Aizawa heaved a sigh of relief as Chiyo took a step away from him. His whole body ached, in the best way possible, and he laid on his bed watching as Chiyo packed up her bottles of oils. Chiyo was one of his professional working girls, offering massages and a happy ending. When he'd first called her, she'd expected sex — and they had engaged in sex before on occasion, so it was not an unreasonable expectation. But he didn't want to fuck, he just wanted some of his problems worked out for him — like the ache in his injured arm and his neck following his encounter with the Nomu. He'd probably throw out his back if he tried to fuck her.
So Chiyo, deeply disappointed, had diligently provided her masseuse services, and it had been torture. Every muscle hurt, every joint ached, her touch in places had been pure fucking agony. He felt like she'd wrung him out and put him back together. He was both glad and regretful to be seeing her go.
Aizawa pushed himself up off his bed and took his hair down from the bun he'd put it in while she'd worked, and went to his bathroom. She found him wiping the oils off his chest a few minutes later and obligingly took it from him to clean the oils from his back.
"You've got something on your face," Chiyo said as he turned to take the towel from her, and she leaned in and licked the tip of his nose.
"You've got something on your face," he repeated to her as he reached out his hand and smudged her eyeliner with his thumb.
"You ass," she laughed, wiping at it fruitlessly and only making it worse.
"Clean it in your car," Aizawa said, laying a hand on the small of her back. "I'm going to bed."
"Are you sure?" Chiyo asked, batting an eye, and he wordlessly pointed toward the door.
She rolled her eyes, but obligingly went. Aizawa followed her, his hand still on her back, looking forward to being done for the night — going back to his bed and laying his head on his pillow.
The last few days had been filled with tumultuous realization. At the forefront was a very simple — embarrassingly simple — fact:
His double life had been discovered by a teenage child.
Yaoyorozu Momo had mentally been able to connect two moments that had occurred weeks apart, and then endeavored to investigate it herself. She had successfully tracked him and he didn't even know for how long. Then she had seen caught him red handed.
He'd nearly killed her. He'd been so close — standing beside her bed. He was not embarrassed or regretful of almost murdering his student. Quite the opposite, he was still second guessing whether he had done the right thing by sparing her. He had no guarantees that she wouldn't go to authorities.
Even as he walked Chiyo to the door, Aizawa hefted a weighty sigh; he should probably just kill Yaoyorozu and be done with the risk. The door opened, and Aizawa began to bend to kiss Chiyo's hair and say goodbye — when he realized someone was outside his apartment door.
Yaoyorozu Momo.
What the fuck.
Chiyo looked back over her shoulder at him, and he could read the offense on her face — as if he'd been lying to her when he said he wanted to go to bed.
"Do I have to leave?" the masseuse asked, doe-eyed, and Aizawa felt only a twist of disgust that Chiyo thought he was interested in Yaoyorozu. Perhaps it was because he was her teacher and when he looked at her he only saw a child, but he did not acknowledge her…physical assets the way others did. When he looked in her eyes, they were the young and inexperienced eyes of a child. It disgusted him that when his men had kidnapped her, they hadn't seen it, too. That Chiyo, now, did not see it either.
He realized, suddenly, that both female's attention was locked on him — and he realized his stage of undress. Realized his Yakuza tattoos, always so carefully hidden while he made merry pretending to be a Hero, were on full display. And that Yaoyorozu was trying not to gawk at them.
"Leave, Chiyo," he dismissed.
The masseuse did not argue — it was not worth the consequences of contradicting him. Aizawa stayed where he was as Chiyo ducked past Yaoyorozu and headed for her car. Only when Chiyo was out of range did Aizawa reluctantly step aside to let Yaoyorozu in.
It was against his better judgment to let her come in. The tricky bitch had already shown her aptitude with technology. He wouldn't put it past her to plant a listening device someplace if she had the opportunity, and he did not let that possibility leave his mind as he locked the door behind her. But his better judgment was overruled by gut instinct — Yaoyorozu knew his secret, and she was not stupid. She would not come here for no reason.
He did not appreciate her interest as she looked around his apartment, and he was glad he kept it boring — in line with his public personality and life as a teacher. There were no tells here for her to find.
He did not want to leave her unsupervised for a moment, but he did not want to engage in whatever she'd come for in his stage of undress. He reluctantly left her in his living room for the time it took him to pull a pair of sweatpants over his gym shorts and tug a t-shirt over his head. He pointed to his couch when he returned to the living room, but the girl did not budge from where her feet were rooted at the center of the room.
