A/N - Writer's block tried to kill this chapter so hard. Please please please please please comment any constructive criticism, questions you have or even just a note saying what you are enjoying in this work.
Chapter 13 – Say Something
Neither of them moved for several moments, Aine's body relaxing into the familiar embrace. The sun had just begun to stream through the apartment windows when Shouta put a hand under Aine's chin and turned her face towards his, "We still have a lot to discuss but," he glanced at the clock on his living room wall, "we both have somewhere to be soon."
Aine followed his glance to the wall and sighed before taking a step back, "I guess we do. Probably wouldn't be appropriate to show up to work in a t-shirt and sweatpants."
Shouta gave her a smirk as he ran his hands down her arms to her own bandaged hands, holding them up between them "Just so you know, there were much easier ways to come talk to me." As she scrunched her nose in feigned offense towards him, he gave a ghost of a chuckle, "You might want to see Recovery Girl before you start seeing students today."
She looked at her hands, "Yeah, less questions that way. I guess I better head over there."
Gently tugging her hands to bring her closer, Shouta touched his forehead to hers'. "I will come by your office after classes are over. We can finish talking then."
As he released her hands, Aine smiled before turning to leave, "I'll hold you to it." she called over her shoulder as she stepped out into the hallway.
Thankfully, the hallway was empty as she quicky padded to the elevator. Her steps softened by her bare feet. Once the doors opened on her hallway, she sprinted to her apartment and hurried to get ready for the day ignoring the look one of the other teachers shot her.
She was pretty sure she could have gotten a world record for how quickly she threw her outfit together. Glancing in the mirror, she eyed the new black vest she wore over a white peasant top and a pair of black fitted slacks – one of the outfits she had ordered after she first arrived. While she appreciated what the nurse and his wife had done for her, it felt nice to be in things a little closer to her personal style.
Quickly sliding on a pair of white and black ballet flats, she grabbed her phone and her monitor tossing both of them into her laptop bag as she headed out the door.
Aine felt drained as she waited for her first student to arrive. Recovery Girl had clucked at her for not coming straight to her office with a second degree burn but had been impressed at whoever had dressed the wound.
Thankfully, before she could doze off at her desk, she heard her first student of the day loudly calling down the hallway to his friends before bursting through her door.
"Hey Miss S!" the blonde smiled broadly waving as he skidded to a stop.
"You're almost 5 minutes late again, Kaminari." she shook her head at him.
He rubbed the back of his neck smiling sheepishly, "Yeah, sorry about that."
"We will keep working on it." she smiled, "Go ahead and have a seat, I wanted to talk to you about something."
Kaminari set his bookbag beside the couch before taking his seat, "Is it about all that stuff from last week?"
Aine settled in to the chair across from the couch, "Yes, I've been talking to your teachers and some of the other professionals here at UA. Kaminari, all the information I got back points to what we discussed in your last appointment. Everything suggests that your struggles in class come from an undiagnosed case of ADHD."
He dropped his head and his shoulders sagged as the words seemed to drop on him like a weight, "So I'm not stupid, there really is something wrong with me?"
"Not 'wrong with you', it just means your brain functions a little differently." She jumped up from the chair and grabbed a box from her desk, "I want to show you something. Have you ever seen something like these before?" she pulled out a few fidgets and chew necklaces from the box.
He nodded as she placed them back in the box and set the box beside him on the couch.
"Go ahead, pick the first one that catches your eye."
After a few seconds of digging, he pulled out a small object that looked like a chained together triangle and started to fiddle with it in his fingers. "I like this one."
"Perfect, we can start with that one. Many people with ADHD find that these little things help them to focus by keeping their hands busy so their brain can focus. I also have some chew necklaces in here as well. It may take us a few tries to find something that helps you but until then you are more than welcome to come in every morning and pick one to try out of my box. I've already emailed your teachers, so they know what to expect."
Kaminari watched her as he continued fiddling with the fidget, Aine mentally smiled watching him.
"Normally, I would suggest medication to help as well but after going through your files and with how your quirk can affect your brain, I don't think that is our best course of action at this moment."
"Do you really think this will help?" his hands stilled, and he held the fidget up.
Aine shrugged, "It might, it might not. We won't know until we try. I've also given some accommodations to your teachers to help with things like tests and note-taking." They spent several minutes talking and going through the different accommodations she had provided for him. "I heard that some of your classmates had created small study groups?"
Kaminari perked up, "Oh yeah! Bakugou helps us sometimes in Kiri's dorm room!"
