Aizawa and Nezu had a gentleman's agreement between them. Nezu adamantly refused to make the entrance exam more rational, aside from hidden 'rescue points' to give anyone without a Quirk specialized in fighting robots a fighting chance - an activity that no hero regularly engages in, Aizawa would always snidely mention - while Aizawa adamantly refused to allow any student falling behind on their brain cell quota to remain in the Hero Course any longer than it took for him to find a sufficient excuse to write on the reject forms Aizawa swore Nezu made longer every year. Once he sorted the wheat from the chaff, Aizawa took his pick from the General Studies, or lacking any promising prospects, simply ran his class with whatever number remained. Aizawa firmly believed in practicing asymmetric engagements, and no one could complain about it if the roster had a prime number of students.
This gentleman's agreement had worked ever since Aizawa was hired on. The school board got a bit snippy about his expulsion records, especially when some 'golden child' with an 'impressive Quirk' ran afoul of his 'unfair and biased teaching practices'. Aizawa kept files outlining hero casualty statistics, civilian fatalities, and property damage, sorted by year and school, complete with colorful line graphs and pie charts ostensibly lacking in U.A.'s golden color that quickly silenced whatever objections anyone could raise against him.
As Aizawa waited in his sleeping bag, watching students pass him without even a glance at the human-sized lump on the floor, he mentally ticked off which ones he would keep. Nezu gave him a promising crop, a martial arts expert with a subtle tail mutation, two sensory specialists who, admittedly, need better situational awareness, but Aizawa can fix that, and an Iida, there was a family that knew how to churn out dependable heroes. The tape dispenser showed some ingenuity during the test, by laying traps and luring robots into them, and frog girl had cottoned on to the off switches on the robots and made excellent use of her agility and dexterous tongue.
Mixed in with the good apples, though, were ones rotten to the core and riddled with worms. The kid frying his own brain every time he powered a lightbulb shouldn't have even applied, then there was the kid too jacked up on sugar to think straight, and wasn't that a collapsed apartment complex and hundreds of civilian deaths just waiting to happen, and the crowning fetid turd atop the steaming pile of human refuse, the purple midget drooling at a girl's backside. As vindicated as Aizawa always felt when he saw a hero lambasted by the news for such and such scandal, he wouldn't burden the general population with anyone like that if he could help it. Sexual harassment expulsion forms practically wrote themselves, and Aizawa was already starting his.
The rest of them sat on the fence, ready to tip to either side. Anger management would need watching, especially if the first day's spectacle didn't sober him up. The Todoroki practically screams daddy issues, and knowing Endeavor, Aizawa can all too easily imagine how he came by that scar. And there's the muttering wreck with surprisingly insightful Quirk analysis who would be perfect if his Quirk didn't shatter his bones with every punch and if his body language didn't scream profound insecurities.
As the minutes stretched by after class was supposed to begin and people were starting to question if they could just leave, Aizawa decided he had given them plenty of time to notice him and stood up. He watched their reactions. A few gave no visible reaction, but he chalked it up more to apathy than attentiveness. The ear-jacks, though, had clearly caught on to his presence. If it was lack of confidence that kept her from informing her classmates, he'd have to drill a backbone into her.
"Put these on and meet me outside," Aizawa said, tossing them the sack of clothes.
"Wait," Iida said, "Weren't we supposed to go to orientation today?"
Trust an Iida to be a stickler for the rules, Aizawa mentally mused. This one had an even bigger stick up his ass than Tensei. "Teachers at U.A. are given free rein to teach however they see fit. I see no need to waste your time with an introduction to the school when you already know why you're here."
Aizawa vaulted out the window and hung on the ledge, waiting just out of sight. He tapped the wall a few times to see if ear-jacks was paying attention, and to his gratification, she rushed into her clothes more quickly. Everyone else took their time, giving each other privacy, chatting, and folding up their civvies before meandering out to the practice grounds. They had a faster time than average, almost a new record, which he chalked up to Jirou's haste getting the others moving, but he wasn't about to let any good impression of their behavior show on his face. After all, they were still too slow.
"Twelve minutes," Aizawa said dryly. "Do any of you know how quickly a fire can spread through a building?"
Most everyone looked confused, but the Iida and the 3-D printer's hands both shot up.
"One minute," she answered firmly.
"One minute," Aizawa parroted back. "After one minute, an entire building will fill up with smoke. Give it a couple more, and anyone trapped inside will be unconscious from carbon monoxide poisoning. In twelve minutes, the entire building burned to the ground, and you arrive just in time to tell the press you're sorry it took you so long to get there and offer your condolences to the grieving family members."
Most of the students had the decency to look ashamed. A few are even turning green. Anger management issues was silently seething at him, while the midget decided to complain.
"Hey, that's no fair! You never said we would be timed!"
"You have three years to learn as much as you can before entering a field where seconds can save lives. Everything is on a timer. If you can't handle that, I suggest that you find a new career."
No one took him up on that. Good thing expulsion forms exist. Aizawa tossed anger management the baseball and said, "I trust you are all familiar with the general fitness exams?"
"Yes, Aizawa-sensei," came a chorus from most of the students. This batch was falling into line better than most, and he'd weed out the few holdouts soon enough.
"The primary education system clings to the outdated belief that using Quirks would detract from establishing the standard human baseline. Quirks are the new standard, and today, we'll see how you fare when you're no longer held back.
The grin anger management gave him after looking at the baseball in his palm made Aizawa believe he definitely ran afoul of Quirk usage infringements regardless of whatever his suspiciously clean school record said. He made another mental note to have Nezu grill their faculty, figuratively and literally.
