It lives! The boys get a little excitement this chapter...please enjoy.

...

It starts with one terrible, awful idea.

Its a friday, so both brats are there, running around and screaming and banging sticks together like swords. The purple kid calls it 'fun' and the blond one calls it 'training'. Shouta is staring blankly up at the sky from the tree branch he is lazing on with dark circles under his eyes during his lunch break, contemplating if it would be worth it to move at this point.

The kids eventually wind down, and the purple one is berated into following along with a six year old's idea of cooldown stretches. If Shouta had to guess, just from peeking an eye down at them once in a while, the blond learned how to stretch by watching his mom do yoga or something and is clumsily trying to copy her.

While the blond is busy trying to instruct the other kid on how to 'empower his inner femine energy', (somehow, Shouta doubted the little blond understood what the word 'femine' meant), the purple haired kid is trying to argue that he should still be allowed to play their games as Eraserhead.

"No." The little blond declares certainly. "I'm not letting you just make up someone whose quirk is 'I win'. That's cheating, and if you gotta cheat to win you'll never make it as my sidekick." The little blond scowls as he strains to touch his fingers to his toes. "And quite calling it playing! We're not playing, we're training to be heros. It's serious business!" Blondie's little cheeks puff up like a chipmunk in his anger and physical exertion.

"Eraserhead is real!" Shouta's littlest fan sulks, sitting on the grass, (below the tree where his hero lounges), with his legs akimbo, spending more energy tearing up stands of grass with his fingers and scowling into the distance than 'stretching'.

"Prove it!" The little blond huffs out, while trying to grab first one leg, then the other, then the ankle, like he's trying to pull his body along his own legs like he's climbing a ladder.

"I will!" The little purple one declared obstantly, dropping his collection of shredded grass and crossing his arms, huffing like a tiny, offended puppy. "I'll...! I'll...! I'll get a picture of him!"

Shouta stared dully up at the sky through a curtain of tree branches, feeling a headache coming on and the bags under his eyes growing darker.

"You don't even have a camera."

"Didn't you say you got a disposable one for your birthday last year? Let me borrow it!"

Why him? Shouta thought to himself. Why was it always him?

"If this Eraser loser is so secret, how are you going to find him? If they don't even post his name in the news they're not gonna have his patrol route mapped out on the forums."

What were five year olds doing on internet forums?! Who was giving these toddlers unsupervised internet access?! Shouta was getting grey hairs listening to this shit.

"Well, I won't be able to find his exaaaact route..." the purple haired kid hemmed and hawed. "I know he patrols in my neighborhood though-that's how I found out about him, I see him roof hopping at night sometimes out my window-"

...so between ten at night and six am? That was alarming. What was the kid doing awake at that hour? Shouta frowns. The kind of neighborhoods he patrols...well, he won't say its illegal to raise kids there, most of the residents are just really poor, not outright criminals; but, well...Shouta will just say he wouldn't raise a kid in those places if he had any other choice.

"-so I'll just...look around for him. I'll run into him eventually."

...purple child has just evolved into problem child.

"What, your foster parents are just going to let you wander around in the middle of the night?" Blondie scoffs.

"Well I'm not gonna tell them, obviously."

Lord. How does any child manage to make it to adulthood? This was why Shouta was studying to become a teacher. Kids were stupid. Stupid kids either need a reality check or they don't need to be going into heroics.

Or wandering the streets in the bad part of town in the middle of the night, as it were.

Shouta contemplates his options, comes to a decision, and quietly shifts to his feet, crouching on his wide tree branch. He peers down, picks his target, and drops.

The conversation changed topics while Shouta wasn't looking though.

"Stretch harder! My mom can reach passed her toes when she does this!" The little blond grunts and strains.

"No way! That's impossible!" The other one refutes, now struggling more earnestly to touch his toes.

"You calling me a liar Troll Doll?!"

"Show me a picture or I won't believe you!"

Shouta made sure to abandon subtlety at the last moment and land in a crouch with a heavy thud, right behind and between the two boys. They both jumped and twitched their heads around in sync to look at him.

What they saw when they turned round was a twenty something year old (practically an old man, in their eyes), with a scruffy lined face, purple eyebags, and long black hair pulled back in a messy bun. Even crouching in a predator's stance, he loomed above them. The man's pittyless black eyes had seen death, but the children did not understand that. Only that there was something eldritch in his gaze.

"A good hero will look up when they're searching for threats." Aizawa stated blandly, blinking down at the kid's stunned and horrified faces with the placid patience of the shinigami. "Constant vigilance, children." And then Aizawa smiled.

The children ran away screaming.

Tripping over themselves, pushing each other, kicking up dust, they really made a production of it. It was the result Aizawa had wanted, and yet he felt a brief pang of offense anyway. Aizawa rolled his neck, still watching the kids disappear across the long open fields of the public park, bouncing on his toes to get his blood flowing a little, and then he slipped away to scale the nearest fire escape and pursue via rooftop.

He caught up to the kids at the other end of the park, where they had stopped to catch their breath. They were both turned back towards the shade of the trees at the other end, where they had last seen Aizawa, and so had their backs turned to the scene of Aizawa silently stalking down the fire escape behind them.

"Where *huff* where'd he go?!" the purple problem child panted. "Who was that?!"

"How should I know?!" The blond snapped, a trace of shrill fear in his voice. "A villain, probably! Did you see the look on his face?!"

Once again, Aizawa's boots made a thud as he jumped down to land on the concrete behind the two boys. They both twitched their whole bodies around when they heard the noise, and their heads followed him up and up and up as he rose to standing this time, still grinning all the while. "I see you young hero wannabes still haven't learned your lesson about looking up..."