The timer started to buzz indicating that the session time was coming to an end. "Looks like we are out of time for today, keep that fidget with you for today and bring it back this afternoon. My door is always unlocked." She stood and walked Kaminari to the door.
"Thanks Miss S! I'll bring it back this afternoon!" he waved as he headed down the hallway.
I'm never going to see that fidget again. Aine chuckled to herself.
The students today were mostly from General Studies and Support with the exception of Kaminari. If she was honest, it was nice to have the almost mundane boy/girl issues, general school anxieties and other "normal" high school issues to discuss compared to the extreme trauma that seemed to permeate the hero courses. Wednesdays like today were her busiest day, which she was grateful for as it made the hours fly by.
As she was gathering up the files strewn across her desk from the day's appointments, she heard a light rapping on her door. Butterflies flew into her stomach as she remembered that Shouta had said he was swinging by.
"It's unlocked."
Instead of Shouta, the door opened to one of his students – a brunette girl with a soft pink hue to her cheeks. She stood in the doorway gripping her backpack straps, her pinkies raised. "I'm sorry, Miss Satterfield. I know we have an appointment tomorrow, but I was wondering if I could talk to you."
Aine walked around from behind her desk and gestured to the couch, "Of course, Uraraka! Have a seat. What is going on?"
The girl sat down on the couch and nervously picked at the hem of her skirt. The eye bags that had been barely noticeable when Aine had first met the child were peeking out from underneath a layer of concealer almost a shade too light for the girl's skin tone.
"Uraraka?"
Uraraka squeezed her eyes shut as her hands fisted on top of her knees, Aine saw tears begin to slip from her eyes and drop onto her clenched fists.
"May I sit beside you?" the girl nodded and Aine settled on the couch beside her. "You know this is a safe space, you can talk to me about anything..."
The teenager took in a deep shaky breath, "I can't stop seeing him… Sir Nighteye… He was alive when I gave him to the medics. He was alive…." her face scrunched as more tears fell, "and then… he wasn't."
Aine sat silently as Uraraka looked to her, "I can't sleep, I keep going over all the ways I could have been quicker or… or done ANYTHING." her body shook with the last word as her fist clenched tighter. "I spoke to Mr. Aizawa, and he told me I did nothing wrong but if I didn't then why do I still feel like this?"
Because you are a teenage girl who should have never seen any of that in the first place.
Aine took a steadying breath and placed her hand over Uraraka's fist, "Because you are human. When something as traumatic as what you went through happens it is only natural to try and analyze every moment, every decision to see if it would have changed the outcome."
"Aizawa was right but that isn't going to stop your brain from trying to 'fix' what happened. I went through something very similar when I was just a few years older than you." Uraraka looked up at Aine, "I went over every scenario possible in my head but no matter what I thought up, it never changed the outcome. In some cases, it even made the outcome worse."
The girl sniffled and rubbed a hand across her eyes, "How did you get it to stop?"
"I won't lie to you, it doesn't ever actually stop" as Uraraka's eyes fell back to her hands, Aine offered the girl a soft smile, "but it does get less frequent. I had someone who I could talk to. Eventually, they talked me into starting therapy, which you've got a head start on here. It took a long time but eventually I was able to sleep without reliving every moment."
Uraraka nodded in understanding and wrapped her arms around herself, careful to keep a finger raised on each hand.
"A word of advice?" Aine put her arm around the girl's shoulders, "Not from your counselor but from someone who has been there." She waited until Uraraka's eyes met her own before continuing, "Talk. Talk to your friends, talk to adults that you trust. Especially those who were there. This isn't something you have to deal with alone."
She gave the teenager's shoulder a soft squeeze as she stood and grabbed a sticky note off of her desk, "If ever you need someone to talk to and feel like you can't talk to your friends, my door is always open and this," she jotted down her cellphone number on the note and handed it to Uraraka, "Is my personal cell number. We can talk about more coping mechanisms and strategies during your session tomorrow."
Uraraka stood wiping the heels of her hands across her eyes, "T-thank you Miss Satterfield." she gave a short bow before putting the sticky note in her backpack and strapping it onto her back.
"I mean it, Uraraka. Anytime you need to, feel free to call or come by here." she held the door open for the brunette who smiled broadly and gave a short nod before walking through the doorway.
"Oh! Hi Mr. Aizawa!" Uraraka squeaked, nearly colliding with Shouta as she turned to head down the hallway. She sidestepped him and jogged down the hall.
