completely impossible to pin down, no matter how hard anyone tried.
And some people were certainly trying.
The Hellions had taken the world by storm, cutting off the rise in crime – both petty and large-scale – that had popped up in All Might’s absence. Criminal organizations that had been living the high life the few years after All Might’s retirement had been cut down to size again in moments as the Hellions worked their way through Japan and beyond. The villains were running and hiding again, but here was their salvation.
A person so revered and respected that merely mentioning his name would stop the Hellions in their tracks. If one of them could get their hands on that teacher, could threaten him or hold him hostage, then they’d be untouchable.
The most important part of that plan, though, was ‘if’. After all, it was hard to properly threaten a man if you didn’t even know his name.
High-ranked villains and low-level criminals alike were investigating. Snooping with whatever resources they had, be that subordinates or dedicated information networks or even just themselves and their own Quirks. They found just as much nothing as everyone else.
And then, something changed.
The Fallen Angel Café and Pool Hall was a halfway point. A location that prided itself on being entirely apathetic. Were you a Hero? A villain? The Fallen Angel didn’t care. As long as you didn’t start any fights or break anything, and you always paid your tab, you were welcome.
That was the rule, at least. Nobody fought with customers. Anyone who tried would immediately be kicked out and issued a ban that varied in length depending on the infraction and the history of the instigator. After years of operation, seeing high-ranked villains and Heros mixed with low-level thugs and even regular civilians, The Fallen Angel had solidified its corner of the market. The regular customers were impossibly loyal thanks to not only The Angel’s neutrality, but also their incredible pastries, coffee, and music selection. The owner – Angel herself – was more secure in her position than any top-ranked Hero or big-name villain.
When the Hellions needed something from The Angel, they sent Nighthide. A subtle Hero, not someone that anyone would even clock as a Hero at all. Nobody but Angel, who knew exactly what she was looking for.
Sometimes, when they needed a more concrete display of their presence, the Hellions would send in a small but noticeable team. Dekiru was common, as their chief strategist and a physical powerhouse. Uravity would come when they needed to appear friendly and harmless, and Forfeit when they needed to seem anything but. Others as they were needed. Over the years, Angel had seen almost the whole cast of Hellions come through her bar.
There was only one Hellion who had never darkened her door.
It appeared that his companions did not trust Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight anywhere near Angel’s strict no-fighting and no-breaking-things rules.
Until now, when Angel was about ninety-seven percent sure that Dynamight had not been sent by the Hellions. When the Hellions showed their hand in places like this, it was always in force. At least three at a time. Now there was only Dynamight. Not even Nighthide tucked into a dark corner.
Dynamight wended his way through the room with single-minded purpose, and everyone who so much as caught a glimpse of him knew that he was mad. Worse than his typical foul-mouthed baseline anger. He was furious, fit to actually kill, Hero license notwithstanding. The buzz of conversation in the room slowly faded, until people only conversed in snipped whispers. Something big was going down.
“Willow,” Dynamight snarled, shoving someone away to get to his target. Sleeping Willow was a well-established hitman with an effective team and a good success record. Her Quirk allowed her to send anyone she was thinking about into a coma.
“Dynamight,” Sleeping Willow hummed, lips quirked up in a smug little smile.
“Let go of him,” Dynamight ground out, and those nearest to him could hear his gloves creaking with how tight he was clenching his hands into fists.
“I can’t imagine what you mean,” Sleeping Willow said airily.
Slowly, deliberately, clearly seconds away from snapping and setting off a full Howitzer’s Impact in the middle of the café, Dynamight reached for the pocket in the back of his gauntlets and revealed a battered flip-top notebook that had seen better days. He flipped through it with admirable dexterity in his thick gloves, and stopped on a specific page.
“Nekomu Iatsu, alias Sleeping Willow, Quirk: Knockout. By focusing on a target, Nekomu can force them into a perpetual state of unconsciousness.” That was all information they already knew, but Dynamight wasn’t done, “Symptoms in the target include slower heartrate and decreased blood flow, higher water consumption, pale or green-tinted skin, stiffening and hardening of the skin, black or dark blue veins clearly visible on the face, hands, and feet, and decreased rate of healing.”