The kids screamed and ran again, this time in different directions. Aizawa shrugged, made his way back up the fire escape, and pursued the purple haired kid by rooftop again. The kid dashed down one street, then another, made two more turns, sprinting and shrieking all the while. A lot of pedestrians turned their heads once in a while, but no one stopped the kid to ask what was wrong.

It was a sad state of affairs, but in their society, bystanders were incentivized not to interfere in crisisces, leading to a need for more heros, leading to more incentives for citizens not to interfere...it was a terrible cycle, but Aizawa took advantage of it right now.

The kid eventually came to a stop on a crowded sidewalk, hands on knees and panting for breath. Aizawa was pleased to note that they were closer to the nearest 'bad' neighborhood than they were before. His plot...err, logical ruse...appeared to be working perfectly.

The building the kid paused next to didn't have a fire escape on the right side of the building for Aizawa to surprise the kid again, and Shouta hadn't brought his capture weapon with him, not imagining he'd have a need for it while only going to the local community college for a few hours in a well patrolled area. No decent hero was a one trick pony though, Aizawa's parkour skills were good enough to drop down silently behind the kid. Once again, nobody bothered to look up.

The kid still hadn't seemed to have learned that lesson, but he did have a pavlovian response to perk up and freeze when he heard Aizawa's boots thud against the ground behind him.

That little purple head of hair slowly started to turn, knees knocking together, as Aizawa's shadow encompassed the kid's own. Aizawa reached his hand out before the kid could turn all the way and pressed his fingertips lightly into the purple locks of bird's nest on the kid's head. Aizawa's handspan easily encompassed the kid's entire skull, and the little Eraserhead fan's neck was so skinny it took little pressure from the press of Aizawa's fingers to hold his head in place.

Aizawa crouched and said lowly into the kid's ear. "So I hear you're planning on sneaking out in the middle of the night to go skulking around the back alleys." Aizawa squeezed his fingers lightly, and the kid swallowed audibly. Aizawa lowered his pitch to a near whisper. "I promise if I find out you're sneaking out in the middle of the night, I'm going to hunt you down across every inch of this town."

Aizawa gave a light shove at the kid's head with his finger tips, causing the kid to stumble a step or two forward. The kid whirled around quickly, angry and fearful expression on his face, to find Aizawa crouching there with a smile so wide it exposed his canines, half hidden by the black strands of hair dripping into Aizawa's face after half escaping from it's loose bun in the excitement.

"Run home, kid." Aizawa says at a normal volume, still grinning.

And the kid runs.

It's just as easy to get back up the side of the building as it was to get down, though a few people notice him and point in exclamation this time. Once again, Aizawa easily follows the kid from the rooftops, and this time that little head of purple hair doesn't stop running. The shops and crowds start disappearing, the apartments start looking more and more run down, the back alleys start to look longer and darker. The kid finally disappears full sprint into a certain townhouse, but not before running face first into the front door and scrambling to open it.

Shouta perches on the rooftop across the street, making note of the place. It is, in fact, along one of his many varied patrol routes, and a precocious child could, in fact, possibly chance to catch a glimpse of Eraserhead swinging from rooftop to rooftop, if they happened to be looking out their window at an opportune moment around midnight or so.

Shouta gives it a few minutes, scanning the house, the cars, the lights on inside to determine that someone is probably home at the kid's place, and then he drops on down to street level floor by floor.

A quick rap on the front door summons a woman in her forties wearing pajamas and a bathrobe, squinting at Shouta dubiously while a cigarette hangs between her fingers.

Aizawa gets it. He might look like the boogeyman to a six year old, but with his messy hair, unshaven face, and what could at best be called a well worn black hoodie and grey sweats, he comes off as homeless to most adults.

"Hello." Shouta grunts bluntly without waiting for the woman to speak. He refrains from attempting a polite smile, not wanting to worsen the woman's impression of him. Shouta gets straight to the point. "I overheard your kid down at the park, planning to sneak out in the middle of the night and fool around doing god knows what in these back alleys. I thought I should tell you, so you can keep an eye on him. Dangerous at night, in this part of town."

The woman slowly raises a single eyebrow at him, giving him a slow glance up and down and ending on examining his face. Aizawa keeps his expression impassive, and the woman snorts. "Thanks," she finally says, "-I'll keep an eye on him." She turns to look over her shoulder, deeper into the house where Shouta can't see due to the door, and scowls. "He's a little trouble maker, isn't he!" She says loudly, almost more to whoever she's looking at than Shouta-the kid, presumably. She turns her indifferent gaze back to Shouta. "Thanks for the tip. Was there anything else you needed?"

"No, that's all." Shouta says blandly. He nods and turns away. He pulls his phone out and checks the time as he strolls away, pretending not to notice the head of purple hair and the suspicious, squinted eyes that had been watching him from within the house duck behind the front windowsill to hide as he strides passed.

Well, he did his good deed for the day, at the cost of missing his last Instruction and Assessment For High Schoolers class of the day. Shouta's been reading ahead though, so skipping one class won't put him behind. And besides, now he can surprise his partner Hizashi by coming home a little early today.

Shouta starts homeward with a little spring in his step. Teaching the next generation of heroes is serious business, but it's going to have its fun moments, he can already tell.

...

This chapter was loosely inspired by The Feral Pro Hero Eraserhead. Thanks for reading, and please review! Your comments give me life.

And hey, if you liked this fic, you might like some of my others, so check them out and tell me what you think.

Like maybe my Harry Potter and the Heroes of UA fic, which also has some cute kids becoming friends and I recently updated. Or my most popular fic, Teddy Lupin goes to UA.