Aizawa's eyes quickly scanned over the room, taking in the necessary information so he knew what he was working with, his eyes glowing as his hair floated, crouching down low, keeping his center of gravity low to the floor, ready to move in any direction at a moment's notice.
Unconsciously, Hitoshi centered in on Aizawa's thoughts.
No one seems injured. No one is being held in a compromising position, but that can change at any time. Especially with Oboro—Kurogiri. He's Kurogiri now. I have to stop—but if—no. I can't get my hopes up. It's too far-fetched. It's been too long. I can't—
"Uh, hey, Aizawa!" Denki tried, voice cracking with anxiety at the valiant effort as he nonchalantly leaned against the bar. "Fancy seeing you here! Come here often?"
"More often than I'd like," Aizawa answered vaguely in a grumble, relaxing just the slightest bit when it seemed like no one was going to rush forward and put the soulmates in a chokehold and use them as leverage to threaten him with.
"So, uh, I can explain," Denki offered, holding his hands out in a calming gesture to Aizawa as if they weren't surrounded by wanted villains, like Aizawa was the one he was concerned about.
Aizawa straightened more, took another sweeping look around the room before his gaze double backed to land on Hawks where his gaze openly remained for a few, long seconds.
"Hiya, Eraserhead. Long time, no see!" Hawks said with a small, two-fingered salute.
Aizawa deflated, relaxing his stance, though his eyes stayed alert.
"Explain," he demanded, eyeing his adoptive son whose unwavering gaze hadn't left his form since he crash landed through the window, a wide variety of muted emotions crossing over his features that Aizawa would have missed if not having watched Hitoshi grow up.
"Did you not see the TikTok?" Denki started with.
He was met with a blank stare.
"I've been at a training camp with the new Class 1-A for the past two weeks," Aizawa said, glancing around the room.
The villains snickered, not even trying to hide their amusement.
"No need to bother hiding it from us, Aizawa," Dabi drawled. "We got what we needed from your class."
"And don't go thinking you're the only traitor," Toga added with a sharp smile. "We could easily get the coordinates if we wanted. Pop in for a visit whenever we want."
Aizawa was interrupted in whatever retort (or plea) he was about to make by Denki's soft questioned, "traitor?"
Neito was not so quiet.
"People were after Denki, thinking that he was the traitor! And it was you this entire time!" Neito seethed.
"Well, not until after the USJ incident," Shigaraki offered. "I wouldn't be so cruel as to take out one of my own like that."
Aizawa's arm twitched, the only indication that he remembered the pain he encountered at Shigaraki's hand.
Shigaraki was kind enough to not mention that Aizawa was the one to seek the League out, not the other way around.
Hitoshi gasped as he spun around to look at Shigaraki, and Shigaraki swore under his breath. There goes his act of kindness, right out the window. Having a mind-reader in-house kind of sucked.
Hitoshi quickly connected the dots, between reading all of Aizawa's thoughts and Shigaraki's, and finding out that Aizawa had sought out the League after their first encounter. He looked over at Kurogiri who watched attentively from his place behind the bar.
Protect Shigaraki Tomura. Serve Shigaraki Tomura. Protect Shigaraki Tomura. Serve Shigaraki Tomura. Protect Shigaraki Tomura. Serve Shigaraki Tomura.
Hitoshi shivered, tears pooling unbidden in his eyes.
"I'm under Full Throttle's quirk," Hitoshi admitted quietly. Anything louder might send him over the edge, completely overstimulated. Aizawa shot a glare at Isozan and automatically activated his quirk on Hitoshi, even as he remembered that it wouldn't do anything. "It's consensual quirk practice," Hitoshi said before Aizawa could start a fight on his behalf, "and I now have the ability to read minds for the next five and a half hours. I want to talk about what I know now, but let's catch you up on all this," Hitoshi said, gesturing to the entire room, "first."
Aizawa looked like he might want to run, logging his escape routes in his mind, but then he nodded and reluctantly wandered further into the bar, taking a seat at a table.
"How did you know to come here?" Neito asked to start with.
"I came to visit you three after I came back from the training camp. When it was just you two, and not Denki as well, and then you two were acting strange, I figured out pretty quickly that they were clones and came right here. Why were there only clones for two of you and not all three?"
"Damn. Were you under a rock or something?" Spinner asked.
"No technology is allowed during training camp. Plus, it's so remote that no signal reaches, even if anyone had snuck any technology in. Everyone was effectively cut off," Aizawa explained. "What happened after the incident with Toga and Full Throttle?"
Denki laughed nervously. "Well, you see, actually I was the one who went to Tartarus."
Aizawa sat back in the chair and seemed to process the information. "But you're…" Aizawa hedged, not understanding how a mix-up could happen when the three were connected by fate.
"We're soulmates, yes," Neito said bluntly.
Aizawa paused at that, looking around the room, knowing for sure that the fact that they are soulmates was not common knowledge among the hero ranks, yet.
"Everyone here knows literally everything. It's full disclosure. No code-words or sneaking around anything," Hitoshi reassured.
"So, these villains can know everything, but the Hero Public Safety Commission can't?" Aizawa asked to confirm. After a pause, he sighed. "Yeah, okay. I get it."
"So, it wasn't a mistake or anything. I've been wanting to go to Tartarus, and this was a great chance. Unexpected, but when was another opportunity going to present itself, you know? And Toga was right there. The perfect person to make this happen and someone who is already friends with my soulmates, so it couldn't have been any better," Denki explained.