Well, if she wouldn't start talking, he would.
"You miss two days of school then come to my home in the middle of the night. This had better be good," he prompted, leaning against the wall.
Yaoyorozu's cheeks flushed red, and her lower lip trembled. But there was a crease on her forehead and her jaw was set — she wasn't embarrassed. She was pissed. That was unexpected.
"I've had no choice. My parents are pulling me out of UA — they were sent a clip of the security video from the club along with a demand for money to not release the video publicly."
Her parents were pulling her from UA? That was not necessarily a bad thing for him. But that her father, former Yakuza himself, had been sent something damning of him and Momo? His first thought at the revelation of there being footage from the club was relief he hadn't decided to cut her throat after all. But what had happened between them that could be used as leverage?
"A video of what?"
Momo moved toward him. He did not back down or flinch as she approached — but she came uncomfortably close. Her body almost pressed against his, and she planted her hands on either side of his head, and Aizawa almost pushed her away as she put her knee between his legs.
She was too close, and he felt the energy of the position — the sexual suggestion that accompanied it. Intimacy. Chest to chest, legs intertwined. He realized, absurdly, that Yaoyorozu was almost as tall as he was, and her face was nearly level with his own. If she came any closer they'd be kissing.
And then it clicked.
This was how he'd pinned her in the club when she'd tried to flee after she spotted him.
The dread grew from there, exponentially. To an outsider, it would look deceptively intimate — and she was an underage female student. Shit.
"And that's all the clip showed?" he asked as he stepped away from her.
Momo crossed her arms over her chest and nodded.
"My parents won't go to the authorities. They don't want the damage to their reputations, but they are making me transfer to Shiketsu instead. I am not allowed to return to UA."
Ah.
Something in his brain realigned as he watched Yaoyorozu. He remembered pondering how he would respect her more if she took his secret to blackmail him with. This was perhaps a rung above, and he could read the air. Her parents would not go to authorities, but she could have — and deliberately chose not to. Instead, she'd come to him to resolve the situation. Yakuza princess was choosing the Yakuza solution.
"How much money was the demand for? Do you know?"
"One hundred million yen."
Aizawa whistled a decrescendo. "I see."
He had another decision to make now, and he made it quickly. He let his gut instinct lead his choice. He had no real reason to, only his hunch, but Aizawa trusted it — and it said to trust her. Yaoyorozu Momo, a fifteen-year-old brainiac who balanced on the precipice of half future Pro Hero and half Yakuza princess, who had discovered his secrets.
Aizawa went to his television and squatted down, hand fishing into one of the baskets underneath it. He picked one out, checked the number for it, and then programmed in his own before offering it to her.
"What's this?"
"It's a burner," he said shortly. "Do you know what that is?" Momo nodded. Of course she did. "Keep it on your person, call me if there's an emergency. Listen to your parents in the meantime. I will handle this for you."
He locked his hand around her upper arm and began steering her toward his apartment door, ready for her to leave. He wondered, briefly, if he should escort her back to her estate, but she derailed his thoughts as she dug her heels in.
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to handle it."
"How? You can't—"
You can't, you can't, you can't, he could already hear her protests in his head and he didn't want to hear her say a damn one. He wasn't ruled by the kingdom of You Can't, full of its Heroes and their governances.
"If you didn't want me to handle this, Yaoyorozu, then why did you come here. Do you want a letter of recommendation for Shiketsu High instead?" he taunted.
Momo pulled herself free of his grip, and Aizawa crossed his arms across his chest while he waited for her response. Challenging her to tell him that this wasn't why she'd come here — that she came to him for the Hero resolution, not the Yakuza remedy. He could see the conflict in her eyes as she wrestled with the morals that the outside world imposed on her. People like All Might, living and dying by their codes of honor, letting others live and die by them, too.
"Are you protecting me or yourself?" she asked.
He rolled his eyes.
"Miss Yaoyorozu, does it really fucking matter?"
Her eyes went round and she didn't say a word in response, muted into total silence. He waited, with interest, to see what she was going to do. What her next step would be.
At last the girl dropped her head, not voicing anymore protests, before she turned and showed herself out the door. Aizawa locked it behind her and dropped his forehead against it, exhaling a long, slow breath, and didn't even know where to begin to clean up the mess.