Sleeping Willow blinked, then curled her mouth into a lazy, mocking smile. “How’s your sensei doing, Dynamight? Is he turning green yet? Do his joints still move? Has his heart slowed down enough that you can’t detect it anymore?”
Dynamight slammed a fist down onto the table with a loud bang. Fortunately, it was one of the sturdy drinking tables and not a more fragile pool table, so it didn’t break. But it might have creaked dangerously.
“Shut up,” he seethed, “shut up, your Quirk is broken, let go of him.”
“No,” Sleeping Willow said smugly, and leaned back in her chair.
Sensing a fight about to literally explode in the middle of her establishment, Angel set down the drink she’d been making and called, “Dynamight.”
He half-turned towards her, his eyes still boring through Sleeping Willow.
“Sleeping Willow can’t stay here forever. Wait outside.”
The whole room caught their breath. Quirkless, untrained Angel stared down volatile, brutally effective Dynamight.
“Or what.”
“Catch.” Angel slipped an item out from a side drawer in the cash register and threw it at Dynamight. He snatched it out of the air in a single swift motion, then opened his hand, staring at what he’d caught with an unreadable expression.
“You know what that means. Your sensei won’t die from the few hours it takes for Willow to leave. Get him banned from The Angel, and he just might kill you instead.”
Dynamight scowled, closing his hand into a fist. “You’re one of his.”
“You could argue,” Angel said smoothly, “that he is one of mine. Wait outside.”
Dynamight turned around and stalked out the door. He settled against the wall, a blatant and unsubtle threat. Waiting. Outside.
Angel returned to making her drink.
Despite her protests, Sleeping Willow did, eventually, have to leave The Angel. The instant she stepped through the doors, she had half a dozen Hellions on her, full of feral, protective rage. Her entire network, allies and team and anyone who had open contracts with her, was wiped off the face of the earth. The Hellions’ patronage of The Fallen Angel notably increased, and Angel’s position was set in stone.
The rumor mill, meanwhile, went rabid.
Where would they find the Hellions’ Sensei next? Who else knew the mysterious homeroom teacher who was little more than a ghost except when it really mattered? What had Angel done to obtain said ghost’s loyalty? To the extent that a simple warning could scare off a furious, borderline homicidal Dynamight? What had she even shown him?
Rumors abounded. People attempted to bribe, coerce, or even threaten Angel into revealing her connection to the Hellions’ Sensei.
Angel remained just as tight-lipped as everyone else, and she liberally handed out extended bans from The Fallen Angel to anyone who pressed too hard. And all the other regulars at The Angel were willing to uphold those bans with less than a prompting from Angel herself.
And Angel went home and shed the mantle of Angel and once again became Aizawa Kusho, Aizawa Shouta’s mother. She tucked away the token Shouta had given her and smiled to herself.
As the Hellions continued to hide and skirt the issue, the mystery that was their homeroom teacher only became more legendary. Other Heroes – high-ranking Limelight and Rescue Heroes, well-known Intel Heroes, brutally efficient and effective Underground Heroes – revealed additional connections to the mysterious ‘Sensei’. Government officials knew him, CEOs and the most famous engineers in the most renowned Hero Support and Quirk-Tech companies refused to speak of him in front of a camera. Everyone, it seemed, knew who he was.
Except him.
Never one very interested in the media, social or otherwise, Aizawa Shouta, by then mostly retired from his role as Eraserhead and only holding onto his Hero license because it was required to teach at UA, knew absolutely nothing about the cryptid that was forming from his secretive lifestyle. His husband knew, of course, and his kids, but he just… didn’t care.
Aizawa Shouta’s legacy slowly grew to eclipse that of All For One at his prime, and the man himself continued to grade papers until three in the morning and terrorize his first-year classes with logical ruses every year, and hardly even noticed that, at this point, all of them seemed downright stunned to meet him. Most people were shocked to see what appeared to be a homeless man with a Hero license. He was used to it. It wasn’t like there was anything really noteworthy going on.