He stepped into Aine's office, "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
Aine shut the door, shaking her head. "No, she just needed someone to talk to. Do the hero courses usually traumatize their students right out of the gate?"
Shouta scoffed, "Just this group apparently, the higher ups have been pushing things along faster this year. Internships, work studies, provisional licenses – all are things that usually happen for second years. Everything has been pushed up for this class. I have my theories but that is for another time."
He looked around the room with his hands in his pockets, "Not a bad little office you have."
"Wish I could take credit for any of it, Nedzu had it all set up for me before I even set foot on campus." Aine shrugged.
Silence descended as neither of them seemed to know where to start. After a few short moments, Shouta coughed, "Listen, about this morning…" Aine tried to read his eyes, something icy settling in her stomach as he continued, "I'm not sure where we go from here. Three years is a long time to just pick up where we left off." He looked down, his capture weapon hiding his facial expressions from her. "While I have missed you and would rather pretend the last three years didn't happen, it is going to take some time for me to be able to fully trust that I won't wake up one morning and you've disappeared."
"Then we start from the beginning again." Aine leaned against her desk, Shouta's eyes peeked over his capture weapon at her, "We take it slow, like a normal couple. Relearn each other."
He closed his eyes and nodded, "I can agree to that."
"Also," Shouta opened his eyes as she continued, "I think it would be best to keep things quiet anyways. The Commission wouldn't be too happy about a pro-hero involved with a former villain. After what happened last week, I don't want to jeopardize anything for you until we can prove to them that I am no longer a threat."
Shouta hummed, "Let me look into things and see what we can do to clear you. In the meantime, we will have to disclose our relationship to Nedzu - school policy." Seeing the concern in her eyes, he added, "He has no love for the Commission, he won't go out of his way to expose us."
Aine nodded as she stepped away from the desk, crossing the distance between them "Okay. So we keep things under the radar and ease back into things. I can handle that. It's going to be a little hard to date, last I checked there weren't any cat cafes on campus like we used to go to." she laughed a little to herself.
As she drew closer, he pulled his hands out of his pockets reaching out to cup her face like he had that morning, "I'll come by your apartment Friday evening before I head out to patrol. We will figure something out." he smiled at her before brushing her lips with his in a soft whisper of a kiss.
His patrol had been long, busy nights were great for keeping it from being monotonous, but it also meant that the sun was starting to rise before he got home. Today was going to be a long one in the classroom.
He opened their front door and was immediately hit with a sixth sense of something being off. Hizashi stumbled out of his room in the three-bedroom apartment, "Hey Shouta, late patrol?"
"Yeah, have you noticed anything off?" Exhaustion had been replaced by a state of hyper awareness as Shouta scanned the room.
Hizashi stopped and turned around, "Other than us beating the girls out of bed for once, I don't think so."
Shouta's shoulders slumped, "Probably just left over from all the crap that went down last night. It's going to be a long day." He started towards the door to his room, that feeling settling into his gut rather than dissipating with each step. As he turned the handle on the door, it held the same feeling as walking into a room in an abandoned house. He looked inside and saw an empty bed, a piece of paper on his pillow.
"No no no no no no" a million scenarios went through his head until he opened the note.
"Shouta,
Don't follow me.
Aine"
She was gone.
All trails ran cold after the plane ticket out of Japan. Whatever method she used to bounce around Europe had been under the radar: no busses, no trains, nothing solid to follow on. Occasionally, they would hear that she had been spotted but the Commission had refused his request to go to Europe to search for himself.
They said that they were in contact with the other commissions in Europe and if she turned up, they would let him know. Weeks went by, no one had found her.
Shouta poured himself into his jobs.
Closed himself off.
Nemuri moved out, getting her own small apartment closer to both UA campus and her agency.
Hizashi stayed as long as he could but eventually found an apartment closer to the radio station and moved out on his own as well.
Shouta stayed. Sleeping on his couch, in a sleeping bag between jobs. He couldn't return to the bed they had shared without memories flooding back. The others came by once a week for dinner and a movie, but nothing felt the same. It took over a month before they stopped absentmindedly leaving a spot at the table or grabbing an extra bowl for popcorn, like she was just running late not somewhere halfway across the world.
After a year, he sold the apartment – splitting the money with Nemuri and Hizashi – and moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in the same building.
That same year, he stopped asking for updates from the Commission.
Stopped checking with connections he had in Europe.
She wasn't coming home.
She was gone.