Aizawa mulled, sullenly, as he tried to keep his grip loose on the steering wheel. He was driving around Musutafu with a student and a dead body in his trunk. No big deal. What was the worst that could happen.

Momo was sitting turned toward him in the passenger seat, and she opened her eyes to watch him as he drove off-campus. He was waiting for her to ask where they were taking Goro, but instead she asked—

"Where did you get the bleach?"

He gestured toward the backseat. "Car bleach."

Momo laughed, weak but real, and he glanced at her for reassurance. There was the dimmest smile on her lips. It was like the first signs of life after resuscitation. Tightness in his chest loosened.

"Yakuza Oyabun, first lesson: keep a bag full of white laundry as cover for the presence of the unsuspecting bottle of bleach."

"You laugh," Aizawa chided, the lines around his mouth deepening as he frowned. "Until you need it and you don't have it."

"Are there security cameras watching the quad?" she asked.

Aizawa exhaled as he looked at her, and again he felt it. The admiration. Even if she hadn't caught in her that Goro was in the trunk, her mind just never stopped working. Fuck that Hero shit, this is what she should be doing. If he asked her if she had any ideas on where to put the corpse, she'd probably have some damn good ones.

"You don't miss much, do you." The apples of her cheeks darkened. "When the dorms were established, All Might and I chose where to place cameras. I left myself blind spots I could use to leave campus."

"All Might didn't realize that?"

It took the remainder of his self-restraint to not get on a tangent about All Might and what a piece of shit the Number One Hero was. Momo was smart, she'd realize everything else on her own with time.

"I went over the cameras out of order from the route I intended to take. And he can think on his feet in a fight, but he's not analytical to that degree."

Perhaps he shouldn't have wasted his restraint on All Might, because what happened next, he shouldn't have done. Instead, Aizawa turned to look at her, well-aware of the cocky smirk on his face as he tagged on, "I picked my assigned parking spot, too."

There was a teasing heat in his grin and in his eyes that he hadn't intended to let get away from him. Too often now his carefully laid game pieces slid where they shouldn't on the board, when it involved Momo. It had become too easy. He was hardly aware of his slips sometimes. She looked back at him now, her lips mirroring his expression, and her eyes light on him.

He took a cigarette from the pack he kept in the center console, tucking the lighter into his hand until he was ready to use it. He lit the end and dropped the lighter back into its home before he cracked the window. The narrow flow of air sucked the smoke out. He had begun to relax into the seat, the prickles up the back of his neck beginning to ease, when Momo jerked upright and turned to look at him. His eyes roved back to her and he took another long, deep drag before speaking.

"I was waiting for you to come to that realization."

Her color, which had only just brightened her complexion again, was once more gone. Even just glancing at her, Aizawa could see her gears turning. Not just to the ramifications to taking her with him — she'd get over that, that much he was sure — but the realization of the corpse. He didn't want her to go back there, to that cold, dark place. He wanted to reach for her, make contact, but he already had a hand off the wheel as he smoked.

"You okay over there?" he asked instead.

"You can't seriously be—"

The panic was hitting her though. Head dropped. He could hear her quick, shallow breaths as she thought about the corpse. Aizawa went to put his hand on her leg and caught himself, and instead held out four fingers where she could see. Four, seven, eight, he cued her, and Momo recognized the signal. She did as he asked, duck walking backward from the nasty precipice of an attack.

At last she wheezed with lingering disbelief, "You're taking a student with you to hide a body?"

"No," Aizawa said slowly. Reluctantly. "I'm taking you with me." And he heard how it sounded, and added, "Not that you left me a lot of options, Momo. I'd have rather left you in the dorm."

"I might have if I'd known—"

"Sit back in your seat, try to at least look relaxed so that you don't draw attention while I drive. I think you would've come regardless."

"Absolutely not! Why would I have done that?"

"Because you're more curious than you are afraid of what I do now."

It was more aggressive than he should've spoken but fuck, he was getting tired of this. He was exhausted by this tightrope. Protect her from his men, protect her from All For One, protect her from himself, protect him from falling into the grip of Yakuza life. Don't groom her to leave her dreams of being a Hero just because he looked at her and saw what she could really do. Shouldn't she know enough by now that she could choose on her own? Wouldn't he be equally in the wrong by steering her away when there was a magnet inside her determined to bring her to this place?

"—and it's only because of what you went through in Kamino Ward that you're having difficulty coping. It's not the acts of violence that melt you down, just a moment. Time will help you get past that."

"I am an accessory to a crime!"

"And I am fully aware of all the ways we could be found out. I am doing everything I can to mitigate the risk to you, Momo. It's a little early in your career for you to have to turn to a life of crime."

Momo sputtered indignantly at his dropping sarcasm, and he laughed. He laid his head back against the headrest to glance at her again. The streetlights rhythmically lit her face before delving back into darkness. Aizawa reached across and gave her forearm a light squeeze. She felt cold still. Her eyes came to him.

"Do you trust me?" he asked.

Momo nodded, and he returned the gesture. Trust. Somehow, he knew he could trust her, too, even though she — more than anyone else in the world — had every tool and opportunity to bring him down. But that was trust in its purest, wasn't it. Giving someone the power to destroy you and believing they won't.

