Hizashi doesn’t know Midoriya the way Shouta and Eri do. He taught him English for a year, worked a few missions with him, and of course, he’s familiar with him as the Number One Pro Hero. There was also the not insignificant amount of time he knew Midoriya as Hitoshi’s boyfriend and his own future son-in-law (you know, whenever Hitoshi got around to actually asking, he had been waiting for the ‘right moment’ for five months and, well, the ‘right moment’ is never coming now), but, compared to Shouta, who was Midoriya’s homeroom teacher for three years, and Eri, for whom Midoriya has been a near-constant presence in her life…
Yeah, Hizashi barely knows the kid.
He knows about the self-sacrificial streak. That’s plain as day, visible to anyone who cares to look close enough. He knows about his intelligence. The whole hero community does—a Number One who’s as whip-smart and quick-thinking as Midoriya is comes as a relief. Not that their previous Number Ones were meatheads, by any stretch of the imagination, but having a Number One out there who thinks around things the way Midoriya does is… it’s a good thing. It’s a new thing. Yeah, his quirk is just sheer, overwhelming power, but it’s in the way he uses it. He rarely uses its full power, hell, according to Shouta, he rarely uses more than twenty-five percent of it at a time. That… resonates with Hizashi, honestly, as a hero who always had to moderate his power and could rarely unleash the full force of his quirk. And to have a Number One out there, running around, showing kids a hero who thinks outside the box and is intelligent and diligent about how he uses his power?
It means something.
Many of the other things Hizashi knows about Midoriya are things he’s learned from Eri or Shouta. Midoriya can draw, and draw well—when Eri was much younger, one of her favorite ways to spend the time was drawing with her favorite people. She still has some of the drawings Midoriya did with her, pinned on the corkboard above her desk.
(And wasn’t it wild, to learn that Midoriya was ambidextrous? That explained a lot about how had so easily adjusted to writing with his left hand, back when he had first lost his arm.)
So, yeah. Hizashi knows quite a bit about Midoriya, but he doesn’t really know him. Which has led to… this… awkward moment, both of them stumbling across each other in the kitchen at three in the morning.
Does no one in this house have a healthy sleep schedule?
(Hizashi knows the answer to that: Shouta has nightmare, Hizashi has nightmares, Eri gets nightmares on occasion, he’s sure Midoriya has nightmares.)
They literally stumble into each other as they walk into the kitchen. Midoriya is near-silent in the way he walks (not to mention, Hizashi doesn’t have his hearing aids in), and while Hizashi isn’t, he’s pretty sure Midoriya is still half-asleep from the tired little whine he makes as he stumbles away from Hizashi.
Half-asleep as he is, he still reflexively activates his quirk, green lightning dancing across his skin and lighting up the room, revealing the way he squints at Hizashi, who has to blink and squint back, eyes protesting the sudden brightness.
“Oh,” he says, and the lightning vanishes. “Hey.”
“Hey, yourself,” Hizashi replies, stepping the rest of the way into the kitchen and flipping on the light. “You up for three AM tea, too?”
“…Yeah.” There’s a bit of hesitation before Midoriya replies. Despite the sleepiness clinging to his words, he speaks clearly.
“Well, we can just make a party of it, then.” Hizashi pulls the kettle off the stove and walks to the sink, turning on the tap and putting the kettle under the stream of water. “Anything in particular keeping you up?”
“Nn… Just. Anxiety. You?”
Kettle full, Hizashi turns and sets it on the stove and turns the burner on. “Nightmares,” he replies, as he reaches up into the cupboard where they keep their mugs and pulls two out at random. One is Shouta’s, simple black with a cat pun on it, and the other is one of Eri’s, with its fancy unicorn art slightly worn. “You want to talk about what sort of anxiety it is?”
With the two mugs out and set out on the counter, all Hizashi has to do is wait for the water to heat up, so he turns around and leans against the counter. Midoriya is still standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking everywhere but at Hizashi as his hand plays with the hem of his shirt.
“I mean…” he begins, and then cuts himself off, shrugging. “Just. General stuff.”
And Hizashi’s not going to push, not if it’s going to make Midoriya uncomfortable, so he just hums and nods.
“Yeah. The world can be a lot,” he agrees. Midoriya snorts and shakes his head in response to this.
“You don’t say.”
“I do say,” Hizashi replies, raising an eyebrow and smiling. This earns him another snort and an eyeroll, and Midoriya takes one step, and then another, slowly moving over to lean up against the counter next to Hizashi.
“It’s just…” Midoriya looks up, to the side, nibbling on his lower lip. “It’s a lot of things. A lot of different things.”
Hizashi nods, because he gets it. Adult life is… juggling the fear, the anxiety, figuring out the ways to make it a little less and a little more bearable.
He can guess what Midoriya is anxious about: how to public is going to react to the announcement of his leave of absence, how his friends are going to react… Those can’t be the only reasons, but they’re the most glaringly obvious ones to Hizashi. Managing your public image is… taxing, and something that he is intimately familiar with.
They’re both quiet, the conversation having dwindled itself out, as they wait for the water to heat up. It boils, and Hizashi turns the heat off.
“Vanilla okay with you?” he asks, holding up the box of teabags. Midoriya nods, and so Hizashi pulls out two teabags and sets them in the mugs and puts the box away. “Honey?” Another nod, so Hizashi pours a little bit of honey in each mug before pouring the hot water.
He walks out to the living room, tossing a glance over his shoulder to see Midoriya, standing next to his mug on the counter, glancing back at him and looking away as soon as he notices Hizashi looking.
“You coming?” he asks, and Midoriya twitches.
“Uh. Sure.” A momentary pause before he picks up his mug and follows Hizashi.
Something that is completely apparent to Hizashi in that moment is exactly how small Midoriya is. It’s not something that carries well on video, and it’s not something that’s even very noticeable when he’s out on the streets as Deku (although that’s helped by the shoes he wears with his hero costume).
He didn’t grow a centimeter in high school. Hitoshi’s voice echoes in Hizashi’s head for a moment, a brief flash of a family dinner and a moment of teasing from boyfriend to boyfriend, and while Hizashi previously just considered that a… joke, a bit of hyperbole….
Now, he’s not so sure, because he remembers how short Midoriya was during his first year of high school, and looking at how short he is now…
It’s a little bit of information he files away.
The physical height isn’t the only thing small about Midoriya in this moment, anyways. There’s something about the way he carries himself, something in the slouch of his shoulders and the way he holds his arm close to himself, like he’s unsure he’s deserving of the space he occupies.
And, well, maybe it’s the two kids he’s helped raise who both had issues with self-confidence, maybe it’s his husband who has self-worth issues, maybe it’s Hizashi himself, who, when he was younger, when he was struggling his way through his early twenties, often diminished himself to somehow make up for the space Present Mic demanded…
He knows how to help with this, so he does. He reaches out, puts his spare hand on Midoriya’s back, right between his shoulder blades. Midoriya freezes, tensing up for a moment and blinking wide-eyed at Hizashi, before his shoulders lower and he relaxes into the touch.
“Three AM tea is always better with company. Not that I would wish insomnia on anyone, but if we’re both up, we might as well enjoy it with each other, hm?”
His words take a moment to process before he’s rewarded with a small, shy smile stealing its way across Midoriya’s face.
“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding, ducking his head. “Okay.”