"You were already friends," Aizawa cut in.
"We met at the waterpark," Hitoshi said with a relaxed shrug. "It was great."
"And every time she snuck into the dorms," Neito said. "Nezu should really look into increasing security."
"So, there was no way that any of us were going to let her go to Tartarus, and I wanted to go. So, it was the perfect swap! That's when Isozan and I became friends. Oh! Isozan, Aizawa. Aizawa, Isozan, but you know him as Full Throttle. And that's Uretori, but you know her as Phantasm."
"Pleasure's mine," Isozan said with a nod.
Uretori gave a small wave.
Aizawa just grunted, ever the charmer.
"Isozan hit me up with Full Throttle again, and we escaped Tartarus. Then—"
"You escaped Tartarus?" Aizawa asked.
"That's what I just said," Denki said. "Keep up!"
"That's never been done before," Aizawa said.
"I survived Full Throttle. I escaped Tartarus using said Full Throttle. I am Chargebolt, hear me roar. Etcetera, etcetera. Now let me finish!" Denki demanded as the villains and heroes cackled at Denki's ability to just brush off major life events as if they were nothing. "Where was I?"
The group howled.
"You escaped Tartarus," Hawks answered through hysterical tears.
"Right!" Denki said, shooting a grateful grin in Hawks's direction. "Then I got rescued-slash-abducted by the League again on Live television so that the HPSC wouldn't get their grubby little hands on me, and Hitoshi and Neito were taken to Fields. Without me, might I add."
"You may," Neito said graciously.
"They put you under a psychiatric hold?" Aizawa asked, rage simmering.
"They did," Hitoshi answered. "We made it fun."
"I made some TikToks that were apparently not crazy enough to land me in Fields with them—"
"The jury is still out on that one," Neito interrupted. "They were plenty crazy," he said to Aizawa. "I'll show you later."
"When did all this start?" Aizawa asked.
"When I was taken the first time," Denki answered easily. "I found out that I had already been friends with Shigaraki and Dabi because we had been gaming online together for years! Small world!"
"So, at graduation, when you told me that Hawks was safe…" Aizawa hedged.
"You thought I meant that he was in hiding or something from the League. No! Yeah, he's in good hands, here! When you asked, I had no idea you had any connection or I would have divulged a little more, you know!"
"I need a drink," Aizawa declared without looking in Kurogiri's direction. Dabi was the one who brought the drink over to him, and Aizawa just stared at it for a long minute.
Oboro has to be in there somewhere. How else would he know my favorite drink? It can't just be a lucky guess, can it?
"You need to explain to the class about how you knew where the League of Villains was even located," Neito demanded when it was clear that Aizawa wasn't going to offer the information himself.
Aizawa downed his drink and slammed the empty glass on the tabletop without looking at anyone.
"Kurogiri is my soulmate."
"I thought Present Mic was your soulmate," Denki offered weakly, sitting down in a quiet show of support, showing that he was there to hear him out, unlike Neito, who hovered and heaved.
"He is. Just like same-sex soulmates are more common among heroes, so are poly situations, like you three have found yourselves in," Aizawa explained. "Rare, but when it does happen, more likely to happen among heroes. Probably an evolutionary safeguard to prevent someone from losing absolutely everything should they lose one of their soulmates in the line of duty, not that it helps any," Aizawa said, daring to glance in Kurogiri's direction before thinking better of it and dragging his eyes back to the tabletop before his eyes could meet their target. "I thought he was dead until the USJ incident."
"Does Hizashi know?" Hitoshi asked, almost not wanting to know, but deciding that it would be better to see the answer coming than to be blindsided by it through Aizawa's thoughts.
"No," Aizawa said, and Denki noticed that he had the decency to look ashamed while Hitoshi looked around the room at the League members scattered about.
Was he unable to look at his adoptive father, unable to relate to how he might keep such a big secret from his soulmate? If so, then how does he really feel about Denki keeping Dabi's true identity a secret for so long? Or was it something else? Maybe he was picking up brainwaves from the villains that told a different story than the one Aizawa was telling, painting a fuller picture for himself.
Aizawa continued, "how could I tell him about this when I don't even know if there's a possibility that Oboro is really in there? When I don't know if anything is ever going to go back to the way it was before? The first time I came here, I tried talking to him, and he didn't give any indication at all that he recognized me."
"He's a Nomu," Shigaraki said flatly, like he had tried to drill it through Aizawa's head a million times already.
"But he's not like the others," Aizawa insisted, a delicate desperation lacing his voice as he turned to look at Shigaraki, grasping the edge of the table and the back of the chair like a lifeline, so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. "I've gone against the one at the USJ and saw the ones released at Hosu. He's not like that."
Hitoshi listened to Shigaraki and Denki having the same thoughts, but not wanting to voice them aloud: Would Nomu Kurogiri warn Shigaraki that All For One was planning to take over Shigaraki's body, or is that Oboro in there, holding on tight and trying to break through?
Hitoshi looked over at Neito, rubbing cool fingers against his temples to fight off the oncoming migraine. What in the actual fuck had they missed the past three days?
Denki looked over at Hitoshi and realized he must have read his thoughts.
Denki snickered, and thought at Hitoshi, loud and clear, that's what you get for going to Fields without me.
"It wasn't by choice, Denks! You know that!" Hitoshi argued.
Everyone turned to look at Hitoshi, and Hitoshi just sighed. It was going to be a long five hours, fifteen minutes.
A/N: Okay, show of hands! Who saw that coming?