"I'll see what I can do about the transfer to Shiketsu. If you're sure that isn't what you want," he said, hesitantly, drawing his hand away.

"I want to stay at UA."

I wouldn't leave. I wouldn't leave you.

"Okay."

What would that look like, though, if she stayed at UA? There was a deplorable moment where he remembered how badly he'd wanted to kiss her, and in a moment he saw it all. Saw what their glances would be like during class, stolen seconds when no one was watching. Clandestine meetings. Each of them checking around as he let her into his campus apartment.

He wanted to scoff, too, as he imagined the consequences of someone knew. Let UA fire him. He didn't need Hero work anymore, he never really had. Momo's father knew who he was now. Certainly the irony of his earliest threat — to force them into marriage to uphold Momo's honor — hadn't been missed by the man now.

The reasons not to were being stripped away, and Aizawa's tongue pressed against the inside of his cheek and slid over his teeth as he mulled on his thoughts. On what he wanted instead of what everyone else did — for once.

He turned the sedan off the road and stopped at the gate of the storage facility. Aizawa took his phone and, after a minute of looking through it for the code, he rolled down his window to punch the digits into the keypad.

He guided the sedan around the back of the building, and the SUV he'd been expecting was parked in front of a unit, idling. The unit door had been rolled upward, and Aizawa saw Kobayashi's silhouette inside, waiting.

Kobayashi hadn't known Momo would be with him. Hell, though, even he hadn't thought she'd be with him for this drive. He wondered if Kobayashi would go tatting back to Daddy Yaoyorozu about this now. He hoped not. He was tired of cleaning up messes.

He turned his sedan around and reversed so that the vehicles sat with their tailgates close. Kobayashi stepped out of the unit, hands in his pockets, and Aizawa rolled down the window and braced. Kobayashi bent, mouth open to talk, when he saw Momo.

"Kobayashi," Aizawa said curtly, demanding the man's attention return to him. "Is there a problem?"

Her father's guard didn't answer at first. Cause this could very well, very deeply, be a problem. Momo hadn't been wrong, her presence here was making her an accessory. If they were caught…

He was so damn tired of cleaning up messes.

Kobayashi's eyes went to Aizawa, then back to her. Back to him.

"No," he said at last. "No problem."

"Good. Let's get this done then." He looked back at Momo, steady. "Stay here."

Aizawa pulled the trunk release and got out of the car, shutting the door behind him.

"What is she doing here?" Kobayashi demanded, voice low, as he followed Aizawa to the trunk.

"I didn't want to bring her," Aizawa answered. "But she was panicking. I couldn't leave her alone."

"No shit the kid was panicking. You killed somebody."

The kid. There it was, the one simple fact that kept eluding him through all his chewing and mulling. Momo was sixteen, but that had become easy to forget against the backdrop of these past few months.

"Let's just get this done."

Goro had made a mess of his trunk. Blood was smeared across the interior and the foul smell of his bowels loosing wafted up. Aizawa grit his teeth though and leaned in to frisk Goro's corpse; a little cash, a phone, a wallet. He put them in his pocket, and then grabbed Goro under the arms while Kobayashi wrangled his feet.

"One, two, three—"

They lifted Goro up, using the momentum to swing him across the short distance into the back of the SUV. The moment sent heat down his side, radiating from his wound, and Aizawa felt his knees begin to buckle under him as the pain rushed him.

"Gonna suck to drive with him," Kobayashi murmured, blowing air out his nose to clear the smell of shit as he shut the SUV's hatch.

Aizawa did the same, closing the trunk and biting back curses. He didn't know if he could get all that out, and if he did the trunk was going to look like crap.

"She get hurt?" Kobayashi asked, nodding his head in Momo's direction.

"No. He didn't touch her, just scared her."

There was a pregnant pause, then: "This is why you're so broke, isn't it, Dan? You paid Boss back the money yourself, betting you could get it back off Goro later when you caught him."

"It was a rookie decision. Especially since Yaoyorozu found out about my extracurricular anyway."

"Well," Kobayashi said, "I hope you get it back."

"Doesn't matter."

"What's next for her?"

"I have to go back to my place and do some first aid," Aizawa admitted. "I'll have to take her back there. But I'll call and let you know if you need to pick her up."

A moment as Kobayashi fished his pockets for scrap paper and a pen, then wrote a number down. Aizawa took it.

"Here. It's one of Boss' acquaintances, Doctor Hirano. He's discreet. In case you need a little extra first aid."

"Thanks."

Then they shook hands and it was done.

"Is it okay? I mean…Did that go okay?" Momo asked as he got back into the driver's seat, buckling his seatbelt and starting the car.

"It's fine."

"What is it?"

"It's fine," he dismissed again, but when he looked over at her and saw her big, dark eyes so wide with concern, he let out a weighted sigh.

"I just really feeling that cut now." Her gaze darted to his waist. There was the gleam in her eyes of her genuine concern, so worried for his safety. He shrugged it off, though, with his usual sarcasm. "Don't give me that look. It's next on my to do list."

"Okay."