His sleeping bag was one of his few remaining pleasures at UA. This year's homeroom class was specifically problematic, and while he was invested in his students, he valued what little peace he could cultivate in their presence more than previous years. It was a fucking relief to be passed out on the floor, cocooned inside.
This morning, though, his peace was broken.
His sleep was interrupted and shallow. He kept seeing snips of his students' faces — the look of fear, revulsion, and violation on Momo's face. That quick, white hot anger he felt when his own men dared lay those hands on her…dared want to force themselves on her and the other girls. It kept waking him. What he'd done, the blood he spilled, didn't feel like enough to atone for what had happened to them on his watch.
He was tired as shit anyway. After Goro had come back, he'd sheepishly brought along the bags the girls had unintentionally left behind so that he could be cussed out for his continued stupidity. Then Aizawa had, irritated and wired, set about handling returning their things himself.
It wasn't the best option, but it was better than tossing everything. When the girls reported it to the police — because certainly it was a matter of when, not if — it would do him no favors to have evidence laying around. So he'd gloved up and wiped the bags down, and taken one of his syndicate's street racing cars to return everything.
Uraraka and Ashido, they were normal girls from normal families — they had normal doors with normal locks. It had been child's play to slip in and out unnoticed.
Yaoyorozu Momo, however, the only child of Yaoyorozu Asao, proved to be a pain in the fucking ass.
He knew about Yaoyorozu Asao. The man had worked as a sidekick, but before that he made his bones selling Chicago overcoats in Yakuza himself. He'd been a kyodai, and what exactly he did with the money he earned to reach this pinnacle of wealth was a mystery. But the man had made himself into one of the wealthiest men in Mustafa, and he had the security detail to show for it.
Getting on and off the property had been a fucking bother. Getting in the house once he located her room was its own pain in the ass. It'd been against his better judgment, however, to just leave the bags anywhere. Momo had tossed and turned in her sleep, making small mewing sounds of distress and fright.
And he was a fucking soft idiot, because watching his student relive the past few hours, even during the peace of sleep, had twisted something inside him. He sat himself down, back against the wall across from her bed, and stayed. Stayed until the cover of night threatened to leave him behind an exposed.
He watched over her in the dark, just listening to the sounds of the mansion. Watching how the shadows moved across the walls as the night slipped away. A knife went between his ribs as she cried in her sleep, tossing and turning fitfully. Pleading with words she'd been too afraid to voice in front of his men, in case it incensed them further. Yaoyorozu Momo, his best fucking student, had been whittled down to nothing more than meat.
Aizawa opened his eyes reluctantly now when he heard his voice, rolling over in his sleeping bag to look, and it was the same Yaoyorozu Momo standing in front of him, flanked by Ashido and Uraraka. There was a brief moment where he was confused by what the three of them were even doing here after last night — but he certainly couldn't ask them about it.
That they were here, however, said one thing louder than anything else: they suspected him of nothing.
"What is it, Yaoyorozu?" he asked, closing his eyes and drawing himself together, shuttering away the night's events.
"We — Ashido, Uraraka, and I — would like permission to be excused for the first part of today."
"Why?"
"There was an incident last night when we were shopping, we need to report it to the police."
He wasn't surprised that they hadn't. He'd hoped to intimidate them into silence, and it seemed the threat had held — at least for the night. He was dismayed in their interest in going now…But he'd had enough time to clean up the mess left behind.
"Why didn't you do it last night when it happened?" he made himself ask, like a responsible and concerned adult.
"I think we were all in shock."
He watched them through narrow slits, judging. Evaluating. Like a snake tasting the air, trying to touch what information they might have for the police. Did they remember where they'd been taken? Any names? Any faces? Tattoos? It was impossible to tell. He would be within his rights to refuse, but it would only delay them going and give them more time to think and recollect. To compare memories. No, better to let them go now.
"Very well. But you should understand I'm letting you go during school hours because you all were in the top ten of the Quirk Evaluation Exam. You'll need to make up the work you miss and turn it in tomorrow. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
"As future Heroes, you need to understand urgency." The obligatory, expected lesson. "When things happen, it's your responsibility to handle them in a timely manner — this should have been done last night. Do you understand that, too?"
"Yes, sir."
"Go."
He rolled back over in his sleeping bag, as though shutting them out, but the wheels in his head were spinning on wet gravel, stones cutting through the air like shrapnel, looking for a target to hit. Reviewing mentally every step of the night before. He would not have his greatest secret, the thing he held tight to his chest, ripped open and exposed to the air by some fucking teenage girls.