After showing the class the distance from his nitroglycerin-fueled throw, the acid girl shouted how much fun they would have, and boy did Aizawa love it when someone tee'd him up perfectly to bat his 'expel the lowest scoring student' threat right out of the park. Sure, he could freestyle it, but the threat always sank deeper if he spun it as a response to someone not taking the exercise seriously.
With the number from Bakugo's throw giving them even more reasons to panic, Aizawa started them on their exercises. Aizawa liked starting them on these exams because there were only two types of students that excelled at these challenges, those who worked on their general physical fitness like the martial artist, or those who could think outside the box like the Lovecraftian child compacting a metal grip with a horrifying yet efficient amalgamation of muscle groups and bones that only vaguely resembled a human hand.
Anyone who relied on their Quirk to coast by and neglected basic exercise, like braindead and pervert, predictably fell to the bottom. There were also sometimes those who thought they could sabotage their classmates to escape expulsion. Last year's batch had devolved into an all out brawl that gave him the perfect excuse to expel them all and photocopy the same expulsion form for each of them, but this year, the kids were behaving themselves. Mainly because the dead last among them became clear fairly quickly.
To Aizawa's consternation the worst of the batch had escaped expulsion. The mutterer had some truly impressive performance anxiety, which was the only explanation Aizawa could find for someone with clear signs of physical conditioning falling so far behind someone with half his weight, a quarter of the brainpower, and zero idea how to zap his way through side-hops or a long jump. So bad was their performance, that even a Quirk-powered throw, which the kid was clearly hyping himself up for, wouldn't quite save him.
So, just before the ball left his hand, Aizawa shut off his Quirk. The ball flopped to the ground a measly ten meters away, and anger management laughed uproariously at the botched throw.
"Tell me, Midoriya," Aizawa said menacingly. "You throw one punch and defeat a villain. Great. Now, with every bone in your arm shattered, how are you going to save the group of civilians staring up as a building falls towards them?"
"You're Eraserhead," the kid said with wonder in his voice.
The answer stopped Aizawa in his tracks. Out of every year he has taught, no one has ever recognized him. They should all know that he's logically a hero, teaching at U.A., but no one's ever bothered investigating it or even asking him. And yet, here was a student, who, after one demonstration of his Quirk, instantly pinned him to his hero name. Whatever he might say about the kid's performance, he certainly did his research on heroes if he even found his name, let alone details about his Quirk. There was a tight lid on that info for a reason.
"Are you going to answer the question?"
The kid's muttering stopped in its tracks. Aizawa could see the thoughts and ideas zipping through the kid's brain before his resolve hardened and he gazed at him with piercing green eyes that looked so thoroughly out of place on the kid nearly having a panic attack five minutes ago. "I can do it."
Aizawa could say that if he could do it, he should have thought about that before he stopped him from breaking his own arm. He could make him stick with the first result, show the final tally, and send him home. But then, if he was going to fail anyway, there was no harm in letting him try. Let him put the final nail in his own coffin and show the class that he will not settle for anything less than perfection out of Japan's future heroes.
So, Aizawa gave Izuku a nod and handed him another baseball. He watched, Quirk turned off, as Midoriya flicked the baseball, falling just short of anger management's score. The human explosion evidently took offense to that, spouting nonsense about the kid being Quirkless at the end of his capture scarf.
The kid was almost literally hanging himself by a noose of his own making, trying to slip free and reach Midoriya despite his Quirk being disabled. Aizawa was tempted to 'slip'. To blink for one second. Never mind expulsion, a child that toxic and aggressive needed a brief stint in juvie and years of court mandated therapy. However, Aizawa was a man of principles, and those principles did not allow him to let his students kill each other so he didn't have to find creative ways to frame general stupidity and a lack of basic human decency as being an unmarketable hero or having strong villain tendencies.
Aizawa was halfway to announcing explosion's expulsion when he wondered how he would tie Midoriya's expulsion into it as well. Expelling them both made it look like he was blaming the victim as much as their abuser. Expelling just the explosion would mean going back on his word about expelling the lowest scoring, and sure, he could make some B.S. up about disqualifying Bakugo for attacking another student - 'unheroic behavior', he could call it - but fact of the matter was, attacking other students was a part of hero training, and he could hardly punish them for it now and then turn around and tell them to do it the very next day.
Expelling just Midoriya was very much the Iida thing to do. It was also very much the Aizawa thing to do. He could expel Midoriya, then blasty-boy would get a swelled head over it, cross a couple lines, and get booted out before the ink on the expulsion form's dry.
Yet, he couldn't do it. Midoriya was clearly smarter than he let on, possibly the smartest one in the class. He knew his hero name. He broke down every Quirk he saw with a single glance. He made a logical call to break just his finger to remain combat viable. Sure, he could argue it gave him ten shots at most, but no agency would turn their nose up to a kid who could throw out ten All Might-level attacks for the low price of a quick hospital visit.
Then there was the kid's willpower. He snapped his finger like a glow-stick, and even through the clearly debilitating pain, he still forced a grin onto his face and stared down Aizawa with fire and defiance in his eyes. Where that moxie was five minutes ago, Aizawa had no idea, and if that strength augmentation came with multiple personalities attached to it, Aizawa wouldn't even question it, but fact of the matter was, he couldn't quite bring himself to dismiss such raw potential from his class.
So, for the first time in his teaching career, Aizawa told his class that the expulsion was just a logical ruse. The tense atmosphere immediately left most of them, though Midoriya still looked as though he was mentally packing away his school supplies. They immediately went back to idle chatter, and Aizawa knew that they would never take any of his threats seriously in the future.
It didn't matter. He could always expel them tomorrow.
A/N: Merry Christmas everybody! This'll be getting another chapter update two weeks from now, then a chapter every month.